What I Didn't See and Other Stories Read online

  "I never said that,” Daisy said.

  "We should call her birdbrain,” I suggested. “But only when the grown-ups can't hear. Can you all do that? Are you big enough to do that?"

  "Birdbrain,” said one of the fives.

  I'd held off on the really good card. Now I played it. “She talks to trees, too."

  "Treebrain!” the seven said. We were all having fun now. Daisy went up to stand at the tiller with her father.

  A gull landed on the deck rail. “Birdbrain's not here,” I told it. Much hilarity. “Can I take a message?” The gull turned sideways to look at me with one red-ringed eye. It puffed out its feathers, and then shuffled them back into place. Flapped its wings, stretched its neck, but didn't fly. I didn't like the way it was looking at me.

  Too late I remembered my plan to be the sort of child birds brought keys to. I tried to rewind. “We won't really call Daisy birdbrain,” I told the children, who were disappointed to hear it. “I just made that stuff up about the birds and the trees."

  Of course, Daisy wasn't there for this. She was scolded later for leaving all the babysitting to me. “One of you was very helpful yesterday,” Daisy's father said.

  * * * *

  The next day, Daisy worked to reestablish her supremacy. “July is snake month here,” she told me. “I hope you brought your anti-venom. I don't need any, myself. If you live around here, you get shots.

  "My father is going to build a tree house for me. For when I want to be alone. No one else will ever be allowed inside it. We're just picking out the right tree.

  "Your mother isn't coming down this weekend. I don't know why. I guess she's too busy or sick or something. Germs spread much faster in the city because you're all crammed up against each other. All it takes is one person coughing on the bus.

  "My mother says your mother never really wanted children. She had her tubes tied after you were born.

  "See those two little birds flying at the one big one? Birds do that. They join together to pester any bird bigger and faster than they are. It's called mobbing."

  We were walking down to the creek, single file. A sparrow landed in a nearby tree, hopped along the branch. “That's a white-crowned sparrow,” Daisy told me. “What's that?” she asked it. “No, she's from the city. No, she's staying all summer.” And then to me again, “He wishes you'd go home."

  This fooled no one. But the whole time Daisy talked, the woods were filled with bird noise. I'd never heard so much of it before, or maybe I'd never listened so carefully. There was a bird with a call like a clicking tongue. The round, hollow sound of a dove. A nearby trill, a faraway whistle. A loose flock of ducks passed over us, white sides, narrow red bills, hoarse croaking cries. Last winter, two girls in my class had decided they didn't like me. They would lean together, whispering, whenever I passed. I had the same feeling now, that I was being talked about behind my back and nothing good was being said.

  That afternoon my mother phoned. “Did Norma tell you I can't make this weekend, sweetie?” she asked. “I've got a report due in to accounting. I'm just swamped. I may not get there next weekend, either, just giving you a heads-up. Lucky you! Out in the country without a care in the world!"

  * * * *

  The year I turned fifteen was the only year Daisy ever came to stay with us. She came just after Christmas, just about the time she started showing. She refused to say who the father was, but probably some tourist boy, her parents guessed, because of the timing. It was a thing that happened to the local girls, though they'd certainly never expected their Daisy.

  Her father thought it might be a boy in her class, because suddenly she was throwing a fit about going to school. They had just about had it with her. Clara would never, they assured my parents. Your Clara is too smart for this.

  My parents immediately offered our home: they loved Daisy. So now it was my bedroom we shared, and I went off to class each morning, but she stayed behind, promising everyone she would make it up in summer school. She settled onto our living-room couch and did nothing but watch television and get bigger.

  By this time Daisy and I had wearied of our hostilities. We still didn't like each other, but the whole thing was pasted over with a thin politeness. I was trying to be a better person in general. It has never come naturally, but I do try.

  The first night before we went to sleep, Daisy told me how much the baby's father loved her. He was, she said, a really, really good-looking guy who wanted to marry her. But she wasn't sure it was in her best interest.

  She was the one who'd advised him to stay away, keep his mouth shut, and she made me promise that, if a boy ever called for her, I would say he had the wrong number. Right now he was probably searching high and low for her, and she wasn't sure her brothers could be trusted not to say where she was.

  A little while later we learned that the baby was a boy. That night I woke and heard her crying. I pretended to sleep until the crying got so loud I was sure I was supposed to hear it.

  "What's wrong?” I asked.

  She told me that, back when she'd first thought she might be pregnant, she'd tried to get rid of the baby with the Mormon tea. She was crying so hard, at first I could barely understand her.

  There'd been no time to dry the leaves, which is maybe why it hadn't worked. But the tea had made her throw up, and ever since, she was afraid she might have hurt the baby. The Hutchings didn't believe in abortion. Daisy had no one but me to tell, and I wasn't to say a word to anyone, though, she said, when the baby was born with no hands or no brain everyone would figure it out.

  I was surprised to be confided in, and I said what I hoped was the right thing, that I was sure everything would be okay. But how could I know? Things were already not okay.

  The Hutchings didn't believe in abortion, nor would they let Daisy raise her own child. The baby was already promised to a family in the city, a Beck and Melody Marshke. The Marshkes called twice a week to see how Daisy was feeling, make sure she was eating fresh vegetables, red meats. Organic milk. Of course, no alcohol. No smoking.

  "Daisy wants to keep her baby,” I told my mother. Daisy had, in fact, said this once (but only once). Mostly I thought she should want to keep him. “I don't see why it's not up to her."

  "Daisy doesn't know what raising a child involves. She's still a child herself. She's a smart girl with a bright future ahead. Her parents want her to have her own childhood before she's saddled with her own children.” And then, running out of clich?s, “You could be nicer to her,” my mother said, when it seemed to me I had been nothing but nice.

  But maybe not. Daisy and my mother were thick as thieves now and I never cared for that. They commiserated over the apparently perfectly natural horrors of exhaustion, insomnia, nausea, hormonal upsets, acne, swollen breasts. Pregnancy had become Daisy's new expertise, the new thing she knew all about and me nothing. “You can't even imagine,” she would say to me. “You're so lucky not to even know.” Once again nature and Daisy had managed to one-up me.

  * * * *

  The baby arrived in early May. I had to go to school as usual, and when I came home, things still hadn't finished. The Hutchings had driven over, eighty the whole way, Norma told us, but there turned out to be plenty of time. Daisy was in labor for thirty-four hours.

  Mother came home twice to eat and then went straight back to the hospital. By the time the baby arrived, everyone was exhausted. Mother called to give us the news. “A big healthy boy,” she said. “Just beautiful! Perfect in every detail."

  His parents took him away. Daisy's parents took her home. I never saw him.

  For a long time I carried the Marshkes’ address in my coat pocket. I'd gotten it off the internet, nothing simpler, and I knew how to get there—the 42 bus and then a transfer to the 18. The thought that I could go anytime was a good one, though I never did.

  Since then, I wonder about every boy I pass, every boy of a certain age. There they are, two of them, three of them, they're four years old, the
y're ten, now they're fifteen and flocking to the mall where they bum cigarettes off strangers and brag loudly about how fucked up they got the night before. I wonder where their mothers are.

  * * * *

  When she was still at our house, when she was still pregnant, it was my job to get Daisy to her appointments with the obstetrician. My mother couldn't bear to think of her, poor pregnant country girl, on the bus by herself. What if she missed her stop? What if we lost her somehow in the big city? I only thought of this later, that perhaps she was afraid Daisy would run away.

  To get to the bus stop, Daisy and I walked across a park with pigeons and sparrows and crows. There were bushes with a kind of berry Daisy said they also had in the country. The berries fall off in the autumn and ferment on the ground, Daisy told me. The birds eat the berries and get drunk. They keel over. When they try to fly, they can't go in a straight line, can't gain any altitude. She was worried, Daisy said, about all those drunken birds in the city. She was afraid they'd fly into the street, get hit by cars.

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  Private Grave 9

  Every week Ferhid takes our trash out and buries it. Last week's included chicken bones, orange peels, a tin that cherries had come in and another for peas, an empty silver-bromide bottle, my used razorblade, a bakelite comb someone sat on and broke, and several early drafts of Mallick's letter to Lord Wallis about our progress. Meanwhile, at G4 and G5, two bone hairpins and seven clay shards were unearthed, one of which was painted with some sort of dog, or so Davis says, though I'd have guessed lion. There's more to be found in other sectors, but all of it too recent—anything Roman or later is still trash to us. G4 and G5 are along the deep cut, and we're finding our oldest stuff there.

  I'd spent the morning in the darkroom, ostensibly to work but really because I was tired of the constant gabble of the expedition house. When I grew up, it was just my mother and me. I had the whole third floor to myself, and she wasn't allowed to come up unless I asked her. I've got no gripe against anyone here. It's just a question of what you're used to.

  The photographs I was printing were all of infant skeletons. There's an entire level of these, laid out identically on their sides with their legs pulled into their stomachs. Davis had cleared each tiny skull and ribcage with his breath because they were so delicate, and it took a week because there were so many. That seemed very intimate to me, and I wondered if he'd felt any attachment to one more than another. I thought it would probably be rude to ask. My pictures were of all different babies, but all my pictures looked the same.

  At lunch, I shared some philosophical thoughts—all about how much sadder finding a single child would have been and how odd that was, you feeling less with each addition.

  Mallick, our director, said when I'd put in a few more seasons I'd find I didn't think of them as dead people at all, but as the bead necklace or the copper bowl or whatever else might be found with the body. Mallick's eyes are all rimmed in red like a basset hound's. This gives him a tragic demeanor, when he's really quite cheerful. The whole time he was speaking, Miss Jackson, his secretary, was seated just past him with her head down, attending to her food. Miss Jackson lost her husband in the trenches and her son to the flu after.

  Remembering that, and remembering how each of her losses was merely one among so many they might as well have been stars in the sky, made me wish I'd kept my thoughts to myself. Women take death harder than we men. Or that's been my experience.

  "No signs of illness or malformation.” Davis has a face round as a moon and that pale skin that takes color easily; he's always either blanching or blushing. I watched him clean his fork on his napkin with the same surgical precision, the same careful attention, he brought to every task. Sunlight flashed off the square lenses of his spectacles whenever he looked up at me. Flash, flash, flash. “Best guess?” he said. “Infanticide."

  Ferhid had carved us a cold lamb for lunch and had the mail lying under our forks. Ferhid has the profile of a film star, but a mouth full of rotted teeth. His mouth is a painful thing to see, and I wish he didn't smile so often.

  We each had a letter or two, which was fair and friendly, though most of them mentioned Howard Carter's dig, which was not. Mine, of course, was from my mother, pretending not to miss me as unpersuasively as she possibly can. I missed the war as her sole support, but since that ended it's been more of a burden. Last month I wrote to her that a man must have a vocation and if nothing comes to him, then he must go looking. Today she responded by wondering if it was necessary to travel half a globe and 4500 years away. She said that Mesopotamia must be about as far from Michigan as it's possible to get. How wonderful, she said, to be so unattached that you can pick up and go anywhere and never mind the people you've left behind. And then she promised me that she wasn't complaining.

  Patwin read bits of the Times aloud while we had our coffee. Apparently reporters are still camped at the Tut-ankh-Amen tomb, cataloguing gold masks and lapis-lazuli scarabs and ebony effigies as fast as Carter can haul them out. These Times accounts have Lord Wallis and everyone else in a spin, as if we're playing some sort of tennis match against Carter and losing badly. Our potsherds, never mind how old they are, have become an embarrassing return on Wallis’ investment, though they were good enough before. Our skeletons are too numerous to be tasteful. I'm betting Wallis won't be whimsical about paintings of dogs, nor will anyone else at his club.

  As he read, Patwin's tone conveyed his disapproval. He has the darting eyes of an anarchist (and a beard like Freud's), but he's actually a stolid Marxist. So he'll tell you slavery was a necessary historical phase, but it's clear that shards of good clay working-class pots suit him better than golden bowls put by for the afterlife.

  "We had a lovely morning in PG 9,” Mallick said stoutly. PG stands for private grave, and PG 9 is the largest tomb we've found so far, four chambers in all, and never plundered—naturally, that's the part that has us most excited. A woman is laid out in the second of these chambers—a priestess or a queen in a coffin of clay. There's a necklace of gold leaves and a gold ring. Several of the colored beads she once wore in her hair have fallen into her skull. The skeletons of seven other women, presumably her servants, are kneeling in the third and fourth chambers, along with two groomsmen, two oxen, and a musician with what I imagine, when Davis reconstructs it, will be a lyre. Once upon a time Wallis would have been entirely content with this. A royal tomb. A sleeping priestess. But that was before Carter began to swim in golden sarcophagi.

  * * * *

  Another American, a girl from Rapid City, has come to visit us in the mud-brick expedition house. Her name is Emily Whitfield, and she's a cousin of Mallick's wife or a second cousin or some such thing, some relative Mallick found impossible to send away. She's twenty-nine, just a couple years shy of me, flapper haircut, eyes of a washed-out blue, but a good figure. Already there'd been some teasing. “High time you met the right girl,” Mallick had said, but the minute I'd seen Miss Whitfield I'd known she wasn't that. I've never believed in love at first sight, but I've had a fair amount of experience with the opposite.

  Patwin had claimed to dread Miss Whitfield's visit, in spite of the obvious appeal of a new face. “She'll need to be taken everywhere, and someone will always be hurting her feelings,” Patwin had predicted, fingers scratching through his beard. Patwin prided himself on knowing women, although when that would have happened I really couldn't say. “She'll find it all very dirty and our facilities insupportable. She'll never have stood before.” And then Patwin had a coughing fit; it was such a rude thing to have said in Miss Jackson's presence.

  But Miss Whitfield was proving entirely game. Davis took her to see the baby skeletons, and he said she made no comment, lit an unmoved cigarette. Apparently she's an authoress and quite successful, according to Mallick who'd learned it from his wife. Four books so far, books in which people are killed in clever and unusual ways, murderers unmasked by people even cleverer. She was about
to set a book at a dig such as ours; it's why she'd come. Mallick told me to take her along and show her the new tomb, so she was there when I took my picture. I'd been pointing out an arresting detail or two—the way the workmen chant as they haul the rubble out of the chamber, the rags they tie around their heads, their seeping eyes—but she didn't seem interested.

  We brought the smell of sweat and flesh with us into the tomb. Most people would have instinctively lowered their voices. Not Miss Whitfield. “I thought it would be grander,” she said when we were inside the second chamber. Patwin had rigged an electrical installation so there was plenty of light for our work here. “I didn't picture mud.” She lifted a hand to her hair, and when she lowered it again there was a streak of dust running from the hairline down her temple. It gave her a friendlier, franker look, but like Mallick's sad eyes, this proved deceiving. What she really wanted to know was whether there were tensions in the expedition house. “You all live in each other's pockets. It must drive you crazy sometimes. There must be little, annoying habits that send you right around the bend."

  "Actually things go very smoothly,” I told her. “Sorry to disappoint.” I was taking my first photographs of the bones in the coffin, adjusting the lighting, dragging a stool about and standing on it to get the best angle. Miss Whitfield was beneath my elbow. Davis was in a corner of the chamber on his knees, pouring hot wax and pressing a cloth down on it. When the wax dried, he would lift out bits of shell and stone without disturbing their placement.

  Miss Whitfield finally softened her voice. She was so close I could smell the cigarette smoke in her hair. “But if you did murder someone,” she whispered, “would it more likely be Mr. Patwin or Mr. Davis?” She might have been asking this at the exact moment I took my first picture.