Emory's Gift

  After a minute or so my dad came into the kitchen to ask me why I was standing at the sink and laughing. I told him and he smiled at my description, but then he stood behind me and stared at Dan’s flashlight lying on the ground, its rays vanishing into the night, drops of rain flaring briefly as they fell through the beam.

  “This could be big trouble, Charlie,” he told me.

  I didn’t really see how, though, and fell asleep still smiling over how Dan and his buddies collapsed in dead terror in the rain. What could we have to fear from them?

  We’d been back to school for more than a month now, and I guess the teachers found the whole experience so demoralizing they needed a day to themselves, so we had “in-service.” I didn’t care what it meant; for me it just meant “Sleep In Friday.” So I was surprised when I felt my father’s hand shaking my foot.

  “I don’t have school today,” I mumbled at him, fighting desperately to stay asleep.

  “I know. I took the day off work.”

  I pulled the covers off my eyes and peered blearily at him. He was already dressed. My senses came alive one by one and I could hear rain falling on the roof and bacon sizzling in the kitchen. He gazed at me to make sure I was not going to wink back out on him and then turned and left the room.

  After breakfast he told me we needed to go into town. We dashed out in the rain and jumped into the Jeep. I buckled in and gave him a questioning look.

  “We need to get some food for your bear. I figure dog food’ll work if we get the kind that has some real meat in it.”

  “Okay.” I liked the sound of it. Your bear.

  “Charlie.” My dad scratched his chin. I waited for him, the wipers squeaking a little as they rattled back and forth.

  “I don’t know what this is, Charlie. I can’t explain about the bear. I guess he could be tame. Raised by, I don’t know. A circus?” He glanced at me, then stared back out at the road. “But that doesn’t account for what was written on the wall. It said he was a private in the Civil War. That he got shot, or wounded somehow, and then, and then he died.” My father’s eyes were fierce when they flickered at me again. “And now he’s back. From the dead.”

  Cool. That’s what I thought and that’s almost what I said, but my father’s expression was so grim I strangled the word in my mouth.

  “With a message,” I reminded him.

  He sighed and was silent for more than a minute. “Yes. Someone is trying to get us to believe that a bear wrote those words, that he is a Civil War soldier who has been reincarnated as a grizzly bear and has a message for us, or you, or somebody. A message from…” He frowned, not liking where his thoughts were taking him.

  We pulled into the grocery store parking lot and stopped. Dad twisted in the seat and looked at me. “But Charlie, someone else had to have painted those words on the wall.”

  “How?” It seemed ridiculous; who would do such a thing?

  “We’ve never locked the pole barn. Anyone could just waltz right in if they felt like it.”

  “His footprints were all over in the paint, Dad.”

  He cocked his head at me. “You’re saying that if someone went into the pole barn, he did so while the bear was inside. A full-grown grizzly bear.”

  Contrary to my dread expectations, I loved that we were having this conversation, I suddenly realized. I loved that I had Dad’s full attention and that we were working the problem out together. To be truthful, I’d actually just meant that the presence of bear tracks on the cement floor implied, to me, that Emory had been there when the paint can was opened, but I immediately saw Dad’s point. You’d have to be more than a little crazy to go into a pole barn with a live, trapped grizzly bear waiting for you inside.

  “But, Charlie, a bear can’t hold a paintbrush. Those letters weren’t painted with paws; they’re too neat.”

  “Okay.”

  “What we’re probably dealing with here, the only thing that makes sense, is that the bear is owned by someone, his trainer, and his trainer wrote the words. His trainer wouldn’t be afraid to go inside the pole barn.” My dad was looking inward, nodding slightly, testing the theory and finding that it worked for him. “That’s it. There just isn’t any other explanation. It’s a hoax, and not a funny one. I catch the guy I’m going to have him prosecuted for trespassing and vandalism.”

  There was still a little doubt in his mind, though; I could see it in his eyes. “We haven’t seen anybody around,” I objected. I didn’t like the idea that Emory belonged to some bear trainer; I wanted him to belong to me.

  The difference between my dad and me was that to him, the writing on the wall was the most important and perplexing of all of the developments, whereas to me, the point was that I had the coolest pet ever. I even was beginning to regret I’d ever shown my dad the Polaroid—those words on the wall felt like they were going to be nothing but trouble. I decided it was critical I never mention what I had witnessed in person, which was Emory etching his name into the riverbank with his paw, something else his “trainer” could have taught him to do, I supposed. “If he did have a trainer, it’s like he’s abandoned his bear, right? He couldn’t turn up and claim him now.”

  My dad picked up on my tone and gave me a direct look. “There’s something else. Whether Emory’s tame or not, he’s foraging like any grizzly would this time of year. It won’t be long before he needs to return to the mountains to hibernate.”

  “No,” I protested.

  “Yes, Charlie. That’s what they do.”

  “Why can’t he hibernate in the pole barn?”

  “That’s not what he needs. He needs a burrow and he’ll be leaving soon to find one. All we can do is fatten him up.”

  I turned away from my dad and faced the grocery store. I did not like this conversation anymore.

  “I’m just telling you the truth, so you’ll be ready. You need to hear this.”

  The anger that flowed through me then was cold and ugly. I needed to hear it. I needed to be ready. But when my mom was sick, neither one of them told me the truth. Neither one of them said she was dying, that she would one day slip into a coma and die with my father pressing his face into her blankets and making sounds as if he was breaking apart. No, they lied to me; they hid it from me; they said she was going to be okay. They let me live in denial until my father’s howls of anguish rang down the hospital corridor and I rushed in from the room where some well-meaning adults had kept me playing inane card games, shielding me from the truth even with the final seconds ticking off the clock. The shock of it all, the betrayal, the deceit, blindsided me when I saw her skeletal body motionless under those thin blankets and witnessed my father’s explosive, selfish grief. Never a thought for what was happening to me; that I had lost my mom. As he grieved, he grieved alone, shutting me out.

  I jumped out of the Jeep and slammed the door in fury and ran to the grocery store, my feet making wet slapping noises on the pavement. The doors slid open and admitted me with a calm, oiled ease, not at all intimidated by my anger.

  Naturally my father misinterpreted my expression and thought I was just petulant because I couldn’t keep the bear. He grabbed a cart and followed me down to the dog food aisle and did what he always did when the emotions ran high between us: he removed himself from the equation, turning away, making himself busy by carefully reading the ingredients on the dog food bag.

  “Meat by-products,” he muttered. Eventually he heaved several twenty-five-pound bags of the most expensive brand into the cart and then added stuff we needed, like milk and eggs.

  When my mother grocery-shopped she kept me by her side and we snaked up and down the aisles together and I would be bored out of my mind. My dad, though, sent me on missions. “Bacon,” he’d say, and I’d fly off like a missile for bacon.

  What I would give, though, for one more shopping trip with my mom. One more earnest discussion about how I needed to eat something besides sugar pops with sugar on them. One more argument about why it was
fair that she buy a square of dark, bitter chocolate for herself for when she “needed it” but that I didn’t “need” a bag of Mars bars.

  The grocery store looked exactly the same as when my mom was alive. Sometimes I resented that things could remain untouched by her death, hated that the walls didn’t crumble and fall in the outside world to match what was happening to me inside. And sometimes I was grateful for the gift of being able to stand and gaze at something so unchanged it was easy to believe my mother was just around the corner, that if I just stood there she would walk up to me, smiling.

  When we got to the checkout line, Yvonne was manning the cash register. She touched her hair when she saw us approach and gave my father a big grin. “There you are, stranger,” she said. “I haven’t heard from you in a while.”

  Good, I thought to myself.

  My dad sort of shrugged and looked uncomfortable. Yvonne started ringing up our purchases, giving my dad smiling glances. Then her eyes suddenly widened and she gave my father a surprised look. “Did you get a dog?”

  chapter

  TWENTY-TWO

  MY dad and I were exchanging horrified expressions, Yvonne’s question dangling in the air between us. We couldn’t have looked more guilty if we’d been caught sticking up a bank.

  “Thought I would someday,” my father stammered, which sounded insane even to my ears.

  Yvonne cocked her head at him. “So you’re buying the dog food…,” she said.

  “Yeah,” my dad replied, nodding. Didn’t everyone run out and buy a hundred pounds of dog food when they were thinking about buying a dog?

  “It’s for a friend,” I said, master of the truthful untruth. My father gave me a grateful look.

  “Right. A friend named Emory,” my dad responded.

  Yvonne shrugged. Then it seemed to occur to her that she should be showing me some fake affection so my dad would want to marry her. She beamed at me. “Charlie, what is your favorite dinner?”

  I thought about it. “Steak,” I answered, keeping my answer short in case there was some sort of trick lying in wait behind the question.

  “And how about you, George?”

  My dad blinked. I could tell that he, too, suspected there was some reason for this interrogation.

  “I guess steak is as good an answer as any I could come up with,” he agreed carefully.

  “You’re not buying any steak today, though,” Yvonne pointed out. That’s right, Yvonne; you caught us! You are so smart!

  “Yeah, well…” My dad shrugged.

  “Well, I have an idea,” Yvonne said. I felt intimations of doom. I did not want Yvonne having ideas. “How about I get us a couple of steaks and bring them over tonight.

  “I’ll make a salad and my famous baked beans,” she continued.

  I couldn’t imagine how dumb you had to be to believe you somehow had attained celebrity status for opening a can of beans. As far as I knew, Yvonne was famous for one thing, and that was ringing up the purchases at the grocery store.

  “Well,” my dad said.

  Yvonne was smiling at him and I knew we were sunk.

  “Okay, that would be great,” he said.

  “I’ll bring beer,” Yvonne said. “The whole meal’s on me.”

  “No, you should let me pay for something,” my dad protested. But Yvonne was insistent. This way, I knew, we’d be in her debt forever. My dad would have to buy her an engagement ring because he owed her for the beer.

  Yvonne was as good as her threat, showing up with a couple of bags of groceries and wearing a medium-length skirt with a big belt buckle. If Yvonne fell in the water with that thing on, the buckle would drag her to the bottom and I would not employ a single one of my junior-lifesaving skills to save her, not even if Kay were there watching.

  Earlier, when we first got home, Emory had, to my father’s astonishment, eaten nearly half a bag of dog food in one meal. Then he lumbered off into the woods, which made me happy, since as far as I was concerned the novelty of cleaning up bear pies in the yard was long over. I made a mental note, though, to keep the back door open and listen for dogs.

  Yvonne hummed around in the kitchen, opening cupboards, not asking me anything. I was in charge of peeling potatoes to mash. I watched her and hated her for the silent judgment I saw in the way she explored my mother’s system, feeling her think that oh no, she’d never put the spatulas here, and why in the world would the cheese grater be over there? In the end, though, she surveyed the room, the whole house, with a satisfied contentment, as if the place already belonged to her.

  When she made her celebrity beans, she opened the cans, poured them into a baking dish, and put brown sugar and some ketchup on top before sliding them into the oven. There, I knew how she did it; so I guess I was famous now, too.

  Her presence made me sullenly angry at my dad, so I wasn’t talking to him, and I didn’t want to talk to Yvonne, so I concentrated on my potato peeling as if I found the whole exercise to be more challenging than I could manage. If Yvonne had been a real cook, I reflected, she’d have made potato salad like my mom. That was famous. Everyone in town knew about Laura Hall’s delicious potato salad, which was chockfull of mysterious secret ingredients and not ketchup.

  Yvonne was stooped down, looking on a lower shelf for something or maybe just snooping, when I looked through the window over the sink and saw, to my horror, Emory come plodding into the yard. The smoke from my father’s efforts was wafting around and Emory had his nose up, tantalized. My father couldn’t see the bear because the grill was on the back deck.

  Yvonne stood up.

  “Miss Mandeville!” I blurted, so sharply she whirled, blinking, emitting a quick, “Oh!”

  “You, uh … this is so nice of you to cook dinner,” I babbled.

  She stared at me as if unsure she had heard me correctly. Then she smiled. The darn bear was still completely visible in the yard and if she turned back around our secret would be out. “Why, thank you, Charlie.”

  “Would you like to see my room?” I asked desperately.

  Her grin was even wider. “Sure, that would be nice.”

  I shocked both of us by reaching out for her hand. I just couldn’t take the chance that she would turn back to the sink, not even for a moment.

  I walked her into my room and acted like I was doing a museum tour, showing her my model airplanes, my junior-lifesaving certificate, and everything else I could think of. I was running out of ideas and was practically ready to show her my underwear drawer when my father suddenly appeared in the doorway. He looked a little frantic.

  “Hi!” he said loudly.

  Yvonne smiled at him and touched her hair. “Charlie was just showing me his room,” she told him.

  “So you’ve been back here what, several minutes?”

  “Yes, probably four or five minutes,” I said.

  Yvonne looked back and forth between us, a little puzzled by the conversation.

  “So, okay, then,” my dad said.

  “We were just in the kitchen and I was looking out the window over the sink,” I told my father, “and then I asked Miss Mandeville if she wanted to see my room.”

  “Ah.” My dad nodded. “Steaks are done. I put them in the kitchen.”

  “I’d better get the beans out of the oven,” Yvonne said. “Everything else is ready.”

  I gave my dad an intent look, which he interpreted correctly. “I put everything away in the pole barn that needed to go in there,” he said to me.

  The whole thing rattled me so much that when I set the table I didn’t think to put out a place for Yvonne. At least, that’s what I assume my father thought. Yvonne didn’t remark on it, even though it was pretty rude. What she did, instead, was grab her own plate and silverware and settle down into Mom’s seat at the table. When I saw this I gave my dad a stare that was full of hot accusation, and he pursed his lips uncomfortably.

  “Yvonne,” my dad said, then stopped because he wasn’t sure what he wanted to s
ay.

  Yvonne blinked at him, smiling, and then the smile faltered when she saw the expression on his face. Suddenly her eyes widened. “Oh!” she said.

  She moved her place over and some of the tension went out of us.

  After the steaks I did the dishes in silence while Yvonne and my dad watched television. Yvonne laughed out loud at Sanford and Son, which offended me for some reason. My mom never laughed at the television; she would just smile when something struck her as clever. It seemed a lot more classy than the guffaws Yvonne was blowing out like gusts of cigarette smoke. When something struck her as particularly hilarious she dropped her head on my dad’s shoulder as if she were having some sort of sudden neck dysfunction.

  I wanted to go see Emory after I did the dishes, but instead I sat at the table to do my homework. I didn’t want to leave the two of them in the living room together.

  Yvonne and my father watched The Rockford Files and then Police Woman and then sat and talked. My dad caught me yawning and rubbing my eyes.

  “Off to bed, Charlie,” he said.

  “Good night, Charlie,” Yvonne said before my dad barely had the words out. She gave me her big grin because we were buddies now. I gave them a surly look but didn’t try to argue with my dad.

  I went to bed determined to stay awake, vigilantly monitoring the hallway for traffic. If Yvonne went back to my mom’s bedroom with my father I knew I would run away and never come back. I would live in the mountains with Emory while he hibernated, and there would be a legend about a boy who ran wild with a grizzly bear.

  Of course, I’d sneak back into town to see Beth from time to time.

  I drifted off to sleep and then awoke around one in the morning, angry at myself for dozing off. I slid out of bed and crept into the living room, where there were still some lights on.

  My father was sprawled in the big reclining chair, and Yvonne was in the chair with him, sitting in his lap, her head on his chest. They were both fast asleep. I stood with my arms crossed, pondering what action to take. I wanted something dramatic, like maybe banging pots together or firing off a shotgun. Or even bringing Emory inside to snarl in Yvonne’s face, to scare her so bad she never came back.