She ripped out the page. Mr. Harvey was in the kitchen making something to eat – the liverwurst he favored, a bowl of sweet green grapes. He heard a board creak. He stiffened. He heard another and his back rose and blossomed with sudden understanding.
The grapes dropped on the floor to be crushed by his left foot, while my sister in the room above sprang to the aluminum blinds and unlocked the stubborn window. Mr. Harvey mounted the stairs two at a time, and my sister smashed out the screen, scrambling onto the porch roof and rolling down it as he gained the upstairs hall and came barreling toward her. The gutter broke when her body tipped past it. As he reached his bedroom, she fell into the bushes and brambles and muck.
But she was not hurt. Gloriously not hurt. Gloriously young. She stood up as he reached the window to climb out. But he stopped. He saw her running toward the elderberry. The silk-screened number on her back screamed out at him. 5! 5! 5!
Lindsey Salmon in her soccer shirt.
Samuel was sitting with my parents and Grandma Lynn when Lindsey reached the house.
“Oh my God,” my mother said, the first to see her through the small square windows that lined either side of our front door.
And by the time my mother opened it Samuel had rushed to fill the space, and she walked, without looking at my mother or even my father hobbling forward, right into Samuel’s arms.
“My God, my God, my God,” my mother said as she took in the dirt and the cuts.
My grandmother came to stand beside her.
Samuel put his hand on my sister’s head and smoothed her hair back.
“Where have you been?”
But Lindsey turned to our father, lessened so now – smaller, weaker, than this child who raged. How alive she was consumed me whole that day.
“Daddy?”
“Yes, sweetheart.”
“I did it. I broke into his house.” She was shaking slightly and trying not to cry.
My mother balked: “You what?”
But my sister didn’t look at her, not once.
“I brought you this. I think it might be important.”
She had kept the drawing in her hand, crumpled tightly into a ball. It had made her landing harder, but she had come away anyway.
A phrase my father had read that day appeared in his mind now. He spoke it aloud as he looked into Lindsey’s eyes.
“There is no condition one adjusts to so quickly as a state of war.”
Lindsey handed him the drawing.
“I’m going to pick up Buckley,” my mother said.
“Don’t you even want to look at this, Mom?”
“I don’t know what to say. Your grandmother is here. I have shopping to do, a bird to cook. No one seems to realize that we have a family. We have a family, a family and a son, and I’m going.”
Grandma Lynn walked my mother to the back door but did not try to stop her.
My mother gone, my sister reached her hand out to Samuel. My father saw what Lindsey did in Mr. Harvey’s spidery hand: the possible blueprint of my grave. He looked up.
“Do you believe me now?” he asked Lindsey.
“Yes, Daddy.”
My father – so grateful – had a call to make.
“Dad,” she said.
“Yes.”
“I think he saw me.”
I could never have imagined a blessing greater to me than the physical safety of my sister that day. As I walked back from the gazebo I shivered with the fear that had held me, the possibility of her loss on Earth not just to my father, my mother, Buckley, and Samuel, but, selfishly, the loss of her on Earth to me.
Franny walked toward me from the cafeteria. I barely raised my head.
“Susie,” she said. “I have something to tell you.” She drew me under one of the old-fashioned lampposts and then out of the light. She handed me a piece of paper folded into four.
“When you feel stronger, look at it and go there.” Two days later, Franny’s map led me to a field that I had always walked by but which, though beautiful, I’d left unexplored. The drawing had a dotted line to indicate a path. Searching nervously, I looked for an indentation in the rows and rows of wheat. Just ahead I saw it, and as I began to walk between the rows the paper dissolved in my hand.
I could see an old and beautiful olive tree just up ahead.
The sun was high, and in front of the olive tree was a clearing. I waited only a moment until I saw the wheat on the other side begin to pulse with the arrival of someone who did not crest the stalks.
