there's a smile between us and it's going on
I need to write a nonfiction book about all of the crazy random things I like and how they've ended up affecting me. This idea was inspired by my current re-obsession with Graham Chapman. ♥
I got this great DVD with Netflix. It's my favorite DVD, ever now. It's a DVD of video footage of Graham Chapman's college tours, giving lectures and answering questions and just being his lovable self. It's hard to describe how wonderful it is. And I can't call it my favorite movie, because it's not a movie, so it's my favorite digital video disc (dubbed video dub). And it will be mine. Oh yes. It will be mine.
Not this particular disc. I'll give it back to the powers at Netflix, with a hearty thanks (well, in the form of still giving them their monthly due).
For the first time, ever, I got re-obsessed with something simply by deciding to watch a bit of it. Normally, I don't even get re-obsessed. The only other time it happened (with The Who) was because I hadn't really even stopped being majorly into them, they just coincided with my LOTR love. So it hardly counts. But with Monty Python - and Graham in particular - I still loved them, but I wasn't so deeply into them anymore. Then I decided to watch Hollywood Bowl and now I'm right back to OMG status. XD My brain. She is weird.
But I'm starting to really like my various silly likes. I used to be kind of in denial of them. Like, I knew they existed and they either amused or annoyed certain people, but I kind of kept 'em as this thing I did and avoided thinking about how sweet it is to have these things. For example, they've helped me meet great friends. They've been common interests with people. They've been ice breakers and shared amusements. They've given me great amounts of fun. I am nerdy by nature, and having intense interests kind of keeps me going. :)
Anywho, so there's that. Christmas is in 14 days. Technically 13, I think. I've always failed at countdowns. Do you include today? Do you include Christmas? Do you like answering questions?
Do you like reading my novel? If you said "yes", good!*
“Lincoln and Harriet,” I read from the letter. We had both taken up seats on the back patio, too eager to find out what the letter said to worry about such things as monsters or booby traps. “By now, if you have found this letter, you are no doubt wondering my fate. I did not die, as Mr. Irving said. Or, at least, I did not die in the way that you commonly think of as death. It was simply my time to leave. I am sorry that I lied to you and had you come back here, but it is the only way that I could get you to come without me.
“If you go out a little ways beyond my back yard, you will find a creek. That is the famous Cadbury Creek. And I guarantee you that, if you go for a swim in it, all of your problems will get better. It is the most relaxing place I have ever been.
“Please do not be sad for me anymore. I had a great life. Although you never really took the time to get to know me, I knew you. And I know that you are destined for great things.
“With highest regards, Oliver Weatherby.”
We both stared at the paper. What on earth was he talking about? He didn’t know us. We had not met him at all until the day before. And, if he had known that he was dying, why didn’t he mention it at all? It was hard for me to comprehend and even harder for me to sympathize.
I looked at Harri to see if she had a similar reaction written on her face, but she was looking down, which was always difficult to read. “He tricked us, Hare,” I said. “He tricked us so we would swim in some dumb lake…”
“It’s a creek,” she said softly.
I didn’t really care about or see a difference. It didn’t matter to me, because I wasn’t planning to suddenly drop everything and go for a swim.
Harri stood up from her chair and examined the yard. “If it’s this important to him, we better do it.”
Re-folding up the paper, I stared at her. “What are you talking about?”
“It’s not like he’s asking us to murder anyone or rob a bank,” she said. “He’s just requesting that we check out the creek. And I’m curious. The town is named for it and I don’t know of anyone ever seeing it. Do you?”
“Well, no, but-”
“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity! Come on, Link. Live a little. Get dirty. You used to love adventure.”
I looked down at the note in my hands. As a kid, I had played outside with Harri, getting into trouble and making mud pies; the typical things that kids do. Ever since our dad died two years before, I just wasn’t into it anymore. It was as though I was afraid of having fun without him around to scold us while secretly laughing along. He was our protection from the sternness of our mother, and, without him, it was hard to get away from this overwhelming feeling of responsibility and order.
Not wanting Harriet to go off into the woods alone, I pocketed Mr. Weatherby’s letter and stood up. “Okay,” I said, taking the hand that she offered to me. “But there better not be any snakes in this creek. If I see one snake, or even a twig that looks too similar to a snake, the deal is off.”
She laughed and pulled me along. “You are such a baby.”
Walking along through the tall grass of Mr. Weatherby’s remarkably well-kept back yard, I thought about what it must have been like for him. In a way, he was like the keeper of Cadbury Creek, like he knew some big secret that the rest of the town did not even ask about anymore. Growing up, I had never heard anyone talking about the place. It was like people thought it wasn’t a real creek. Just a name attached to a place. But that never really happened, did it?
I still could not get over the fact that Mr. Weatherby said that he knew us, and that we were destined for greatness. I did not feel destined for anything other than C average grades and average SAT scores. I did not see myself as anything other than that: average. What great things could be accomplished by an average person? I knew that there were stories about simple people doing extraordinary things, but Mr. Weatherby seemed to have a lot of confidence in two kids who were, by definition, screw ups. Maybe the great things he was destining us for were just things like passing high school. That was a great thing I hoped I could achieve, even if the homework annoyed me.
Fallen branches snapped beneath our Chucks and snapped me out of my thoughts. The thick forestation that surrounded the old man’s house was now surrounding us. The creek couldn’t be too far now.
“So he’s says he’s not dead,” I said, trying to keep light conversation going to distract me from my thoughts and the creepiness of the place. “Maybe he really did just skip town.”
Harri looked over at me, just barely missing a low-hanging branch to the face. “But he said that it was his time to leave in that ‘I’m going to a better place’ type of way.”
“Yeah,” I said with a nod. “A better place. Like maybe Vegas.”
She rolled her eyes at me, but she didn’t laugh. “He’s dead, Link.”
“Mr. Weatherby has left the building.”
She hit me, but not only to shut up my inane attempt at humor. We had reached a small creek. It looked barely wide enough to even swim in. If we had not been seeking it out, we might’ve just skipped over it and kept walking.
“They named the town after this?” I asked, disappointed. “I think maybe Weatherbyville would be more fitting. He was far more impress-”
“Shut up!” Harri hissed. She walked all the way up to the edge of the water and started the laborious task of pulling all of her designer clothes off, til she was down to her underwear. I hesitated to join her, but she glared at me icily, so I did, setting my glasses down on the pile of clothes and hoping that no large bird would decide to steal them. She laughed only when she saw my Goofy-print boxers. “See? Anyone who wears those shouldn’t be such a fuddy-duddy.”
I ignored her. “Should we just dive right in together, do you think?” The water didn’t look ominous, but we were doing this on command, so I wondered how he wanted us to go about it. “He didn’t exactly give us directions.”
“Oh my god, you’re turning into mom.” Harri sucked in a big breath and dove into the water.
I worried about it not being deep enough and expected her to come right back up, but it took several moments before she did so. Her eyes were wide.
“What?”
“Get your skinny ass in here! You have to try that!”
With a sigh, I took a deep breath and dove in. The width of the creek seemed to widen up and engulf me, and it went on for miles and miles below the surface. I blinked, trying to make out as much as I could without vision correction. I thought I saw a door at the bottom, but surely that was crazy. It may have been an old door that someone tossed down there, but it was not worth swimming all the way down there to explore. Anyway, I was running out of air, so I quickly swam back to the surface.
Harri was staring at me, and her eyes were still so much larger than usual.
“What?” I asked.
“I thought you were never going to come back up,” she said. Swimming over, she gave me a soggy hug. Luckily, I didn’t get too attached to the idea, because, a few seconds later, she dunked me, cackling.
We splashed and floundered about for about an hour. Even though I couldn’t see the exact reasoning behind us swimming there, I was grateful that Mr. Weatherby had decided to share it with us. As we did our best to dry off on the water’s edge, I continued to think about my averageness and Harri’s penchant for doing, pretty much, whatever she damn well pleased. We weren’t exactly special or gifted. Why anyone would think of us as ideal candidates for any sort of secret - especially one as nice as Cadbury Creek turned out to be - was beyond me. Even if Mr. Weatherby had been watching us from afar as we grew up (which I refused to believe, not just on the basis of it being pretty creepy, but because I didn’t think we were worth the effort). There were much more talented, interesting kids in town. Why focus his aging energies on us?
“We shouldn’t tell Mom about this,” Harri said as she tied her shoes. “She would only get more concerned…and probably mad.”
I nodded. “So what’s our story? What did we do here?”
She looked off into the trees, toward the house. “We fixed the door. We said we would, and so we did.”
That would give us time to completely dry off, too. Sometimes, Harriet was a genius.
Hours later, when we arrived back at home, Mom was understandably curious about what had happened. “Was he really gone? You didn’t see his body, did you? I hope they’ve cleared it away already. That’d just be terrible.”
We looked at each other. “There was no body,” Harri confirmed. “The front door was still open, but we closed it when we left. We didn’t think it would be right to leave it open. Disrespectful, even.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Even though he’s not there anymore, it wouldn’t be good to let his house get robbed or something.”
Mom eyed us. “Did you fix the door?”
Harri nodded. “Yup. It took quite a while, but we did it. The hinges were so old. It’s not a surprise that it broke.”
“Wow. Well, that was very kind of you. I’m sure, wherever he is now, he appreciates it. You want pork chops tonight? I think you deserve it.” Our mom seemed plenty impressed with our way of memorializing the old man, and paying our respect. As she spoke, I thought about the old house and wondered what would become of it. Would someone move in? What would happen to that great creek? I felt the letter from Mr. Weatherby in my pocket and wondered what his plans for the place consisted of. Did he have plans for the place? Did he want us to go back, ever? So many unanswered questions; I still felt that it wasn’t fair. How could he just decide, so seemingly randomly, to up and leave us with such a big secret to keep?
No amount of pork chops and conversation could keep these questions away. As I lay in bed later, with a happily full stomach, I found myself asking the questions under my breath, as though Mr. Weatherby was a spirit who happened to be hanging out in my bedroom, ready to talk to me. I felt silly for doing it, but it didn’t stop me from trying. I’d never been a religious person, but I liked to believe - especially with the death of my dad - that there was something nice waiting for you after you died. And maybe that something could let people talk to you. Or give you a sign. Something. Anything. But, if the old man sent me a sign, I didn’t feel or notice it. And I ended up falling into a frustrated sleep.
I don’t know how long I was asleep, but I was woken up by Harri gently shaking me. “Link,” she whispered in a hurried tone. “Link, wake up!”
Squinting at her and blinking as I tried regain a full state of awakeness, I reached over and grabbed my glasses, putting them back on. The squinting continued, though, because it was plenty dark in my room still. “What? What are you doing in here?” I wanted to ask her if she’d seen a sign, but I didn’t want to sound stupid, so I kept the question to myself.
“Do you feel any… different since we swam in that creek?” she asked. I could just barely make out her large blue eyes. It helped that the moonlight was illuminating the room with a dim spotlight of white. The eyes that I saw were an interesting mixture of curious, anxious and scared. I had no idea what was going on.
“Different?” I asked. “How do you mean?” I sat up, leaning against my elbows. The only way I felt different was in the fact that I was tired. But I got the feeling that Harri didn’t mean that way; she didn’t seem very tired at the moment. I knew that I had been asleep for a while. It hadn’t been so dark when we went to bed.
She sat at the foot of my bed and extended her right arm toward me. “It’s completely numb,” she said. “Like it’s asleep. You know, the pins and needles thing? It’s like that, but it’s been like that since right after dinner. It came out of nowhere.”
I scratched the back of my head, looking at her arm. “Have you tried moving it a lot?”
“Of course I have,” she replied, sounding annoyed. “And it kind of feels like it’s gone away, but the hand is still numb.”
Leaning forward, I stretched out both of my arms. Neither of them felt weird or asleep. They were moving normally, and the felt the almost unnoticeable way that limbs feel. Like they were attached to me. I tried pinching each, and I felt it. Shrugging, I shook my head at Harri. “Maybe you have a pinched nerve or something? If it’s still numb in the morning, maybe you should tell Mom.”
I could barely make her out, but she seemed to be giving me a look of unease. “I hope it’s not a pinched nerve. That needs surgery or something, doesn’t it?”
“Worrying about it now, won’t help,” I said. I have always been a bit of a hypocrite, but not in the extremely asinine way. Just in the entirely unhelpful way. “Get some sleep. Chances are that it will go away by morning.”
She nodded then; a dark, bobbing blur that was soon gone from my room. It did not take me too long to go back to sleep, but my dreams did not become any less frustrating or worried. Something unnamable still loomed over my and occupied my brain with its questions and its confused ‘what if’s.
Harri didn’t say a word about the mysterious tingling in her arm, so I figured that all must be right in her world again. Mom put us on newspaper detail again, so, after breakfast and a good shower, we grabbed our bikes and headed out to deliver the news of the day. But, first, as soon as we were away from our house, we had to scour the pages for any word on Mr. Weatherby’s mysterious disappearance. Maybe the obituaries, if nothing else, would mention him. He wasn’t popular, but he was a fixture in the town, and talked about enough that he would leave a rather large hole in the local folks’ gossip.
Flipping, page after page, getting the blackish-gray newsprint all over our fingers, we found no trace of him or his disappearance/death or anything. There were no ads for his house suddenly being on sale. It was as though none of the past day’s experiences had happened.
I looked at Harri and she gave me a knowing look, accompanied by a small nod. “I think I’m thinking what you’re thinking,” I said back to her. Mounting our bikes, we pedaled as fast as we could to the old house in the middle of the woods. Riding over the twigs was much quicker, but we had to duck and swerve to avoid all of the demon branches as they reached out at us. It reminded of that scene in Star Wars when Luke and Leia are hovering quickly through the trees on Endor… except that, thankfully, there were no evil weapons of the Dark Side following us. Out here, it was only Mother Nature who seemed to want to kick our butts.
When we reached the old house with the green door, we wasted no time staring and wondering. We let our bikes fall where they had stood and ran up the porch steps, calling for Mr. Weatherby in hopes - perhaps foolish ones - that we’d landed in some sort of time warp and he was still there. Hope can do funny things to a person’s mind; it can make you believe the unbelievable and cling to something that makes absolutely no sense. But, still and all, it keeps mankind going. Life would be completely unbearable without it.
The door was closed, as we had left it, and still unlocked. We cautiously walked inside and looked around. As before, there was no sign of the man, either of his dead body or his living one. It was as though he had completely vacated the premises. I thought of my stupid Elvis comment. It was starting to seem a lot like that.
“Well,” Harri said simply, sitting down in the old man’s chair, “now that we’re here, at least it’s a good time to talk about this. My arm’s numbness didn’t go away.”
I stared at her. “What?”
She rubbed the fleshy part of her upper right arm. “It hasn’t gone away. In fact, I think it’s worse. I’m starting to feel it in my left arm, too.”
Moving toward the chair, I knelt beside her and touched her arm. “That’s weird,” I said softly. “My legs have felt kind of weird today. But it could just be because of how fast we were just bicycling.”
Giving me a look of utmost seriousness, she looked down at my legs. “Do they feel painful, like muscles have been worked, or do they feel tingly and almost like they’re not attached to you?”
I hesitated, thinking about it and wiggling my toes. At least, I was telling them to wiggle. I couldn’t really make out the feeling of movement. “I guess they feel asleep. But, Harri, you don’t think…”
“Why do you think he had us swim in the creek?” she asked in a whispered tone, as though he was around and could hear us. “What if… What if it did something to us? Something bad?”
“You still want to believe that he was somehow a bad person?” I threw my hands up. “Maybe you just have a pinched nerve and I just overworked my legs. God, you’re such a fatalist.”
She looked down, still rubbing at her arm. “I’m just scared,” she said.
I smacked my leg, which was something I usually tried when one of my limbs was asleep. It was my ‘just give it a good smack’ method. It hadn’t been patented yet, but it had always worked before. “Well, what do you suggest we do about it? I could escort you to the hospital…”
Shaking her head, Harri sighed. “We can’t go without Mom.” She let out a soft sob then. “What if we’re dying?”
I just took it to mean that she had read too many scary books, but, standing back up, I rode homeward with her. Our mother would know what to do. That was pretty much her job, and she had yet to let us down.
*If you said no, :(
I got this great DVD with Netflix. It's my favorite DVD, ever now. It's a DVD of video footage of Graham Chapman's college tours, giving lectures and answering questions and just being his lovable self. It's hard to describe how wonderful it is. And I can't call it my favorite movie, because it's not a movie, so it's my favorite digital video disc (dubbed video dub). And it will be mine. Oh yes. It will be mine.
Not this particular disc. I'll give it back to the powers at Netflix, with a hearty thanks (well, in the form of still giving them their monthly due).
For the first time, ever, I got re-obsessed with something simply by deciding to watch a bit of it. Normally, I don't even get re-obsessed. The only other time it happened (with The Who) was because I hadn't really even stopped being majorly into them, they just coincided with my LOTR love. So it hardly counts. But with Monty Python - and Graham in particular - I still loved them, but I wasn't so deeply into them anymore. Then I decided to watch Hollywood Bowl and now I'm right back to OMG status. XD My brain. She is weird.
But I'm starting to really like my various silly likes. I used to be kind of in denial of them. Like, I knew they existed and they either amused or annoyed certain people, but I kind of kept 'em as this thing I did and avoided thinking about how sweet it is to have these things. For example, they've helped me meet great friends. They've been common interests with people. They've been ice breakers and shared amusements. They've given me great amounts of fun. I am nerdy by nature, and having intense interests kind of keeps me going. :)
Anywho, so there's that. Christmas is in 14 days. Technically 13, I think. I've always failed at countdowns. Do you include today? Do you include Christmas? Do you like answering questions?
Do you like reading my novel? If you said "yes", good!*
“Lincoln and Harriet,” I read from the letter. We had both taken up seats on the back patio, too eager to find out what the letter said to worry about such things as monsters or booby traps. “By now, if you have found this letter, you are no doubt wondering my fate. I did not die, as Mr. Irving said. Or, at least, I did not die in the way that you commonly think of as death. It was simply my time to leave. I am sorry that I lied to you and had you come back here, but it is the only way that I could get you to come without me.
“If you go out a little ways beyond my back yard, you will find a creek. That is the famous Cadbury Creek. And I guarantee you that, if you go for a swim in it, all of your problems will get better. It is the most relaxing place I have ever been.
“Please do not be sad for me anymore. I had a great life. Although you never really took the time to get to know me, I knew you. And I know that you are destined for great things.
“With highest regards, Oliver Weatherby.”
We both stared at the paper. What on earth was he talking about? He didn’t know us. We had not met him at all until the day before. And, if he had known that he was dying, why didn’t he mention it at all? It was hard for me to comprehend and even harder for me to sympathize.
I looked at Harri to see if she had a similar reaction written on her face, but she was looking down, which was always difficult to read. “He tricked us, Hare,” I said. “He tricked us so we would swim in some dumb lake…”
“It’s a creek,” she said softly.
I didn’t really care about or see a difference. It didn’t matter to me, because I wasn’t planning to suddenly drop everything and go for a swim.
Harri stood up from her chair and examined the yard. “If it’s this important to him, we better do it.”
Re-folding up the paper, I stared at her. “What are you talking about?”
“It’s not like he’s asking us to murder anyone or rob a bank,” she said. “He’s just requesting that we check out the creek. And I’m curious. The town is named for it and I don’t know of anyone ever seeing it. Do you?”
“Well, no, but-”
“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity! Come on, Link. Live a little. Get dirty. You used to love adventure.”
I looked down at the note in my hands. As a kid, I had played outside with Harri, getting into trouble and making mud pies; the typical things that kids do. Ever since our dad died two years before, I just wasn’t into it anymore. It was as though I was afraid of having fun without him around to scold us while secretly laughing along. He was our protection from the sternness of our mother, and, without him, it was hard to get away from this overwhelming feeling of responsibility and order.
Not wanting Harriet to go off into the woods alone, I pocketed Mr. Weatherby’s letter and stood up. “Okay,” I said, taking the hand that she offered to me. “But there better not be any snakes in this creek. If I see one snake, or even a twig that looks too similar to a snake, the deal is off.”
She laughed and pulled me along. “You are such a baby.”
Walking along through the tall grass of Mr. Weatherby’s remarkably well-kept back yard, I thought about what it must have been like for him. In a way, he was like the keeper of Cadbury Creek, like he knew some big secret that the rest of the town did not even ask about anymore. Growing up, I had never heard anyone talking about the place. It was like people thought it wasn’t a real creek. Just a name attached to a place. But that never really happened, did it?
I still could not get over the fact that Mr. Weatherby said that he knew us, and that we were destined for greatness. I did not feel destined for anything other than C average grades and average SAT scores. I did not see myself as anything other than that: average. What great things could be accomplished by an average person? I knew that there were stories about simple people doing extraordinary things, but Mr. Weatherby seemed to have a lot of confidence in two kids who were, by definition, screw ups. Maybe the great things he was destining us for were just things like passing high school. That was a great thing I hoped I could achieve, even if the homework annoyed me.
Fallen branches snapped beneath our Chucks and snapped me out of my thoughts. The thick forestation that surrounded the old man’s house was now surrounding us. The creek couldn’t be too far now.
“So he’s says he’s not dead,” I said, trying to keep light conversation going to distract me from my thoughts and the creepiness of the place. “Maybe he really did just skip town.”
Harri looked over at me, just barely missing a low-hanging branch to the face. “But he said that it was his time to leave in that ‘I’m going to a better place’ type of way.”
“Yeah,” I said with a nod. “A better place. Like maybe Vegas.”
She rolled her eyes at me, but she didn’t laugh. “He’s dead, Link.”
“Mr. Weatherby has left the building.”
She hit me, but not only to shut up my inane attempt at humor. We had reached a small creek. It looked barely wide enough to even swim in. If we had not been seeking it out, we might’ve just skipped over it and kept walking.
“They named the town after this?” I asked, disappointed. “I think maybe Weatherbyville would be more fitting. He was far more impress-”
“Shut up!” Harri hissed. She walked all the way up to the edge of the water and started the laborious task of pulling all of her designer clothes off, til she was down to her underwear. I hesitated to join her, but she glared at me icily, so I did, setting my glasses down on the pile of clothes and hoping that no large bird would decide to steal them. She laughed only when she saw my Goofy-print boxers. “See? Anyone who wears those shouldn’t be such a fuddy-duddy.”
I ignored her. “Should we just dive right in together, do you think?” The water didn’t look ominous, but we were doing this on command, so I wondered how he wanted us to go about it. “He didn’t exactly give us directions.”
“Oh my god, you’re turning into mom.” Harri sucked in a big breath and dove into the water.
I worried about it not being deep enough and expected her to come right back up, but it took several moments before she did so. Her eyes were wide.
“What?”
“Get your skinny ass in here! You have to try that!”
With a sigh, I took a deep breath and dove in. The width of the creek seemed to widen up and engulf me, and it went on for miles and miles below the surface. I blinked, trying to make out as much as I could without vision correction. I thought I saw a door at the bottom, but surely that was crazy. It may have been an old door that someone tossed down there, but it was not worth swimming all the way down there to explore. Anyway, I was running out of air, so I quickly swam back to the surface.
Harri was staring at me, and her eyes were still so much larger than usual.
“What?” I asked.
“I thought you were never going to come back up,” she said. Swimming over, she gave me a soggy hug. Luckily, I didn’t get too attached to the idea, because, a few seconds later, she dunked me, cackling.
We splashed and floundered about for about an hour. Even though I couldn’t see the exact reasoning behind us swimming there, I was grateful that Mr. Weatherby had decided to share it with us. As we did our best to dry off on the water’s edge, I continued to think about my averageness and Harri’s penchant for doing, pretty much, whatever she damn well pleased. We weren’t exactly special or gifted. Why anyone would think of us as ideal candidates for any sort of secret - especially one as nice as Cadbury Creek turned out to be - was beyond me. Even if Mr. Weatherby had been watching us from afar as we grew up (which I refused to believe, not just on the basis of it being pretty creepy, but because I didn’t think we were worth the effort). There were much more talented, interesting kids in town. Why focus his aging energies on us?
“We shouldn’t tell Mom about this,” Harri said as she tied her shoes. “She would only get more concerned…and probably mad.”
I nodded. “So what’s our story? What did we do here?”
She looked off into the trees, toward the house. “We fixed the door. We said we would, and so we did.”
That would give us time to completely dry off, too. Sometimes, Harriet was a genius.
Hours later, when we arrived back at home, Mom was understandably curious about what had happened. “Was he really gone? You didn’t see his body, did you? I hope they’ve cleared it away already. That’d just be terrible.”
We looked at each other. “There was no body,” Harri confirmed. “The front door was still open, but we closed it when we left. We didn’t think it would be right to leave it open. Disrespectful, even.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Even though he’s not there anymore, it wouldn’t be good to let his house get robbed or something.”
Mom eyed us. “Did you fix the door?”
Harri nodded. “Yup. It took quite a while, but we did it. The hinges were so old. It’s not a surprise that it broke.”
“Wow. Well, that was very kind of you. I’m sure, wherever he is now, he appreciates it. You want pork chops tonight? I think you deserve it.” Our mom seemed plenty impressed with our way of memorializing the old man, and paying our respect. As she spoke, I thought about the old house and wondered what would become of it. Would someone move in? What would happen to that great creek? I felt the letter from Mr. Weatherby in my pocket and wondered what his plans for the place consisted of. Did he have plans for the place? Did he want us to go back, ever? So many unanswered questions; I still felt that it wasn’t fair. How could he just decide, so seemingly randomly, to up and leave us with such a big secret to keep?
No amount of pork chops and conversation could keep these questions away. As I lay in bed later, with a happily full stomach, I found myself asking the questions under my breath, as though Mr. Weatherby was a spirit who happened to be hanging out in my bedroom, ready to talk to me. I felt silly for doing it, but it didn’t stop me from trying. I’d never been a religious person, but I liked to believe - especially with the death of my dad - that there was something nice waiting for you after you died. And maybe that something could let people talk to you. Or give you a sign. Something. Anything. But, if the old man sent me a sign, I didn’t feel or notice it. And I ended up falling into a frustrated sleep.
I don’t know how long I was asleep, but I was woken up by Harri gently shaking me. “Link,” she whispered in a hurried tone. “Link, wake up!”
Squinting at her and blinking as I tried regain a full state of awakeness, I reached over and grabbed my glasses, putting them back on. The squinting continued, though, because it was plenty dark in my room still. “What? What are you doing in here?” I wanted to ask her if she’d seen a sign, but I didn’t want to sound stupid, so I kept the question to myself.
“Do you feel any… different since we swam in that creek?” she asked. I could just barely make out her large blue eyes. It helped that the moonlight was illuminating the room with a dim spotlight of white. The eyes that I saw were an interesting mixture of curious, anxious and scared. I had no idea what was going on.
“Different?” I asked. “How do you mean?” I sat up, leaning against my elbows. The only way I felt different was in the fact that I was tired. But I got the feeling that Harri didn’t mean that way; she didn’t seem very tired at the moment. I knew that I had been asleep for a while. It hadn’t been so dark when we went to bed.
She sat at the foot of my bed and extended her right arm toward me. “It’s completely numb,” she said. “Like it’s asleep. You know, the pins and needles thing? It’s like that, but it’s been like that since right after dinner. It came out of nowhere.”
I scratched the back of my head, looking at her arm. “Have you tried moving it a lot?”
“Of course I have,” she replied, sounding annoyed. “And it kind of feels like it’s gone away, but the hand is still numb.”
Leaning forward, I stretched out both of my arms. Neither of them felt weird or asleep. They were moving normally, and the felt the almost unnoticeable way that limbs feel. Like they were attached to me. I tried pinching each, and I felt it. Shrugging, I shook my head at Harri. “Maybe you have a pinched nerve or something? If it’s still numb in the morning, maybe you should tell Mom.”
I could barely make her out, but she seemed to be giving me a look of unease. “I hope it’s not a pinched nerve. That needs surgery or something, doesn’t it?”
“Worrying about it now, won’t help,” I said. I have always been a bit of a hypocrite, but not in the extremely asinine way. Just in the entirely unhelpful way. “Get some sleep. Chances are that it will go away by morning.”
She nodded then; a dark, bobbing blur that was soon gone from my room. It did not take me too long to go back to sleep, but my dreams did not become any less frustrating or worried. Something unnamable still loomed over my and occupied my brain with its questions and its confused ‘what if’s.
Harri didn’t say a word about the mysterious tingling in her arm, so I figured that all must be right in her world again. Mom put us on newspaper detail again, so, after breakfast and a good shower, we grabbed our bikes and headed out to deliver the news of the day. But, first, as soon as we were away from our house, we had to scour the pages for any word on Mr. Weatherby’s mysterious disappearance. Maybe the obituaries, if nothing else, would mention him. He wasn’t popular, but he was a fixture in the town, and talked about enough that he would leave a rather large hole in the local folks’ gossip.
Flipping, page after page, getting the blackish-gray newsprint all over our fingers, we found no trace of him or his disappearance/death or anything. There were no ads for his house suddenly being on sale. It was as though none of the past day’s experiences had happened.
I looked at Harri and she gave me a knowing look, accompanied by a small nod. “I think I’m thinking what you’re thinking,” I said back to her. Mounting our bikes, we pedaled as fast as we could to the old house in the middle of the woods. Riding over the twigs was much quicker, but we had to duck and swerve to avoid all of the demon branches as they reached out at us. It reminded of that scene in Star Wars when Luke and Leia are hovering quickly through the trees on Endor… except that, thankfully, there were no evil weapons of the Dark Side following us. Out here, it was only Mother Nature who seemed to want to kick our butts.
When we reached the old house with the green door, we wasted no time staring and wondering. We let our bikes fall where they had stood and ran up the porch steps, calling for Mr. Weatherby in hopes - perhaps foolish ones - that we’d landed in some sort of time warp and he was still there. Hope can do funny things to a person’s mind; it can make you believe the unbelievable and cling to something that makes absolutely no sense. But, still and all, it keeps mankind going. Life would be completely unbearable without it.
The door was closed, as we had left it, and still unlocked. We cautiously walked inside and looked around. As before, there was no sign of the man, either of his dead body or his living one. It was as though he had completely vacated the premises. I thought of my stupid Elvis comment. It was starting to seem a lot like that.
“Well,” Harri said simply, sitting down in the old man’s chair, “now that we’re here, at least it’s a good time to talk about this. My arm’s numbness didn’t go away.”
I stared at her. “What?”
She rubbed the fleshy part of her upper right arm. “It hasn’t gone away. In fact, I think it’s worse. I’m starting to feel it in my left arm, too.”
Moving toward the chair, I knelt beside her and touched her arm. “That’s weird,” I said softly. “My legs have felt kind of weird today. But it could just be because of how fast we were just bicycling.”
Giving me a look of utmost seriousness, she looked down at my legs. “Do they feel painful, like muscles have been worked, or do they feel tingly and almost like they’re not attached to you?”
I hesitated, thinking about it and wiggling my toes. At least, I was telling them to wiggle. I couldn’t really make out the feeling of movement. “I guess they feel asleep. But, Harri, you don’t think…”
“Why do you think he had us swim in the creek?” she asked in a whispered tone, as though he was around and could hear us. “What if… What if it did something to us? Something bad?”
“You still want to believe that he was somehow a bad person?” I threw my hands up. “Maybe you just have a pinched nerve and I just overworked my legs. God, you’re such a fatalist.”
She looked down, still rubbing at her arm. “I’m just scared,” she said.
I smacked my leg, which was something I usually tried when one of my limbs was asleep. It was my ‘just give it a good smack’ method. It hadn’t been patented yet, but it had always worked before. “Well, what do you suggest we do about it? I could escort you to the hospital…”
Shaking her head, Harri sighed. “We can’t go without Mom.” She let out a soft sob then. “What if we’re dying?”
I just took it to mean that she had read too many scary books, but, standing back up, I rode homeward with her. Our mother would know what to do. That was pretty much her job, and she had yet to let us down.
*If you said no, :(