The Autobiography of Jenny X by Lisa Dierbeck

Author:Lisa Dierbeck
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-935928-19-5
Publisher: Mischief + Mayhem in association with OR Books
Published: 2010-03-10T16:00:00+00:00

During the near mishap with Jeremy and the tilted chair, the phone had stopped ringing.

“We missed the call,” said Jeremy, mournfully. He had a rubbery face, always mugging and hamming it up, full of exaggerated expression. He’d righted himself just in time, grabbing at the table and scattering hundreds of dollars on the floor. It was dark outside. Nadia and her sons were alone in the house, on a Thursday night, playing Monopoly.

“It was probably Dad,” said Will. “He’ll call back.”

“What if it wasn’t?” said Jeremy, who tended to dramatize minor events. “What if it was a crucial call for me?”

“How crucial could it be?” asked Will. He had an open book propped up on the table before him. Will had earphones on. He held his cell phone in his hands as his fingers moved across the keypad while he typed, read, played Monopoly, and listened to his band. Nadia had given up her naïve parental attempt to get her kids to do one thing at a time. They were incapable of this. They were fast-thinking twenty-first-century children who burned through electricity as quickly as they hemorrhaged cash, watching television and downloading and uploading songs, short videos, and photographs into their hand-held gizmos, their state-of-the-art computers. Music came through the two new speakers that the kids had set up on either side of the fireplace, but the den, sparsely furnished, felt empty. Nadia loved the emptiness, and it was why she gravitated towards this funny, ugly little room. It had an echo that reverberated when anybody spoke; wind whistled through the loose old windowpanes. The den was built crookedly, haphazard and off-kilter; none of the walls met the ceiling at right angles. Blondie’s ball rolled swiftly along the sloped wooden floorboards, rolling, rolling of its own accord, through the den, over the carpet, and out the door into the dining room, like a toy possessed by a demon, making the dog wag her tail rapturously and bark in surprise each time. Outside, lamps lit the front and back porches, throwing circles of light on the meadow that stretched all the way down to the shore. On either side of the house were woods. Straight ahead was a field planted with wild grasses and, past that, the dark, fast waters of the river. Though the house felt secure, Nadia could imagine what it might have been like to be a settler hundreds of years ago, gathered around a fire in the enormity of the wilderness. A wolf bayed, or a dog. It was a quiet night, with rain pattering on the roof. Sitting by an open window, Nadia jumped when a twig broke in a thicket of trees. She detected other, fainter noises outside among the leaves. The back of her neck began to prickle. She sensed someone standing in the copse, hidden by the trees, but when she stared out the window, no one could be seen.

The phone rang a second time. Will didn’t notice; he had his headset on. Nadia and Jeremy stared at the phone without touching it.

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