My Name Is Not Easy: Part IV–Epilogue

We were always here,

hanging on where others couldn’t,

marking signs the others wouldn’t,

counting kin our own way.

By the time it was my turn to climb down those new stairs, it felt like the din had turned my insides to mush and made my knees get as wobbly as day-old noodles.

It was a tentative sort of step, like he was trying to remember how to walk.

“That’s whale meat and blubber, cooked,” Luke said.

My feelings are not about President Kennedy, but I can’t say this to Father, who’s stooped forward like he’s carrying the weight of Kennedy’s death on his back.

The line between Sacred Heart and the café was scratchy with static that time, just like it is now with the radio.

“Amau?” Her voice had wavered. “That you?”

I’d forgotten how many relatives I had until right at that exact minute when Mom started punctuating every other word with their names.

The girl in the mirror concentrates hard on something off in the distance, as if she doesn’t even hear the coiling and uncoiling sound of scissors cutting hair. She holds her chin up, aloof and certain.

She feels as sassy as a gull, so free she could spread her arms out and drift upward without any effort at all.

The gym is festooned with soft, dreamlike colors, and the music, which had been bright rock-and-roll a moment before, has transformed to match the colors—Donna can feel the change in the music with her whole body, like a change in the weather.

It’s “Unchained Melody,” and the words wash over her, touching something deep inside, something fluttering and birdlike. Something so exquisite she hardly dares breathe for fear of dislodging it, of forcing it to fly.

She’s never been this far out into the woods before, especially not at night, but Amiq knows the game trails blind, the way one meanders into another, disappearing and reappearing in strange ways, leading them deeper and deeper into the dark heart of the woods.

When he pushes the spruce branches aside, there’s a sudden rushing hole of light so bright, it takes her breath away—a spruce-lined room, lit by moonlight. They stand at its silvery center, transfixed.

It’s only his idea of her—slurred and generic—a quiet girl named Donna who’s easy to look at.

Mullen was saying something, and Sonny was saying something else, and Luke understood that maybe he was supposed to be saying something back, but he couldn’t because all of a sudden his ears were echoing and the sound of their voices was receding.

“Operation Plowshare,” Amiq said, leaning back onto his chair with a smug smile.

“Sister Mary Kate and her student volunteers are up to their elbows in sandpaper and varnish, and from out of the dust, shiny new desks are arising,” Amiq read.

She reminded Junior of an indignant little squirrel.

“But you know when you write for a newspaper, you are supposed to convey facts, not express opinions.”

He stood up, leaned over Amiq’s desk, and looked at the words scrawled across the top of the page lying there.

Amiq sat still. Calm and certain. Then, very slowly and very deliberately, he stood up.

Junior raised his hand. It seemed at first that no one even noticed him, way in the back, his skinny arm poised like a question mark.

It was not an amiable grin.

“President Seward paid the Russians $7,200,000 for something they didn’t even own. A royal rip-off,” he said, shoving the book underneath a wad of underwear. “Seward’s Folly.”

He just sat there in his darkened hideout, staring morosely at the ground.

It feels, in fact, like one big communal hunting trip, with Junior as the unlikely guide, and the rest of them watching the horizon and waiting for their turn to shoot.

He hears the sound of it as the pen scratches the paper, the sound of his mother’s voice, a warm, guttural buzz in the dusty darkness of Johnson’s Lodge and Bait.

But sometimes, at odd moments, he feels her presence. It seems by turns to be both an admonishment and a comfort.

The beach is full of flat, smooth stones perfect for skipping, but Father seems to have lost the knack.

The sound of things returns, piece by piece, but his head feels stuffed with cotton, noises arriving slowly as if from a great distance: the staccato of scared girls, the squawking of the youngest ones, the sudden shriek of Sister Mary Kate’s voice, sharp as gunshot.

Inside, the school looks ravaged, like somebody big ran through all the rooms swinging a two-by-four.

Books spilled out of bookcases, windows broken, everything out of place, everyone scurrying everywhere, even into the nuns’ quarters.

As we get closer and closer, we can see the animal’s breathing grow labored, see its eye, straining backward, watch how it marks our approach with a look that speaks of resignation.

As we get closer and closer, we can see the animal’s breathing grow labored, see its eye, straining backward, watch how it marks our approach with a look that speaks of resignation.