The Painted Drum - Louise Erdrich [79]
Even though she’d already done this, Shawnee decided to look through the whole house methodically to see if there was anything to eat forgotten in some bag or box, some corner. There were two rooms, and the bathroom. She started in the bathroom. They had eaten the toothpaste already. Striped towels were balled up in a corner, and she carefully took them apart and shook them free of wrinkles. The bathroom was icy cold; the wind shot through the window, which did not close right. Sometimes the pipe that made the faucet work froze, and Mama had told her to leave the water on just enough to drip through the night. Shawnee opened the cupboard and dragged out the nearly empty bottles of shampoo, the cracked plastic toys, the broken tubes of hair mousse, her mother’s plastic hair cap printed with bright yellow flowers. She put the combs and the brush aside in a heap. Way back in the cupboard there was a bottle with an inch of cherry cough syrup in the bottom. She drank most of it and then ran water in the bottle and shook it. She brought it out to the kitchen and gave it to Apitchi. He went quiet and began to drink the pinkish stuff with a greedy sob. Shawnee went back to the bathroom, dumped the trash out carefully onto the floor. She pawed through it and then jammed it back into the plastic bin.
She began to search all through the room that was part kitchen and part living room. She had looked all through that room before, but the find in the bathroom encouraged her. She opened the cupboard doors one by one. Easy to tell, of course, they were completely empty. But in a time past her remembering, someone had covered the shelves on the bottom with white paper, now yellowed and stained. When it occurred to Shawnee to lift those papers up, she found crumbs underneath or maybe they were crushed bugs but she did not care. She swept them carefully into a plastic bowl and then parceled them out into shallow coffee cups. Alice and Apitchi saw what she was doing and watched her. When the crumbs were evenly divided, each took a cup and then they went over to the blankets and carefully sat down. Quietly, intent, they wet their pointer fingers and then dipped into the crumbs. Put their fingers in their mouths. While they sucked on crumbs, Shawnee kept searching.
The refrigerator had not worked for some time and was used to store dishes and cereal and bread. There were only plates and cups in it now, a box of screws and some jar lids. Shawnee looked through the compartments and drawers anyway because her mother always hid treats so that the children wouldn’t eat them all at once, or sometimes because she’d bought herself a special little something. Shawnee was counting on her mother’s habit of stashing things away and forgetting where she put them. She opened pots, overturned empty cans, reached her hands into the creepy dark recesses under the sink and behind the stove. She unbent a clothes hanger and plucked at the catch on the rectangular hinged door beneath the oven until it opened. She stood on top of the counter and swept her hand carefully across the tops of the cupboards where she couldn’t see. There were no closets to look inside, but there was a rack by the door that held coats and sweaters. Boots, shoes, socks, and slippers were piled all around. She pushed them aside and it was here, rummaging through pockets, that she made a spectacular find. As soon as her hand closed on the bar of candy, she froze. She didn’t let the paper crackle. Alice and Apitchi were curled in the pile of blankets. Shawnee drew the bar out slowly until it nestled in her sleeve. If Apitchi had been crying again or Alice chewing on her hair, she might have kept it for herself. But when she turned, she