Outside In (21 page)

Pretty soon the new people would come to our old house. Until they did, I could still go over and sit in my room, only there wasn’t anything in there but the bed. The view from my old window was still
my
view, my view of the roof and the pines and Aunt Bonnie’s house and Pete Asconti’s window. My new window.

If I forgot that view, all I had to do was look at the painting Aunt Bonnie had left over the mantelpiece. She’d wrapped it up in brown paper and a bow and hung it on the nail, in case anyone questioned that it was a present, with a note that said: “Open now, don’t wait for Christmas!”

I was the only Witkowski who’d ever seen the other painting, the cherry red house under the pine trees. So I was the only Witkowski who stood there gaping when Mom unwrapped the painting of the lemon yellow house under the maples—Aunt Bonnie’s house. Our house.

“How could she leave it?” Mom asked, and sat down on the living room floor and bowed her head. She didn’t mean
just the painting of the house. She meant the house. I didn’t tell her that what Aunt Bonnie had taken with her was her favorite view: her best friend’s house.

I sat on the floor with Mom and looked at the painting for a long time. At last Mom sighed and stood up.

“Next?” I said, as though reporting for duty.

“The garage,” she said wearily.

I got up and went to find Aimée.

While we were wheeling the bikes out, Aimée stopped right in the middle of Marvin Road and stood there. She was clutching the handlebars of her bike so tightly her bones showed through her skin. “Chérie,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“Chérie!” She was standing rigidly straight, shivering.

“What?”

“Now, Chérie,” she said. She nodded her head at the bike in her hands.

“Now?”
I looked at her closely. She was biting her cheek, but her eyes were dry.

I walked Reshna to the driveway and went back to stand beside Aimée. There were no cars coming in either direction. “Of all the fuzzy timing,” Aimée said, sounding like Aunt Bonnie.

“It’s the exact right time,” I told her. “Don’t worry.”

The asphalt and pebble surface of Marvin Road suddenly looked evil, lethal. Aimée’s legs were covered with stretch pants, her arms safe inside her wool jacket. Her hands were bare, though. I worried that soon they’d be scraped and oozing blood.

“Do you want to go over to the baseball field?”

“No,” she said. “Here.”

Her face was pointed down the road. Her hands gripped the handles tightly. Her feet on the pedals were firm.

“I’m going,” said Aimée. “Are you going to hold me or what?”

With one hand on the seat and the other on the handlebar, I ran along beside her.

“Are you going to let me go?”

I took my hand off the handlebar and kept running.

“Chérie? You still there?”

“Yeah,” I huffed. I took my hand off the seat and kept running.

“Chérie? Did you let go?”

Her eyes were bright and focused straight ahead. She was balancing perfectly and only a little wobbly in the handlebars.

“Keep pedaling,” I said. “Keep the handlebars straight. Don’t forget to brake.”

“Chérie!” Her voice flew away from me. I stood in the road and watched. Her braid hung down her back, so pretty. Without a thought I reached up to wrap my braids around my head. But they weren’t there. So I wrapped my arms around my head instead and stood there in the middle of the road like that.

There was a toot. A car was coming up behind me. “Aimée! A car!” A green car. Mr. DeLuna. Who knew what he thought? There’s that girl doing something dangerous with bikes again?

Aimée steered to the side and crashed on the grass.

I couldn’t see her face because the car passed her, but when she appeared again, she was wheeling the bike. “Ride it!” I yelled, jogging toward her.

“No!”

“Just try. Just get on. Look how far you rode by yourself already!”

“You let go!”

“Yup. Way back here.”

“Really?”

“Here,” I said.

“I rode all the way down the hill by myself?”

“Yup.”

Her face was like the sun coming out from behind clouds.

I said, “I’m going back to the house to help. Just put your foot on the pedal and push off.”

“Chérie!” she said, panicked again.

I checked her face. No tears. No cheek biting. “Come on!” I walked back to Reshna and stood beside her in the road, watched Aimée step on the pedal and try, step on the pedal and try, fall off, try again, wobble toward me, stop. Then she got it. She was coming, ever so slowly, up the hill.

Mom came out of the house—our old house—and said, “Chérie, will you get busy?”

“I am,” I said.

“You’re just standing around,” she said. “And where’s Aimée?”

“Down there,” I said.

She looked. I said, “Don’t say anything to her.”

Mom didn’t say anything. She hustled back across to the Ascontis’—our—stoop. “Patrick Witkowski!” she called into the house. “Get your derrière out here!”

Then she trotted back and stood beside me in the road. “Look at Aimée!” she called. Aimée smiled through her concentration. She was wobbling less and less. When she arrived, we all were standing there clapping for her, except baby Fred, who was still in the old house asleep.

“Aimée, you genius!” exclaimed Dad. But he couldn’t hug Aimée while she was riding, so he hugged me instead. Or maybe he had guessed. Aimée reached the place between the two houses and tried to stop. Then, of course, she fell off.

“O
PEN THE WINDOWS,
Chérie,” Mom called. “Let the place air out a little. All this dust…”

In 1968 the outside world got into my house like air through my bedroom window, my old bedroom window under the pine trees. It would still be my window for four nights, then three, then two, then one. On Christmas Eve we moved the beds and made them up in the new house.

From my new window I could see my old window. From here there was no sign of my bookshelves full of building stuff, and you couldn’t see my bed even if it had still been there. You couldn’t see
me
unless I was looking out. And I was here now.

I opened my new window to see if I could still hear the pine trees. Yes, a little. The trees were like whispering voices, telling the news of the old house.

Listening to the news—or not—was like opening the windows to let the air in—or not. What did I want to let in? I couldn’t keep the news out whether I tried to shut it out or turn it facedown or drown it in the river.
VIETNAMESE, U.S. DISAGREE ABOUT SHAPE OF TABLE FOR PEACE TALKS
, the
Bell
said.

If I listened hard every day to everything that was reported in the world, I knew I’d never get out of bed again, never walk to school again, never trust a soul, because I’d just have to crunch myself up into a ball and die of sadness at the way things could go. Sometimes I wanted to crunch up anyway, just from hearing about what could happen to one person in the world.

What was I going to do? Be scared of everything? What was best was to do something simple. Learn how to ride a bike. Walk to school alone and not be afraid—or not let being afraid stop me. Write a letter to Aunt Bonnie to say thank you for the picture, knowing that Mom had probably written her own letter, not knowing what the real gift was.

“Love, Dave.” I went into Freddy’s new room, which was Dave’s old room, and tried to get a whiff of him. Dave,
that is. It was easy to get a whiff of Freddy: diapers, baby powder, his little baby hair on top of his little baby head. His smells completely wiped out Dave’s. But I took a good sharp pencil from one of my shoeboxes and wrote very lightly but firmly on the underside of one of Dave’s old windowsills: Dave + Chérie = 4-ever.

From his window I could see the forsythia hedge, bare branches now but still thick enough to hide the beginnings of a new Elfland.

We went to bed early Christmas Eve, after reading the St. Luke gospel and
The Night Before Christmas.
For a long time I lay awake listening.

“You might hear sleigh bells,” Mom had told Aimée and me. “But don’t get up, or you’ll scare Santa away.” Aimée had looked awestruck and slightly afraid—as ever—of Santa. But I went into Pete’s old room and settled under my new Prussian blue gingham bedspread and thought about the sky on the other side of my ceiling. I knew what I was getting for Christmas—at least in part—because I had heard Mom and Dad pushing something heavy around in the garage, and figured it might be the drawing desk I’d asked for.

Santa Claus, I thought. Was he just another story to make kids behave? How could I believe in anyone who could go around the whole world in just one night to every kid? Even to Vietcong kids? And what about army kids with dads in Vietnam? What about Pete and Dave up in Massachusetts, or the DeLunas, or the King kids, or the Kennedys?

I turned onto my side and listened to the shifting of my bed until it quieted, listened for the sound of the pine trees. I knew they were still whispering outside my bedroom window at our old house.

I heard a jingling on the stairs: not Santa, but Dad, the coins in his pants pocket announcing him. He tapped gently on my half-shut door, tiptoed toward my bed. “Cher? You awake?”

I sat up so quickly we almost knocked heads. I saw his smile in the light from the hall. “Come see,” he said. “Come down for a minute.”

“See what?”

“Shh.”

I descended the stairs behind him. At the foot of the stairs Mom came out of the living room, baby Fred in her arm, beckoning us with the other. Dad pulled me by the hand.

Walter Cronkite was on, talking about the rocket that had taken off on Saturday. It was one of the last things Mr. Stone had talked about in school, at the end of Carol Ack-erman’s report on John Glenn: the Apollo 8 mission that was going to orbit the moon.
APOLLO 8 TO ORBIT MOON 10 TIMES
, said the
Bell.

“Where are they?” I asked, yawning. I couldn’t see what Dad had gotten me up for. Sure, I had eagerly watched the rocket launch the other night on the news, then slithered away when the Vietnam scenes began flickering and flashing on. Maybe he thought I was getting to be a space nut on account of my moon report.

“Look
where they are,” Mom said, squeezing past me onto the couch and pulling me onto her knee, Fred and all.

“Mom,” I said, because I was too big. What was going on?

“Shh!” she said.

Now here was Dad again with Aimée in his arms, trying to coax her awake. “Did Santa Claus come?” she asked wearily.

“Not yet,” he said. He sat on the couch beside me, put Aimée’s feet in my lap, pointed at the TV screen.

There was the spaceship, the edge of it in the edge of the screen, and beyond it black night.

“So where’s the moon?” I asked.

Dad’s hand covered my mouth gently, without once looking at me, then pointed at the screen. The dark space sky had a lighter edge to it now, a gray glow.

And then—

“Oh,” I said. “Oh, God.” And no one told me not to talk that way. Because there on the TV screen was rising what could only be planet Earth, a half-Earth like the half-moon, its edge fading away to nothing, but where the moon was white and shadowy, Earth was a cloud-swirled jewel.

Mom held on to me so hard it hurt my stomach, but we both sat unmoving, leaning toward the set, Mom’s chin on my shoulder.

“In the beginning,” a voice said, “God created the heavens and the earth.”

Mom sniffed back tears behind me, and I watched, listened, with my hands to my face.

“Is that the moon?” asked Aimée.

“It’s Earth,” Dad said, hushed her, sat completely still, trying, it seemed, to read what was written on Earth’s face, figure out what part he was looking at. “It’s Africa,” he said, then: “No, it’s—hmm.”

Maybe it’s here, I thought, then realized with a stomach-shaking flash that home, here, was surely in the dark half, the hidden half—or quarter, or whatever it was. Maybe we aren’t there, my crazy mind suggested. No, of course we are. Where else would we be? Of course we’re there.

“That’s Earth,” I told Aimée again.

“No, it isn’t,” said Aimée.

“Yes, it is.”

“Girls!”

It was Earth. My mind told me that that was where I was, where we all were.

“It’s impossible,” I said aloud.

“It’s the only thing that
is
possible,” Dad answered. “It’s the only place we
could
be.”

In a dream I went back up the stairs, my arm around Aimée, tucked her in bed, and watched her go back to sleep faster than you’d believe. Would she remember tomorrow? In my own blue room I slid into a bed that was miraculously still warm from the hour I’d spent there before.