“Mick’s leaving, Mom. Isn’t he?”
She leaned down and kissed the top of my head. “Looks that way.”
“Where’s he going?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think he does either. Hopefully to college.”
“When?”
“Soon, I imagine. He hasn’t told us yet.” She did not sound particularly unhappy at the prospect of Mick going off to school, and that confused me, since I could see nothing good coming of it. At all.
I went to his room that night after dinner to ask him about hawks. Dozens of drawings were pinned to the walls, of everything, seemingly, he’d ever seen when he went outside, or the pieces of outside he brought in: wildflowers, rocks, sticks, bones, trees, birds, reptiles, mammals big and small, mountains, clouds, planets.
He finished the song he was playing on his guitar, set it down, pulled a dog-eared book from the shelf and read: “ ‘Krider’s Red-tailed Hawk is a very pale race found in the Great Plains. These are light mottled brown above and nearly pure white below. The belly band is often indistinct or absent, and the tail is usually light rust above and creamy below with faint barring.’ ”
“ ‘A very pale race,’ ” I said, or mumbled. I was lying on the floor with a stuffed animal draped across my forehead like some bizarre woolly headdress. “Aren’t we a very pale race?”
“We are,” Mick said. “Paler than most.”
A minute passed. Then two. “Most what?” I didn’t even know what I was asking.
“Go to bed, Riley.”
Mick played for a while. Bob Dylan. Peter, Paul and Mary. I loved the dragon Puff. Hated it when he had to go. Finally, Mick laid his guitar on the bed, scooped me up off the floor and carried me to my room. I tried to not be entirely deadweight, but I wasn’t so easy to carry anymore.
“You’re going to be too big for this pretty soon, you know.”
“I know. But you’ll be gone anyway. So it won’t matter.”
I waited. I kept my eyes closed.
Mick said, “Good night, Punk.”
“Night, Bozo,” I said. I think.
I heard him leave on his bike again, sometime in the deep middle of the night. Cash woofed in my ear.
“Forget it, dog. He’s not taking either one of us.”
When I rolled over I heard something rustle. I pulled a piece of notebook paper from underneath me and held it up to the light coming through the window. I could tell what it was by the straight-up tail and the bristles. It was standing under a palm tree on a beach, gazing out at the waves.
I traced it with my finger. “Hey, little buddy.”
I fell asleep, still hearing the sound of the motorcycle long after it had faded, and dreamt of rabbits, hairless and round, like little moons.
At breakfast the next morning Mick didn’t even look tired. I searched his face for some clue as to where he might have been, or what he might have seen, or what he was thinking about. He looked exactly the same as he had every morning of my life.
He said, “Quit, Riley.”
“Quit what?” I stared at my bowl, at the cornflake crumbs floating there. Like I was an astronomer and they were a newly discovered constellation. Discovered by me.
“Looking at me like that.”
“I’m not looking at you. Obviously.”
“Riley,” Mom said. She didn’t finish, but I knew.
Arguing wasn’t going to get me where I wanted to go, especially since I didn’t know where that was. I sneaked a look at my father, on his second cup of coffee and getting ready to light a cigarette, to see if any help might be coming from that quarter. He tapped the cigarette on the table and a few strands of tobacco fell out. I could smell it, sharp and bitter. Mom stood up and started clearing dishes, raising an eyebrow at Dad when he looked at her. There was a new no-smoking policy in the house, and sometimes he forgot. He put the cigarette behind his ear.
“Was there something you wanted to ask your brother, Miss Riley?”
“No, sir.”
“I think there is, and you’re probably not going to get your answer by staring a hole through his head.”
“I wasn’t—”
“What,” Mick said, “do you want to know?”
He said it gently enough, but it didn’t matter anymore. I knew if I asked, whatever it was, and got an answer, I wouldn’t like it, unless he said he was staying put, and I knew that wasn’t even a distant possibility. Mick didn’t want to be a farmer. He wanted to see the world. He’d been telling me that since I could remember, but I had never realized it meant he’d be leaving me. I’d always imagined us somewhere together; somewhere that looked a lot like home.
I said, “Never mind.” I excused myself, put my bowl in the sink, and left by the back door. Cash came with me, wagging his tail hopefully.
• • •
When the college catalogues came, Mick pored over them at the kitchen table. I helped by tearing the corners off the pages, piling the bits of paper together, and blowing on them so they scattered. Havre and Great Falls were okay, close enough that he could come visit. Missoula was too far away, on the other side of the mountains. Mick had that catalogue open.
“You aren’t thinking about going there, are you?”
“Yes, nosy. I am thinking about it.”
“But it’s so far.”
“Not so far, really. Not nearly as far as some places.”
“So far really.” I started another pile of corners. When it reached a decent size, I blew on it. Hard. Some fell on the floor.
Mick looked at me like he might be angry this time, but wasn’t. “This is what people do, Riley. They get out of high school and go away to college. Or some do.”
“What about the other ones?”
“They do other stuff.”
“Other stuff around here?”
“Some of them.”
I waited.
“That’s not going to be me, kiddo.”
I sat down hard on the chair next to his and flipped through the pages of the Havre catalogue. “This looks nice,” I said after a while, even though I wasn’t really seeing it.
Mick laughed. “Relax. I haven’t decided anything yet.” He turned my chair around and tilted my chin up so I had to look at him. My eyes kept blinking, and I swallowed so hard my throat hurt. Mick pushed back from the table and pulled me onto his lap. “I was never going to stay here forever, Riley. I thought you knew that.”
I leaned into him, lowering my head to bite one of the buttons on his shirt. “I didn’t,” I said, sort of, because I had a button in my mouth. “You should have told me.”
“I should have,” he said. And we left it at that. For a little while it felt okay.
Then he brought a girl home. There had been others, but I hated this one the most. She and Mick disappeared behind his bedroom door, and with my ear pressed to the wood I could hear them murmuring. Whispering. I hated her, and I hated it. He was telling a stranger his plans.
I went down to the creek with Cash, to escape the house and the heat and the terrible tightness in my chest. We lay in the shallow water and I watched the cottonwood leaves turn in the sun, even though there wasn’t any breeze. I groped for stones in the sandy bottom and threw them at the far bank. After a while Cash started to retrieve them. “Silly dog,” I said, and hugged his wet fur.
I wondered what they were doing in Mick’s room — if he was reading to her or playing songs for her on his guitar. I turned over and put my face in the water, to see if I could leave it there long enough to drown. He’d be sorry. He’d hate her too because she was there when it happened, distracting him. I held my breath as long as I could, staring at small, current-smoothed rocks, water plants and tiny fish. It wasn’t going to work. I raised my head and took a deep breath.