Free Ajar by Marianna Boncek Page A

her, “But cancer isn’t a good
thing.”
    “I know. But at least it’s a disease. It’s
something you can name.”
    I nodded. I didn’t really know what she was
talking about. I let her be quiet again. Then she spoke, not to me,
but out to the river, “I just can’t eat. No one knows why. I try to
eat, but I throw it up. I mean, I think about food all the time. I
fantasize about dishes I’d like to make or order in a restaurant.
But then when I sit down at a table I can’t eat at all. Sometimes,
I have to eat everything. I will eat a whole cake or all the
leftovers after dinner. But then I have to throw up all night
long.”
    She shrugged, turned her head and shrugged
again.
    “The school nurse says I can’t come back to
school until I’m better. Since no one knows what’s wrong with me, I
don’t know how I am going to get better.”
    “Wow, that really sucks,” I said softly. She
shrugged again.
    After a while I looked at my watch. I had to
get her back to the library for her mother to pick her up.
    Nothing had changed. When I got home, my
mother was still in her nightgown and robe. Aunt May was watching
her soap operas. Uncle Elliot was at work. Dan was still in a
psychiatric center. Our house on Mill Street was still ash. Naomi
Tillson and Phil Moretti were still dead. But somehow, that
morning, everything had changed.
     

 
    Chapter
Fourteen
     
    Once Mrs. O’Reilly saw that we would do our
work by ourselves and not rat her out, she started showing up less
and less. We spent those crisp autumn mornings riding around
Sawyer, me pedaling like mad, Lindy laughing on my handlebars, her
hair trailing behind her like wings.
    Some days we would ride down to the Esopus
Creek and walk along its shore. Lindy couldn’t walk too far, she
tired easily, so we would find a rock or a fallen tree, sit on it
and talk. Or sometimes we wouldn’t talk at all; we’d just be quiet
together. There was a nature preserve on the other side of town and
we’d ride down, sit under the trees and listen for birds. Lindy
knew the names of all the birds and could talk back to them by
making shapes with her mouth and hands. We’d go over to Sailors and
Soldiers Memorial Park and walk among the flower gardens; most of
the flowers were gone now, but one garden was blooming with freshly
planted mums. When we were feeling particularly crazy, we’d go to
the golf course and look for lost golf balls. We got chased off
once by a maintenance man in a golf cart. If it was rainy, we
stayed at the library and read books. Once, during our antics, I
worried out loud about getting caught, what the school might do if
they found us running around Sawyer rather than sitting in the
library with Mrs. O’Reilly.
    “They wouldn’t care,” Lindy told me.
    “They wouldn’t?” I found this hard to
believe.
    “No. I was in the hospital for a whole
marking period last year. I didn’t get any work done and I still
got all Bs.”
    “Really?”
    “Yeah, really. It’s like some unwritten
code. You can’t fail the sick kid.” She stopped, looked at me
remembering I wasn’t sick. “The last place they want us is
back in school. They are going to make sure that doesn’t
happen.”
    She was right. When our report cards came
out in early November, I had a B in all my subjects.
    The place Lindy liked going to the most was
the Heavenly Rest Cemetery, located way out of town up on a hill.
It had graves way back to the 1700s when Sawyer was first founded.
Back then, the hills were loaded with all sort of trees and several
rich men built sawmills here, hence the name, Sawyer. Later,
factories were opened on the Esopus Creek. Iron mills and paper
mills flourished. We found the names of all the early settlers.
    I showed Lindy the graves of my grandparents
and my dad.
    “Do you miss your dad?” she asked as we
looked down at his tombstone. It was a simple stone, small,
rectangular: “Clayton Woodard, 1925-1961, May flights of angels
sing thee to thy