Emory's Gift

  “Are we done?” I asked him after each task. Finally, after the mailbox, he said yes, we were done. I turned to sprint away.

  “Go wash up. We’re going to the Becks’ for Sunday dinner.”

  I looked back at him, astounded. “What?”

  “We’ve been invited to the Becks’ house. Shower and put on something clean.”

  As I stood in the shower I pictured a hungry grizzly bear pacing the riverbanks, wondering where lunch was. Walking up the road to the Becks’ house, I thought of the way the bear looked at me, now believing that in his implacable gaze I saw affection and friendship, a friendship I was abandoning by putting on a pressed shirt and striding next to my silent father to the home of our neighbor.

  The Becks lived next door to the Aldertons. They had a son named Scotty who was eight years old, with whom I was expected to “play” while my dad sat with the adult Becks and drank beer. Scotty Beck amused himself with toy soldiers, for God’s sake! He was still at that age when he ran everywhere, like a puppy.

  But there was no preparing myself for the betrayal that awaited me inside the Becks’ home that afternoon. Worse than abandoning the bear, worse than playing with stupid dolls with Scotty, worse even than wearing a starched long-sleeved shirt on a warm August evening, was the woman who rose off the couch to greet us when Mr. Beck ushered us into the house.

  “Charlie, you remember Miss Mandeville,” Mrs. Beck gushed at me.

  The lady worked in the grocery store, ringing up purchases. I never knew her name. The only times I’d ever seen her, she wore a smudged white smock of some kind and her hair and smile were a little dull. Now, though, she had on a black skirt, her brown hair was up, her watery blue eyes dark with makeup, and her lips bloodred. “Hi, Charlie,” she said, as if we were old friends. A strong lavender scent spilled off of her. Her eyes sparkled at my father.

  “Hello, George,” she said to my dad, her voice full of a throaty mirth.

  “Hi, Yvonne.” He sort of stood awkwardly, but the lady came forward and turned her head to my dad and then he shocked me by kissing her on the cheek.

  My dad kissed her on the cheek.

  chapter

  FOUR

  SCOTTY Beck’s idea of fun was for him to take his G.I. Joe, wrap it in a toy parachute, and hurl it out of an upstairs window. My assignment was to chase the plastic soldier down, so I stood in the backyard, loitering by a snowmobile that sat marooned in the grass. Through the windows I had a clear view of the adults sitting in the living room, drinking cocktails. Mr. Beck laughed a lot, and there seemed to be a connection between how much he laughed and how many times he went to pour himself another drink. He had the biggest, whitest teeth I’d ever seen on anything not wearing a saddle.

  “Here he comes!” Scotty yelled at me, waving to get my attention. I squinted up at him. The G.I. Joe came flying out, the chute all tangled, and fell to the ground like a shotgunned duck. “Cool!” Scotty called. I could hear him tearing through the house to join me. I walked over to where G.I. Joe lay stiffly on the ground, wrapped in his plastic shroud. It appeared that rigor mortis had already set in.

  “You want to throw it this time?” Scotty panted at me.

  “No,” I snarled, a flash of rage coursing through me.

  Scotty had such an innocent face, his white skin so perfectly unmarred, his features so baby soft, that I felt a little ashamed at the hurt I’d just caused. He blinked at me like a dog being scolded, not sure what he had done wrong.

  I held out my hand for the doll. “Okay, I’ll throw it.”

  I passed the living room on my way to launch G.I. Joe on another mission. Miss Mandeville—Yvonne—was sitting closer to my dad on the couch, and her hem had ridden up a little on her crossed legs. She was smoking a Virginia Slim, holding it at the end of a bent wrist. I felt my face flush.

  Dinner was lasagna. Mrs. Beck pulled it out of the oven like she was delivering a baby, turning to us proudly. “I’ll bet you two bachelors haven’t had lasagna in a long time,” she trilled. Mr. Beck laughed. Yvonne touched her hair and looked at my father.

  It was on the tip of my tongue to tell Mrs. Beck that, in fact, we’d had lasagna two nights ago, thank you very much; we had frozen lasagnas stacked up ten high in the game freezers. Yes, we’d had lasagna; we were awash in the stuff. I felt my dad staring at me, though, and when I met his eyes a tiny shake of his head told me to keep my mouth shut.

  “It looks very good, Mrs. Beck,” I said instead. I glanced over to gain some approval from my father, but Yvonne was touching his arm and asking him how we two men managed to feed ourselves, which was stupid because she knew full well we bought groceries; she rang them up for us.

  “I cook, some,” my dad muttered.

  “Yeah! Some!” Mr. Beck said through a mouth full of white teeth, laughing at his wit and then picking up his cocktail glass as if to show us why he thought he was funny.

  Yvonne touched her hair again and smiled at my dad. I looked away.

  “I saw a bear in the woods,” Scotty told me from across the table, cutting me out of the conversation with the adults. I stared at him.

  “Nuh-huh,” I said.

  “Sure did. With my dad’s binoculars. On the other side of the valley.”

  This made me angry for reasons that were not clear. “You did not see a bear.”

  My sharp tone quieted the grown-ups a little. “A bear?” Mrs. Beck repeated uncertainly.

  “There are some black bears around here, but they usually don’t come down this far,” my father said.

  Yvonne smiled at him as if he’d just said the smartest, most admirable thing she’d ever heard come out of a man’s mouth. Abraham Lincoln could be delivering the Gettysburg Address at the other end of the table and Yvonne would be ignoring him and mooning at my father, reeking of lavender, dimpling, and touching her hair.

  “Scotty, you know why bears are em-barr-assed?” Mr. Beck asked. I don’t know how the man could even talk with all those teeth in his mouth.

  “Why, Dad?” Scotty asked.

  “Because they’re bear naked,” Mr. Beck hooted. Scotty laughed, a single “ha,” while Mr. Beck the Comedian stood. “Anybody need a refresher?”

  Mrs. Beck put a hand on his arm as if to slow him down, but Mr. Beck walked very deliberately to the liquor cabinet, placing his feet carefully, not at all acting drunk. “Larry.” Mrs. Beck sighed. Yvonne touched her hair.

  “He was way over there, climbing up rocks,” Scotty said, as if we were still talking about bears.

  Yvonne put a concerned hand on my dad’s arm. “I worry about you two, alone in that cabin,” she pouted.

  “We get by just fine,” my dad said. Yvonne’s hand stayed on his wrist. Her eyes were all soft. Mr. Beck opened a new bottle of clear liquid with a joyous twist of the cap.

  “You need a woman to cook you fellows a homemade meal,” Yvonne stated, moving the conversation ahead like someone playing chess.

  “Could have been a grizzly,” Scotty speculated.

  “I’m going to be sick,” I said suddenly.

  Conversation froze. Everyone looked at me.

  “I’m sick to my stomach,” I elaborated.

  In the silence that followed you could have heard Yvonne touch her hair. Finally my dad responded. “What is it, Charlie?” he asked.

  “I said I’m going to vomit!” I shouted at Yvonne. And then, though I hadn’t been the slightest bit sick when I’d made my declaration, my body backed me up by regurgitating right there at the table. I turned away from everyone and aimed at the floor, but I don’t imagine it made the sight any more appealing.

  Mrs. Beck was on her feet and had a towel to my mouth before anyone else had even moved. “It’s okay, Charlie; you just go ahead,” she said softly. I closed my eyes at the sensation of her soft hand on my back. This was what mothers did; they held you and spoke kindly to you when you were sick. When you had a fever their hands were cool and soothing on your forehead.

&
nbsp; Mrs. Beck drove us home. I sat in the front seat and ignored Yvonne as she unhappily waved at us from the front deck of the Becks’ house.

  “You should go lie down,” my dad said, though it was still light outside. I didn’t fight it; the light touch of Mrs. Beck made me want to bury my face in my pillow.

  I thought of my mother helping me one day when I’d skinned my knees falling off a rope swing. I was maybe eight years old. Her tanned skin at that point was more than a year away from the blotchy yellow pallor I would come to associate with her face when the disease—chronic myelogenous leukemia—took over and killed her blood. Her name was Laura, Laura Hall—we were a family with a Charlie and a George and a Laura, normal names, nothing at all like Yvonne.

  My mom sat me down in the bathtub that day and carefully cleaned my burning wounds. That’s what mothers did; they took care of you.

  And then when they got sick it was your job to take care of them. But I hadn’t done that, not when it mattered most, and that was what made my tears burn my face as I lay in bed—that was my awful secret. When it was my job to take care of my mom, I failed her, and the consequences were life altering.

  When sleep finally came it released me from both my grief and my guilt.

  I was ravenous the next morning and ate so many bowls of Cap’n Crunch that the inside of my mouth burned. A note from my dad told me to call him, so I did—I liked phoning him at the shop, but I knew it pulled him off the floor, so I only did it when it was important. My father’s company made furniture parts out of wood, and I could hear banging and drilling and cutting going on while the woman who had answered went to go find him.

  “Hello?”

  “Dad, it’s Charlie. You said I should call you when I woke up,” I said in a rush, so he wouldn’t get mad at me.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Not bad. I’m okay. I’m fine. I feel good,” I said, adjusting the story when it occurred to me that anything less than a glowing report of health might result in me being ordered to stay inside. “I’m all better.”

  “Probably just something you ate, then,” my dad speculated.

  “Yes, I guess. I mean, I like the food here at home.” As far as I was concerned, we never needed to go anywhere for dinner again.

  There was a silence on the line. Someone hammered something. A circular saw shrilly ripped into a board.

  “Okay, well, you stay close to the house. Call me if you feel sick again,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  There was another silence, this one so deep it felt like it was pulling me like quicksand into the phone. Why couldn’t my dad just talk to me sometimes? Ask me about something, tell me something, give me something besides instructions?

  “Okay then,” my dad said, hanging up.

  I pulled a big aluminum pan out of the game freezer and lifted up the tinfoil to see what I’d found. It looked like one of many hamburger casseroles. I could see cheese and noodles and maybe some canned peppers. We would never eat it, and my dad would never miss it. I marched down the path into the canyon holding the casserole like a waiter headed for the table.

  I sat by the creek all afternoon, occasionally poking at the casserole with a stick to check on the progress it was making toward a thaw. There was no sign of the bear.

  The next day I brought down a cooked chicken that was badly freezer burned. The casserole pan from the day before had been crumpled and ripped, but as I examined it I couldn’t be sure what kind of animal had eaten the contents. Some of the scrape marks looked too sharp and tiny for a bear and probably were the result of a fox having a meal, but whether the fox was cleaning up after a grizzly had had supper or had hogged the whole thing I just couldn’t be sure.

  The chicken vanished: not even bones were left the next morning. I reluctantly left another casserole. “Bear!” I yelled into the woods. A tinny echo bounced back at me and then the trees whistled with the warm breeze, but other than that, there was no reaction.

  “I’m not coming tomorrow!” I shouted.

  Nothing.

  “I’ll be back in a few days. You’d better come out if you want food!” I threatened.

  It’s easy for me as an adult to wonder what the heck I thought I was doing. This was a grizzly, not a stray cat. But I wasn’t the first person in the world to want to provide food to a bear: it had only been a few years since the country’s animal experts had closed the dumps in Yellowstone that had for decades served up free food to the grizzlies. The park service had even built bleachers so people could sit and watch the bears eat garbage!

  I make these excuses to myself now because as a bear biologist I know just how wrongheaded my impulse was. But still, had I known where it would all lead would I have stopped trying to feed the bear? I simply can’t answer that.

  What I can say, though, is that as incredible as it sounds, the remarkable encounter with the bear actually faded in importance for me over the next several days, shoved out of the way by a casual reminder at our junior-lifesaving class.

  “Don’t forget next week, you don’t have to come in your bathing suits,” Kay told us. “We’ll be doing artificial resuscitation.” Her dark eyes blandly looked us over. “Mouth-to-mouth.”

  Don’t forget? Like any of us had been thinking about anything else? The Soviet Army could be attacking our town and the only concern I would have was whether it would mean canceling mouth-to-mouth class.

  Where once I luxuriated in the languid pace of summer vacation, I now cursed it. Like every teenage boy, I had managed to turn lethargy into a defining form of personal expression, but now I was almost angrily impatient, glaring at the clock, outraged by its lack of progress. I went down to the creek a dozen times or so and saw nothing of the bear and that, too, made me restless and grumpy.

  I don’t think I slept much the Friday night before the big day. That morning I ate breakfast and then brushed my teeth eleven separate times. I swished nearly a pint of mouthwash, until you could use my breath to thin paint. When my father came home at lunchtime from the Shelburton ranch he found me on the front deck where I had been sitting for an hour and a half. I yanked open the door to the Jeep and bounded in.

  Dan Alderton had apparently dropped Lifesaving. This was the second class he’d skipped—miss two and you’re out, Kay had warned us. The sixth grader was also missing—the prospect of what we were about to do was probably just too much for him to bear. But all four seventh graders were there, nervously bumping into each other. Kay waved at us, leading us down a hall and unlocking a door to a conference room.

  “Come on in, guys.”

  We walked as if glued together, a gaggle of gangly geeks looking ready to bolt for the doors. The room was small, carpeted, with yellow walls and a black rubber mat on the floor. A large vinyl bag lay by the mat.

  Kay smiled at us as we fidgeted our way into the room and spread out on one wall as if preparing for a firing squad. She was wearing short red shorts and a simple T-shirt. Her jet-black hair brushed her shoulders and gleamed with a metallic sheen in the fluorescent lighting. Her lipstick matched her shorts, which I found to be an almost unimaginably beautiful combination, though both the shorts and her lips were plenty nice on their own.

  “So, did everyone read the chapter?”

  We gave nervous nods.

  Kay knelt by the bag, unzipping it. “Carl, come help me with this,” she said.

  Carl was a tall, sandy-haired seventh grader, who leaped forward with absurd eagerness. Kay had him unfold a life-sized mannequin and lay it on the mat. The plastic lips on the thing were open, the eyes shut. Carl lingered until he realized he couldn’t really justify kneeling next to Kay on the floor, and then he sprang back up to be with the rest of us on the wall.

  “Okay, so, we can do this two ways. You can do it either on the dummy or on me. Who’s first?”

  Relief and disappointment were written on our faces. The tension went out of our bodies like a breath we hadn’t realized we’d been holding. br />
  Carl, eager to exploit the incredible intimacy he felt he’d developed with Kay during the whole lay-out-the-dummy incident, stepped forward. He knelt by the mannequin’s head, unmistakably picking plastic lips over real ones.

  There was absolutely nothing in Kay’s expression to betray whether she was kidding or not about the idea of doing live lip-to-lip training. She lectured us about compressing the water out of the lungs and made sure Carl squeezed the nose shut. I listened numbly. The next boy in line picked the dummy, as did the next. I held back, asking myself what would happen if I told her I wanted to try it on her. Would she laugh at me? Tell me I was stupid for taking her offer seriously?

  The safe thing would be to do like everyone else and blow into the dummy.

  I stood there, locked in indecisiveness, until all the other boys had gone and it was my turn.

  “Charlie?” Kay said. “You ready?”

  I nodded. I stepped forward. I cleared my throat. “I’ll, uh, do you.”

  The boys on the wall straightened as if they’d just been hit with a cattle prod. As for Kay, those dark eyes flickered just a little—amusement? Pity? I stood, awaiting my fate.

  “Okay,” she said simply. She pushed the dummy off the mat and lay down. “What’s the first thing?”

  “Check the airway,” I muttered. My pulse was hammering in my head so hard I couldn’t really hear myself. I lowered myself to my knees. What was I thinking? Was I really going to do this?

  Her nose was soft and delicate. I pinched it shut. Her head was back. I shakily put my mouth on hers.

  If I did everything as I was trained—watched for her chest to rise, simulated rolling her over to press the water out of her lungs, timed my breaths—I have no memory of any of it. But I will never for a moment forget the light, warm, amazing sensation of touching my mouth to Kay’s. It wasn’t a kiss, not really. But it was close enough.

  “Good, Charlie,” Kay said with her studied blandness. I could feel that the boys on the wall were ready to raise their hands and ask for another go at it, but Kay had me practice on the dummy a few times so she could watch, and then class was over.