Read Online Heroes of the Frontier by Dave Eggers - Free Book Online Page B

absurdity in all this—the silliness of his concern for the strays and the madness of his mother’s explanation—but this was not the meaning of Paul’s smile. No. Paul smiled because something that was wrong in the world had been righted. Paul’s smile confirmed the true north of the moral world: How could he doubt the preeminence of order and justice? His smile confirmed rightness. His smile laughed at his temporary doubt in this rightness.
    Ana was finished with her ice-cream sandwich, and handed the wrapper to Josie on her way to inspect, a few feet down the pier, what seemed to be a bloody fish head. They were near the cleaning station, where the fishermen weighed and gutted their day’s catch. The boardwalk was pink with watery blood and a last fisherman was finishing his day. Ana stood below him and looked up, then down at the head of the fish, its silver skin stained with bright plasma. She picked it up. She picked the head up.
    “This yours?” she asked him.
    Before he could answer, she’d dropped the head, and, in an incredible feat of dexterity and fine-motor skills, kicked the head, on the fly, into the dark water below. She laughed, and the fisherman laughed, and Josie wondered just how this child was hers. “What’s my name?” Ana asked the frothing water where the head had disappeared. Josie had not taught her this expression, and Paul certainly didn’t know it. But Ana had said this before, and had also said “You want this? You want this?” And “What’d you expect?” These confrontational phrases she insisted on yelling to rocks, trees, birds. She often spoke disrespectfully to inanimate objects, and often walked around practicing gestures, facial expressions, like a clown preparing backstage.
    The fact of Ana’s existence, and her will to live and run and break things and conquer, was all attributable to her birth. After living for a month in a plastic box, and spending her first two years looking like a withered old man, she shed her preemie skin like Lady Lazarus and became a world-ender. Carl had long before abdicated any responsibility. When they first brought Ana home from the hospital, Carl thought it a good time to start training for his triathlon—there was suddenly such urgency to it—and Josie soon gleaned he was not likely to be instrumental in Ana’s care. So she deputized Paul. Your sister is very small and not strong, she told him. When she comes home she’ll need your help. They talked about Ana’s homecoming every night and every night Paul seemed to take his impending responsibilities more and more seriously. One night she found him on the floor with a hand vacuum, cleaning the room waiting for Ana. He was three. Another time he’d found an old greeting card, a burst of balloons on the cover, and dropped it into her empty crib. Josie’s intent was to be sure that Paul, a sensitive boy but nevertheless a boy, would be careful not to accidentally smother tiny Ana, or break tiny Ana’s bird bones, but instead she created this boy who came to understand his role as something akin to caretaker of the world’s most delicate orchid. He slept in her room, on a mattress next to, and then under, her crib. By the time Ana was three months old he knew how to feed her and swaddle her. When Josie or Carl did either he sat nearby, adding frequent notes and corrections.
    Ana grew stronger, and by two she was running without fear or limit, though she was still Pinocchio-thin and her eyes were circled in pale blue shadow—temporary evidence, Josie hoped, of her traumatic journey thus far. As she grew in confidence and awareness of her power of ambulation and self-determination, as she became more aware of herself and the world, she became less aware of Paul. He sensed it and felt betrayed. There was a time when she was two and Paul five, when he came to Josie, anguished. “She won’t let me hold her,” he wailed. He was on the verge of tears, while Ana barely knew he lived in