Dark Water - Laura McNeal [55]
Amiel nodded and when I set the tin down, he picked it back up and tapped the photograph into his hand. He held it for me and pointed at the little boy, then at himself.
“Is that your mother?” I asked.
He nodded, so I asked if that was his house, and he nodded again.
“Do you write to her?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“May I sit down?” I asked.
This time, he didn’t immediately answer me with a nod or a shake. He leaned briefly against the wall, but then he offered me a kind of tree stump and went outside. I sat on the tree stump and waited, listening hard for clues to where he’d gone. I stared at the bags of ramen noodles and a can of black beans and wished I’d brought loquats again.
Amiel returned with another log roughly the same size and set it down. Our knees were almost but not quite touching, and I felt the way the sea looks in the afternoon, when every wave glows.
“How long ago did you first come here?” I asked.
He drew in the dirt with the stick that looked like it had been whittled smooth and then charred in a fire. He wrote the numeral four.
For some reason, the way he was writing in the dirt reminded me of the way Greenie and I would talk to each other in church. For a while, her family took me with them to services and during the long sermons we would write on each other’s backs with a fingertip and the other person would try to guess the word.
“Where do you cook?” I asked.
He seemed glad to stand up and go somewhere else. I followed him out to a path that led through willows so thick and low that you’d think it wasn’t worth it to swat your way through. Then we came to a huge mangled sycamore growing half under and half over a hollowed-out bank. The roots formed a sort of ladder that he climbed, reaching down to give me his hand at the top.
Once I stopped feeling the terrific buzz of his hand on mine, I could look around. We were standing on a strange little plateau where someone had once built a little house out of river rock and stucco. The house still had a doorway but no door, four windows but no glass, a chimney but no roof, and a concrete floor. All around the ruined house the trees were near enough and tall enough so that they formed a sort of blind, and I thought you probably couldn’t see it at all from nearby hills.
Inside the house, near the hearth, Amiel had built a sort of fire pit with rocks. It was a safer place to cook than most campsites, really, because there was concrete all around, and I longed to be there when he had a fire going, when we could be cowgirl and cowboy and pretend we weren’t a few miles from two million people. We stood in the sunlit, roofless house and looked down at the charred rocks.
“I love it here,” I said.
Amiel poked at the coals with the stick he’d used to write on the dirt floor of his other house. His sore hand had only a small bandage on it and I reached out to touch it.
“It’s better, I guess?” I said.
Amiel wrote SI with the black end of the stick, each stroke reminding me of the skin-writing game with Greenie.
“Good,” I said.
He balanced the stick on one palm while standing still and then while walking in a circle. He tossed it so that it whirled several times in the air, then caught it.
“Let me try,” I said. He handed me the stick, and I balanced it for a few seconds on my palm. I tried again, chasing after it as it wobbled and fell. Everything seemed perfect. “Can I come back here?”
His face was unsettled.
“Give me your hand,” I said in a teasing voice, and he held out his flat palm as if waiting for me to balance the stick there, but I left the stick where it fell and pulled