Secrets to Keep

There were bruises on my hands.  I wasn’t to write with my left.  I knew it but I forgot.  At least I think I forgot.  Maybe I was just angry.

First grade isn’t for babies.  Only babies switch hands when they write.  I was to use my right hand.  The ruler stung the backs of my hands to remind me when I forgot.  Or maybe when I was angry.

When daycare picked us up after school, I stayed in the back.  No one noticed me until I didn’t get up for snack.  Snack today was graham crackers with peanut butter.  I like graham crackers with peanut butter, but today I stayed in the corner, holding my hand.

He was the only one who noticed. He got up and brought me a napkin stacked with graham crackers with peanut butter and a cup of orange Tang.  I loved Tang, I wasn’t allowed to have it at home.  He said it could be our little secret.  It was our first.

He sat with me.  He smelled good, clean, like aftershave but not like my dad or my grandpa, a smell that was just him, one I’ll remember forever.  We sat together in the back corner of the community room in the basement of the church.  He held my bruised hands and spoke softly and nobody noticed.

***

There was an art project at daycare today, we were making airplanes.  Not just paper ones, wooden gliders.  The pieces were all stamped in thin sheets of wood, we just had to punch them out and slide them together.  Everyone got one plane.  When he gave me mine, I said, “Thank you.”  No one else did.  When everyone had their one, he said I could have a second because I was the only one with manners.  Everyone else glared at me, but he smiled.

***

We were down at the creek today, making walking sticks.  He had a little saw that folded up and fit in his pocket.  He cut off thick pieces of willow for us to carve.  He told us about how aspirin comes from tree bark and slippery elm will make you go to the bathroom a lot.  He winked at me when he said that.  I was embarrassed and I didn’t look at him anymore.

When the other kids all had their walking sticks he came and sat next to me so our legs were touching.  He pushed my shoulder to tip me over and tried to make me smile.  I didn’t smile.

He took a thick piece of the willow and carved out a rectangle hole in the gray bark.  He took my hand and we walked back to the church, to the art room.  He took out the wood burner.

Kids weren’t allowed to touch it, but he asked me if I wanted to anyway.  I said no and he looked sad, but he didn’t say anything.  He burned my name and his inside the little window in the bark.  The green wood burning smelled strange and it made me sad.  It was still steaming when he gave it to me.  He said I could keep it forever.  To remember that we were special friends.  The letters looked like scars on the wood.  That made me sad, too, but I kept it.

***

He told me we were going to do something special today.  He took me in the back room.  There was a pile of plastic sheets there, thick ones.  There were black ones and clear ones so thick you could hardly see through them.  He used an old clothes iron to melt the edges of the sheets together.  He asked if I wanted to try it.  I wasn’t allowed to touch irons so I said no, but he looked sad and asked me again and finally I put my hand on his on the handle of the iron.

I was afraid and it was hard to breathe through the stink of hot plastic.  I wanted to leave but when I pulled my hand away he looked sad and asked if I didn’t like him anymore.  So I stayed.

It took until lunchtime but we made a big plastic igloo.  He put a box fan in one end to blow it up and made a little tunnel on the other end for us to crawl through to get in.  There was one big room inside and two little rooms on the back with flaps that covered the doors.

All of the kids crawled inside and sat in the big plastic room and giggled and made noises that echoed funny off the walls.  He took me into one of the side rooms and let down the flap.  He sat so our legs were touching and put his hand in my lap.  He put my hand in his lap.  The plastic was too thick to see through.  Nobody knew we were there.

***

He told me he had something fun to do today.  We went into one of the back rooms.  He had a pile of yarn, all different colors, some of them tangled up.  He showed me how to fold it back and forth over and over itself until it was a thick wad of loops.  Then he tied a piece of yarn around the middle of it and used his pocket knife to cut through the loops on either end.  It turned into a pom pom.  We sat on the floor.  He leaned against the cabinets and pulled me into his lap.  He put his arms around me and helped me loop the yarn.  His beard prickled against my face, I could feel his breath on my neck.  We stayed in there all afternoon.  Pom poms piled up around us.  We even missed snack time.  Nobody noticed we were gone.

***

Today we got to choose what we wanted to do.  One group was going bike riding, one was going downtown, and one was going to the pool to swim.  To choose our activity we were to cover our mouths and raise our hands when the one we wanted was called.  They called swimming first.  He was taking the swimming group, and I kept my hand down.  He was sitting at another table and he waved to me.  He showed me him covering his mouth and raising his hand.  I didn’t want to but he nodded at me and showed me again.  I shook my head and he looked sad.  I covered my mouth and raised my hand.

In the pool he made a stirrup with his hands, kids put their feet in his hands and he threw them into the air.  They splashed and laughed and nobody noticed when he went to lift me his hands slipped and went up my thigh.

***

We were playing down at the creek today.  The other kids already went in, it was just me and him.  He said he needed to use the bathroom but he didn’t want to walk all the way back.  He said he would just go out here.  He asked if I’d ever seen a boy pee, would I like to watch?  I said no, but he looked sad and asked me please so I did.  He said not to tell anyone.

***

Today when we went in the back room, he locked the door.  He doesn’t bring yarn or plastic or games anymore, it’s just him and me.  I talk to him about school, about who I like and who’s mean to me.  I tell him what I won’t tell my parents, what I won’t tell anyone, that I get hit at school.  He listens and sometimes he cries.  He soothes my bruises and tells me he loves me.  He says we will always be friends.

***

Today I rubbed dirt on my tongue, I thought I could scrub it clean.  Sometimes I rub my hands on thistles until they bleed because it’s the only way to get off the feeling of him.  I tell my mom and dad I don’t want to go to school.  I tell them I’m too sick.  They think it’s school that’s the problem.  They keep talking to my teachers.  Nobody thinks of daycare.

***

He’s been acting strange for a while now.  My second-grade teacher is different, I don’t think he likes her.  She doesn’t hit me.  She looks sad when she talks to me.  Yesterday she gave me a pom pom with googly eyes and paper feet glued on it.  She said that it was a Warm Fuzzy.  She said I could tell it my secrets and nobody else had to know.  She said I could tell her my secrets, too.  I told her I didn’t have any, but I put the Warm Fuzzy in my coat pocket.  He asked me how school was today.  I told him it was fine.  I didn’t tell him about the Warm Fuzzy.

***

He said today is a special day.  He said I was going to see God.  I don’t know if there’s a God.  I used to wonder about it.  I used to think that if there was a God, he’d have noticed what was happening to me, inside of a church, of any place in the world, I figured he’d notice it there.

Other times I figured there isn’t any God and people just fool themselves building churches thinking there’s somebody there.  Sometimes I figured God just doesn’t care and people fool themselves praying thinking somebody’s listening to them.  Sometimes I figured God is up there watching and listening and he just wasn’t helping me because of me.  Because I didn’t go to church and I didn’t know how to pray even though I tried sometimes.

Today he took me down to the creek.  It was cold out, the sky was covered with grey grey  clouds.  I stared up at it when he laid me on the ground, it looked to me like the earth could tip over and I would fall off and fall and fall into the grey grey clouds.

We were down on the bank at the bottom of the bluff, I could see the top of it when I turned my head.  The church was up there, a long walk away.  Right on the edge of the bluff there was a little wooden cross stuck in the ground.  I’d seen it there before and I always wondered about it.  I thought maybe it was for someone’s dog or maybe someone got hit by a car near here.  Or someone drowned in the creek.

I stared at the cross while he put the knife in me.  It was the same knife he used to carve the willow branch with our names on it.  The same knife he used to cut the loops of yarn when we made pom poms.  He told me that I was going to see God today.  He said I would be an angel.  Soon.  As soon as I was clean.

I wasn’t breathing when they pulled me out of the creek.  At least that’s what they said.  When they pulled me out of the creek, they said, I was almost frozen.  They took me back to the church and put blankets around me.  They dried me off and made hot chocolate and laughed because they stirred it with a plastic spoon and it melted.

They didn’t ask me about my clothes, or the blood.  When my hair was dry one of them took me into the bathroom.  She gave me my dry clothes and a maxi pad and she asked me if I knew how to use it.  I said yes so she would go away and figured it out myself.

***

I went to the creek today.  The blood all washed away months ago, it’s just dirt and grass there now in the place where I stared at the sky.

He never came back.  The willows have all grown up around the branches that he cut off, you almost can’t find the stumps anymore.  They packed up the plastic igloo in a box and we never saw it again.  The pom poms I threw all away.  I never liked pom poms anyway.  I don’t know where the airplanes are, maybe I lost them, or broke them.  I forgot, or maybe I was angry.

I have the piece of wood he carved for me.  I hold it in my right hand, I remember to write with that one, now.  I thought I was going to throw it into the creek, let it wash away with all the blood and dirt and maybe then I’d forget.  But now I’m here and I see the little wooden cross on the top of the bluff and I know I won’t forget.

I thought I would throw it in anyway, watch it float away down the stream, but I can’t.  I just sit there by myself on the edge of the bank.  The wood still smells a little green and burned.  I rub my fingers over our names over and over again.  I have no one to keep secrets with now.  Now I keep them on my own.

Sometimes I wonder where he went, why he left, and if he stopped loving me.

Sometimes I miss him.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Like