The Ever Breath

  This book is dedicated to those inhabitants of the Fixed World who have led me to the Breath World and back again—Glenda, Bill, Phoebe, Finneas, Theo, Otis, and Dave.

  And thank you, Wendy, Nat, and Justin, for tending the passageway.

  The universe is made of stories, not atoms.

  —Muriel Rukeyser

  CHAPTER ONE

  Swallow Road

  It was cold outside, and the car’s heater smelled like a wet dog—even though they didn’t have a dog. Truman Cragmeal had always wanted one, but he was allergic to fur—well, to pet dander, actually.

  Truman was allergic to a lot of things. Strawberries made him break out in itchy hives. Nuts made his throat tighten. Bee stings caused him to swell up all over. Chocolate gave him a headache. Pollen clogged his nose. He was lactose intolerant and mildly asthmatic. He carried an inhaler in one front pocket of his pants and an EpiPen, in case of severe allergic reactions, in the other at all times.

  Worst of all for Truman at this very moment was the fact that he easily became carsick and his mother was driving along back roads that curved and twisted, dipping in and out of a misty fog.

  To take his mind off his carsickness, Truman was trying to concentrate on the dog he’d never have. With his stomach full of belchy air, he decided on a Chinese fighting dog—the kind with all the extra skin and the smushed, wrinkly face. He closed his eyes and pictured the Chinese fighting dog but, in his imagination, the dog quickly sprouted horns and then wings and then webbed claws. Truman’s brain always seemed to play tricks like that. It was the kind of thing that made his mind wander in class and got him in trouble with his teacher, Ms. Quillum.

  He burped and opened his eyes. He thought it’d be good to have a dog, especially now that his dad was gone. Boys need dogs, he thought, even though he knew he’d never be allowed to have one and wouldn’t be able to breathe if he did.

  Truman’s twin sister, Camille, was sitting next to him. She was reading a book about someone who’d climbed a mountain and almost died and ended up having to have his nose amputated because of frostbite.

  One month earlier, before their father left, Camille had been a girl who wore pink Girl Power sweatshirts and wrote her homework in sparkle gel pens and dotted her i’s with hearts.

  But now she wore black T-shirts and camouflage pants and spent her spare time watching TV shows where people were dropped off in the middle of the jungle with only a piece of flint, and reading books on disasters—plane crashes, circus fires, shipwrecks, tsunamis, earthquakes, floods. She tied back her curly dark hair with leather shoelaces and sometimes insisted on eating without silverware.

  She never got carsick, and unlike Truman, she wasn’t lactose intolerant, never got hives, and didn’t swell up when stung by a bee. She wasn’t allergic to pet dander or pollen. She didn’t need an inhaler. She didn’t even wear glasses. Truman’s glasses had thick lenses that weighed them down, and he always had to keep pushing them back up the bridge of his small nose. Truman didn’t understand how he and Camille could be twins. They were complete opposites.

  The car crested a small hill and Truman’s stomach flipped and he moaned a little.

  “Really, Truman,” Camille said. “Please don’t barf.”

  “I don’t barf on purpose, you know!”

  “This is the right way, don’t you think?” Truman’s mother said nervously. She was sitting right on the edge of the seat, in close to the wheel, squinting through the windshield. She’d forgotten the map, as well as the directions and her glasses. Since their father left, she’d had to work harder and harder, taking on an extra job at night where she answered phones for doctors who were on call but were at the opera or something. She worked so hard that she forgot things. She was dropping Camille and Truman at their grandmother’s so that she could work extra hours over the holidays and get paid overtime. Truman wondered whether she might work so hard over the holidays that she’d forget to come back for him and Camille. He knew it wasn’t logical—his mother would never forget them—but still the idea worried him a bit. “Swallow Road? Is that what we’re looking for? Like the little bird, the swallow?” his mother asked.

  It was a strange name for a road, and Truman remembered it distinctly. “That’s what you said before,” he told her. “Swallow Road. It seems like the kind of road that could get swallowed up.” There were only a few houses and bare trees and lots of cloud-clotted sky. Truman felt the hot itch of panic in his chest. He was afraid now that the car trip might go on forever. What if they never found the place?

  “A road being swallowed?” Camille said. “It’s named after the bird. Trust me.”

  “Did I say left or right?” his mother asked.

  “Are we still lost?” Camille asked.

  “We’re not lost,” their mother said. “Just misplaced.”

  “Ah, right, misplaced,” Camille said. “Like Dad, I guess. He isn’t lost. He’s just misplaced?”

  Camille was fearless about bringing up their father. Every time she did, Truman started breathing heavily, as if he were going to have an asthma attack, just to distract everyone, which was what he did now. He began a wheezy inhale, but Camille glared at him.

  “Stop faking.”

  Truman stopped midbreath. He was a little scared of Camille these days.

  “Your father isn’t lost or misplaced,” his mother said. “He’s just been called away on business.”

  “He’s a manager of three Taco Grills,” Camille said flatly. “Has he been called in to Taco Grill headquarters? Is he a Taco Grill spy now?”

  “Stop it,” his mother said. “Just have a little faith in him. That’s all I ask.” And she sighed with deep exhaustion. She sometimes reminded Truman of a rowboat without oars, drifting out across a lake. She used to have lots of energy, and she’d been the type to charge around with purpose and wear lipstick and brush her hair, but now her lips were pale and she pulled her hair back in a tangled ponytail and she seemed to shuffle and drift, usually forgetting to take her name tag off, and so there was a plastic badge pinned to her shirt that read “Hello. My Name is Peggy Cragmeal. May I help you?” Sometimes Truman could pretend that his father was still living with them and was just out picking up something at the dry cleaner or making a grocery-store run. But then he would look at his mother’s tired eyes or at Camille wearing her camouflage backpack and he couldn’t pretend anymore. He sometimes wondered if he’d changed, but he didn’t think he had.

  “Must be a nice house to be on a golf course!” Truman said brightly. Their grandmother’s house supposedly had a view of the seventeenth hole at a ritzy club, and Truman was trying to change the mood a little. His teacher, Ms. Quillum, often said, “Happiness is contagious!” She smiled when she said this, an enormous smile that took up most of her small round face.

  “I’m sure it will be a lot of fun,” his mother said. She didn’t sound convincing.

  And then, as if by sheer luck, Truman saw a sign for the Gilded Capital Country Club. His mother had passed it. “There it is!” he shouted, twisting around in his seat. “Back there!”

  It was almost dusk as they rolled under the wrought-iron entranceway that spelled out GCCC in gold cursive. They followed a road past the clubhouse to the edge of the nearly empty parking lot. Truman’s mother parked the car and turned off the engine. The heater let out one last puff of dogginess and the car went quiet, except for a few exhausted knocks of the engine.

  Truman and Camille leaned forward between the bucket seats. Their mother rested her arms on the wheel. They looked down the sloping green of the fairway and saw a house—tall, ancient, with a rusty tin roof and boarded-up windows. It wasn’t sitting on a road beside the golf course, as Truman had expected; it was actually sitting
on the golf course itself—on the small hill of the seventeenth hole—all alone. On one side there was a sand trap, on the other side a pond, and right in front of it the green, and stuck in the hole was a pole with a white flag whipping in the wind. The house looked as if it had grown straight up out of the ground and refused to be destroyed. But now its roof was puckered. Its sides were green with mold. The drain spouts were rusted and sagging. The shutters looked cockeyed.

  Truman whispered, “To build a golf course, don’t they have to tear down woodland and any old house that stands in the way? How is it still there?”

  “Is this really where Dad grew up?” Camille asked.

  “Yes,” their mother said, “but he never talked about his childhood much. He never brought me here, not even when we were dating.”

  Truman always had trouble imagining his parents ever being young, though there were pictures of them, with bigger, puffier hairstyles, on the mantel at home. His mother rubbed her eyes and Truman wondered if she’d teared up. He hated to see her cry. It made his chest tighten, as if he were being hugged too tightly.

  “Let’s go,” Camille said. “It’s getting dark.”

  Truman felt his stomach give one more lurch, as if it had just realized that they’d come to a stop. He grabbed the handle on the door, opened it quickly, and threw up on the pavement.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The House on the Seventeenth Hole

  They made their way across the long sloping stretch of the fairway’s trimmed grass in a line—Camille under the weight of her backpack, Truman pulling a suitcase on wheels, and their mother trailing behind. A solitary golfer bobbled by in a golf cart, his golf clubs rattling. He gave the three of them a suspicious glance, but Truman barely noticed. He was staring at the house. It loomed larger and larger the closer they got. In fact, it seemed to rise to meet them.

  There, in its dark shadow, was a squat figure with bow legs in thick black stockings sticking out from under a bulky parka. Each breath the person released formed a little cloud in the cold air. It was, of course, Truman and Camille’s grandmother. A woman they’d never met and knew only by the disappointing presents she sent for birthdays and holidays—bars of soap, ChapSticks, boxes of crackers. She was standing next to a metal mailbox, dented and dinged over the years by golf balls. Its red metal flag was missing. “Cragmeal” was printed on the side of it in peeling black letters.

  She had on a pair of white sneakers that looked like they’d gotten wet and then had dried in a stiff, odd shape with slightly upturned toes. She carried a gnarled wooden walking stick the way a native in the jungle would hold a spear, as in one of Camille’s books on survival. On her head was a wooly blue hat that was lumpy and looked as if it had been made by someone who barely knew how to knit. She tugged at the hat, keeping it snug over her forehead just above her thin white eyebrows. She had a sharp jaw and a noticeable underbite, and when her face sagged and then cinched up tightly, Truman was reminded of a bulldog. (Bulldogs were high on his list of favorite dogs.)

  But the most striking thing about their grandmother was her glasses; one of the lenses was completely normal but the other was covered by a shiny black plastic cup. Truman wondered what was wrong with the hidden eye. And he felt his own gaze linger on the plastic cup—longer than he should have let it. His grandmother’s other eye caught him staring. It fixed on him with a steely blue concentration. He smiled weakly, fiddling with his inhaler in his coat pocket.

  The eye squinted and then blinked and then moved on.

  “It’s so good to see you,” Truman’s mother said wearily.

  “We haven’t seen enough of each other over the years,” his grandmother said. “I’m glad I can be of help now … now that, well, you know.”

  Camille sighed loudly. Truman translated the sigh in his head. It went something like: Oh, so you’re going to tiptoe around the subject of our missing father, too, huh? How lovely.

  “This is Truman,” his mother said. “And this is Camille. Really growing up, aren’t they?”

  Truman hated talk about growing. He was pretty sure he’d stopped growing. He was short and slightly pudgy, and he was afraid that the only way he was ever going to grow was horizontally, not vertically.

  Their grandmother shook Camille’s hand, and then reached for Truman’s.

  “Careful,” Camille said, “he’s a barfer.”

  Their grandmother paused.

  “I get carsick,” Truman explained.

  “Note to self!” their grandmother said. “Barfer.” She shook his hand and smiled in a way that suggested she was trying to hide a sudden pang of What have I signed on for?

  “And here’s information on Truman’s other medical conditions,” his mother said. She handed their grandmother a thick folder.

  “Oh my!” their grandmother said.

  “Sorry,” Truman mumbled under his breath.

  “It’s all right. I think you might actually do quite well in my house,” their grandmother said. And then she looked up at the sky. “Glad you made it before the snow. They’ve been predicting snow for a week straight, but none comes.” Truman looked at the sky through a break in the patchy fog. It looked heavy with gray clouds. “Do you want to come inside and warm up and eat some dinner?”

  Truman looked at his mother, as if seeing her for the first time in a long time. She was wearing her navy peacoat with its three oversized buttons. The coat was too big for her. How could his mother look lost even in her own coat? She shook her head. “It’s hard enough to say goodbye—even though it won’t be too long,” she said. “I can’t string it out.” She pulled a tissue out of her coat pocket and wiped her eyes.

  “Don’t go all Jell O on us,” Camille said. She was fine with disasters but didn’t like plain old emotions. She hadn’t cried—not once—since their father left. Truman had cried right away, that first morning when their mother told them at breakfast. He was embarrassed about it, but still, once he started he’d had trouble stopping.

  “I’m not! I promise!” their mother said. “I’ll call every day. It’s only three weeks. It won’t be forever. Be good! Okay?” She opened her arms for a hug.

  Truman wrapped his arms around her. He’d never gotten the chance to say goodbye to his father. That was one of the hardest parts of it. He breathed in the wooly smell of her coat and tried to memorize it. His father smelled of aftershave, but Truman could barely remember the scent.

  After he let go, their mother turned to Camille. “You don’t have to hug me if you don’t want to,” she said. Ever since Camille had given up on her old girly self, their mother gave her a lot of space. She was careful around her.

  Camille shrugged as if she didn’t care either way. “It’s only three weeks. You said so yourself.”

  “Okay, then,” their mother said. “I’ll just say, ‘See you soon!’” She waited, obviously wanting Camille to change her mind. But Camille only hooked her thumbs around the straps of her backpack and stared at her Converse sneakers. After a moment Truman’s mother turned to their grandmother and said, “Thank you again. I can’t tell you how much this helps. Once he’s home, you know, once he’s come back …”

  “We’ll have a party,” their grandmother said.

  “Exactly,” their mother said. “A party.” She smiled in a tired way, as if she was barely able to lift the corners of her mouth. Then she gave a small wave, turned, and headed back up the fairway with her pocketbook tucked under her arm.

  Truman and Camille stood there, letting their eyes follow her. Truman felt like crying. In fact, he sniffled.

  Camille looked at him sharply. “Don’t!”

  “It’s just pollen allergies,” Truman said, even though there wasn’t really a pollen issue in winter.

  Camille rolled her eyes.

  “Well,” their grandmother said.

  They turned around and there she stood before them—this strange-looking woman with her curl-toed sneakers and her ugly woolen hat, sizing them up with her on
e visible eye. The house looming at her back looked even worse up close—more pocked and dinged by golf balls, more slouched and weathered. “I’m not used to children,” she said.

  “That’s okay,” Camille said. “We’re not used to old people.”

  Truman winced. Camille had a way of saying the wrong thing. She was too blunt. But their grandmother gave an appreciative nod, as if she liked this answer. “Let me take you for a tour,” she said, digging her walking stick into the ground and heading across the yard.

  Camille followed her. But Truman wanted to run back toward the fairway to catch up with his mother, tell her that this was a mistake, that they should stick together as a family now. But he knew that it wouldn’t do any good.

  He started following Camille and their grandmother. He was still pulling his suitcase, which kept tipping over in the grass. He followed them as quickly as he could, but then let himself glance over his shoulder one last time to see his mother before she left. But she was already gone—a ghostly figure that was lost in the thick fog. Swallowed, Truman thought. Swallowed by the fog. Maybe he’d been right after all. Maybe Swallow Road wasn’t named after the bird.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Tour Begins

  “I don’t like the term grandmother. It sounds old, like someone who belongs in a rocker and can only bake pies,” their grandmother said. “Plus, I haven’t been much of a grandmother to you. I haven’t seen you since you were babies, sharing a crib. I looked into your small wobbly eyes. You were so tiny.” She paused as if remembering it all in great detail. “But I’m a stranger to you now. Aren’t I? A stranger more or less. Why don’t you just use my real name? Swelda.” She looked at the two of them. “Try it out,” she said.

  Truman and Camille glanced at each other and then they both said, “Swelda.”

  She waited expectantly, as if they’d said her name to get her attention. “What is it?” she asked.