Dark Water - Laura McNeal [30]
“Why are you taking that?” she asked suspiciously.
“English paper,” I said.
For a while, I studied. I read “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” found two examples of alliteration, and explained “how they added to the tone.” Then, after wondering for some time what it would be like to live in the tree house, all alone, in Mexico or Guatemala, I climbed down, extracted my bicycle from a spidery part of the Wallaces’ shed, pushed it along a gravel drive that was well out of my mother’s sight, and rode to the river.
I’d never been there so late in the day, when the light was orange and gnats hung in nameless constellations. In certain parts of the woods, the oldest, biggest trees were burnt to charcoal from past fires, but they’d sprouted soft leaves and young white branches. Vines crept up and over them, a hundred feet into the air. I always felt when I reached these huge shrouded rooms that I’d found my way to a foreign country, a secret wilderness into which I could disappear.
Where the river flowed past Amiel’s house, I tightened the backpack that held the components of my plan to show him a mime who’d become famous for doing what Amiel could do. I looked around for joggers, hikers, and dogs but saw only gnats, tadpoles, and a wary duck.
I plunged knee deep into the water and slogged across. I could hardly hear the bubbling-babbling current over my pulse. The river seemed colder, my legs wobbled, and the thicket suddenly had a forbidding look. What if Amiel protected himself with a handmade ax? What if he didn’t live alone? I blundered toward the silvery lattice of driftwood and stopped to consider what I would do if a completely different illegal immigrant was sitting there with a gun.
Maybe I should call Greenie and hang up so police could trace the origin of my last and final phone call, I thought.
I was just about to do this when I saw a person standing on the branch of a sycamore ten feet away.
It was Amiel.
He wasn’t holding an ax, and his feet were bare. He didn’t smile when he saw that I’d discovered his hiding place but watched me with what looked like the hope that I would go away. He just stood in the tree and waited. Everything incredibly stupid about my plan—the movie in my backpack, my heavy laptop, the bicycle I would have to ride home in the dark on a winding road afterward—revealed itself.
And yet I blundered on. “I wanted to show you something,” I said.
If he understood me, he gave no sign. He didn’t nod. He didn’t climb down. The sun was at the vanishing point beyond us, a final glimmering orangeness in the west. I looked behind me and saw only reeds—no hikers or joggers or dogs. I knelt on the sand and unzipped the backpack. I removed the computer and set it on my lap. Then I fumbled with cases and buttons until I made the silvery-black images of Les Enfants du Paradis move across the screen. I turned on the Spanish subtitles and tilted the screen so that it faced Amiel up in the tree.
The look on Amiel’s face was less forbidding now. The sun went out in a single breath and I shivered, the sand already cold against my knees. In the light that was now turquoise, he looked at me and the screen with what might have been curiosity or just acceptance that I wasn’t going to disappear. He jumped down from the tree and walked over to me. He didn’t say hello in any language. I felt a stroke of fear like I used to feel as a child when I knew I had pushed my father too far. Amiel reached for the computer, closed it, and the pale silver light of the movie went out.
As I sat on the sand with the closed-up theater on my knees, foolish and ashamed, he walked away from me. I wondered where his bicycle was. I wondered if he had cooked and eaten his dinner and if he ever felt safe enough to take off all his clothes and bathe in the river. The world around us was so beautifully blue-green and sharp that