SHE HAD A JUMP rope and had wound it around her wrists to shorten it. Already, she had jumped hundreds of times without missing, and she was still jumping.
She was singing, “One-day. Stew-day. A bake-day, coming up,” but her lips didn’t move.
In the field, the osage trees bowed down, waving at her with the slow motion of plants under water.
“Four-day. Boil-day. Here’s a Fry-day.”
It was night in the field. She could see as though it were day. Midday sun warmed her back, although there was no sun shining. The sun-night didn’t seem odd to her.
Jumping rope made a noise—whum-uhk—each time the rope turned through the air and hit the ground. She jumped in an old pair of boots belonging to Thomas. They were too big and floppy, and half full of rainwater. Her socks were soaked through, but she didn’t mind. Everything around her, the whole field, was black and shiny with rain.
Must’ve poured real hard.
The field became a glistening river. Justice stopped the rope to get a better look at it. But she couldn’t stop jumping. With each jump, she came closer to the river water.
Don’t fall in!
She curled her toes, screaming, and made no sound. She held her breath to keep from jumping. Yet, in no time she was at the edge of the black river.
The rope shivered in her hands. Cool and leathery, it wiggled and slithered. She let go of it and it dropped into her boot. Tightening around her ankle, the rope bit her toes.
Justice fell into the river on her stomach. She held her breath until the need for air forced her to breathe water. Black water filled her nostrils and her mouth. She gulped it down eagerly, hoping to drink up the river before she had to become a fish.
Something pounded and pounded as she woke up. Gasping for air, Justice sat straight up and nearly screamed out of fear. Slowly, she came to recognize her room. She was in bed, where she was supposed to be. The pounding was her own heart racing.
The dream vanished completely in her warm, dry room, with the earliest morning light pressed against the windows.
My nose is stuffed up. Maybe why I couldn’t breathe.
She had kicked her covers into a ball at the foot of the bed. Her pillow was on the floor.
I’m never going to sleep again.
Frightened, she would’ve liked to call for her mom.
Must be still very early.
Instead of calling out, she managed to straighten the sheet and blanket and pull them over her. Leaning out over the edge of the bed, she snatched her pillow from the floor as if plucking a babe from water. And curled herself into a ball with the covers and pillow over her head.
Now I’m safe.
She was safest of all when no part of her—head, toes or elbows—was left uncovered. But after a minute there wasn’t enough air to breathe. Smothering, she punched a small hole leading out from under the pillow. A nice stream of air made its way to her. She took deep breaths until she felt calm; still, she kept her eyes wide open.
I’ll wait for Mom or Dad to get up. Dad first, I guess. Has to be still early enough for him. I won’t sleep again.
Somewhere within the staring into the safety of her bedclothes, she did fall asleep again. It was a fitful sleep with no clear dreams. A nothingness, with sudden bursts of meaningless words. She recognized the sound of them as the single voice of herself, Thomas and Levi.
“Us. Three,” the voice said.
Justice was afraid.
Later, she awoke with a start to the tinny, chim/chi-chim/, chim/chi-chim/ of Thomas’ standing cymbals. She had slept long enough to erase the memory of the last dream. And she lay awhile, listening to the steamy rhythms from the living room. Justice could appreciate cymbals more than she could drums. They made a restful sound, somehow mixed yellow and dusty with bright sunlight now streaming into her room.
Suddenly, Thomas added the quiet-shattering boom of the bass drum. From then on, the noise of drums and crashing cymbals was earsplitting. She knew she had to get up and out of the house. She rolled out, pulling clean things from her bureau. She dressed in a flash in a T-shirt and a last clean pair of jeans, and avoided looking at a mess of pajamas, belts, games and books in a jumble on the floor. Racing to the bathroom, she washed her face and neck and managed to comb about half of her hair before she gave up. There were tangles like rats’ nests, and these she cut out with a pair of dull scissors she found in the cabinet. She sat up on the sink with her face a couple of inches from the mirror, and snipped and sawed away. Justice cut until she was satisfied that nothing she could do would make her hair look any better. Then she climbed back down, cleaning the sink of every trace of hair.
There was no way for her to reach the kitchen from the bathroom hall without going through the living room. She would have avoided Thomas if she could have, but there was no way.
Hope breakfast isn’t all dried out.
She thought of her mom, who knew how all alone she felt the first thing in the day and would have made breakfast for her before going off to work.
Why’d I have to sleep so late? Now I won’t see her until way this afternoon.
Maybe Levi is having his breakfast, she thought. No, he’ll be through. Thomas won’t eat anything before eleven. And then go right ahead and eat a big lunch. Enough to make a normal person sick to her stomach!
Rushing into the parlor at full speed, she began shouting her lungs out in the hope of startling the drummer.
“Thomas, will you cut it out? It’s awful! I hate it!”
She could have been a gray wall with a dull landscape hanging from it for all of the interest Thomas showed her. His head continued to bob and weave as he patted the cymbals and the snare with his brushes, with a boom from the bass drum in rhythm.
“You just can’t do this every day like you’re the only person here,” Justice told him. “It’s not normal—we live here, too!”
It registered on her that Levi lay stretched out on the couch. His head was veiled in a thin cloud of smoke. He pressed two fingers on the bridge of his nose—eyes closed—while one foot tapped in time with Thomas’ drumming. In the other hand he held a lighted cigarette.
Levi must have heard Justice, but he made no notice. He took a deep draw from the cigarette and breathed it out. Then he lifted his arm straight up and back over his shoulder. Thomas, sitting somewhat behind the couch, leaned forward over his drums and took a draw from the cigarette. He never missed a beat.
“You guys!” Justice couldn’t believe her eyes. “What are you doing? You’re smoking—is that grass? Wait until I tell Mom!”
Both of them gazed at her without comment. She felt caught, like a mealy worm smashed at the center of their sight.
“Get off our case,” Levi said. “It’s not pot and we’re not doing anything so terrible, so you don’t have to tell Mom.”
The way he spoke to her made Justice feel ashamed of herself. She stood there hanging her head and clutching her hands.
Levi took a last drag on the cigarette and put it out in an ashtray which already held two butts. The way he did that made him seem much older, separating him from her. Finally, she eased down next to the couch, hoping to close the gap between them.
“But if Mom ever found out—” she said, at last. “You know you oughtn’t to smoke.” Then, “Please make Thomas stop that drumming. I cannot stand so much noise!”
Looking very dramatic—pitiful, actually—she covered her ears. But truly the drumming hurt her in back of her eyes. And it made her insides feel full of jumping nerves.
“It’s not noise,” Levi said matter-of-factly. “It’s full of patterns.” He did smile at her sympathetically.
Justice pouted back at him. “It’s too loud and it makes my head hurt. Levi? Make him stop it.”
“Oh, okay.” At once, the drums ceased.
Surprised, Justice looked up to find Thomas putting away his cymbal brushes.
“It isn’t noise, though,” Levi said. “Noise is like—”
She watched, wide-eyed, as simultaneously her brothers got up. Levi took Thomas’ place, taking drumsticks from a pocket on the side of the snare drum. He commenced beating the drum and working the bass. He hit the floor tom-tom and the cymbals. Levi filled the parlor with the worst confusion of sound Justice had ever heard.
The beats forming a drummer’s logic had no order when he played them. He had so little sense of timing or rhythm that the pattern he’d spoken of before was completely missing.
“That’s noise!” he shouted to Justice over the racket, stopping it as quickly as he had begun it.
He handed over the drumsticks to Thomas and got up from the stool.
“Take it easy,” he told his brother, like a whisper. Justice heard.
Thomas drummed again, but with a gentle beat.
“Good,” Levi said, under his breath. Again, Justice heard.
“You better come on and eat,” he told her. “I’ll fix it up for you.”
She let him step around her and out of the room before she followed. And she wouldn’t look around at Thomas for fear he might stare her down.
Something is new, she couldn’t help thinking.
She left the parlor with Thomas’ gentle drumming pursuing her.
Something is different. They got up at the same time when Levi went to play the drums. Did they?
And last night, she thought, when Thomas beat the kettledrums. Levi’s hands twitching. Brother!
She stopped there in the hall between the parlor and the kitchen. Thinking back to lunchtime yesterday and Levi saying something like, I am Thomas sometimes.
They say identicals can sense and feel for one another.
And figuring out how Thomas and Levi might know things about each other beforehand was like thinking ahead of time. Or backward. Something.
Could she tell her mom? Justice wondered.
Tell her what? That they get up at the same time? That one of ’em’s hands twitch?
Not even her mom was going to think there was anything funny about that. Justice wasn’t sure she did, either. But one thing she did know for certain: Thomas never liked her getting in between him and Levi.
He likes having Levi either alone by himself or alone with him. He likes having me away from them both.
And she knew that Levi always tried to protect her from Thomas’ meanness and temper.
What if he was to turn on Levi the way he does me and some of the boys?
And, quite suddenly, she realized that the one person Thomas never turned on, never had a fight with, was his brother.
Now, that has to be weird. But I don’t know what it means. I don’t know anything, she thought anxiously. And slowly made her way to the kitchen, where she quietly seated herself at the table.
Back to the sink, Levi stood drinking a cup of iced cocoa as Justice sat down. He thought she looked forlorn this morning—peaked and tired, like she might be coming down with something.
“You sure you’re wide awake this morning?” he asked Justice.
Maybe his mom hadn’t noticed how peaked Justice looked, being away so much.
“Did you leave a part of you asleep back in your room?” he said, joking with her. Smiling at her, he drained his cup and then went about setting her breakfast before her.
She stared at her favorite brother. “You sure you’re still you?” she said. Their conversation yesterday in the kitchen came to her. “Did you leave yourself in there drumming?”
There was a split second in which something ran scared in his eyes.
“You get so upset over nothing,” he said, not quite looking at her. “Smoking in there, it wasn’t my idea.”
“That just makes it so much worse,” she said. “Follow the leader.”
“It’s not like that at all,” he said, and added: “Eat your egg.”
“I don’t want any egg.”
“Come on, Tice, eat your breakfast,” he urged. “That’s a brand-new egg there. The other one Mom made got all shriveled in the warmer. I had to eat it myself.”
Right then he seemed about as normal and nice as a brother could be.
She stared at the egg. Done perfectly and sunny-side-up, it still wasn’t a Grade A Large. It was small and almost round. There was a slice of whole-wheat toast next to it. Justice felt it. The whole-wheat was soggy with too much butter. It was also warm, so she ate it.
They were acting as ordinary as they ever had. She had to admit that earlier, in the parlor, even Thomas hadn’t seemed too wild.
It was me that was wild, she thought glumly.
Levi was hurrying around now, talking to her while finding her a napkin, which he’d forgotten to place next to her plate. He poured her a large glass of tangerine juice.
“Or would you rather have some iced cocoa?” he asked her.
“No.”
“But what I meant about smoking in there,” he said. He stopped. They both listened. Justice quit chewing.
Drumming still went on in the parlor. There was an air of testing about it, the way it would sound when Thomas was studying and reading from drum notation. It stopped and started unexpectedly.
“I mean,” Levi said, “Tom-Tom has to try anything once. He has to experiment around.”
Justice eyed him, swallowing juice. “But you don’t have to. So why did you do it?”
“I did have to,” he said. “Because. Because he has this real mad stuff that gets caught in the stutter and can’t come out.”
She gazed up at him, shuffling nervously from one foot to the other beside the table. She knew her egg would be getting cold, but at once she forgot about it.
“What are you talking about?” she asked.
“I’m trying to explain it,” Levi said. “Doing different things all the time kind of eases the pressure for him. Just imagine what … what it’s like not being able to … to say anything you want. That’s why Tom-Tom drums. He … doesn’t e-e-ever stutter wh-wh-wh-whe—as-long-as heee’s drumming!”
Justice stared at him. The last piece of soggy toast she had in her hand dropped to the plate. She watched Levi cover his mouth, as though to hide the halting speech that came from it. His eyes suddenly flared and gleamed with the smirking presence of Thomas. As though in a dream, she saw Levi smack his own face with his free hand and reach for his eyes to press them closed. And he stood there with his hands covering his mouth and eyes. Dimly, Justice was aware that the sound of drumming had stopped again.
Stillness paraded down the hall and utter quiet entered the morning kitchen. It crept around the table to capture them unawares.
There was a muffled rasp from Levi. Then his hands fell to his sides as easy drumming in swing time began again in the living room. He slumped down into the chair across from her. He breathed heavily and looked limp and exhausted, but Justice saw no lurking presence in his eyes. What had she seen a moment ago?
She found herself on her feet, and for a long time she stood there, gripping the table edge.
“He drums to stop the stutter?” she asked.
Her voice seemed to clear the air. Levi sat straighter, but kept his face turned slightly away from her.
“At least,” he said, “that’s why he took it up in the first place.” There was no halting sound to his speech now.
“Oh, I am awful dumb!” she said. A flash of memory came to her. Thomas kicking furniture, bursting out with something mean. Being loud and beating on anything with the flat of his hands.
“You haven’t been around him enough to notice,” Levi said.
She recalled Thomas pounding his fist and spitting words at her. In the dim past when she was much younger, before Thomas ever played drums, he had seemed to pound and stomp his way through her life. And she had never suspected he might be trying to find a way out of his stutter.
Justice listened to the drumming from the parlor. She heard the cymbals’ chim/chi-chim.
Thomas racing around, yelling his head off. But did he have to hurt somebody to get the words out?
She stood there staring fixedly at the table, and slowly she understood that this was not what she and Levi should have been talking about.
“You and Thomas,” she said. “Levi, listen!” Whispering, forcing him by her urgency to look at her. “I get the feeling that the two of you—I get so scared the way you two seem—”
And she broke off as a warning so swift, so insistent, swelled in his eyes.
“You should be outside playing,” he said hoarsely. He smiled wildly, then steadily at her. “Go on and ride your bike for an hour,” he told her. “Maybe find somebody to play with.”
Casually, he got up from the table and busied himself clearing away her dishes.
“This you call finished?” he said, staring at her plate, his voice somewhat louder than it needed to be. “You should’ve eaten the egg. I went to a lot of trouble.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Never mind, nothing to be sorry for,” he said. “I’ll cook two or three more and make sandwiches out of them.” He spoke bravely, but Justice noticed a quaver in the sound of his voice. “Thomas and I both like to eat cold eggs,” he said.
She hated cold eggs. It was one more thing that separated her from them. Only a moment ago, she knew, she and Levi had somehow grown closer. She had grown older and they were together within some terrible, vague—she could not name what it was.
I can’t keep it straight, she thought. Thomas doesn’t stutter when he drums—that’s something I didn’t know. I just flat-out missed it. How could I have missed it?
And why had Levi actually sounded like Thomas stuttering? And covered his eyes and his mouth for some reason. Why did he do that? she wondered.
She moved out of Levi’s way, standing leaning her shoulder on the doorjamb. Down the hallway, there was Thomas parading toward her.
Forever the spitting image of Levi. But Thomas was a stronger, louder image, she had to admit it. There was total life, total noise in the furious way he moved.
Coming at her, he gave her a screaming look before he chose to ignore her completely.
“Yeah, sure,” Levi said, “go on out and play,” as though he and Justice had been talking right then, “but don’t stay away forever.”
Thomas came on, passing by Justice. All at once, he spun around, slamming the flat of his hand on the doorjamb above her head.
“G-g-g-got thaaat old spuh-ider!” he said, grinning at the space above her.
She clung to the doorway. Thomas had frightened her speechless. But she knew better than to say anything. That’s all he wanted, so he could pick on her.
She knew there was no spider.
Justice slid out of the doorway and managed to walk calmly down the hall.
“You didn’t have to tease her like that,” she heard Levi say, his voice low.
Thomas snickered. “Wh-whaaat’s fer bre-breee—wh-ut’s to eat?”
I’m dumb as they come, she thought, ashamed of herself for not realizing. But she was furious at Thomas and hurt by his meanness.
And found herself yelling, she couldn’t help it: ‘Thomas? Guh-guh-ooodbuh-buh bye, stuh-stuh-stutter-rat!” Frantically, she ran from the house, slamming the door as hard as she could.
On the vicious sound of Thomas screeching at her.
I’ve done it now, she thought as she hurtled through the burning heat.