Kensey Stedman
Studio. February 5, 2008. 
This is without a title because it is not finished yet.  


There was no firstborn son or daughter.  There were some stillborns.  So Honey and John rented the second floor and the attic room of their green house on a street called Floral to a couple in glasses and scarves and within two winters there was a baby girl and the couple called her Beth.  Another two winters and a little boy joined her.  
Three more winters and a Christmas Eve, a crackling fire, and the little boy calls Honey "Mother" and Honey smiles and his mother smiles and neither say, "No, no."

Honey turned the gas stove on whenever the children cried.  She pointed to the blue flame and said, "Look."   
	He watched the fire and he did not blink. The blue and orange always soothed him, the hushed hissing always calmed him. 
 But Beth did not stop crying when Honey turned the stove on.  Beth cried and felt alone.  Her little brother was in a trance.  If he wanted to turn his eyes from the burner, he would not be able to.  
	"Look, Beth," said Honey.  
Beth was afraid of the small blue circle of flame.  She was more afraid of the bees.  Beth was allergic.  
Beth's brother has grown up.   His name is Adam and he has a sharp jaw like a hook or the flourish at the end of a signature. The jaw is where our gills used to be, a long time ago, when humans were fish.  
When did this happen? thinks Beth.  When did he grow up?  Evolution, thinks Beth, Fish, infant, little boy, man.   

Honey stopped evolving the winter that he started shaving.  Honey stopped evolving soundlessly, in her sleep.  She left a dress she was sewing for Beth halfway finished in the Singer.  Beth kept it. 
"May I keep it?" she had asked their mother the morning they buried Honey.   
"Of course," their mother had answered.  
He kept Honey's bible and one of her silver thimbles.  He did not ask their mother if he could.  He just took them.   

"There is an Indian in Honey's room," Adam said on the day they buried her.  
"Native American," his mother said.  
Beth was curled up in the couch corner, hidden in folds of discolored blankets and decorative stitched pillows their father hated.  He thought she looked like a small, pale rabbit.  
"Honey said she saw an Indian in there," Beth said, "a man."    
"There is not a man in Honey's room", his mother said.  
The soft tick tick ticking of the clock in the corner was louder because the faint tickings of quiet clocks always get louder when someone dies.  
"What are we going to do with the tree?" his father asked, sad-mouthed from the doorway. 
 

The tree, the slice of giant sequoia stump.  Beth and her brother like to lie on it and look up at the stars and feel the wind on their toes and rest their heads on the birth of William Shakespeare or on the invention of gunpowder.  Each wobbling, concentric ring is proof that time exists and passes, or at least one-thousand and three hundred years of it existed and passed.   
Pope Benedict is born, World War One, growth and shrinkage of the Byzantine Empire.  This tree was felled by loggers in 1863.  
"Where is the rest of it?" Beth had asked Honey a long time ago.  
"Oh," Honey had said, " I couldn't tell you."  
The rest of the tree is a four-post bed in Oregon, a log cabin in Nevada, armoires and hope chests in Wyoming and Arizona and California collecting dust and despair; no one keeps things in an "armoire" any longer, girls get married without any thought of a hope chest.  Another slice of it is still in Muir Woods, on display- a natural monument in a National Monument.  
"How," Honey had asked her husband when he pulled her out into the cold lawn and there it was, glossy, whorled, thirty feet across, "did this come to be here?"  
He had kissed her.  His name was John.  
"It was in the museum," John said.  
		"The museum," Honey repeated.  
		"The Museum," said John, "of Natural History." 
		"John," said Honey.  
And John said, "Hush."  


A ceramic bowl of naïve plums, a row of winking thimbles, a sulking rocking chair.  This is where I am.  This is where I come in, slipping and sneaking into Adam's childhood home.  Breaking and entering, but not truly.  I tell myself this.  
"Where in the world," Honey would have asked Adam if ever I had met her, "did you find her?"  
The jam-fated plums are gone now-it has been a long time since he and his mother and father and Beth have lived in this house. The pits of those plums would be small trees.  But Honey still lives in this house.  Honey and the Indian.  
Honey and the Indian are watching me when I crawl in through the window in the kitchen, the one they did not board up or lock when they boarded up and locked each window and door in the house they used to live in, the house the children were born in, the house with a record player and Christmas music.  These two last things are still here.  
I wonder if Honey and the Indian ever put them on and spin through the rooms, dance through the cobwebs, ghost waltzing all night.  I think they must-there cannot be a lot else to do.  
Honey and the Indian are watching me when I come through the stiff floral curtains with lacey trim, sun bleached.  I have this part down-hoist, open window, part curtains, jump, one leg, swing, two leg, and in.  
This is how we got in the night he said, "Look, this is the house I grew up in and we've got nowhere else to go."  
 And we parked in the street in the wet August heat and I followed him through the kitchen window and without him telling me I could feel them there, I could feel them in the walls and on the staircase and peering down from every eave.  Watching, watching.  
We were there because we had nowhere else to go.  We had no friends.  We had lost them all. We had driven them all away.  I had driven them all away.  We were not sure what they spent their time doing anymore, any of them-talking in basements and living rooms? Going to bars across the river, where it was cheaper to drink?  
They would have liked his company.  I imagined they wanted for it, that they missed him.  
"That is not true," he would have said that night if I had brought it up.  But it was true, and that night I could feel their eyes on us, Honey and the Indian, even before I was in the house.  
Standing in the dark driveway before we entered I had asked him, "Who is in there?" 
"Nobody," he said.  
"Someone," I said, "is in there.  I asked, "Ghosts?"  
He did not say anything but showed me how to hoist, open, jump, swing, and land painlessly enough on the dusty kitchen floor with an empty thud.  
We did this for a summer.  We slept on the sun-faded carpet of the living room floor and woke up sweating. We splashed water that sputtered and protested from the rusting bathroom sink on our faces and slipped outside, walked through the field, the Indian graveyard.   I wondered why they bothered to keep the water running at all in that house but he wouldn't tell me.  
We did this up until the end of August, when it seemed like it wanted to burn itself out, a final sunny day, a fire, and then nothing.  We did this up until the morning that he disappeared.  
Now, I walk through his abandoned house without him and look for anything.  Sometimes I say aloud, "Where did you go?" but he does not answer me.  Sometimes I see things out of the corner of my eye and this is when I go back through the kitchen window and run to the sequoia stump and lie with my head on the marker for the French Revolution.    

I woke up and he was gone.  It was that simple.  It is still this simple.  I have repeated this over and over to many people.  I have said it to his mother.  I have said it to his father.  I have said it to his mother and his father sitting together on their living room couch, both of them looking ill and drawn.  
I have said it to my mother and father, classmates, neighbors, police officers.  I have stared over the bobbing heads of school guidance counselors and read the posters encouraging me to have PERSERVERANCE and DETERMINATION and said it.  I have said it to a psychologist who nodded and nodded and asked me ridiculous questions.   
The police officers I will later remember as separate from everyone else because I did not dread talking to them.  They listened, wrote things down, said "Alright, good.  Alright."  
No, I did not see or hear anything.  No, he was not acting in any unusual way that night.  No, I did not know he would leave and do you think if I had I would have let him go?  Do you think he would have left without me?  Do you think he would have left me?  
This is how I know that someone took him.

	My brother Matthew makes our father read out loud.  When our father will not, Matthew sits Indian style on the floor and spreads a book open on his lap and pretends like he is reading.  He does know enough to hold it so the words are right side up.  
	It is morning, cold, the book is a Mother Goose.   Someone's Mother Goose or someone else's Mother Goose-you could not count all of the different Mother Geese on the fingers of both hands.  I imagine that if each and every Mother Goose written into existence and shelved in children's rooms came together on a grassy field there would be an army-a boot-clad, bonnet-wearing, grandmotherly army.  
	"Matthew," I say, "read me something." 
I wait for him to recite from memory an anecdote about a cat, a cobbler, a fiddle, a shoe. A cobweb, an apple.  
But he says in one long breath: "If one goose gets sick and cannot fly with the others, two more geese will leave the flock and wait with it until it dies."  
He does not look at me.  
"Did you know that?" he asks.

		On a bitterly cold night before Adam disappeared he told me that he would sometimes wake up in the house he grew up in. 
		"You mean you open your eyes and that is where you believe you are?" I had asked. 
		He shook his head no but said, "Sure."   
	This was before I had ever seen the house, before he had ever taken me there.  
		"There was an Indian graveyard in the field behind it," he said.  "Beth and I always heard them at night".  
		"Did you see them?" I asked.  
		"Beth did," he said.  
	I imagine that every childhood home is haunted.  When you are a child, every corner is darker, every eave higher, every staircase more winding and creaking.  In the house I grew up in, it was the seventh step down that creaked.  
	The house I grew up in was quiet, always almost asleep or coming out of sleep, resigned to children, pillowcases, teapots, the evening news played low on a crackling television.  Its spirits were benign.  
	"Did the Indians come in the house?" I asked. 
	I thought that the house he grew up in sounded too alive, as cogitating and volatile as the people that lived inside it.  It sounded wild and untamed and restless, the sort of house that seems to sit under a full moon more nights than it should.  
		"One did," he said, "one came in the house."  
	I had wondered if his parents ever felt them, felt the whisperings and gusts of the ghosts, or if he and his sister had kept it between them-a secret in sibship they did not share around any orange campfire.  
	I would like to have a secret like that with my brother.  When he was born, our drowsy house had begun to smell of something else besides beeswax and dish soap.  It was a sweet smell, but not floral or epidermal or the sort of sweetness that collects in a warm house on cold holidays.  
	It was cammaderie.  Lying on the kitchen floor, white tiles cool against bare legs and arms, I would watch the millions of pinpricks of light hanging in the air, particles of dust lit to visibility by the sun coming in through the windowpane and think, He can see them, too.  Adults miss these things: dust illuminated by filtering sunlight making tiny golden galaxies that move, but just barely; Cherokee ghosts talking, singing in the middle of the night.  
		"What else?" I had asked.  
	I had wanted more.  I wanted to hear that Beth had woken him up in the predawn lavender darkness of Christmas morning saying, "Hush", saying, "Come on," pulling him by the hand to the twinkling tree downstairs. 
	I had wanted to hear that the stove was gas stop like the stove in my house been-the sharp hiss, the crackle, the sudden small ring of fire, blue and playful, the oily, mineral smell: these are things that adults miss, as well.  
		"Was it a gas stove?" I had asked him.  
And he had pulled his head up, suddenly more awake.  
	He said, "How did you know that?  Did I tell you that before?"  
	I told him he had not and he had not-I had just known  
	Months later, in the seasick heat of summer, when he did show me the house, help me through the window, tumbling in to the kitchen, the first thing I said was, "There it is!" 
	And there it was, the stove in the corner of the room, now rusting slightly but when Honey and John bought it it would have been a perfect quiet yellow.  When Honey and John bought it they used it for heating the teakettle, for lighting candles and frying eggs.  
	But on that evening the stove did not flicker, sputter, hiss.  The room smelled of gasoline but only faintly, not enough to cause alarm, just enough to remind.  

	When I spoke to the psychologist, I left out almost everything.  I left out: Honey, the Indian, the sequoia stump, the graveyard, the gas-stove, John.  
	I told him what I would not have to explain, what he would believe.  I did not use words like "haunted" or "alive."  I used words like "creaking" and "abandoned."  
	"Do they still live there, his family?"  the psychologist asked.  
I wonder in what way my "abandoned" means something different than his does.  
	"No," I say.  "They live somewhere else, now."  
	My mother was in the parking lot, waiting in the car.  She had looked exhausted, her eyes fixed on some point in the distance.  She did not ask, "How was it?"  She did not ask, "Next week, same time?"  
	I got in to the passenger's seat, shut the door.  We drove halfway home in silence.  
	 "You don't have to go back there," she said finally, "if you don't want to."  
That night she fell asleep in the chair she used to rock Matthew in.  Her arms were folded like she was holding a baby.   I stood there for a while and watched her.

Evening, cooler than it should be, walking to pick up Matthew from a friend's house and I see Beth walking ahead of me on the road. I follow her and though she does not turn around  I think she knows that I am following her.  Beth and I are alike in this way. 
 Beth and I are alike in many ways I imagine, though she has more grace.  Litheness, fluidity, suppleness: she possesses everything that they say a dancer should.  She possesses everything she should.  I envy her placidity, her likeness to a stream.  I imagine that if you opened up a vein in her arm or leg you would find minnows swimming there, tadpoles.  Swimming calmly and single file.  
Even with things as they are, her brother missing, disappeared, her mother holding the space between her eyes with two pinched fingers, her father drawn and turned a sickly shade of yellow, and all of them silent and immobile except going for aspirin, or the telephone when it rings.  When the telephone rings in their house, it means something different than what it used to.  "Hello?" means "Have you found him?"   
This is the Indian graveyard.  The sad oaks, the overgrown lawn, the odd gray rabbit.  Where is the keeper?  Dead, gone.  Buried-but not here. It is someone's job to hire a new keeper, to find another able body with a background in groundskeeping and pay him modestly but adequately.  Whose job is this?  I could not tell you.  
	I watch Beth sitting in the grass now, back against a lichen-covered stone.  She is more graceful than I am and also more fearless.  It takes a certain kind of fearlessness, I think, to rest against the grave of a departed Cherokee chief.  Or maybe not a chief at all, maybe just the neighbor adept at mending fences, maybe his three-year old niece who died of whooping cough.
"Ruth," she says suddenly, sharply but quietly.  "Ruth, I know you're there."  
	I do not step out of the tangle of honeysuckle I am crouched in.  I do not go to her, say, "Beth, I love your brother.  Beth, I do not know what happened, I do not know where he has gone."   
	Beth does not turn around and I do not say a thing but I get up, leaves and twigs cracking under me, and run away from her.   "Beth," I want to say, "you must miss him terribly."  I want to say, "Beth, is there something you would like to talk about?"

	Did that bright kitchen in the house that he grew up in ever darken?  Even with a yellow stove, white curtains, sugar bowls and smiling saltshakers, sunlit floors and walls and wooden spoons hanging? 
	Of course it did.   The were a few days and more than a few nights when the hiss of the flame and the whistle of the kettle and the crackle of the radiator all went unheard because the ears that were there to hear them, that would have on some other evening delighted in their warm domestic hum, were too full of fighting words, stationed on either side of heads too full of thoughts, of sorrow, of churning, bilious anxiety.  
	John came home one evening or one late afternoon and stood in the doorway.  
	He said, "I am a dead man.  I do not want the transplant. I am fifty-eight."  
	"You are only fifty-eight," Honey said.  
The kitchen was dark that night, and for some nights after.  
	The kitchen in the house I grew up in darkened whenever a grandparent died.  One unsuspicious, balmy day it was a grandfather-my father's father-and the rest followed in succession and too quickly.  I was young, Matthew was younger or not at all. 
	Matthew would not remember my father's father, my father's mother, my mother's mother.  He would remember my mother's father as a war story, as white cotton shirts, as tanned skin and an emphysemic cough.   
	He would not remember everyone gathered in the kitchen of the house that we grew up in after each funeral, voices low, thoughts stifled and left unsaid, limbs crossed uncomfortably, everybody milling about.  
	No longer friendly, the kitchen seemed those times to be too clean, too polished, too eager to serve and heat and nourish.  The copper pots gleamed cruelly, the glasses all seemed dirty, clouded, each knife in the block and the whisk and the can opener seemed to all glint unnaturally.  
	The room would grow suddenly, become unmanageably big, the walls rising and tilting at strange angles.  The kitchen had become a circus funhouse full of cold cuts and tasteful flower arrangements and black hosiery-mourners standing in for the lion tamers and fire-eaters.  
		When my mother and father fought the room would darken in the same way.  Any child will tell you this.  
And then an evening would come when the kitchen would get strange and dim and shadowy when no fight had been had, no grandparent had died, nothing different, nothing changed except for a gray and bubbling grief that settled over the house like a dampness, like what hangs over a lake in the early morning.

"Hello.  We are the Samaritans.  We are a confidential listening service.  Is there something you would like to talk about?" 
Is there something I would like to talk about?  I would like to tell you about his face.  I would like to tell you about the tiny round bones of his ear, with so many parts and pieces that sound like types of seashells or ways to describe the structure of a violin.  I would like to tell you about his eyes, nondescript in color, not brown or green or any murky combination of them.  
Handsome, but the streak of strange in him that kept him from being boringly handsome-the broad forehead, the nose like a curve of a fireplace mantel.  These things saved him from the aesthetic perfection that makes a face boring.  
Is there something I would like to talk about?  His mother's voice is tired.  I say nothing.   
"Hello? Hello?"  she says.  
"My friend vanished into thin air," I imagine myself saying into the receiver.  
"Ruth!" his mother would say if she knew it was me, if she recognized my voice.  "This must be very hard for you," she would say if she did not.  
But she would know. 	And so I say nothing and she hangs up.  The Samaritans must have to hang up on a lot of people, people that call and then are unable to speak.  The Samaritans must get a lot of hang-ups, people that call and then regret their decision to do so and slam the receiver back down before the volunteer on the other end of the line has another chance to speak. 
	I wonder if his mother has ever called her own hotline. I wonder if she has ever dialed the number, waited for a volunteer to answer, listened to the ring: One, twice, three times and then-Is there something she would like to talk about?  
	Has his father called?  Has Beth?   Have the three of them called on three different evenings, prayed it would not be the other that answered, prayed for a stranger to cry to?  


His mother and father founded the Good Samaritan Confidential Listening Service the summer before Beth was born.  
"Is it like a suicide hotline?" Honey had asked his mother.  
His mother had been very pregnant, standing at the kitchen counter wanting for the coffee Honey and John and her husband were drinking from white mugs.  She had not had a cup of coffee in months.  She ate things like yams and romaine and she drank milk at dinner.  
John had even taken to smoking outside, back pressed against the maple tree because it gave the best shade, even though what he really liked to do was sit in his underwear in front of the air conditioner and blow smoke into the living room.  
"It's a little like a suicide hotline," his mother had said.   
She felt hot and tired.  Her neck hurt.  Her skin felt as if it were stretched too thin.  Each morning she turned the thermostat as low as the other people in the house could stand it, and still by noon she would have sweat through all of her clothes.  Each night she went to bed feeling unclean, like she was covered in a layer of something-like a moth or butterfly must feel in the cocoon, trapped in all of that gauze.  She thought about words like "pupae" and "chrysalis" all summer.  

	Matthew and my father must choose YMCA Indian Guide names.  
	"Swift Mountain Lion!" cries Matthew.  
	My father tells him that we do not have any mountain lions, that we do not have a single puma, cougar, or wildcat.   
	"We have deer," my father says.  "How about a snake name?"  
	My father will eventually settle on Flying Crow, while Matthew will choose Broken Arrow, because he will find one in the lawn.  
	"How about that," my father will say.  
	Black and stone and chipped , a piece missing, small and startled-looking in Matthew's palm.  
	"Which direction was it pointing in?" I will ask.  
	My father will say, "Does it matter?"  
By then, I will think that everything is a clue.   I will spend my days and nights looking for the letter he must have left, the sign, the map, the X, the message scratched into a tree, the birds flying in the formation that will spell out where he has gone.

A Christmas that passes in this way: a slow snow, breath curling in black air, the twinkling of blinking lights, and inside a yellow glow and voices-contentedness, sadness.  Matthew's rocking horse in a corner.  Rocking horses are like valises and hope chests; these things in these days are so antiquated that they are no longer entirely real.  
	Matthew: one night he will stand in the checkered kitchen of a girl and he will say, I love you-or something that sounds like it.  Enunciate, Matthew.  He will.  She will not say anything because her chest will be exploding, quietly, and without theatrics, like the cup fungi that explode soundlessly in that you find in the dark parts of a forest, not seeing it s there until you unknowingly kick it and it bursts into a cloud of peat-colored dust. 
	Hush: this is something he would say to me, but not in the way that it sounds.  When he said 'hush' it sounded like he had said, 'I love you.' 'Hush' sounded like a different word, a new word, a word he had found, discovered in the furthest cove of a lake.  'Hush'-the sleek, brown jackrabbit that lived in me would stop running.  'Hush'-the speckled deer would think better of crossing the highway, all together miss the terrible dash across asphalt, the blinding white headlights.  
	I remember once seeing a nature show on the television with my father.  A woman with a sunburn and blonde hair had been bitten by a rattlesnake.  In my mind, I have filled in the details that I do not remember: a Western Diamond Rattler, the Northern Mojave Desert.  
 Miles away from any hospital, a man lay her down, knelt at her feet, cut her ankle with a pocket knife in a straight, deep gash, and then lowered his mouth to it and sucked  And sucked and spit and sucked and then spit again.  This must have been a dramatic reenactment. 
	"Hush"-what he was doing each time he said this was: taking a pocketknife, making a small cut, sucking the fear right out of me.