The insomnia, on the other hand, wasn’t such a big problem as you might imagine. I worked around it. I read a lot. In med school I did my best studying while my classmates were in the throes of rapid eye movement. I still considered my night-prowling habits to be a kind of secret advantage I had over other people. I had the extra hours in my day that they were always wishing for.
Emelina would not understand this. The night before school started, she brought me warm milk.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. She’d also brought out a blue embroidered tablecloth, which she shook out like a little sail and spread efficiently over my table. She felt the place needed more honey touches.
“You’ve got to have your sleep. They had a special on Nova about it. This man in Italy died from not sleeping for around eight months. Before he died he went crazy. He’d salute the doctors like he was in the army.”
“Em, I’ll live. That’s too pretty, that tablecloth. Don’t you need that?”
“Are you kidding? Since Grammy joined Stitch and Bitch she’s been embroidering borders on the dish rags. What happens if you just lie in bed and count backward from ninety-nine? That’s what I tell the boys to do when they can’t settle down.”
“Insomnia’s different,” I said. It was hard to explain this to people. “You know the light that comes on when you open the refrigerator door? Just imagine it stays on all the time, even after you close the door. That’s what it’s like in my head. The light stays on.”
Emelina made herself comfortable in my other living-room chair. “You’re like that Thoreau guy that lived at Walden Pond. Remember when we read that in Senior English? He only had two chairs. We need to get you some more stuff in here.”
I was surprised that Henry Thoreau entered into Emelina’s world view. “If I want company I can always go over to your house,” I pointed out.
“That’s the God’s truth. I’m about ready to move out. Tonight Glen and Grammy got into it, oh boy, she says he’s impudent. That’s her all-time favorite word. Whenever Mason gets mad at somebody he yells ‘You’re impotent!’ And people laugh, so we’ll never get him to stop now.”
I drank the milk. I could stand some mothering. I wondered if I’d had this in the back of my mind when I moved in here.
Emelina scrutinized my clean, white walls. “Codi, I hope you’ll take this the right way, but I don’t see how you can live in a place and have it feel like nobody lives there.”
“I have things in here. My clothes, look in the closet. And books. Some of those books are very personal.” This was true. Besides my Field Guide to the Invertebrates there were things Hallie had sent me over the years, and an old volume of American poetry-incomprehensibly, a graduation gift from Doc Homer.
“Your room was like this when we were in high school. I had posters of Paul Revere and the Raiders and dead corsages stuck in the mirror, every kind of junk. And when we’d go over to your house it was like a room somebody’s just moved out of.”
“I’m neat,” I said.
“It’s not neat. It’s hyper neat.”
“Can you imagine what Doc Homer would have said if Paul Revere and the Raiders turned up in his home? Without an appointment?”
She laughed.
“Emelina, who’s Uda Ruth Dell?”
“Well, you know her, she lives up by Doc Homer. She used to take care of you sometimes, I think. Her and that other woman that’s dead now, I think her name was Naomi.”
“She used to take care of us?” I’d been trying all day to place her. I couldn’t believe I’d draw a complete blank on someone who’d been a fixture of my childhood.
“Sure. Uda’s husband Eddie saved you and Hallie’s life that time when you got stranded in a storm down by the crick.”
“I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”
“Yes you do. When you and Hallie almost drowned in that flood. You were just little.”
“Well, how do you remember it, then? I don’t.”
“Everybody knew about that. It was a famous incident. You hid down in a coyote burrow and wouldn’t come out and Eddie Dell found you and drug you out. You all stayed at Uda’s. Doc Homer must have been working at the hospital or something.”
“I don’t remember anything about that.”
Emelina looked at me peculiarly, as if she thought I might be pulling her leg. “It was a real big deal. There was a picture in the paper of you two and Eddie the big hero, and his mule.”
“I guess I do remember,” I said, but I didn’t, and it bothered me that my childhood was everyone’s property but my own.
“You know what you are, Codi? I don’t know if there’s a word for it, but it’s the opposite of ‘homemaker.’”
I laughed. She was still distressed by my blank walls. “There’s a word. Home wrecker. But I’m not one.”
“No I don’t mean in the sense of home wrecker. I mean in the sense of home ignorer.”
“Oh, that way,” I said. I was playing dumb. I knew what she meant. My first boyfriend in college was a Buddhist, and even he had had more pictures on his wall than I did. It wasn’t anything noble; I couldn’t claim a disdain for worldly things. Hallie had once pointed out that I had more shoes than you’d find in a Central American schoolroom with class in session. What I failed at was the activity people call “nesting.” For me, it never seemed like nesting season had arrived yet. Or I wasn’t that kind of bird.
After Emelina left for the night, I wrote Hallie. I had a general-delivery address for her in Managua and I asked, the way we did when we were kids leaving notes for each other in secret hiding places, “Are you there yet? Are you reading this now?” I told her about the dead alfalfa fields around Gracela Canyon, which I thought would interest her professionally, and I told her Doc Homer seemed pretty much the same as ever, which was the truth. And I asked if she remembered the time we almost drowned in a coyote den.
9 The Bones in God’s Backyard
Grace High School, backdrop of the worst four years of my life, was as familiar as one of my bad dreams. Walking toward it up Prosper Street filled me with dread. The building itself had a lot of charm, though, which surprised me. As a child I’d paid no mind to the façade. It was a WPA-era building made of Gracela Canyon’s red granite, with ornate egg-and-dart moldings on the white-painted eaves and woodwork over the doors. The school was actually built by the mining company, in its boom years, and with minerly instincts (or possibly just the proper tools) it was built right into the steep side of the canyon, sunk into rock. It was in an old part of town where the cobbled streets wrapped up and around behind the buildings, occasionally breaking into flights of steps and elsewhere so steep as to make motor vehicles pointless. The principal form of exercise in Grace was just getting from your house to wherever you needed to go.
The school had four floors, and each one had a street-level entrance. I’m pretty sure the building was in some record book on account of this. The main entrance was on the side, halfway up the hilclass="underline" floor three. Carved into its granite arch was a grammatically suspect motto in Latin, CAUSAM MEAM COGNOSCO, which boys used to quote like pig latin or the inane “Indian” talk we heard in movies.
I checked into the principal’s office, where his secretary, Anita, gave me a set of keys and an armload of official-looking papers and cheered me on. “There’s a million forms there: grade forms, class roster, some new thing from the DES, and your CTA. It all has to be filled out.”