Chapter 19
it was the most obvious decision. When the school science fair was announced, Luca knew exactly what he was going to make: a security system connected to an app that controlled the whole thing from a phone, something his tech-phobic teachers would be both impressed and confused by.
He was only in grade four, but he already knew how to code better than any grown-up he had ever met.
When he asked his mother two years ago if he could register in an after-school coding class, she had looked at him blankly and said, “Code? Like in The Matrix ?” Most people over the age of thirty, he reasoned, would have no idea how an app was even constructed.
The teachers would be in awe. Guaranteed success.
In his project outline, he had written that he would install the app on his mother’s phone, but she hadn’t left her room in three days and he hadn’t had a chance to look at her settings.
What if her operating system was too old for what he was planning?
What if she didn’t even have enough memory?
Maybe he could sneak in and grab her phone while she was sleeping and later return it with the app installed.
And then if the app was good enough, she would feel safe and calm and she would emerge from her sad, silent room, and it would be him, Luca, who had finally cheered her up.
And then their lives would be normal again.
Late that afternoon, when the sun was low in the sky, Luca walked around the house, methodically mapping the darkest corners and possible points of entry with a pad of graph paper and a mechanical pencil.
He did this with the lights off, using only a flashlight to walk up or down stairs or when navigating the cracked walkway in the backyard.
He stared at the back kitchen window, separated from the door to the yard by a strip of drywall only fourteen inches wide.
“Anyone could break the glass and reach in to turn the doorknob,” he muttered to himself, making a note on his pad and then drawing three asterisks beside it.
In the yard, he measured the fence. Only five feet tall, which meant any adult could peer over the top and see everything that was going on.
All someone needed was a boost from a friend to get over, silently and quickly.
Luca jiggled the lock on the gate, which was loose from years of rain rotting away the fence post. He shook his head.
“It’s a good thing Mom has me to notice things,” he said, poking his finger into the soft damp wood.
He could see that it had been painted many times, could see the layers of white and then blue and then grey.
The whole house was like this: layers and layers of fingerprints and scars left by his parents and grandparents and great-grandparents.
Everywhere he looked, there was a trace of someone from the past. A single pearl earring caught under the runner on the stairs.
A faded pile of red lucky money envelopes on the top shelf of the linen closet.
His grandfather’s name scratched into the windowsill in his own room: TOM WAS HERE.
At the door to the basement, Luca stopped.
Behind him, the yard was dimly lit by the street lamp on the corner, and he could hear the buzzing from the fluorescent bulb, the rustle of an animal in the bushes.
When he was very little, he liked to sit on the lawn with his eyes closed against the sunshine, listening for sounds he could name: the tapping of a crow walking along the gutter, the hum of a city bus on Kingsway, his sister’s toy shovel hitting a rock as she dug in the dirt.
It was calming, a game of observe, question, and answer.
Luca loved games, but only if the answers were tangible, easily arrived at through reason and knowledge.
Now he paused, his hand on the knob of the basement door.
Inside, he knew, there were piles of teetering boxes, filing cabinets with drawers half open, a slow drip in the laundry sink that his mom could never fix.
He couldn’t predict where the piles might be today or whether the bottom drawers would be pulled out, if he would walk into them, the sharp corners nicking at his ankles, drawing blood if the angle was wrong.
How could he map so many risk factors, so many potential dangers, if they were never consistent?
Luca took a deep breath and turned the knob.
As the door creaked open, he heard a voice from deep within, where all the shelves stood at funny angles against the damp cinderblock walls, unsteady on the concrete floor.
“Mom? Is that you?” When he poked his head through, a figure the shape and size of his mother was creeping slowly toward the stripe of light that led to the door—and straight to him.
“Who’s there?” He tried to lower his voice and sound as unafraid as possible.
The figure continued to inch toward him, each step making a thud on the concrete floor. Luca took a step back and tried to pull the door closed, but it was stuck in the frame and he couldn’t move it.
“I said, who’s there?”
Finally, the figure stepped into the light and he saw the red-painted nails, the floral sequined sweatshirt, and the smooth black hair of his grandmother.
She was holding a small box and breathing heavily, her face soft at the edges, as if she could no longer hold the tension in her jaw from fatigue or old age.
Luca’s shoulders fell and he exhaled loudly, close to crying from relief.
“God, Poh Poh. What are you doing here?”
His grandmother set the box down on the worktable and picked a piece of dust out of her lip gloss. “Luca. Can you open that box for me? The joints in my hands are killing me.”
The flaps were only folded shut, so Luca pulled it open and peered inside.
An old analogue alarm clock. Six boxes of photography film.
A rolled-up pair of long white gloves, the empty fingers hanging loose.
A dark blue address book, the pages inside swelled and furred, as if it had once been dropped in water and then dried.
Judy leaned over and picked up the address book.
“I left some things here before I moved. I had forgotten about them until today, so I came to look.” She gestured to the basement behind her.
“There are corners here your mother never changed. In the garden, too, same old plants, same old weeds.” She looked toward the open door, with its five steps up into the backyard.
“Your gong gong buried something there once, but I couldn’t find it just now.
Maybe I’m remembering the wrong spot. Maybe I need a better shovel.
” His grandmother’s voice trailed off. Luca had never heard her sound so old or confused.
“Why do you need this stuff?” Luca picked up a smaller box that had been partially hidden by the open flaps of the bigger one.
The cardboard was covered in a thin layer of red foil that was peeling away at the corners, and, even though it seemed old, it was still shiny and bright.
It was strangely heavy, and when he shook it, he heard metal against metal.
He pulled open the lid and inside was a ring of brass keys, the old-fashioned kind, the kind he had only ever seen in the scary haunted house movies he streamed after his mother had gone to bed.
His grandmother suddenly reached out and grabbed it from him, her nails scratching his wrist as she twisted it out of his hand.
“Ouch! Poh Poh, that hurt.”
As she dropped the box into her purse, she shook her head. “Kids today. So weak.”
Luca pointed at the address book tucked under her arm. “Are you taking that too?”
“This is my mother’s, your great-grandmother’s.
” She opened it upside down and shook. Several loose pages and one yellowed envelope fell out, and Luca could see now that it was actually a diary.
Judy bent down to pick them up, careful not to bend the old soft paper.
Luca kneeled on the floor and gathered the pages into his hands.
“Be careful,” Judy said quietly. “The paper is so thin now.”
“Don’t worry. I got it.” He tucked the slim book into the front pouch of his hoodie, then gave his grandmother a wink. “I’ll help you bring this to the car.”
She picked up both boxes again and headed toward the door. “Good boy.” Her voice was brisk, like the Poh Poh Luca had always known. “I have an open house in one hour, all the way in Steveston. Why does anyone want to live on a flood plain? You can’t help some people.”
later that day, after he had quickly eaten his dinner, Luca stood in the backyard, eyes scanning the perimeter for any potential entry points he might have missed.
The shadows had grown long, casting most of the yard in semi-darkness.
Just then, he heard a noise coming from behind him—dry but deep, a rhythmic scratching, the sound of two solid objects in friction.
A bear . Maybe it’s a bear scratching at the tree .
He spun around, his eyes squinting in the half dim.
“Hey, bear! I hear you! Go away, bear!” Whenever they went fishing, his dad had always told him that if he saw any signs of bear activity in the wild, he had to make as much noise as possible and sound as manly as he could. Luca bellowed into the twilight, “I’m not afraid, you big dumb bear!”
He heard Luna shout at him from inside the house—“What are you fucking yelling at, you fucking psycho?”—but he ignored her and began waving his arms and stomping toward the sour cherry tree. He heard a rustle from behind its trunk and then the sound of exhaled breath, almost a snort.
“That’s right! Get out of here!”
When he reached the tree, he turned his flashlight to the knotted, bumpy trunk.
Long jagged lines had been gouged out of the uneven bark, exposing the fresh blond wood underneath.
Luca traced one of the wounds with his finger, felt how narrow it was, how sharply it had been scarred.
Then the pad of his finger caught on something, a tiny sharp object stuck in the wood.
He pulled it out and held it in the circle of light.
It was the broken tip of a claw, two inches long.
Don’t black bears have black claws? This was off-white, ashen even, and he could almost see through it.
He shone the flashlight around him, illuminating the messy pile of rocks to his right where nothing ever grew, where maple keys might land but never take root.
He could see someone had been moving the rocks, scrabbling at the hard, unforgiving dirt.
Maybe it was Poh Poh, looking for lost things.
Or maybe the bear needed a place to take a dump.
He would look for droppings in the morning.
But for now, he tossed the claw over the fence and sprinted to the side path, pushing open the gate, his pad of paper tucked under his arm.
Bear or no bear, he still had to finish mapping the front yard.