Outside it's still dark. The sky is navy blue, almost purple, all clouds left over from yesterday's rain. There's no stars. Only the moon glowing in a little white fingernail behind the night. I shiver a bit in my pajamas, and it's hard to walk with my pockets full of eggs, the way they swing heavy at my sides. I have to hold my pants up by the waist to keep them from falling. I close the back door quietly and drop a single egg there. The porch light shines off the silver wrapper. It twinkles.
I go out across the lawn all wet from a day of rain, soaking the bottoms of my pants and cold on my ankles, and then onto the street where my footsteps echo a bit, tap tap tap in my runners on the pavement. Every twenty steps exactly I drop an egg. I count twenty and duck and put one down, then twenty and duck and put one down, again and again all along the curb of the street. I put one right in front of Jared Wein's house and think about knocking on his window, getting him to help, but I decide no, this is something I have to do on my own. Then at the end where there's the path I look back and there they are, all in a line lit up by the streetlights.
Down the hill at the end of our street, along the path, into the woods. Eggs dropped all the way. It's dark because tonight the moon's not enough but I know the way by heart: where to step, where to duck. When I come to the entrance to the tunnel that leads to The Inner Sanctum, I stop. I've only got two eggs left, but I made it. From way up above, Mom the moon is looking down. She's faint and out of focus, just the corner of her face like she's turning away and every now and then little wisps of darker cloud go past like smoke. All around her the night sky is a big murky sea but she shines out of it far away and watching, up there.
I haven't brought anything to dig with, nothing to make the hole for my Parent Trap. There's a broken beer bottle behind the log so I use that, holding it by the neck and using the jagged edge to carve into the mud. I use my feet too and my hands — dirt gets up underneath my fingernails and sticks there. I go down on my knees and can feel the earth cool and wet through my pajamas. But I keep digging, I dig and dig and I'm sweating even though it's cold out and I'm shivering and digging and covered in muck.
As the hole gets deeper and deeper the earth gets wetter and once I'm a ways down there's water at the bottom collecting in a little pool. I stop for a second and think maybe it's from the ocean, that this is water that flows in a river all the way from the coast underneath the surface of the world and I've tapped into it. An underground seaway, linking all the water on the planet.
In The Human Body we learned a little about all the tubes you've got inside you — Fallopian tubes and whatever, all those tubes like canals and rivers carrying stuff back and forth around your vagina, or wang — depending on what you've got. And right then, right when I'm thinking that — I swear — the clouds break up a bit and even though she's gone so tiny Mom the moon comes smiling down into the water at the bottom of the hole, lighting the puddle up silver.
From my pocket I take the two last eggs and open my fingers to plop them one at a time into the water at the bottom of my Parent Trap. But I don't. I look down and the water's gone black again. The hole's not big enough for a parent. It's barely big enough to trap a cat. I'd need like a digger and a crew of a thousand Jared Weins to make a Parent Trap big enough for my dad Greg, to trap him there and keep him for a while and teach him a lesson.
So I put the eggs back in my pocket and I squat there beside the stupid useless hole in my pajamas in the mud, kind of cold and it's five in the morning and for other people tomorrow will be Easter but not us. This year there won't be any Easter. There's nothing that makes my dad Greg sadder than seeing Brian sad, and if there's no chocolate for Easter Brian'll be the saddest he's ever been ever, and my dad Greg will be even sadder. But I'll have saved two eggs. Later I'll give my brother one in secret and I'll have one too and no one will ever know.
Right then I hear a voice go, Hey, and nearly fall over. I have to put my hands down in the mud to stop myself.
It's my dad Greg. He's standing at the entrance to The Inner Sanctum. The branches are low so he has to duck and it's still dark so he's like a black hunched-up shadow but it's definitely him. Hey, he says again. But he doesn't come in.
My heart's going crazy. I wait for it to slow squatting there in the mud, seeing what my dad Greg's going to do. He doesn't move and I don't either. We both just wait for something to happen. It's like in Trouble when you've got one guy left and Brian's got one guy left but they're both in their homes and you're just popping the popper and popping, trying to get out.
We wait for a long time, me and my dad Greg. Both our breath comes in clouds. He sits down after a while in the mud but still doesn't say anything. I don't either. My hands are covered in mud, and I can feel mud stuck up under my nails and drying in streaks up my arms but I don't really care. I'm tired.
After a while the sky starts to lighten a little, going greyish up through the branches of the trees. The moon's fading. Soon it'll be morning and the moon will be gone for the day, and then the next night she probably won't be there at all.
I start thinking maybe if the world is like a person and underground seaways are the tubes, making the world go on, then when the tides go in and out it's like the world having its period. Like the blood of the world rushing in and out and making everything grow. It's a big thought like the kind you have to say out loud when you think them and it kind of makes me go whoa a little bit. But I can't tell my dad Greg about it, about periods and stuff. Not him. Even though he's over there just waiting for something, I'm not sure what.
So then he goes, Hey, in a weird sad tired voice.
By now the light is morning light. It came so quick, it's pale and thin but it's washing over the night, erasing the night.
And my dad Greg goes, Hey, again, and that's when I realize he's showing me something. He's holding out his hands, cupped together. I can't see so I have to get up and take a step closer. It's the eggs. They're all there in his big hands, like twenty of them, maybe thirty. I found them, he tells me, like he's proud.
And I say, Yeah. I look at his hands, my trail of chocolate eggs collected in there together like grapes. I put my hand in my pocket to make sure I've still got the two extras.
You found them, I tell my dad Greg. You found them all, I say.
LONG SHORT SHORT LONG
IN A SCHOOL in London, Canada, there was a classroom. In it: a teacher, Miss, weary in her skirt but standing, and twentyeight fourth graders silent as the sky in rows at their desks. Miss clapped her hands four times and said, "Ta, tee-tee, ta," one clap to each syllable. Then a translation: "Long, shortshort, long." And the students all died.
With laughter, like a cloudburst.
Why so funny? Miss didn't understand, fresh from Althouse and already of waning hope, B.A. History with a minor in Music also. She held up her hand in a gesture that meant: silence. It took a while; the laughs were a downpour, a drizzle, the occasional drip from a drainpipe. "Shhh," the one named Trish encouraged them, though Miss was sure she had been the first to laugh. Then, okay, quiet enough.
Miss tried again. Clap, clap-clap, clap. "Long, short-short, long."
Boom. Down rained hilarity.
Miss threw up her hands and retreated behind her desk. When her students had settled she decreed, "Work period," and from her book bag got out some marking, set to it, trying not to think about the basement bachelor apartment she rented with the towels for drapes, her life.