Read Klickitat for Free Online Page B

him?”
    Audra glanced out the window, where the shadowy trees were swaying, then checked the hammock, all folded up in her hand.
    â€œDon’t worry,” she said to me, and then she went around me, out of the bedroom, down the stairs.
    In a moment I heard the front door open, slam shut,and then I saw her walking away, pushing the tire so it swung up, loose on its rope, back and forth behind her as she went down the street.
    That was the night when Audra waited until we were all asleep and then she broke the screen of the television in the living room, shattered it so it looked like a spiderweb. She somehow took the computer in my parents’ room apart, too, unscrewing the plastic cover and taking pieces out so it would never work again.
    She did this all silently, while Mom and Dad were asleep in their bed. That was one reason she’d studied all those ways of walking, to do things like that.

SEVEN
    It took a day or two to know that Audra was really gone. It felt different, the house felt different, the three of us wondering and worrying in different ways, trying to understand what was happening.
    On the third day I stood in a thin beam of sunlight, next to the window the bird had crashed into. The window was clear, the bird’s feathers washed away.
    I started down the stairs, peeking through the railing. It was dark down there except for the lights in the tiny windows of the radio. Dad had the headset on and he was slumped over, his elbows on the desk and his hands over his face.
    I got close so I could hear sounds and voices buzzing in the air, nothing I could understand. And when I came around the side of him I saw that his eyes were closed. He jumped a little when I reached out and touched his shoulder, then opened his eyes and looked at me.
    â€œAre you feeling okay?” he said, his voice louder than it had to be. He pulled the headset down around his neck, reached to switch off the radio.
    I turned and went up the stairs, not stopping when he called my name. I should have told him not to worry, but I didn’t. I should have told him that Audra was fine, wherever she was. She was out there, somewhere—I felt it, even though it would be days before I found the note she’d left in my underwear drawer. It was wrapped with twine around a heavy pocketknife, a folding knife with just one sharp blade that I still have, and a magnifying glass. The note said:
The most important rule, then, for anyone who is suddenly faced with a survival situation, is to keep from panicking.
    I knew that, of course. I wasn’t going to panic, but still I was confused and unhappy to be left behind.
    Ten times a day I checked my notebook to see if there were new words for me. In those first days without Audra, the pages were blank. I took out a pen and wrote, as small as I could, at the top of the next blank page: Where is my sister? What do you want me to do?
    Those first days, Mom and Dad worried about me, too. They gave me Audra’s cell phone, the one she’d left behind, and kept asking me if anyone had called it. The only calls I got were from them, Mom and Dad, checking that I was okay and wanting to know where I was.
    I think they wondered why I wasn’t more upset, and they thought I knew something, that Audra had told me something that she hadn’t told them. They kept asking and asking and I said I didn’t know. Then they stopped asking, like that would make me want to come and tell them what I knew.
    Mom talked about how Audra had been hanging out with new people, people we didn’t know. She said someone could have taken Audra, that anything could have happened.
    This was at dinner, and I sat there between Momand Dad with Audra’s chair empty. Mom’s pyramid light, next to her, made one side of her face bright and the other all shadowy. Dad had set out an extra plate and a fork and a knife, like that might bring my sister back at any moment, like she’d sit down to