The Wikkeling Page 5

“Handshakes,” said Henrietta.

  “She accepts hugs, of course,” said Henrietta’s mother, a note of annoyance in her voice. She prodded Henrietta slightly from behind. It was odd—Henrietta knew she didn’t like Al, but for some reason still felt it necessary for Henrietta to hug him.

  Al, however, quickly held out his hand, and Henrietta shook it. “I watched you on the porch,” he said genially, “and I got the impression your shoes were a little uncomfortable. Am I right?”

  “They’re super uncomfortable,” said Henrietta.

  “You know how I could tell? Because you walked like this!” said Al, and he limped comically ahead of the three of them, waving for them to accompany him through the crowd. Henrietta’s father laughed, a laugh Henrietta recognized as fake, and the three of them followed Al inside.

  The house was packed with all kinds of people united by the bonds of their common oldness. In her daily life, Henrietta saw very few old people, and it was daunting to encounter so many at once. Of course, the reason she didn’t see many elderly people was because they all lived in Sunset Estates and other similar communities.

  Through a sliding glass door on the opposite side of the living room drifted sizzling sounds and the rich, charred smells of a barbecue. Henrietta’s mother would never allow an open flame near their house, and barbecue skewers could cause terrible accidents. But there it was, a metal clamshell on the rear patio, tongues of orange flame cooking steaks, hot dogs, and kebabs in sizzling rows. It was so mesmerizing that Henrietta didn’t notice she was standing right next to her grandmother until she looked up to see Al, Henrie, and both of her parents watching her.

  “Say hello, Henrietta,” said her father, a little sharply.

  “Would you like a handshake or a hug, Henrietta?” said her grandmother, a short, elderly woman with a pronounced stoop. Henrietta looked up at her and suddenly noted the family resemblance between her grandmother, her mother, and herself, all three of them women with ruddy skin, blockish features, and sturdy frames. This was not, at the moment, a pleasant realization—Henrietta felt strangely trapped by it.

  “A handshake,” said Henrietta determinedly, though she could feel her mother’s withering gaze. She held out her hand, and briefly grasped her grandmother’s cool, papery fingers.

  They sat with Henrie on a soft, cream-colored couch in the living room. Henrietta thought her grandmother looked tired. In fact, there was something of a forced gaiety to everyone at the party.

  The morning melted into a series of loosely connected vignettes of dodging around long legs and overhearing snippets of conversations until the barbecue was ready, and everyone ate. Henrietta was starved because she’d missed breakfast, and she gulped her food ravenously. It tasted excellent, especially the charred bits.

  “Don’t eat the charred bits,” said her mother.

  As they all finished their meal, Al turned to Henrietta. “So, Henrietta,” he said, “I’ve heard you’re interested in reading.”

  “Yes, I like reading,” she said, though she wondered where Al would have heard about it.

  “I’ve got a few old books in the basement you might enjoy,” he said. “You do know what a book is, don’t you?” He smiled.

  Henrietta held up her textbook silently as an example, a little defensive over being poked fun at.

  “Be careful on the stairs,” said her father.

  “If the books are moldy, hold your breath,” said her mother.

  “Walk this way!” said Al. As he limped forward, again mocking Henrietta’s gait in her uncomfortable shoes, he shot a significant glance at Henrie that terminated in an inscrutable wink.

  This time Henrietta imitated his walk, and doing so helped her avoid the pinchiest parts of her shoes. The two of them clowned through a crowded hallway to a narrow white vinyl door where several people lingered in conversation.

  “Excuse us,” said Al, “we’re walking this way.” He limped through the crowd, opened the door, and headed down a dark, carpeted staircase. Henrietta followed.

  A few steps in, Al flipped a light switch, illuminating a series of overhead fluorescent panels. Henrietta had imagined the basement would be like the attic in her house—old, shadowy, and full of cobwebs. But this house was built recently, and its basement was a regular room, full of the stinging scent of new carpet.

  Henrietta closed the door behind, but didn’t let the latch click shut, remembering Ms. Span’s lectures about getting trapped in basements, car trunks, and refrigerators, all of which would result first in suffocation, followed quickly by dehydration, hypothermia, and finally starvation (in that order).

  Al descended the stairs slowly, leaning a little on the tan handrail. At the bottom, several plastic folding chairs surrounded a small, vinyl-topped card table. The basement was about the size of the living room upstairs, but instead of being full of people, it was full of books, stacked on shelves and in cases.

  “Everything down here is plastic, except the books,” said Al as he and Henrietta sat at the table. “These shelves are actually part of the house. It’s one molded piece.” He gestured to where the tan shelves merged seamlessly with the wall.

  On the table before them lay two books, which Al had obviously placed with the intent of showing to Henrietta. “All of the books down here are Henrie’s and my collection, which we combined when we moved in together. These two are interesting—one was mine, and one was Henrie’s. Can you tell which is older?” he asked.

  Both books looked old, and the writing on their covers was a highly ornamented cursive that was difficult to read.

  “They have the same title,” Henrietta observed.

  “They’re different editions of the same thing. Look at this one from the side. See how thick it is? Compare.” One was considerably thicker than the other. “What do you think?”

  “One has more pages.”

  “If you wrote a book about something, and then wrote it again a few years later, would the new one be shorter?”

  “Longer,” said Henrietta. “I’d know more.”

  “Just so,” Al said. He opened each book to a random page. “Now look inside, and tell me the difference.”

  “One is typed, and one is . . . handwriting?” said Henrietta.

  “The older one is handwriting. It’s so old, they hadn’t invented typing yet. The thicker book, the newer one, is typed.” Al closed both books, and Henrietta studied the title on their covers, trying to untangle the cursive. “It’s fascinating, isn’t it, to see how people figure out things? How they learn, and fill more books.”

  “So, is mine the best of all?” said Henrietta, holding up her textbook.

  “What do you think?” said Al. Henrietta looked at the shiny, plastic cover. “I like yours,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “They’re just . . . interesting. The handwritten one most of all.”

  “That’s nice to hear,” said Al. He smiled. “It’s good for an old person like me to know that young people like old things. Look at the title a little more. Have you ever seen cursive?”

  “A little,” said Henrietta. “B-e-s . . . the word is . . . Bestiary?” She pronounced it BEST-ee-airy.

  “That’s right,” said Al. “But it’s pronounced BEAST-ee-airy. Do you know it?”

  “No,” said Henrietta.

  “Say ‘not yet,’ when someone asks you that,” said Al. He winked.

  “You winked at Grandma Henrie when we left the living room.”

  “I’m a winker,” said Al.

  Henrietta tried to wink in response, but she blinked instead. “Were you sharing a secret?”

  “You’re an observant girl,” said Al. “Henrie and I have a few secrets, some that we’ve kept a long time. Most haven’t been worth it. Do you think that’s true?”

  “I don’t know,” said Henrietta. “Some secrets might be important.” She thought about the secret hiding in her attic back home.

  “Perhaps,” said Al. He paused. “Your grandmoth
er asked me to take you down here so she could talk to your parents. She’s going to tell them something they won’t want you to hear.” Henrietta didn’t respond. She could tell Al was going to say more. “Henrietta, your grandmother has cancer. She’s going to die.”

  Henrietta suddenly felt very uncomfortable, and she found her eyes drawn to the two old books, covers facing up, resting before Al on the table. The ornate calligraphy was metallic gold.

  “This party isn’t just a birthday party,” Al continued. “It’s a farewell party.”

  “I thought it seemed sad,” said Henrietta.

  “Your grandmother is eighty today,” said Al. “You might not be able to imagine how old that is, but I’ll tell you—it’s the blink of an eye. That’s as old as anyone ever gets.”

  “I don’t know what to say,” said Henrietta.

  “Say anything or nothing,” said Al. “The important thing is that you know. You don’t need to be protected from it.” A drop of water appeared suddenly right in the middle of the older book’s cover. It was a perfect circle, and it came from nowhere. Henrietta thought of the drop of blood she’d seen the night before, and she looked up at the ceiling. She’d once watched a TV news story about a family who drowned when their basement flooded. She looked at Al to see if he’d noticed it.

  He was crying. He wiped his eyes with one old hand.

  “I don’t know grandma very well,” said Henrietta. This was difficult for her to admit for some reason, and it felt bad to say.

  “Your parents don’t come over much,” said Al. “It isn’t your fault, Henrietta. In fact, if it’s anyone’s, it’s mine.”

  “Yours?” Henrietta looked curiously into Al’s tear-reddened eyes.

  He smiled. “It’s a strange world,” he said.

  “I know.” Henrietta nodded. In fact, she felt she’d only learned of the world’s strangeness recently.

  “I assume you’re aware that your mother was against Henrie’s and my marriage.”

  Henrietta had never been expressly told, but she’d certainly heard her parents talking about it plenty of times. “Yes,” she said.

  “Do you know much about your grandfather?” Al asked.

  “Mom said he got sick from his work, and died.”

  “His name was Roy,” said Al. “He and I were friends. In fact, I was his best man when he married your grandmother. Did you know that?”

  Henrietta shook her head. With regard to this subject, she knew pretty much nothing, but she had long been curious.

  “Roy was an agrichemical scientist, and he did grow ill from it. He was bedridden for the better part of two years before he died, and I tried to help him and your grandmother. I was at their house almost every day, tending to your grandfather’s needs and helping keep the house in order. Your mother was about your age, then. And, we didn’t plan it, Henrietta, but . . . well, your grandmother and I fell in love during that time.” Al paused, and picked up the older Bestiary and turned it restlessly in his hands.

  “Your mother sensed what was happening, I believe. When Roy died, I think she blamed your grandmother and me. And maybe she was right. Henrie and I tried to end our relationship. We stopped seeing each other. We hoped we’d fall out of love. But we didn’t—we couldn’t. Even as the years passed. So, once Aline was out on her own and had started her own family, we faced our feelings. I asked Henrie to marry me. You know the rest—we moved out here together, and you and your parents moved into her old house.”

  “We didn’t go to the wedding,” said Henrietta.

  Al shook his head, studying the book in his hands. “I wish things had been otherwise,” he said. Then he suddenly looked up and met Henrietta’s gaze and held it. “You know what?” he said. “Maybe they still can be otherwise, Henrietta. After all, we aren’t dead yet!” He put the book decisively down on the table with a thump. “Henrietta, by gosh, let me ask you something. I’d like to be your grandfather. What do you think? Do you want a grandfather? Some silly old man?”

  Henrietta hesitated. Al was, after all, more or less a stranger to her. She knew her mother disliked him, which made her feel uncomfortable. But at the same time, she saw him clearly—sitting there, his hands clasped nervously on the tabletop, worried she’d reject him. When you yourself are rejected almost every day, it becomes easy to spot in the faces of other people. And perhaps that’s one good thing about rejection—it allows you to help others, if you choose to.

  “You’re not a silly old man,” Henrietta said. She looked him up and down, joking a little as if she were studying a product for sale in a store. “I think you’ll make a good grandfather,” she said.

  Al smiled, and released the breath he’d been holding. “Hey,” he said, “I haven’t given you the tour down here yet.” He stood and gestured to Henrietta to follow him, and they walked back among the plastic bookcases. Al pointed out a few volumes as they passed. “There’s an old journal—probably my oldest book. And that one’s called How To—it has all kinds of instructions in it, like how to build a bird house.”

  “I saw a bird once,” said Henrietta. As she looked at the hundreds, maybe thousands, of titles she thought about how computers had made books obsolete. Even her own textbook, which was practically brand new, was outdated.

  On the far wall of the room, past the last set of tall shelves, stood a narrow sliding door. Al pulled it open. “This is the only other room down here. I keep my tools in it. It’s pretty jammed full.”

  The little room was lit with fluorescent lights just like the main room, and the walls were lined with more plastic shelves, which were crowded with old tools instead of old books. Henrietta recognized some of them: a skill saw, a few hammers with different heads, drills, wrenches.

  “Have you ever seen tools?” Al asked.

  “In safety videos,” said Henrietta. “They’re dangerous. We don’t have any.”

  “Everything just snaps together nowadays, but there was a time when people had to build from scratch. I keep these back here thinking they’ll eventually come in handy.”

  “You’re nostalgic,” said Henrietta. She’d seen a movie in class where a father kept some tools out of nostalgia, but then his son died when a hammer fell on him.

  “Guilty as charged!” said Al, laughing. He closed up the tool room, and they returned to the card table and plastic chairs by the staircase. Henrietta’s mind was carefully circling everything she and Al had talked about. Her eyes played over the covers of the two bestiaries on the table: one ancient and slim, the other old and thick. If people were books, she thought, she’d added a few chapters to herself in the last twelve hours. Finally, she spoke. “I have a secret to tell you, Al,” she said.

  Al looked at her seriously, and took a seat at the table. “I’m honored to hear it, Henrietta,” he said.

  Henrietta reached out to the older of the two books, and opened the cover a crack. “I found an attic above my room,” she said. “It’s full of stuff. And . . . a cat. It was bleeding, and I tried to help it.”

  Al leaned toward her as Henrietta lowered the cover of the book.

  “What did it look like?” he asked.

  “Actually, it’s not really like a cat,” said Henrietta.

  “Did it have long legs?” said Al. He held out his hands to indicate roughly how long he meant. “Big green eyes?”

  Henrietta was so surprised that it took her a moment to stammer, “Yes!”

  “Henrietta,” Al said, leaning forward even more, “you’ve made an amazing discovery. The cat in your attic is a wild housecat!”

  Al’s excitement was catching. Henrietta felt her heart beat faster. “I don’t know what that is,” she said, leaning forward a little bit herself. She and Al looked like a pair of conspirators.

  “You’ve heard of domestic housecats,” said Al. “They’re just like domestic horses, or domestic dogs—they’ve lived with people so long, they’ve become used to us. But all of those domestic animals have wild ancestors—wild hors
es and wild dogs. The same is true of housecats. There are domestic housecats and wild housecats. Now, wild animals are very strange creatures. They don’t have anything to do with people. Have you ever seen a wild horse, or a wild dog? Maybe on TV?”

  “On history shows,” said Henrietta.

  “They’re all extinct now,” said Al. “People made so many buildings and roads that those animals had nowhere left to live. They died out.”

  “But where do wild housecats live?” said Henrietta.

  “In houses,” said Al, “that’s why they’re called housecats. Normally they lived in basements or attics, but the old homes they needed have all been torn down now, except a few. The new plastic houses, like this one, are no good—the cats can’t get into them. Also, people misunderstood them, and thought they were dangerous.”

  “I’ve heard cats are dangerous.”

  “Everything is dangerous,” said Al, “but not everything is particularly dangerous.” He paused. “Henrietta, I’m proud of you. What you did was very brave. And you were smart to keep it a secret. If your parents knew, they’d probably have the cat exterminated.”

  “Some secrets are worth keeping,” said Henrietta.

  Al smiled. “Now, as for the rest of what’s in that attic—”

  Before he could finish, the basement door opened, and Henrietta’s mother stuck her head in at the top of the stairwell. “Henrietta,” she said, her scowling face hovering over the white ruffles of her blouse. “We’re leaving. Now. Your father is in the car.”

  “All right,” said Henrietta. Her mother removed herself and shut the door. Henrietta turned to Al. “The attic,” she said.

  “Those things belonged to Henrie,” said Al, standing. “I wonder if Henrie even remembers it’s all up there—inventory from her old store.” As Al fell silent, he picked up the older of the two bestiaries from the tabletop. “Henrietta, let me quickly show you this a little more.” He opened it. “See how the edges of the pages are dusted in gold? And how the paper is sewn into the binding, and the hand-colored inside cover? Now, if your parents ask, you can tell them what we talked about.” He winked at her. “It’s a funny coincidence that I pulled these down, actually. When you learn the word bestiary, you’ll understand why I decided to give you this.” He held out the older of the two editions. “I hope it provides you with good information.”