Once she and Micah were halfway across the field, Frida said, “I have a present for you.” She wanted him to wait while she ran up to her room. “I want you to unwrap it outdoors.”
“You mean the baster?” he said.
“You already know about it?”
“Nothing gets by me, Frida. That much should be clear by now.”
The look on his face. Years ago, when he announced to their family that he’d applied to Plank, he’d had a similar expression. There was a deliberateness to the look, a purposeful arrangement of his features, an anagram of emotions. If Frida stared at him hard enough, might something entirely different be revealed? She thought she had uncovered the old Micah when they were in the tree, talking freely, but she’d been wrong. He had himself under control. Frida couldn’t get to him.
12
Cal hadn’t taken a shower this good in years. He and Frida had never been able to get this much warm water on their own, and he’d never considered how comforting even a rudimentary wooden stall could be. He could’ve been in Cleveland again, showering in their cold moldy bathroom while his mother cooked breakfast in the kitchen. She’d be frying up the eggs his father had dropped off the night before. Cal leaned his head back, and the water fell across his face.
The reverie didn’t last. He couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that Frida had talked to Micah the day before. She’d told Cal very little about it, just that it felt weird, hearing Micah talk so openly about the man who had died instead of him. “What happened to my brother?” she asked as they fell asleep, and then, “Why is he like that?” They weren’t questions anyone had answers to.
He thought it would make him happy that Frida was finally seeing the truth about Micah, but he was surprised by how much it unsettled him. Her optimism was fraying. She had always believed people, especially her family, were good, that the world would only allow so much suffering. In the past, some of that delusion (because wasn’t it delusional, to carry on with such thoughts, after all they’d seen?) must have rubbed off on him. He hadn’t realized how much more palatable she’d made their days. If she suspected something of Micah, Cal could barely stomach the thought of him.
Cal wanted to know what Micah thought about her pregnancy. Did the prospect of new life, of a new family member, soften him? Probably not. Did it do just the opposite? Cal waited for Frida to tell him, but to these questions all she’d said was “August will be coming back soon.” As if this were news, as if she’d done useful detective work. She wouldn’t be giving Micah the baster, she said. “He doesn’t need it,” she said. When Cal asked her when she’d told August about her brother, she said she couldn’t remember. “I guess it just slipped.” So much for their agreement to keep the past a secret.
From the shower, Cal heard someone squawking like a rooster at dawn, and then the crunch of dirt traversed by wheels. If he didn’t know any better, he would have imagined a truck passing just out of sight, imagined the weight of its body and the heave of its motor as it pulled up to the barn. Because it was just lame nostalgia, he would never admit it to Frida, or to anyone, really, but sometimes he missed the sounds of large, gas-guzzling engines: idling and accelerating, their gruffness and soot. Childhood sounds.
He didn’t go to investigate the sound because the water from the old plastic jug was almost out, and he wanted all of it. It felt great. They’d been on the Land for almost a week now, and he deserved this shower: Morning Labor had been kicking his ass. They had finally started on the outdoor oven. He and the others had carried the bricks to the lot behind the Hotel and then dug out the area where the oven would be built. His neck and arms were sunburned, and his hands were chapped as badly as they’d been when he and Frida had first found the shed, when there’d been so much to build and do outdoors. At least back then, she’d kiss his hands every night before bed, blow her cool breath on his open cuts. Now she didn’t offer, and it felt pathetic to ask.