SEVEN
We climb into Walter’s Blazer. Mom sits in front with Bitsy and Walter. Jason and I sit in the back. He is wearing his Dracula cape. He never takes it off. I think he even sleeps in it. I hold Minka on my lap. Behind our seat is an open area, where Walter has piled our luggage. When I turn around to make sure that neither my bag nor my knapsack has been left behind, I notice the rifle, or something that looks like a rifle. It is long and sleek. My heart begins to pound. “Uncle Walter,” I say, “is that a gun in the back?”
“Yes,” he answers.
“Is it loaded?” I ask.
“You bet … so don’t go messing with it.”
“Is there a lot of crime here?” I feel myself breathing harder, faster.
“No,” Bitsy says. “And on The Hill …”
“The Hill?” I ask, interrupting.
“Yes,” Bitsy says, “we call Los Alamos, The Hill … and up there we have virtually no crime at all.”
“Then why do you carry a loaded gun?” I ask, telling myself to relax. Relax and try to breathe slowly, normally.
“You never can tell,” Walter says, “especially down here. It’s better to be safe than sorry.”
I don’t understand but decide not to pursue it because the whole subject is making me jumpy and every time I ask Walter a question, he turns and speaks to me over his shoulder, taking his eyes off the road.
I see my mother grab the back of her seat with one hand and hang onto the handle of her door, with the other.
“Walter!” Bitsy shrieks, as he swerves and just misses colliding with a passing car.
Jason crashes into me, laughing. “Daddy had a gun in the store. Right, Mom?”
“Right,” Mom says, easing her grip on the back of the seat.
“But he didn’t keep it loaded because he was afraid I’d want to play with it. Right, Mom?”
“Right, Jase. Now why don’t you look out the window at the beautiful scenery.”
“I am looking,” he says. “I can talk and look at the same time.”
The scenery is beautiful. We whisk by flat open spaces with mountains in the distance, rising out of nowhere, stark and black, looking as if they’re made of papier-mâché. The land is brown, then yellow, then almost red.
After an hour on the road, Jason says, “I have to pee.”
There are no gas stations, no restaurants, nothing, as far as you can see, except the land and the sky.
Walter pulls off the road and takes Jason for a short walk. When they come back, and we are on our way again, Jason falls asleep, with his head on my lap. He wakes up suddenly, not knowing where he is and I can read the fear in his eyes.
“It’s all right,” I tell him, smoothing his hair away from his sweaty cheek, where it has stuck.
I close my eyes, too, and when I awaken, I can feel the pull of the Blazer as we climb higher and higher. I have to yawn to clear my ears. “How much longer?” I ask Walter.
“Another fifteen minutes or so,” Walter says, turning around to face me. I must remember not to talk to him while he is driving.
Minka jumps from one side of the Blazer to the other, chasing a little moth that has flown in the back window. I look at my watch: five-thirty. But I remember that that is New Jersey time. Here it is just three-thirty. I reset my watch.
We go around a series of S-curves, with a sheer drop of hundreds of feet to our right. Jason grabs my arm and squeezes so hard he leaves finger marks. Around and around, and I understand why Bitsy calls Los Alamos, The Hill.
Halfway up, Walter pulls off at a scenic lookout and we get out of the Blazer to stretch our legs and take in the view. All there is, for miles and miles, is a sea of rocky cliffs, dropping away into deep canyons. I don’t know how I will ever describe this view to Lenaya and Hugh.
“You can understand why Oppenheimer chose Los Alamos as the site for Project Y,” Bitsy tells Mom.
“What’s Project Y?” Jason asks.
“The code name for building the atom bomb,” Bitsy says. “And Los Alamos is the secret place where the scientists lived while they were developing it.”
“Is it still a secret place?” Jason asks.
Bitsy laughs. “Not anymore.”
Jason is disappointed.
We get back into the Blazer and drive a few more miles, until we come to the town itself. After the two hour drive, after the spectacular scenery, after hearing about the town as a secret place, I am disappointed, too. Los Alamos looks ordinary. Flat and ordinary. I once went to visit a friend’s brother at Fort Dix, an army base in New Jersey, and Los Alamos reminds me of it. We could be anywhere, I think, as we drive past a shopping center, past the small library, past the post office. Anywhere at all.
We turn right, onto Diamond Drive, and Bitsy points out the high school, a sprawling brown cinder block building. There are a lot of kids hanging out in the parking lot. They are dressed in T-shirts and jeans. I’ve forgotten that it is Thursday and that most kids are in school. I wonder what’s going on at my school, in Atlantic City.
Then we turn left, and left again, and we pull into a driveway on a street where most of the houses look the same, with small, neatly mowed front lawns and rows of marigolds. Everything looks familiar to me, as if I have seen it all before, except for the mountains.
“Here we are!” Bitsy sings.
There is another car parked in front of the garage with a bumper sticker that reads, I Love My Volvo. Bitsy pats it on the way to the house and says, “This is my baby.”
Walter carries in our bags, then goes back outside to hose down the Blazer, while Bitsy takes us on a tour of the house. She explains that it had been a government-built duplex but that she and Walter have renovated it, making it into a one-family house.
Inside, there is a huge living-dining room. The furniture is Early American and seems small, but only because the room is so big. There is a fireplace flanked by two sofas which are piled high with needlepoint pillows.
In the kitchen Bitsy opens the freezer and says, “We buy a side of beef every year.”
Jason and I peer into the freezer. I expect to see half a cow, but instead there are just stacks of neatly wrapped packages, labeled one pound ground meat, three pounds chuck roast. There are also stacks of frozen vegetables, enough to last six months.
Upstairs, there are two wings. Bitsy shows us to ours, which consists of three small bedrooms and a bathroom. It’s not very different from our house in Atlantic City. Bitsy and Walter have a bedroom and bath in the other wing.
“Supper on the deck in an hour,” Bitsy says.
I close the door to my room and flop onto the bed with Minka. But Minka is anxious to explore and doesn’t want to be held. She likes the little balls on the white chenille bedspread. On one wall there is a group of old photos. I study them for a long time before I realize they are of my father’s family. Sometimes I forget that Bitsy is my father’s sister. That they had the same parents.
There is a refinished trunk at the foot of my bed, with a yellow and white afghan folded over it. I toss the afghan onto the bed and open the trunk. It is empty. But it has been carefully lined with a paisley print material. If it were my trunk I’d keep special things in it, like my angora sweater set and my diary and my favorite books.
I decide to unpack, sure that I will feel better once I put my things away. I arrange my clothes in the dresser drawers and hang my dress and two jackets in the closet. I put the brown paper bag on the top closet shelf, over in the corner. I shove the breadknife under my pillow. There. Finished. I scoop up Minka and carry her downstairs.
The rest of the family is already outside. Jason is on the back lawn, tossing a Frisbee into the air; my mother is stretched out on a lounge chair on the deck, sipping a drink; Walter is dressed in a chef’s apron and is cooking hamburgers on the grill; and Bitsy is flitting in and out of the house, carrying dinner plates, a wooden salad bowl, and a basket of fruit.
Suddenly I feel hungry. I don’t kno
w if it is the hour, the smell of charcoal broiled hamburgers, or what. But I haven’t felt so hungry since before that night. I used to have this really intense appetite and Mom was always teasing me that I’d better watch it or I’d wind up fat. Not likely. I only weigh 101 and I’m 5′ 5″, and now, with all the weight I’ve lost I probably don’t weigh more than 95.
Walter checks the meat and calls, “Jason … supper’s on …”
Jason comes racing back to the deck and we sit down at the redwood table.
“Well,” Bitsy says, waving her fork, “what do you think of our place?”
“It’s beautiful,” Mom says. But she sounds dreamy, as if she is talking about something else.
Bitsy sighs. “You know, Davey, when we bought this house we expected to raise a family here, but … c’est la vie.”
I don’t respond. I don’t know what to say.
“We tried for years,” Bitsy continues. “We went through every test imaginable. Didn’t we, Walter?”
“We did,” Walter says.
“Of course, today they have so many new methods … but it’s too late for us.”
I think about my parents taking a chance just one time and wham … getting me. I wonder how Walter and Bitsy feel about that. I’m sure they know. And I wonder why they never adopted a baby if they wanted one so badly. But I don’t ask. I finish my hamburger and reach for a second helping of potato salad.
“You see that apricot tree,” Bitsy says, pointing. “We planted it the year we moved in. Isn’t it beautiful?”
“Yes,” we all answer at once.
“We’re just so happy that you’re here,” Bitsy says, giving Mom’s arm a pat. “And we want you to have a wonderful time.”
Bitsy is talking as if we are really on vacation. As if everything is fine and dandy. As if we are just an ordinary family visiting their relatives and having supper on the deck.
No one mentions the real reason for our being here.
No one mentions my father.
For dessert Bitsy carries out a strawberry ice cream pie with a graham cracker crust.
“Yum,” Jason says, tasting it, and licking his lips. “This is really good.” He wolfs it down, then runs back into the yard, to play with his Frisbee.
Bitsy serves coffee to the rest of us. I never drink coffee but I accept a cup anyway, then disguise it with four sugars and pour cream up to the brim.
I half listen as Walter and Bitsy chat on about the town, their friends, all the interesting sights we are going to see.
And then, suddenly, Jason is crying, “Mommy … Mommy …” and running back to the deck, his hands over his face.
When he takes them away I see the blood. Blood, gushing—gushing and dripping onto his clothes, onto the deck. I panic and scream. I scream and I scream until Mom grabs me and shakes me by the shoulders and shouts, “Stop it, Davey! Stop it! It’s just a nosebleed. That’s all. A nosebleed.” She hugs me tightly and my screams turn to sobs. “It’s all right, honey,” Mom says over and over again. “It’s all right.”
Bitsy shoves a glass under my nose and says, “Here … take a sip …”
I try to say, What is it? but I can’t get the words out.
Still, Bitsy must understand because she says, “It’s brandy. It’ll make you feel better.”
I take a sip and it burns my throat. Burns my throat and makes me cough. I take a second sip anyway, then a third. It makes my stomach feel warm. I sit down and try to breathe normally.
“You sure can scream,” Jason says. He is sitting on Walter’s lap, an ice pack pressed to the back of his neck.
“It’s the high altitude,” Walter tells me. “Some people get nosebleeds when they first come here. He’ll be fine.”
“I’ll be fine,” Jason repeats. “Did you think I was going to die?”
“No, of course not,” I answer.
“Then why did you scream that way?”
I shake my head, unable to answer.
EIGHT
A week later we are sitting around the dinner table when I ask Bitsy if I can borrow her bicycle tomorrow. I’ve seen two of them in the garage, each labeled Kronick, with their address, phone and social security numbers engraved across the bar.
“Certainly,” Bitsy says, “as long as you wear a helmet.”
“A helmet?” I ask.
“Yes. You can borrow mine.” She finishes her third cup of coffee and wipes her mouth with a napkin.
“But I ride all the time in Atlantic City,” I tell her, “and I never wear a helmet.”
“That’s the rule,” Bitsy says as she stands up and stacks our plates.
“Really?” I say. “You’re serious?” Of course I know that she is serious. But I have this idea that by questioning her I can make her change her mind.
“You bet I’m serious,” she says.
So much for my idea.
“Okay. I’ll wear the helmet.” I will do anything to have some time to myself. Some time alone, to think.
“We’ll be leaving for Cochiti Lake at ten-thirty. Just be sure you’re back by then.”
Cochiti Lake is number one on tomorrow’s agenda. Walter has taken the week off so that he can show us the sights. So far we have visited Camel Rock, Bandelier National Monument, three Indian pueblos, Taos and the D. H. Lawrence Ranch.
But I don’t think I can make it through another day of sightseeing with the family. This is a touchy subject, and I have to approach it carefully. So I clear my throat and say, “The truth is, I’d really like to beg off tomorrow. That is, if you don’t mind.” I look around the table for reactions. I can’t tell what anyone is thinking so I continue. “I’d just like to ride around on your bicycle and maybe sunbathe on the deck …”
It is important that I don’t insult them. They’ve been nice. But I’m sick of listening to Walter’s lectures on everything from Black Mesa to black pottery, from solar energy to nuclear energy. He talks as if he is an expert on every subject. And who knows? Maybe he is.
Bitsy speaks first. “Well,” she says, carefully, “rest and relaxation is what we were planning for next week, when Walter goes back to the Lab.”
“But that’s really what I need now,” I say firmly, surprising myself.
“What do you think, Walter?” Bitsy asks.
Walter mulls it over as if world security is at stake. “Hmmm …” he begins. I fidget with the buttons on my shirt and wait. “I think it will be all right,” he finally says, “if Davey promises to be very careful.”
“Oh yes,” I tell them. “I’ll be very careful.”
“Gwen …” Bitsy says, looking down the table, at Mom. “Is it all right with you?”
“What? Oh, yes … fine,” my mother says. I get the feeling she doesn’t even know what we are talking about. She seems distracted.
“And if Davey doesn’t come with us I get the whole back seat of the Blazer to myself, right?” Jason says.
“Wrong!” Bitsy tells him. “I’m going to sit in the back and tickle you all the way to Cochiti.”
“No!” Jason shrieks.
They have this game where Bitsy threatens to tickle Jason, but she never does. Jason is wildly ticklish. He becomes hysterical if you just wiggle your fingers close to his body, hinting that he might be in for it. I once read an article that said tickling is a form of torture. I wonder if Bitsy knows that.
NINE
The next morning I grab a piece of toast, go directly to the garage and walk Bitsy’s bicycle out into the driveway in time to see Walter shoving his gun into the back of the Blazer. I am used to this by now. The gun automatically goes into the Blazer whenever Walter leaves The Hill. And as soon as he returns, the gun is removed. I don’t know where he keeps it in the house. And I don’t want to know.
“Bye, Uncle Walter,” I call.
“Remember … ride with the traffic,” Walter tells me. “That’s a rule we observe on The Hill.”
“With the traffic,” I repeat.
; “See you later, Davey.”
“You bet,” I call as I pedal away. You bet is Walt and Bitsy’s favorite expression. Sometimes it means yes, sometimes it means you’re welcome. Other times it seems to be a substitute for okay. This is the first time I have tried it.
As soon as I am out on Diamond Drive I stop and take off the helmet, shoving it into the canvas bike bag. I shake out my hair. There, that’s better. What they don’t know won’t hurt them. I ride up Diamond Drive, past the high school. Groups of kids are hanging out in the parking lot. I have forgotten that it is Friday, another school day. Which reminds me of how many classes I’m missing. Sixteen days. Still, sixteen days at the beginning of the term isn’t that bad. I bet I can catch up in a week, if I want to.
I pedal harder and faster, until my legs hurt. The pain begins in the backs of my calves and spreads up, into my thighs. My shoulders ache. But I don’t care. I’ve been numb for so long the pain makes me feel alive again. I wish I could skip the whole school year. I bet I could keep up at home. I wish I never had to go back to school. What good does it do you in the long run?
I have trouble breathing, but not from hyperventilating. From the exercise. From the altitude. Everything is that much harder at 7,300 feet. Even breathing.
Sweat trickles down my face, stinging my eyes. It trickles down inside my T-shirt and along the backs of my knees, but I keep pedaling, past the Conoco Station, past the golf course, up the hill, until I come to an area of tall pine trees. I pull off the road and lean the bicycle against a tree. I make my way through the woods until I come to a beautiful canyon. I am still amazed at the scenery here. I half expect to hear hoofbeats in the distance, and then, to see a cowboy thundering into view, riding a slick, black stallion.
I sit on a rock, at the very edge of the canyon, hugging my knees and looking down. The rock juts out and makes me feel I could fly right off it.
How quickly everything can change, I think. One minute you’re alive and the next, you could be dead. There isn’t any way to know what’s going to happen. If this rock comes loose, I’ll fall, I think. Fall to the bottom of the canyon. Will I fall straight down, I wonder, or kind of float down, gently? Either way my head will smash open and my bones will break. How long will it be before I am found? Days, weeks, a month? Maybe I’ll never be found. Then the buzzards will pick at my flesh until there is nothing left of me. Nothing, but bones. Broken bones.