The Ever Breath Read online

  “You told us to say your name,” Camille said. “So we did.”

  “Even so, we’ve established that I’m a stranger to you and you to me, and you don’t have a single question?”

  The only question Truman could think of was: What kind of a name is Swelda?

  Camille looked at the embattled house and around the grounds. She said simply, “If you were stranded on a deserted island with only a piece of flint, what would you do?” This was a typical Camille question these days.

  “I have been stranded almost all my life,” Swelda answered. “This is my deserted island.” She banged her walking stick on the ground. “And you know what I’ve done?”

  “No,” Camille said.

  Swelda lowered her wizened face. “I’ve survived,” she said. “You will too, when the time comes.”

  Truman didn’t know what she’d meant. They’d survive too, when the time came? Survive what? Truman wasn’t good at surviving even picnics. (He’d been carted away from the last one due to a pollen/asthma/collision-with-an-errant-Frisbee fiasco.)

  The three of them walked across the lawn. And then Swelda stopped and waved her walking stick at the golf course. “In this idiotic game of balls and clubs and loudly colored pants, the golfers must get from the seventeenth tee box to the seventeenth hole. Here, they have to go around this house,” she explained loudly. “And they don’t aim well! So don’t be surprised if you wake up in the morning to the sound of golf balls popping off the roof. Louder than acorns, I tell you! I’ve boarded up the windows. Tired of replacing the glass! Golfers tee off at five a.m. I hope you two are early risers!”

  “I’m an early riser,” Camille said. “There’s no use just lying in bed dreaming.”

  “Mmm,” Swelda said, as if Camille had given the correct answer on a test. “Good.” And then she peered at Truman intently through her single uncovered lens. “What about you?” she asked.

  Truman loved the early-morning fogginess when he couldn’t quite tell whether he was dreaming or awake. The mornings were the best time of day to pretend that his father was still living at home, was maybe even in the kitchen frying bacon. “I like to sleep in,” he said.

  Swelda eyed him suspiciously with her one eye, as if he were some strange new animal that looked familiar but she couldn’t quite name. She gave a grunt. “I’ll have to keep an extra eye on you.” Truman wondered whether she had extra eyes, fake ones maybe, that she kept in a jar somewhere.

  Swelda strode to the clipped grassy edge of the course, just a few feet from the front door. She pointed out the sand trap on one side of the house. “Don’t play in there. It isn’t the beach, you know.” Truman hated beaches. His skin was so pale that he always had to be slathered with a thick coat of sunscreen that got in his eyes and made them water uncontrollably. And then he usually burned anyway. (Camille would lightly apply a single coat and then turn golden.)

  On the other side, Swelda showed them a pond. “During certain times of year, that little body of water attracts mean, spiteful geese that litter the grass with goose poop. Steer clear of them.”

  In front of the house was the green of the seventeenth hole itself, with its tall pole and white flag. “Stay off the green,” Swelda said. “Golfers do not like children.” Then she paused. “And maybe they’re right. It’s been so long since I’ve been with children that I barely remember.” She looked at them again, with her head cocked to one side. “You interest me, though. I have to admit that. You seem sturdy enough. Are you curious children?”

  “About what?” Camille asked.

  “About everything! It’s a waste to go through the world without a good dose of awe and wonderment.”

  “I’m curious,” Truman said.

  “You’re cautious,” Camille corrected.

  “And do you like questions?” Swelda asked Camille.

  “I like answers,” she said.

  “A straight shooter,” Swelda said. “I see.”

  She stopped at the side of the house and pointed her walking stick at a rusty cellar door. “Browsenberry wine,” she said.

  “Browsenberry wine?” Camille repeated.

  “I brew browsenberry wine in the root cellar. That means there are jugs and glass tubing and the delicate working of fermentation. And there is a set of stairs that leads down to the dirt floor, but the third step—the bottom step, that is—well, it’s missing. You shouldn’t go into the root cellar, but you will. And when you do, remember there is no third step.” Swelda smiled. “I don’t recall much about children, but I do know that they end up where they’re not supposed to be. And sometimes you are supposed to be where you’re not supposed to be. That is how things happen. That is how the worlds march forward. Actions lead to other actions.” She sighed. “You won’t be here long,” she said, tugging on the ugly blue hat. “Everything is ticking along, one small mechanism clicking with the next. There is no going backward. Only forward.” She looked at the two of them. “Do you understand?”

  Camille looked at Truman and then back at their grandmother. “How the worlds march forward? Worlds? Plural?”

  “That’s what I said. That’s what I meant.” She spoke to them as adults, and what was even more unusual, she spoke to them like she was in the middle of a conversation about something big and important. She tapped her walking stick on the ground and set off toward the front of the house. “Come along,” she said.

  The fog was rolling in quickly now. Truman paused in the front yard. He could no longer see the clubhouse or even much of the flag at the seventeenth hole. They were lost in white. He wondered how long before the fog rolled down the hill and settled on this house too.

  Swelda marched up the front steps and opened the door, which creaked loudly. “This house is going through a difficult time right now,” she said. “A sudden decay. But I hope that changes soon. Come in! There’s more inside!” She disappeared into the dark house.

  More? Truman thought nervously. He could feel a little rasp in his throat. He stuck his hand in his pocket and let his fingers touch the edge of his inhaler. It hit him now for the first time that this was the house his father had grown up in. He’d lived in this house when he was Truman’s age. It was strange to think his father had ever been a kid at all—he was tall and hairy and smelled of the aftershave that Truman could barely remember.

  Camille walked up to Truman and whispered, “She’s weird. I like her.”

  “Me too,” Truman said.

  Camille brushed past him up the front steps, but Truman paused a moment. Something rustled in the bushes. He thought he saw the shiny black tail of a cat. He let his eyes flit over everything around him then—the rolling fog, the sand trap, the pond, the grass of the seventeenth hole, the boarded-up house with its rusty tin roof, and the yard where he stood, the tall grass snug up to the house’s brick, and within the grass, some things glowing in the last bit of dusky light, glowing like eggs—or eyes. But they were only lost golf balls.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Imports from a Distant Land

  The living room was so dim that Truman felt as if he’d walked into a tunnel. His eyes had trouble adjusting. He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, but that didn’t help much.

  At first it seemed that glowing orbs were suspended in midair in the corners of the room, but then he saw that they were paper lanterns, gold and blue. They hung above over-stuffed sofas covered in frayed brocade, with ornate wooden arms and feet carved to look like swirling horns. The old pine floor was covered in a wooly white rug.

  “These are heirlooms! Antiques!” Swelda’s voice rang out. “Imports from distant lands! Keep your mitts to yourselves!”

  Truman was sure he was in a distant land, someplace foreign. He felt the way immigrants he’d learned about in school must have felt when they first stepped off the boat. The house even smelled foreign—like some strange stew was boiling over somewhere. He couldn’t eat strange stews! Too many possibilities for an allergic reaction. He’d
have to ask for something bland, like toast.

  “Coats go here on the hall tree,” Swelda said. Truman expected an old-fashioned hall tree, they’d had one in their old house—a wooden one with brass hooks. But this hall tree looked like an actual tree, and it seemed to be growing straight up out of the floorboards. On it were a few scattered Christmas ball ornaments, some hats, and an umbrella.

  “Is this a real tree?” Truman asked.

  “I don’t like fake ones,” Swelda said.

  Camille walked up to it. “It can’t be real,” she said. “There’s this thing called photosynthesis that doesn’t work so well in a boarded-up house.”

  “It’s as real as I am,” Swelda said.

  Camille shrugged off her coat and hung it on one of the tree limbs very carefully. “If it’s real,” she asked, “where are its leaves?”

  “It’s winter now,” Swelda said. “You can’t blame it for not having leaves!”

  “It looks a little thirsty,” Truman said.

  Swelda walked up to it and rubbed one of the limbs. “You’re right,” she said.

  “I think trees do better outside,” Camille said.

  Swelda didn’t seem to hear her. She was examining the tree’s trunk very closely, shaking her head.

  Truman was standing by a set of bookshelves that held enormous books. He read a few spines: The Dark and Ignorant Ages; Pre-Exodus: The Complete Understanding: Field Guide to Fire-Breathers; Dendrology: A Gramarye’s Dictionary of Terms and Best Practices.

  “Camille,” he whispered, “look at these.”

  “Old tomes!” Swelda said. “It’s important to have a reference section at your fingertips.”

  Camille walked to the bookshelf and let her fingers drift over the bindings. “Reference section?” Camille said, and then she stopped and laid her finger on one enormous book. “The Breath World,” she read aloud. “A Complete History”?

  “Would you prefer an incomplete history?” Swelda said. “That wouldn’t do you much good, would it.”

  Truman walked to the middle of the room, and as he turned a slow circle, he stared at the shelves crammed with tins and jars and candles, and at the framed parchment scrolls and old pictures that hung everywhere. One, for example, was a photograph of an exhausted, worn-down family by a stew pot in a ratty hut whose walls were covered with large winged insects; it was labeled “Early Gramarye Settlers in the Ostley Wood: The Plague of Tree Vermin.” Another photograph had the caption “Founding Members of the Society of Jarkmen.” On a high shelf sat a model of a ship that was being pulled down by a school of suckerfish. An etching—crude but beautiful and rich—was propped under a glass frame; it showed a tree with its web of roots stretching to bind together two worlds. He noticed a large crest on a shield; winding through its center was a snake with flared feathers on its head. Truman was pretty sure that this animal didn’t actually exist.

  There was also a painting of three snow globes that was hung over the mantel above a dark and musty fireplace. All the globes were full of swirling snow, as if they were being shaken at that very moment even though they were sitting on a table in the painting.

  “Why is there nothing to see in these snow globes?” Truman asked.

  “There’s snow in the snow globes,” Swelda said.

  “But why just snow?”

  “They are called snow globes, Truman. What do you expect?”

  He expected little winter scenes, as in every other snow globe he’d ever seen, but he knew there was no use arguing with Swelda. He moved along to a photograph in a small gilded frame. “Who’s in this picture?” Truman asked, pointing to a framed photograph of two girls—identical twins—a little younger than himself and Camille. The twins were dressed in pale skirts with dark sashes, and they were standing in a field, holding a hoop. They each had a patch over one eye. A third girl, smaller than the other two, had poked her head in the middle of the hoop, trying to hog the spotlight. Twins—like him and Camille. Truman was always kind of fascinated by identical twins, because he and Camille weren’t—even though, oddly enough, when they said they were twins, people often asked, “Are you identical?” Sometimes Truman would answer yes, just to watch it settle in.

  “That’s me on the left,” Swelda said. But then she squinted, walked over to the photograph, picked it up, and said, “No, no. That’s me on the right or … then again … Well, I’m one of them!” She propped the photograph back up on the shelf. “I was young once too, you know.”

  Swelda had hung her parka on the hall tree as well. But she hadn’t taken off the blue hat. She’d only pushed it to the back of her head, revealing puffs of white hair. “The other girl is my twin, of course. That’s our homeland. She stayed behind and I came here.”

  Camille walked over and stared at the photograph too. “And who’s the one in the middle, looking through the hoop?” Camille asked. The little girl was holding a jar of insects of some sort, with holes popped into the lid.

  “That’s Milta. She is our sadness. We carry her in our sad sack,” Swelda said.

  “Sad sack?” Camille asked.

  “All of us must carry our own sad sack around with us. That’s why we all look so tired sometimes.”

  Truman thought of his mother. She was tired from carrying her sadness, that was a fact. He looked at the girl in the photograph and noticed a scar on her cheek—a curlicue scar, a dainty spiral. “What happened to her face?”

  “A run-in with a bad gramarye when she was a child,” Swelda said. “A nasty one. I still feel guilty about that. Ickbee and I were supposed to be watching her.”

  “What’s a gramarye?” Truman asked.

  Swelda stared at them, shocked, with her one eye wide and round. “Hasn’t your father ever even whispered a thing about our family?”

  Truman and Camille weren’t sure what to say. They shrugged. “He kind of has,” Truman said. He turned to Camille. “Remember when we had to do that report in second grade about our heritage?”

  “He told us we were immigrants,” Camille said.

  Swelda started muttering to herself. “It’s my fault. I didn’t encourage it enough! I let him let go of it all for love. I … I’m sorry.”

  “That’s okay,” Truman said, not exactly sure what he was forgiving.

  “My sister Milta could be anywhere … it’s hard when people leave unexpectedly,” Swelda said. “I understand how that feels.”

  Camille shifted nervously and dug her hands into her pockets. Truman didn’t say anything. He missed his father, and now he felt as if he’d been abandoned again, by his mother this time. It wasn’t true. He knew she’d come back, but still…

  “Where is your homeland?” Camille asked, changing the subject.

  “It’s not Brooklyn and it’s not Boca Raton,” Swelda answered. “It’s not a lot of places. But it’s hard to say exactly what it is. Your father was right, though. We are immigrants.”

  “Do you miss it?” Truman asked, missing his own house with the card table in the kitchen and the heating vents that let him eavesdrop and his own bedroom with his collection of bobbleheads.

  “No, I don’t miss it,” she said. “We all make decisions in this life. Some are for good!”

  Truman thought about his father. Was his decision to leave for good? Would he ever come back?

  “So you’re glad you left?” Camille asked.

  Swelda, her blue eye almost glowing in the pale light from one of the lanterns, looked at Camille. “I love my homeland with all of my heart, and I hate it just the same.”

  “But how can you love something with all of your heart and hate it too?” Truman asked.

  “The world is full of contradictions. Do you think the world is simple? Have you already figured it all out?” She put her hands on her hips and stared at him.

  “No,” Truman said. He remembered his father—how he had lingered in the doorway of Truman and Camille’s bedroom the night before he left. (The kids shared a room divided by a sheet stru
ng between the beds.) He sang them a lullaby—the one Camille complained about because she said they were too old for it—the same one every night. The chorus went like this:

  Sleep, slumber, sweet slumber ba-ru.

  Sleepy-seed, sleepy-seed, dew.

  Snug cover and pillow, hear the hush of the willow

  And I will stand dream watch over you.

  Their father usually said “Good night” and shut the door—though not all the way. But that last night, he stayed there in the doorway until Truman and Camille fell asleep. It was the last time either of them would see him before he disappeared, but they didn’t know that then.

  Now when Truman thought of the lullaby, it only made him angry. His father wasn’t keeping dream watch over him. Truman loved his father with all of his heart. But how could he have left them without any word? Sometimes Truman’s chest felt heavy, as if it had taken on some angry leaden weight, and even though he knew it was wrong, he felt that he hated his father too.

  Swelda raised her crooked finger in the air. “Be wary of anyone who tells you that the world is simple,” she said. “Be wary of anyone who hands you simple answers to complex problems.”

  Camille walked to the bookshelves again.

  “I don’t think you’ll understand any of those books,” Swelda said.

  “What’s mundivagation?” Camille asked.

  “See what I mean?” Swelda said.

  Camille continued along the rows, moving from one book to the next. But Truman couldn’t focus. His eyes seemed to shoot off in all directions and his thoughts were jumping all around like a bunch of frogs. He walked over to a mossy exotic fern with fuzzy pink flowers dangling from its webby fronds. Looking at it closely, he thought he saw an eye—a small beady eye—staring out at him. He pushed a frond out of the way to reveal the eye, which was embedded in the hunched feathery head of a vulture with a red beak. He gasped and clattered backward, bumping into Camille at the bookcase.

  “Hey, watch it!” she said.

  “A vulture!” he said, breathlessly.

  “It’s a fake,” Swelda said. “A shrunken, stuffed-animal version. In real life, these vultures are massive. You can be afraid of it all you want, but fear is a waste of time.”