Debbie whispers something to Mom. Tony is mad. I’m told he’s my brother. I see him on the playground but he never plays with the other kids. He sits by himself. I sit by him sometimes but I don’t think he likes me because he pushes me and tells me to leave him alone. He’s three years older and twice my size. People say we look like each other but I don’t see it.
Mom picks us up. She seems so much like a giant bird. Like she swooped down from the sky and got us. I want to tell her not to worry, that I can fly too. I’m strong enough and sometimes when I’m dreaming, my ears get big—big enough to be like wings—and I can fly anywhere I want. I just flap them and soar way up into the sky. I tell myself, Remember, you have to remember this when you wake up. You can fly. And I’m remembering now because I just woke up. I want to tell her but there’s no time. She beats her wings and we take flight over the school, the playground, the yard, the field, the buildings, the entire Synanon compound where we played games and ate and sang and slept. Where we heard the adults screaming through the speakers of the Wire, the in-house radio, with its crackle and hiss letting us hear the sounds of people laughing, people crying, people yelling, people dancing, a jazz band playing music. The Punk Squad, the mean teenagers with their cursing and cuffed jeans getting punched in the face if they ever talk back. Every week one of them runs away and everybody gets so mad. The sound of Chuck, the Old Man, the leader, talking about things we don’t understand. He says he loves us but he’s always so angry. And the bird, we are told to call her “Mom,” flapping furiously, eyes locked on some faraway point as she clutches her chicks and we fly up over Tomales Bay with its streams draining into the Pacific Ocean, the giant redwoods on the hillside, the big waves crashing against the rocks on the coast, slowly breaking them into tiny pieces, fracturing them, pulling them apart—until they’re soft to the touch, portable and broken, easy to walk on, to place into a small plastic bag for a tourist visiting with sunburned ankles from some ancient city to the east.
CHAPTER 2
THE BIG ROAD
There’s a brown car waiting in the parking lot at the front of the compound. The driveway looks different at night. I’ve seen stars before, when Bonnie and Clubby would take us outside to lie on our backs and look up at the sky. Bonnie and I have chosen a star for me. It’s easy to find, hanging over the pine trees at the edge of the field. But I don’t see it. I wonder where it’s gone. I want to point at it and name it and say hello. All I can hear is the shuffling of our feet, a soft cooing from the woods and the rumble of the engine in the parking lot. The air smells damp, like concrete and pine needles, a big cloud of steam bursting from behind the long brown sedan. There’s a man sitting in the front seat with a short blond mustache that goes halfway across his upper lip.
I can’t believe my luck that I get to ride in a car. “Is that your car, Mom? Who’s that man?”
“That’s your grandfather.” She opens the rear door and helps us in.
“Hi-dee do,” says Grandpa Frank. I see his eyes in the little mirror. He looks like an older, short, mannish version of Mom. Same round cheeks which I’m later told are something called “Dutch.” Mom has told me stories about him, that he was on the Olympic team for Dutch but that he couldn’t go because they canceled the Olympics because of the war. Mom says Grandpa has the strongest hands in the world because he was a gymnast, that he was in two different armies for two different countries, America and Dutch. She told me he was far away fighting the Germans when she was born and that Grandma Frieda sent him a picture of her. She showed it to me once: it was a round-cheeked baby girl sitting on a chair in a white apron, a bonnet on her head. “Daddy carried this on his ship. Carried it in his pocket.” He would look at the picture, crouched in a hole in the ground when the Germans would drop bombs on him and his friends in a place called the Bulge where there was a big battle and awful things happened but Grandpa won’t talk about it because it was so terrible. All he’d ever say is that he would look at the picture and whisper, “Gerredina. Daddy loves you.”
“Hi Dad.” Mom climbs into the front seat. She looks around, scanning the parking lot, the woods, the driveway that leads to the Big Road.
“Where are we going?” Tony says.
Grandpa Frank is frozen in his seat, staring straight ahead, hands on the steering wheel. Mom turns around.
“We’re leaving, honey.”
“Will we be back by lunch?”
“No. I’m sorry. We won’t.”
“But Noah has my baseball card!” Tony yells, stomping his foot.
“I’ll get you some new cards,” Grandpa says.
It’s strange to hear a man speak. We’re so used to the women. His voice is deep and certain. The men don’t come to the School very often and when they do, we stare at them like wild beasts from our storybooks. They have beards or mustaches, big muscles and leather boots. Some are bald with hair on their arms, necks and chests. They’re so tall and when they play with us, they throw us in the air to show us how much stronger they are. It’s fun to be small next to something so big.
“Okay,” Tony mumbles. I can tell he’s just as stunned as me. We aren’t used to the men.
Mom closes her eyes and puts her hands over her ears. She rubs her temples. She looks exactly like Noah when he got stuck in the big tree behind the School.
“Are we going to live with Grandma and Grandpa?”
“For a little while, yes. But then we’ll probably live somewhere else.”
“But what about Bonnie and Clubby?” I ask. “And Dmitri? Will I see them? Are they leaving too? Are they coming with us?”
“I don’t know if they’re leaving. I hope so. We can write to them.”
“What does that mean?” I can write letters. I know my alphabet as well as Dmitri and we read books together, at bedtime, and sometimes during the day. But I don’t understand why writing matters, what the letters on a piece of paper have to do with sitting on Bonnie’s lap naming stars or playing with Clubby and being called Suuuuuun.
“You’re just gonna have to trust me, honey. We have to go now.”
The ride down the driveway is bumpy. I’m amazed as I’m pushed back into the seat. I look back at the School. The rear window looks like a giant movie. I think about my friends asleep in their cots, the time I woke up in the middle of the night to find Dmitri talking with his eyes closed. I got out of my cot and put my ear right up next to his mouth to hear what he was saying, but it was just pieces of words. “He’s dreaming,” Clubby whispered. I looked over my shoulder and saw her smiling face, the deep-set eyes with heavy black circles, the short clipped hair, the massive shoulders protruding up in swells from beneath the straps of her overalls. “Sometimes when people are dreaming, they talk and sometimes they don’t.”
“Will he hear me if I talk to him?”
“Nah, he can’t hear you. He’s not really there. He’s somewhere in his head. That’s what a dream is. When you imagine you’re somewhere you’ve never been while you’re sleeping.”
The stars are moving so quickly behind the Synanon compound as we turn onto the highway. The Big Road! Wow! I try to flap my ears so I can fly back. I want to hug Bonnie and sit next to Dmitri’s cot to see if he’s dreaming right now. Maybe we both are. Maybe this is his dream. How can you tell?