Idle Grounds: A Novel

CHAPTER ONE

INITIAL SIGHTING

As always with these things it started with a birthday party. What you should probably know is that the day was bright and clean even though it was summertime, which was malarial at best most years but this year it wasn’t.

As I said, it was bright and clean.

An aunt with yellow, highly styled hair had baked a cake, also yellow, with sugar confetti. It was a boxed cake rather than a homemade one as those are a variable lot and not to be trusted. Her name was Frankie. It was Frankie’s house but not Frankie’s birthday because she wouldn’t have baked her own cake even if it was just from a box, nor would she have hosted her own party as it takes a special kind of person to do that and Frankie was just ordinary in a hysterical, wet-eyed kind of way. She was unmarried and also the only Republican in the family as far as we knew.

It was one of the grown-ups’ birthdays; it doesn’t matter. What matters is that we were all together, which everyone seemed to dread and anticipate in equal measure. Cars and cars and cars rolled up Frankie’s blue gravel drive and every last one of them nosed forward the last few feet and you just knew they were saying something like Well, here we are!

Cousins stuck their legs out from the car doors, always the children first, parents girding their loins behind the steering wheels.

It’s eleven now, we’re out of here by three, our parents said, a fount of shaky determination, three at the latest.

Cousins eyed up cousins, standing a full cousin-length away, giving a shy wave while the adults eased themselves out with a dish covered in tinfoil or a six-pack of Beck’s tinkling like a piggy bank.

Stay up here, okay? Up where we can hear you.

Chickens hopped around on hostile yellow legs. Bug spray was passed along, hot dogs were sliced from their packaging. Hummingbirds appeared at the feeder, fed, vanished.

Frankie had built the house herself. She’d built it so far back from the road that you forgot leaving was an option. Though technically within the borders of the town where most of us lived, Frankie’s house was really in horse country, and although it was only ten minutes in the car from the elementary school, horse country had hardly any people in it. Instead it was full of split-rail fences and birch and pine woods and a few old houses landed like dice rolling way off the playing board into their own shaded grottoes forever.

It was very pretty.

The house’s back deck dropped away into a sloping pasture in which Frankie kept two horses whose names, it seemed, were always changing. Beyond the pasture with the horses was the bulk of the woods, which tumbled downward to a river which was mentioned sometimes but never as a destination. The river was, as far as we knew, the boundary of the family property.

On the wall of Frankie’s dining room she had copies of oil paintings of hunting parties or that’s what we guessed anyway because of their red coats and trumpets. The horses looked absolutely panicked, the people on their backs panicked too but in a more focused way. No one ever ate in there, Frankie’s dining room. We just passed through it on our way out to the deck, or from the deck into the dark of the house to use the bathroom or get ourselves a glass of water or fetch something from our parents’ coat pockets. Once the adults had drinks in their hands everyone relaxed. Back then the bottles were green for the most part and in the sun they looked unbelievably expensive, like they were carved from something you had to excavate and polish.

Anyway what I’ve established, I hope you’ll agree, is that it was a beautiful day and there was no reason for what happened to happen. Nothing propulsive in the atmosphere or setting. The adults were talking about many things, they had known each other for so long the conversation just rowed across the surface of the water like this:

Reagan is worse. Mom would have loved him though.

Mom would have left Dad for Reagan if Dad hadn’t left first, no question.

Reagan would have loved Mom.

She would have died before voting for him though.

Yes. Do you remember when—

It was interesting in that we were excluded entirely but after a while we got restless and went inside, where there were some more of us sitting on the steps that went up to the bathroom and bedrooms and this lot was talking among themselves like birds before they fly off in one jaggy but coordinated movement. There were ten of us cousins give or take and the tallest and also the oldest one was Travis. He was twelve. He looked at us with his long, swinging jaw, trying to weigh us up. Time had passed since the last time we’d all been together, his face said, but blood was blood.

Do you guys want to see something?

Yes, we said. We always want to see something.

We all went up the stairs together. The wallpaper had both stripes and flowers so either the flowers seemed caged or the stripes looked like they had some kind of bacterial infection.

Okay—Travis pressed his finger against the screen of the bathroom window—look.

What we were looking at was Frankie’s front yard and drive with our parents’ cars and then beyond that, at the far-left periphery of our vision, a shed with Frankie’s tools and behind it the band of woods that separated Frankie’s house from her neighbor’s house, which used to be the house they all grew up in, our parents that is, their childhood home.

Just watch.

It was funny because even though we’d been to Frankie’s many times, our parents had never really mentioned the childhood home. It was there under a weight of trees like a bug under a rock and so we’d never given it a second thought. Until Frankie told us, we hadn’t even known they’d lived there, but here’s what we did know: sometimes our grandmother Beezy had whumped them with a switch cut from a blackberry bush.

We watched. If Travis weren’t so tall and old we would have given up watching but he pressed his finger against the screen so hard it turned violet-white and then we saw it. One of the flock from the stairs gave a little moan.

What is it?

Shh. It was certain Travis’s finger would be grated right down to the knuckle. The blond prow of his hair nosed against the screen.

At first it was just a movement, like when you close your eyes in the sun and things jump about. From the wall of trees hiding the childhood home to Frankie’s shed. A ten-yard dash.

What is it?

Shhhh—

Oh, it was fast, you had to give it that. So fast you just knew that whatever it was it didn’t want to be seen, but the thing is, we had seen it.

There! Travis was in a special school.

One of the little ones was standing on the toilet seat and nearly toppled onto the rest of us below but Travis hardly noticed. His whole body was like when you rub a balloon on your hair. At Travis’s school there weren’t any desks, just beanbags, and a robotics lab and a theater where you could sit all around the stage so no one ever needed to feel left out. The Macalasters’ kitchen was filled with mugs with the school’s motto on them, which was the words nostra sponte underneath a shield with animals and plants. It was costing his parents the earth.

Frankie’s yard was still in the sun, pinned down by the heat. Directly below us in spitting range there was a statue of a pop-eyed jockey with his face painted bright paintbox pink that our parents hated, just get rid of that thing oh my god in this day and age. He stood at the source of the blue gravel drive holding a lantern, which must have been intended for someone else—he had no use for it himself—out toward Frankie’s shed and the thicket of pines with the childhood home lost somewhere behind it and this thing moving so fast, the size of a big cat, 15 percent bigger than a big cat.

Last Thanksgiving Travis’s mother, Aunt Maureen, had slapped Frankie across the face. We were all there at Aunt Maureen’s but we hadn’t really been paying much attention until the moments just before the slap, which was so hard we felt slapped ourselves. Frankie had cried and smiled at the same time and Aunt Maureen had said, Sorry, I’m sorry, over and over again until someone took her into the other room and no one saw her until board games later that night, where she didn’t play but just sat there, Travis’s dad rubbing her back in circles.

Zip zip zip. From the tree line to the shed but not back again, that was the part we couldn’t figure out, it was just ever in one direction. You could be excused for thinking that meant it was many different things running to the shed but we just knew it was the same thing over and over, which was worse, somehow, even though it should have been better that there was only just one.

The door rattled splenetically at our backs but it was just an aunt-by-marriage, needing to pee.

What are you all doing in here? she said and we shrugged.

Come on, Travis said in his quietest voice and crooked his finger toward Frankie’s bedroom.

Frankie’s bedroom had a thick aquamarine-ish carpet and potted ferns and a statue of a woman made of white marble, no bigger than the smallest of us. Her face was like O! and she was so soft-looking you might want to run your hands all over the stone except for the snake that wove itself around the folds of her body. Its head reared back at a vicious angle which let you know that it was a biting snake as opposed to, say, a talking one. Otherwise it was a quiet room, full of pet hair.

We crowded to the window.

We didn’t know what to hope for, thing or nothing. Thing meant that our day, only somewhat extraordinary, would become truly remarkable, but it would also mean that whatever else we feared—a woman sewing us into our beds while we were asleep, for example—was possible even if it wasn’t probable. It opened things up in ways both surprising and permanent. Nothing, on the other hand, meant that we would need to go downstairs eventually and get ourselves a 7UP, start thinking about the 9 times tables or something along those lines. That or listen to our parents, who always ended up talking about one thing, which was what had happened with our grandmother Beezy and who was responsible and what the roots of it were and who was responsible for the roots. Everyone with invisible pickaxes and miner’s lights and dirt all over the place. Shining lights into each other’s faces, getting careless with their pickaxes the more they drank, not being mindful of the dirt or who got dirty.

We heard our aunt flush next door and just as we all looked at the sound there it was, like it sensed we were distracted, zip!

It was clever. It already thought it knew us well.

And it was just then, sparked by the flush, that the littlest one, whose name was Abi, made a break for it. Abi was Travis’s sister and she was nice, you could tell even though she was only three, the type who kissed your elbow when you weren’t looking. She’d always been that way. The other thing about Abi is that she had a purple cast on her wrist, on which someone had done a tic-tac-toe, and her pigtails stood straight up from her head, which made her look like a satellite floating in space and gave her an aura of alert melancholy. She still took naps in the afternoon but when she was awake she was everywhere. In many ways she was the best of us.

Abi was out the door and, we had to presume, down the stairs, but honestly here is what it looked like: when she rounded the corner and out of sight it looked like the house moved toward her rather than, you know, the other way around. It looked like the house just jumped and snuffed her out.

Travis reached toward where she’d been and called Abi! and what was funny is that he was scared for no reason. You could tell that he was really terrified. We all were. The house spasmed, then sat back.

Hey, Abi!

But Abi was gone as if she’d never been there at all and there was nothing we could do so eventually we resumed watching the stretch between the shed and the tree line which shielded our parents’ childhood home and it was our stretch now, whether we wanted it or not, and even from Frankie’s bedroom we could feel the warmth of the springy soil coming up through our soles. We felt the sky was preternaturally blue but otherwise, otherwise the day was bright and clean.

CHAPTER TWO

BASEMENT

No one knew where the jockey with the lantern came from, but