being axiom

I.
Summer rain is pouring down in good ole' Alaskan style. The sky is grey and dark, but some strange aspect of the light reflects from the pine trees and makes them seem greener. Strange mysteries. Yellow reflects off the raincoat- plays across a pond shaped like a soy bean. Waterbeetles frogger-swim from shore to deeper waters, pondering deep water-beetle thoughts. Perhaps they see the yellow light and wonder about it. A nice idea.

There is the smell of burnt steak wafting from the next door neighbor's house. It comes and goes with bursts of the warm wuzzy, the westerly storm winds known neither for warmth nor wuzziness. The air is cold, damp, clingy. It's beautiful and perfect.

“David!” Mom is yelling. “It's time for dinner!” Maybe the burnt steak smell wasn't from the neighbor's house after all. Hunger is definitely setting in, regardless. Setting off for the house, every puddle begs a stomp. Mud and water noises fill the air, “GalOMP! galOmOP! Slurcsh! GalOMP!” Crossing the yard, puddles stomped, the white shine of quartzite rocks under the deck catch the eye. They look fake- like plastic chalk rocks, but mom said they were quartzite. Kwooort-site. They've a strange shape, too, not like rocks from the forest beyond the back yard- but jagged and crystalline. There is no clarity to them. Just chalky, jagged, white rocks in abundance. “DAVID! HURRY UP!”

Splishidy splashidy splishidy splashidy… coming around from the back yard to the front of the house, two headlights pull into the driveway. Attached to those headlights is dad's blue Eagle. Attached to the Eagle, driving it, is dad. He wrestles with something in his seat and then gets out of the car, his suit coat draped over one arm. He reaches back into the car and the object of his wrestling appears. He pulls out a briefcase, but it is not shut entirely and papers slide out onto the wet ground. They are ruined. Everything is ruined. The day is ruined. Dad's face is a ruin.

Dad's nose gives way to his mouth- his mouth becoming larger and more twisted. His eyes are wild. There is something about his face when it is frustrated that makes it seem as though his whole head is swelling, as though it may pop at any moment. His teeth flash like the chalk-rocks. He swears and throws the briefcase and the rest of its contents into the car.

“GOD FUCKING DAMN IT!!!!” He emphasizes the last syllable. It. It be damned, oh damnable it. Poor it. Poor David, if dad notices him standing here watching, thinking about syllables. But it is strange, isn't it. No one emphasizes 'it'. It's always 'damn'. But the strangeness adds emphasis… the 'it' is the roar, the beating of the chest, the gnashing of teeth, as dad himself would say.

In his angry gestures, Dad's glasses lose their grip and join the papers in the mud. Bending down, he looks this way. Grimaces.

ii.

Waking the next morning, the smell of coffee wafts in from the kitchen. There is the clatter and clink of silverware on ceramic- someone stirring sugar into coffee. Once sleep is wiped from eyes, the world makes itself manifest: Mark still sleeps on the bed across the room, curled into a slip of baby-like moon. His blue spaceship pajamas are all fuzzy and pilled like an ancient and well-loved doll. Light plays brightly across them, shining in through the single big window above the dresser.

The world shifts. Rotates ninety degrees. Sitting up, there is the feeling of hunger, the taste of a yawn and the glory of a long stretch, “yaaaawwwwwwwwwrrrrrrrrrrrrgrgrgrgrgrgrgrgrgrgr!” There is a setting of toes to the ground, a weaving between strewn legos. The carpet feels soft and inviting, squishing under weight and springing up again behind.

Dark seeps out of mom and dad's mostly closed door, casting a slick, hazy sleepiness down the corridor. Mom must still be asleep in there. Around the hallway corner, the kitchen is bright. The sun shines directly through the windows into the kitchen sink, spilling beams and reflections across the ceiling everywhere. Just as the lack of any coffee cup in sight is noticed, the front door lets out a queasy swish-thunk. The coffee cup has made off with the coffee. Giggling. A minute later, the sound of the Eagle starting echoes from the driveway. The coffee is stealing the car. Walking to the tall windows in the livingroom- the ones that overlook the front yard and the road out front- several new stains are noticable near the stairs. The sunday newspaper lays strewn about all over the couch. Sunday paper. The funnies!

Forgetting the driveway, the coffee and the front windows, now there is a search for the funnies. Each sheet is picked up, flattened and placed squarely on the foot table. The funnies are not to be found, but the paper makes a neat stack, pleasing to the eye. All the corners line up just so.

A squeak-gadunk noise comes from mom's room. Padump. Padump. Footsteps. Mom stands, smiling at the livingroom entrance, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. Mom always smiles in the morning. Not always in the evening.

iii.

Casey is asleep, her hair a swath of beautiful auburn-brown sunshine. She snores lightly- little kid snores. The lawn is blazing green, polka-dotted by yellow dandelions. Dad said once they weren't real dandelions- that dandelions have red veins and you can eat them; but everyone else calls them dandelions. These don't taste good, though, so words don't have THAT much affect on reality. It's not like dad's jesus friend. Grape juice into sacrament or not, the white sap of THESE dandelions is bitter and icky, regardless of blessing.

There are dandelions spread out on the jacket mom bought yesterday to take to school. Breaking off the heads, taking the stems and folding one end into the other, Casey showed how to make dandelion rings before falling asleep. She wasn't really sleepy- just wanted to cuddle- but promptly fell asleep anyway. It's understandable, remembering the times spent pretending to sleep in the car, only to accidentally fall asleep to the droning of the wheels on pavement, the flash and skitter of headlights in the windows and the monotonous adult-talk of work and plans and logical conclusions and…. zzzzzzz…..

Playing with Casey is a weekend routine. Sometimes she comes over and spends the night. Pitching fort-like tents, playing house, building lego mansions populated with mice- these are regular hobbies. Forest-delving is not part of this relationship. She fears the forest without adults.

Now, Casey sleeps and the talking and playing are drawn to a sputter. The forest can be heard again. Trees hush and shush in the light wind. Pine trees, silver birches, giant maples. These are their names. They talk in sighs and whispers. Sometimes creaks and groans. The smell of rain from yesterday still lingers. It never departs entirely in the summer since it rains almost every other day. Rain doesn't smell like itself. It smells like everything else around it. It amplifies and tunes other smells- asphalt, mown grass, dandelion stink, little-kid sweat, pine sap, oil slick… all these things are borne in the rain, changed, transformed from a cacaphony into a sweet choral, singing, “beauty! beauty!”

Across the street, home looms. Gargantuan house. Dark, dark brown- almost black. A huge telescope stares out of one tall window at something in the sky. Waiting for the light to fade- a long wait until winter. Summer nights in even southern Alaska are bright enough just barely to read by. The days are long, and when the sun goes down it leaves an entourage of permanent twilight behind. The moon and Venus shine, but the stars sleep until fall. One winter evening, mom pointed the scope at Mars, a twinkling red dot of shifting brightness and hue, and the circle of it could just be made out. A planet, smaller than this one, and drier than gramma's place in Idaho. Drier even than Idaho. Wow.

Slowly standing and carefully putting feet down so as not to wake Casey, the sound of a car coming around the road echoes between the trees. The forest isn't quite gone from this place- big patches of it sit in the suburbs and it sticks out like dad's beard stubble from between the houses, edging in on the road. The car comes round and into view, slowly. A long, slender and gracefully angled boat of a car, a mercury monarch, putters. At the helm is Casey's sister, Susan, with long, dark hair and pretty round face.

Susan baby-sits sometimes. She sits on the bed and does algebra but she doesn't ignore or yell. Sometimes she pretends she needs help with the problems, which is fun, because the problems are a lot more interesting than the ones in elementary school where math is all addition and subtraction. It's all numbers. But Susan's math has letters, too, and the letters are more real because they tell the ways of things instead of telling of the things themselves. It's about describing relationships, she says, like how fast things move relative to one another when everything is moving. She doesn't actually like the math, probably, but gets a kick out of explaining it. And the math is not that hard. It's like playing piano- one note leads to another. One letter's relationship leads to another.

Susan gets out of her car and walks up the sidewalk to the front step. Something is on her mind. Instead of looking up and out at the world, she's looking down at the ground and in. Her steps are longer than normal and slower. Hands in pockets. It's interesting how much can be understood from the way a person moves- how their limbs are tense or loose and where. Susan is not sad or angry or upset. She's too busy in her head and gut to be any of these things. She's feeling her way through some situation from wherever she has been and trying to prophecy what affect it will have when she walks in the door. She's concerned with how her mom is going to respond to something. Her stomach is twisted in knots.

There's a big difference between thinking and trying to know how someone will respond. But thinking happens so much that sometimes people don't notice this. Susan is thinking, but underneath the thinking is something dark. Something simmers under the surface of blatant calculation. Jack London said something in White Fang about it… about how two wolves meet and there is a moment of gauging each other. It's like that, but even that misses the mark. But it's knowable- the knot in Susan's stomach is written across her countenance and needs no cypher to sense.

Susan comes to the door, reaches out her hand, pauses, and turns the door knob with her thumb and forefinger. she pushes the door inwards and open with the fingertips of her right hand. She looks up and into the house, eyes wide. She steps inside, and without looking back, closes the door behind her quietly and is gone.

The hood of the brown car speaks suddenly in a slow cooling of the hood. the hood creaks and pops softly. The wind answers by passing a secret to the trees. The trees creak to the car. “Ahhhhh,” says the wind. “Ahhhhh,” says the trees. “Ahhhhh,” says the car. “Ahhhhh,” says the boy on the grass and decides to go for a walk.

Stepping away from Casey's kingdom and crossing the street to the strawberries mom planted by the road, the heat of the recently paved road burns the foot soles. Hop! Hop! By hopping quickly from one foot to the other, the strawberries are reached. The soft silty dirt there is cooler and of fine grit. The ground feels smooth.

The strawberries are gleaming fatly, moistly. Two weeks before, mom caught the newspaper boy sitting by the side of the road, eating them. She laughed and called out, “HEY! You gonna eat em ALL!?” The kid had been startled, ashamed. He stammered a negative and jumped on his bike. He never ate them again, which was too bad because mom probably didn't really mind. The strawberries wanted to be eaten, it's sure, because they didn't have thorns or vines or big shading leaves. They wanted to be eaten or they wouldn't be red and fat and juicy. Maybe. This kind of thinking can be dangerous in a mind that wants something bad enough for its own purposes. Like the other neighbor boy who stole Susan's bicycle. He probably thought similarly- that a bike left out was a bike desiring to go for a ride. Too bad Susan had other intentions for that bike.

The strawberries are sooo fat. They have to be picked after a hard rain. If they don't get picked, they swell up so fat that they burst and rot and all the strawberries are gross. Picking one, it comes away from the stem with ease. The seeds embedded in it are all light tan. It's perfect and unblemished, the pointy tip rounded off to a fine butt-chin dimple. The first bite is harmony. It's everything the strawberry promised in its cardinal glow. The berry tastes teh way three dog knights' joy to the world sounds. It tastes like rain smells. It tastes real good.

Slurp. Gone. And one is enough. Any more and they lose their beauty which is almost a sin. It's almost a sin to ruin something so good. It's like peeing on them, which mom made clear was a big no-no several years ago.

Barefooted, the grass smooshes under-foot. The short pine tree waves hallo. Around the side of the house, after passing the neighbor's rope swing and the small raised garden of carrots and cabbages, there's an old dirt road behind the house that runs in from one side of the backyard and out the other side. It's an old road, mostly mud and a few ancient ruts, unused. Going left leads behind the house next door where Calvin and his mom lives. They have a dalmation that barks and barks and barks and barks which is one too many barks to go left. So the road naturally leads right and into the forest.

Only a couple hundred feet into the forest on the old mud road, it's already obvious that this is a tree place and not a human place. Branches, pine needles and moose poopie litter the ground. Water pools and trickles from the alongside moss into the ruts and tread marks, filling them. Water fills in the gaps everywhere, at home everywhere.

It's fun to make dams and levies, in this place. To guide and shape the water courses into channels, canals, reservoirs and sometimes even falls or waterwheels made from toothpicks and plastic sporks gathered from the kitchen drawers.

Walking down the road, the forest gathers comfortable dimness around itself. The moss intrudes further into the road. And further. Until the road is only a wide path, overgrown with silver birches with small fluttering leaves and peeling paper bark. Different animals become available to the eye.

At home, only chickadees, mice and the occasional moose are seen. Here, there are tracks of all shapes and sizes and poops of various canine sources. A bright blue bird with a sharp crest flaps noisily through the woods and lands on a baby tree. The tree bends under the weight of the pudgy scrounger bird. The bird says, “BAA DIIGA DIIGA DIIGA!” Her voice is metallic, like rocks smacking into a road grader. Unlike the sound of rocks smacking into a road grader, the bird call does not bring Tom, the road crewman, out of his back yard yelling angrily. She says again, “BAAA dIIGA dIIGa!” She cocks her head back and forth, staring out one eye and then the other. She flies off.

Around a corner, the path opens up again onto a paved turnabout. Across the turnabout is a familiar house- Ricky's old house. Ricky was a good pal in first grade. Mrs. Besh was always yelling and acting hysterical when Ricky would talk a little too loudly from across the aisle. Once, she even grabbed a yard-stick and smacked him with it. She was like that. She would grab kids by the ear and haul them up out of their seats, yelling red-faced. Some of those memories bring a flush to the face, anger. Resentment. But the dirt and the water and the road and Ricky's house sitting there across the turnabout settle everything before these emotions get very far.

Ricky moved away last year. Someone else lives in this house now, and it is empty of the old sensations. The road is paved now. A different car is parked out front- one with mud all over and parked halfway on the lawn. Who would park on the lawn? Strange people. People who might be careless, oblivious to details. The kind who are dangerous to small things, creatures and people. The woods are more familiar than this familiar place. There is something about a place that has lost its tenants. Something ominous that hints at betrayal. Or maybe this is about Ricky moving away. Either way, the feeling persists until the forest has enveloped the road again, hiding the house, the misparked Bronco and the void-shining house.

Arriving again on Casey's lawn, she is gone as is the jacket. Dandelion rings and heads lay in a pile. Mom will be upset about the jacket unless Susan or Casey's mom sent it back. The brown car is gone. The wind is still talking, though. Going to the front door of the big brown house with the strawberries out front, coming to the door, reaching out a hand and turning the door knob with thumb and forefinger, the door swings inward with a push. Looking up and into the house, eyes are greeted with familiar smells, familiar dark, familiar walls. The jacket on the lawn is forgotten. The door shuts behind.

iv.

There is a boy talking.  His lips jiggle and waver and dance, sneering sometimes and grinning sometimes.  There is no smile in his eyes- just that look of hunger.  Everynow and then, the school bus bumps and shimmies, sending the boy's hair flopping across his face.  Even though the boy is talking, threatening, and laughing like a hyena… there is no involvement with the subject.  It's a dance he's performing for the other boys.  A soap opera like the western show on tv where the bad guy swaggers into the bar and spits on the floor while eying the cricket-enhancingly-quiet patrons with malice.  The piano player quits playing, but isn't listening to the outlaw's words.  The piano player keeps quiet and watches the six shooter with definite and keen interest, perhaps noting the location of the nearest exit.

The bus jounces again and the kid's hair flounces again.  Something familiar about this kid's face.  It's like Ricky's house the day before.  There's betrayal here, as though his regular consciousness has packed its bags and gone someplace else.  Perhaps his mental tenants are all asleep.  Either way, the whimsical way of his staring and vacant gesturing is frightening.  This is a potentially harmful person.  But then someone else says something about the girl two seats forward and everyone turns around, laughing in violent bursts of air.

Looking out the window of the bus, trees and houses roll by.  There goes Michael's house.  There goes Eric's house.  The glass is wet with condensation, beads of coldness.  The cheap aluminum frame doesn't quite fit- the slats that line the edges should come together to make a point at the corners, but they don't.  There's a good-sized gap between them that lets the water run down into the little, black rubber lining.  Some kind of red-green water creature, algea or mold or fungus, is drinking down there.  Making little algea or mold or fungus baby spores.  This is nice, that some water creature has made its home in a mechanical place.  Maybe it sucks the metal atoms off of the dead frame ever so slowly- turning them into life.  Perhaps it will grow and grow and grow and fill the entire bus, devouring it, transforming it.  Probably not, though, because when metal and mechanical things break they go to the dump where they get turned into junk that someday alien archaeologists will find when they excavate.  By then, all the humans will be gone and their bones will be dug up.  Some three-eyed arachnid will turn to his partner and say, “By the suns of klakturn!  I think they were descended from girraffes!  Go get the books, Slidjerbik!”  And they will find this bus frame and there will be a stain on it where this little creature ate and drank and made babies and pooped and died.

The bus stops.  Outside, a little boy with a green sweater and green backpack waits, looking up anxiously.  For the three seconds between the bus stopping and the doors opening, he seems on some pinnacle of expectation.  There has been a waiting for the bus and there will be a bus ride.  Here, between these two phases is a holding of breath, a present moment of in-betweenness as though a ball pitched high in the air stops for a split second at the peak of its arc and says, “Well.  Well.” The little boy shifts his weight from his left foot to his right.  The doors open. Ksshhshshshshshhhh-duh!  The boy looks at the driver.  The bus driver looks at the boy.   And the green backpack and sweater are brought involuntarily into the bus by the mesmerizing stare of the driver.

The stairs on all school busses are too big for little kids.  They are designed for the driver for some strange reason, and when the little kid goes to climb them he has to pull him or herself up with the handrails while taking ginormous steps.  The little boy's knees almost come to his chest as he takes these steps.  And he comes to the top of the steps and looks at the bus driver's console- the neat buttons, pedals and dials.  The spring-bottommed chair.  The bus driver's thermos of coffee on the dashboard.  He glances at these things just long enough to get a view but not so long as to incur the growl of the driver.  And then he turns to the aisleway.  Even though he hasn't found his seat yet, the bus is moving again, lunging forward and on to its next victim and eventually the school.  The green backpack shifts too and fro.  The little boy moves forward one seat at a time, grasping each and looking left and then right for a friendly face- or even better yet- a preoccupied one.  Coming to this seat, the boy pauses, finds something undesired in it, and lunges on to the next one.

It's the intentness that sends him on his way.  Mrs. Bennet called mom last year because of the staring thing.  Sitting around Mrs. Bennet's desk with papers, a red pen, a blue pen, three loose paperclips and a hair brush, they had talked.  She had said, “It's because David stares- he's so intent- and it makes the other kids uncomfortable.  And he never plays with anyone- he just goes off by himself.”  And mom had been embarrassed.  Even a little worried.  But mostly irritated.  “Maybe he's just introverted.  Have you ASKED him why he doesn't play with the other kids?”  And Mrs. Bennet had, in fact, asked. but David didn't play with teachers, either.  The rules regarding playing with teachers are even more complicated than those used when playing with kids.  Seven-year olds ask you what they want to know.  They tell you what they think.  The teachers ask you questions with hidden agendas.  They ask questions in a special voice, with a special look and a special pat on the head.  Then they tell you what you OUGHT to think.  What you SHOULD have known.

The boy sits next to a girl who stares out the window blankly.  She doesn't even look up from her inspection of nothing.

The bus brakes hiss and screech.  The bus stops in front of the school.  The kids all standing.  All shoving.  All talking and laughing.  Finally, the end of the line is even with the seat and everyone else on the bus is ahead.  Nothing for it but to go.  And the bus seats click by.  Then the bus driver's seat with dials and buttons and the spring-bottommed chair.  And the gargantuan steps.  And the sidewalk.

v.

“Dammit, Peggy!  You can't force it down like that!  Now you'll have to pull all the nails out and saw another quarter inch off it!”  “You don't have to be an asshole about it.  Just hand me the crow bar thing.”  “You mean the cats-paw.  It's called a cats-paw.”  “The god-damned nail puller!  Hand it to me.”

Mom and dad are up on the cabin roof, swearing at each other at regular intervals while fastening the plywood decking to the trusses.  From the inside, the cabin looks better without the plywood.  The trusses make sharp angles and lines that contrast against the sky.  It's beginning to rain, though, which makes a roof useful.

Dad is wearing the tool belt that he bought at the hardware store yesterday.  He also bought a hammer and a fifty pound box of nails, but somehow the hammer got lost on the way.  Now he's using his old hammer which has to be wapped against a board periodically to make sure the head doesn't fly off and hit someone.  Mom doesn't have a tool belt.  She puts the nails in her pants pockets and she pulls them out a half-handful at a time.  Sometimes, mom drops a nail and it slips down along the completed part of the roof and lands on the ground below.  Dad gets angry when this happens and says it's a waste of nails and might pop a tire, but really he is upset because mom is nailing almost twice as fast as he is and using a cheap hammer to boot.

A big gash in the hill next to the cabin reveals layers of tan sand and stone.  An excavator sliced through the hill to make the road here.  Mark is picking up all the big rocks and piling them in a spot next to a plastic kid's shovel.  As he picks them up, he examines them closely.  He rubs all the dirt away and exclaims, “This one has a red stripe!” or “You gotta see this one.  It's got gold in it for sure!”  Rushing over, it's always a plain old rock, but the excitement is contagious.  Plans are made to gather all the rocks and then split them to get at the gold.  Twenty big stones are gathered.  The largest one is dropped on the others to break them, but they are all too hard.  None will break.  Mark has an idea.  He saw a big hammer in the back of the truck that would surely smash the rocks into a dozen pieces.  Again, plans are made.

Opening the door to the truck is difficult because the handle is so high.  Finally, enough pressure is applied to the button that the latch clicks and the door flies open, smacking Mark in the head and knocking him down.  Oh no!  Is he okey? Dread and horror in the stomach.  Then expectation.  There will be crying.  Mom and dad will hear.  They will come.  There will be yelling and blaming and spanking.  Resentment begins to rise up out of the bowels of dread.  Jaw clenches.   Eyes widen.  Why did Mark have to get in the way?  Why didn't he stand on the other side?  Why didn't the little brat…

But Mark stands up entirely oblivious to the little cut on his forehead.  He clambers with difficulty into the truck and reaches under the passenger seat.  The thought of checking the cut arises vaguely, but the dread of punishment is greater.  It's confusing.  Mark seems fine.  He seems happy.  Jaw unclenches.  The dread sinks and disappears below the surface of play.

The hammer is under there but his five year-old muscles aren't strong enough to dislodge it.  He turns and grimaces- his little nose wrinkling.  He climbs down out of the truck backwards, grabbing hold of the steering wheel.  The prongs on the hammer head are stuck on the seat cushion.  By looking under the cushion upside down and guiding the hammer slowly, it comes free easily.  It's heavy and shiny and beautiful.

Because Mark got hurt and it was his idea, he goes first.  He tries to swing the hammer by the handle but resorts to holding the hammer by the head and smacking the rocks with the prongs.  The rocks scratch and mar but otherwise remain unharmed.  Pretty sparks fly.  Mark can't break the rocks and it's frustrating to watch, but taking the hammer away will make him cry and scream.  Then mom and dad will come.  So the frustration sits and stews.  It grows into irritation.  It festers.

Mark gives up and hands the hammer over, but it can't break the rocks because the sand under them is too soft and the rocks just squish into the dirt with a WHOoomP sound.  One rock is stacked on another, but they topple too easily.  An idea- why not carry all the rocks into the camper and break them there on the hard floor inside?  The floor is flat and hard- it might work.

The rocks are all carried into the camper.  The camper is an old truck-camper.  It has one narrow door, windows and table on one side, a kitchen and bathroom on the other.  The big bed is forward and up above where the truck cab would be if the camper were on it instead of sitting on jacks.  The rocks pile up under the kitchen table one at a time.  Just as it begins to rain big, sloppy drops, the last one is inside.  To keep the rain out, the door is shut.

The first rock breaks right away into two even, jagged pieces.  The inside is all sworls of shiny black and glossy white.  It's gore-jee-us.  Mark takes the hammer and bashes at a second rock with the sharp end.  It chips and splinters but won't split.  Sparks fly.  Chips whizz by.  While he whacks and beats at his rock, the fresh halves of stone absorb all attention.  Tracing the swirls of opposing colour with one finger, a pattern is felt but not entirely made out.  Both the white and black stripes seem to glow with some special opalescence.  Some signal of intelligence…. some deep, magical, singing beauteous pearl…

Mark's leg is too close to the stone.   The hammer head slips off the surface.  It strikes him in the knee.  He drops the hammer.  He howls- blood slowly drips from the gash.  He screams.  Mom yells from the roof.  Dad bellows.  They are coming down the ladder- the rungs clanging.  The rain is bouncing off the camper roof like gravel.  They are at the door.  The door won't open- there is sand in the lock.  Mark is screaming, howling, yowling, screeching.  Mom is saying to open the door, but there is only paralysis.  Dad breaks the window.  He sees the hammer on the floor.  He is saying something about the truck door being left open in the rain.  He is saying something about the dirt and rocks all over the camper floor.  Mom is climbing in through the window.  She opens the door from the inside.  She is looking at Mark's leg.  And then there is dad.  And the rain.  And fear.