Free Klickitat by Peter Rock Page B

days sorting through shredded papers, fitting those names and numbers together.
    That night I didn’t know that, yet. I hardly knew anything at all. All I could see was Audra and Henry ahead of me, their shoulders lightly bouncing together, and I was following them. Not too close, not too far away.

THIRTEEN
    I saw Audra and Henry hold hands. I saw them lean close together. Beneath the house, the space was tight, so we were never far apart. There was the wool blanket hanging between us, but I could see their bare feet, down at the end, on top of each other, moving around. I knew what they were doing; I tried not to think about it, to imagine it. Sometimes I heard whispers I couldn’t understand, but they never made much noise, even when they were moving around, and I couldn’t see their bodies. I pulled my electric blanket up over my head.
    Lying there, trying not to listen to them, I looked at my own body and I thought about what that girl Taffyhad said. I was almost as tall as Audra, and almost as skinny, but my body didn’t look like hers. I could tell it would never really look like hers. My chest would always be flatter, my shoulders wider, my hips not as wide as hers.
    Audra and Henry left in the morning before it was light, and didn’t return until it was dark out. I could read their work schedules in the blue notebook and I wondered sometimes what they did with all the extra time, early in the morning or in the late afternoon, whether they did things together or were alone.
    I waited, and I was ready, but I was impatient, learning only a little at a time about what would happen. We were going to live out in the woods in Alaska, in the wilderness—if I didn’t understand why we needed money to live like that, or why we needed passports, that was because I didn’t know anything about precautions, about preparation.
    While I was waiting, I tried to imagine what we were preparing for, what kind of family we would be. When I thought of the future, where we were going, all I could see was snow. I thought of Laura Ingalls Wilder in
The
Long Winter
, how Laura and Pa twisted straw into sticks because they had no firewood or coal to burn, no other way to keep warm.
    I looked for clues to our future in the notebooks, but Audra and Henry wrote so few things down. Once, gathering dirty laundry, I did find a folded piece of paper, a note I kept and still have, something that Henry wrote:
    THE SCOUT OBSERVES A ROUTINE,
    FINDS THE WEAK POINT IN THAT
    ROUTINE, AND THEN ENTERS THE
    WEAK POINT AND MOVES WITH
    IT, THUS BECOMING INVISIBLE
    TO EVERYONE. THIS DEAD SPACE
    EXISTS IN BOTH NATURE AND THE
    CITY. EVEN THOSE PEOPLE WALKING
    ALONE AT NIGHT, FEARFUL OF
    ATTACK OR ROBBERY, FRIGHTENED
    AND HYPERVIGILANT, STILL HAD
    COUNTLESS DEAD SPACES IN WHICH
    I COULD OPERATE. EVEN THOSE WHO
    STALKED HAD THIS DEAD SPACE.
    I’d read enough in Audra’s Tom Brown, Jr., survivalist books to recognize that’s where it came from. But Henry had copied it down, because it was important to him—he wanted to operate like Tom Brown, Jr., inside people’s routines, tracking them, where they wouldn’t expect and couldn’t see him. Henry knew that there was so much beyond what we can see, and how important these secret spaces can be.
    I looked for other words, as I searched through the notebooks, I hoped for messages like I’d received before. None came. My yellow notebook had been left behind, back in my bedroom; still, I had to believe that the words, the voices, could find me without that notebook, wherever I was, wherever we were going.
    Maybe the voices would be there, where we were going. I thought of the note that Henry had written to me, about the man who talked to people no one else could see—it made me think that Henry understood, maybe, that he recognized how I was different. We would go to a place where I would never become agitated, where I could do so many things and the people