Out she whisked, Popchik trotting after her, leaving behind her a smell of cinnamon gum, and I turned my face into the pillow feeling crushed by my stupidity. Though I would have died rather than told anyone, I was worried that my exuberant drug use had damaged my brain and my nervous system and maybe even my soul in some irreparable and perhaps not readily apparent way.
While I was lying there worrying, my cell phone beeped: GES WR I AM? POOL @ MGM GRAND!!!!!
I blinked. BORIS? I texted in reply.
YES, IS ME!
What was he doing there? RUOK? I texted back.
YES BT V SLEEPY! WE BIN DOIN THOS 8BALS OMG :-)
And then, another ding:
* GREAT * FUN. PARTY PARTY. U? LIVING UNDER UNDRPASS?
NYC, I texted back. SICK IN BED. WHY RU AT MGMGR
HERE W KT AND AMBER & THOSE GUYS!!! ;-)
then, coming in a second later: DO U NO OF DRINK CALLED WITE RUSIAN? V NICE TASTNG NOT V GOOD NAME 4 DRNK THO
A knock. “Are you all right?” said Hobie, sticking his head in the door. “Can I bring you anything?”
I put the phone aside. “No, thank you.”
“Well, tell me when you’re hungry, please. There’s loads of food, the fridge is so stuffed I can hardly get the door closed, we had people in for Thanksgiving—what is that racket?” he said, looking around.
“Just my phone.” Boris had texted: U CANT BELIEVE THE LAST FEW DAZE!!!
“Well, I’ll leave you to it. Let me know if you need something.”
Once he was gone, I rolled to face the wall and texted back: MGMGR? W/ KT BEARMAN?!
The answer came almost immediately: YES! ALSO AMBER & MIMI & JESICA & KT’S SISTR JORDAN WHO IS IN *COLEGE* :-D
WTF???
U LEFT AT A BAD TIME!!! :-D
then, almost immediately, before I could reply: G2GO, AMBR NEEDS HER PHONE
CALL ME L8R, I texted back. But there was no reply—and it would be a long, long time before I heard anything from Boris again.
iii.
THAT DAY, AND THE next day or two, flopping around in a bewilderingly soft pair of Welty’s old pyjamas, were so topsy-turvy and deranged with fever that repeatedly I found myself back at Port Authority running away from people, dodging through crowds and ducking into tunnels with oily water dripping on me or else in Las Vegas again on the CAT bus, riding through windwhipped industrial plazas with blown sand hitting the windows and no money to pay my fare. Time slid from under me in drifts like ice skids on the highway, punctuated by sudden sharp flashes where my wheels caught and I was flung into ordinary time: Hobie bringing me aspirins and ginger ale with ice, Popchik—freshly bathed, fluffy and snow-white—hopping up on the foot of the bed to march back and forth across my feet.
“Here,” said Pippa, coming over to the bed and poking me in the side so she could sit down. “Move over.”
I sat up, fumbling for my glasses. I’d been dreaming about the painting—I’d had it out, looking at it, or had I?—and found myself glancing around anxiously to make sure I’d put it away before I went to sleep.
“What’s the matter?”
I forced myself to turn my gaze to her face. “Nothing.” I’d crawled under the bed several times just to put my hands on the pillowcase, and I couldn’t help wondering if I’d been careless and left it poking from under the bed. Don’t look down there, I told myself. Look at her.
“Here,” Pippa was saying. “Made you something. Hold out your hand.”
“Wow,” I said, staring at the spiked, kelly-green origami in my palm. “Thanks.”
“Do you know what it is?”
“Uh—” Deer? Crow? Gazelle? Panicked, I glanced up at her.
“Give up? A frog! Can’t you tell? Here, put it on the nightstand. It’s supposed to hop when you press on it like this, see?”
As I fooled around with it, awkwardly, I was aware of her eyes on me—eyes that had a light and wildness to them, a careless power like the eyes of a kitten.
“Can I look at this?” She’d snatched up my iPod and was busily scrolling through it. “Hmn,” she said. “Nice! Magnetic Fields, Mazzy Star, Nico, Nirvana, Oscar Peterson. No classical?”
“Well, there’s some,” I said, feeling embarrassed. Everything she’d mentioned except the Nirvana had actually been my mom’s, and even some of that was hers.
“I’d make you some CDs. Except I left my computer at school. I guess I could mail you some—I’ve been listening to a lot of Arvo Pärt lately, don’t ask me why, I have to listen on my headphones because it drives my roommates nuts.”
Terrified she was going to catch me staring, unable to wrench my eyes away, I watched her studying my iPod with bent head: ears rosy-pink, raised line of scar tissue slightly puckered underneath the scalding-red hair. In profile her downcast eyes were long, heavy-lidded, with a tenderness that reminded me of the angels and page boys in the Northern European Masterworks book I’d checked and re-checked from the library.
“Hey—” Words drying up in my mouth.
“Yes?”
“Um—” Why wasn’t it like before? Why couldn’t I think of anything to say?
“Oooh—” she’d glanced up at me, and then was laughing again, laughing too hard to talk.
“What is it?”
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Like what?” I said, alarmed.
“Like—” I wasn’t sure how to interpret the pop-eyed face she made at me. Choking person? Mongoloid? Fish?
“Dont be mad. You’re just so serious. It’s just—” she glanced down at the iPod, and broke out laughing again. “Ooh,” she said, “Shostakovich, intense.”
How much did she remember? I wondered, afire with humiliation yet unable to tear my eyes from her. It wasn’t the kind of thing you could ask but still I wanted to know. Did she have nightmares too? Crowd fears? Sweats and panics? Did she ever have the sense of observing herself from afar, as I often did, as if the explosion had knocked my body and my soul into two separate entities that remained about six feet apart from one another? Her gust of laughter had a self-propelling recklessness I knew all too well from wild nights with Boris, an edge of giddiness and hysteria that I associated (in myself, anyway) with having narrowly missed death. There had been nights in the desert where I was so sick with laughter, convulsed and doubled over with aching stomach for hours on end, I would happily have thrown myself in front of a car to make it stop.
iv.
ON MONDAY MORNING, THOUGH I was far from well, I roused myself from my fog of aches and dozes and trudged dutifully into the kitchen and telephoned Mr. Bracegirdle’s office. But when I asked for him, his secretary (after putting me on hold, and then returning a bit too swiftly) informed me that Mr. Bracegirdle was out of the office and no, she didn’t have a number where he could be reached and no, she was afraid she couldn’t say when he might be in. Was there anything else?
“Well—” I left Hobie’s number with her and was regretting that I’d been too slow on the draw to go ahead and schedule the appointment when the phone rang.
“212, eh?” said the rich, clever voice.
“I left,” I said stupidly; the cold in my head made me sound nasal and block-witted. “I’m in the city.”
“Yes, I gathered.” His tone was friendly but cool. “What can I do for you?”
When I told him about my father, there was a deep breath. “Well,” he said carefully. “I’m sorry to hear it. When did this happen?”
“Last week.”
He listened without interrupting; in the five minutes or so it took me to fill him in, I heard him turn away at least two other calls. “Crikey,” he said, when I’d finished talking. “That’s quite a story, Theodore.”
Crikey: in a different mood, I might have smiled. This was definitely a person my mother had known and liked.
“It must have been dreadful for you out there,” he was saying. “Of course, I’m terribly sorry for your loss. It’s all very sad. Though quite frankly—and I feel more comfortable saying this to you now—when he turned up, no one knew what to do. Your mother had of course confided some things—even Samantha had expressed concerns—well, as you know, it was a difficult situation. But I don’t think anyone expected this. Thugs with baseball bats.”
“Well—” thugs with baseball bats, I hadn’t really meant for him to seize on that detail. “He was just standing there holding it. It’s not like he hit me or anything.”
“Well—” he laughed, an easy laugh that broke the tension—“sixty-five thousand dollars did seem like a very specific sum. I have to say too—I went a bit beyond my authority as your counsel when we spoke on the phone, though under the circumstances I hope you’ll forgive me. It was just that I smelled a bit of a rat.”
“Sorry?” I said, after a sick pause.
“Over the phone. The money. You can withdraw it, from the 529 anyway. Large tax penalty, but it’s possible.”
Possible? I could have taken it? An alternate future was flashing through my mind: Mr. Silver paid, Dad in his bathrobe checking the sports scores on his BlackBerry, me in Spirsetskaya’s class with Boris lazing across the aisle from me.
“Although I do need to tell you that the money in the fund is actually a bit short of that,” Mr. Bracegirdle was saying. “Socked away and growing all the time, though! Not that we can’t arrange for you to use some of it now, given your circumstances, but your mother was absolutely determined not to dip into it even with her financial troubles. The last thing she would have wanted was for your dad to get his hands on it. And yes, just between the two of us, I do think you were very smart to come back to the city on your own recognizance. Sorry—” muffled conversation—“I’ve got an eleven o’clock, I’ve got to run—you’re staying at Samantha’s now, I gather?”
The question threw me for a loop. “No,” I said, “with some friends in the Village.”
“Well, splendid. Just so long as you’re comfortable. At any rate, I’m afraid I have to dash now. What do you say we continue this discussion in my office? I’ll put you back through to Patsy so she can schedule an appointment.”
“Great,” I said, “thank you,” but when I got off the phone, I felt sick—like someone had just reached a hand in my chest and wrenched loose a lot of ugly wet stuff around my heart.
“Everything okay?” said Hobie—crossing through the kitchen, stopping suddenly to see the look on my face.
“Sure.” But it was a long walk down the hall to my room—and once I closed the door and climbed back in bed I began to cry, or half-cry, ugly dry wheezes with my face pressed in the pillow, while Popchik pawed at my shirt and snuffled anxiously against the back of my neck.
v.
BEFORE THIS, I’D BEEN feeling better, but somehow it was like this news made me ill all over again. As the day wore on and my fever climbed to its former dizzying wobble, I could think of nothing but my dad: I have to call him, I thought, starting again and again from bed just as I was drifting off; it was as if his death weren’t real but only a rehearsal, a trial run; the real death (the permanent one) was yet to happen and there was time to stop it if only I found him, if only he was answering his cell phone, if Xandra could reach him from work, I have to get hold of him, I have to let him know. Then, later—the day was over, it was dark—I had fallen into a troubled half dream where my dad was excoriating me for screwing up some air travel reservations when I became aware of lights in the hallway, a tiny backlit shadow—Pippa, coming suddenly into the room with stumbling step almost like someone had pushed her, looking doubtfully behind her, saying: “Should I wake him?”
“Wait,” I said—half to her and half to my dad, who was falling back rapidly into the darkness, some violent stadium crowd on the other side of a tall, arched gate. When I got my glasses on, I saw she had her coat on like she was going out.
“Sorry?” I said, arm over my eyes, confused in the glare from the lamp.
“No, I’m sorry. It’s just—I mean—” pushing a strand of hair out of her face—“I’m leaving and I wanted to say goodbye.”
“Goodbye?”
“Oh.” Her pale brows drew together; she looked in the doorway to Hobie (who had vanished) and back to me. “Right. Well.” Her voice seemed slightly panicked. “I’m going back. Tonight. Anyway, it was nice to see you. I hope everything works out for you okay.”
“Tonight?”
“Yeah, I’m flying out now. She has me in boarding school?” she said when I continued to goggle at her. “I’m here for Thanksgiving? Here to see the doctor? Remember?”
“Oh. Right.” I was staring at her very hard and hoping that I was still asleep. Boarding school rang a vague bell but I thought it was something I’d dreamed.
“Yeah—” she seemed uneasy too—“too bad you didn’t get here earlier, it was fun. Hobie cooked—we had tons of people over. Anyway I was lucky I got to come at all—I had to get permission from Dr. Camenzind. We don’t have Thanksgiving off at my school.”
“What do they do?”
“They don’t celebrate it. Well—I think maybe they make turkey or something for the people who do.”
“What school is this?”
When she told me the name—with a half-humorous quirk of her mouth—I was shocked. Institut Mont-Haefeli was a school in Switzerland—barely accredited, according to Andy—where only the very dumbest and most disturbed girls went.
“Mont-Haefeli? Really? I thought it was very”—the word psychiatric was wrong—“wow.”
“Well. Aunt Margaret says I’ll get used to it.” She was fooling around with the origami frog on the nightstand, trying to make it jump, only it was bent and tipping to one side. “And the view is like the mountain on the Caran d’Ache box. Snowcaps and flower meadow and all that. Otherwise it’s like one of those dull Euro horror movies where nothing much happens.”
“But—” I felt like I was missing something, or maybe still asleep. The only person I’d ever known who went to Mont-Haefeli was James Villiers’s sister, Dorit Villiers, and the story was she’d been sent there because she stabbed her boyfriend in the hand with a knife.
“Yeah, it’s a weird place,” she said, bored eyes flickering around the room. “A school for loonies. Not many places I could get in with my head injury though. They have a clinic attached,” she said, shrugging. “Doctors on staff. Bigger deal than you’d think. I mean, I have problems since I got hit on the head, but it’s not like I’m nuts or a shoplifter.”
“Yeah, but—” I was still trying to get horror movie out of my mind—“Switzerland? That’s pretty cool.”
“If you say so.”
“I knew this girl Lallie Foulkes who went to Le Rosey. She said they had a chocolate break every morning.”
“Well, we don’t even get jam on our toast.” Her hand was speckled and pale against the black of her coat. “Only the eating-disorder girls get it. If you want sugar in your tea you have to steal the packets from the nurses’ station.”
“Um—” Worse and worse. “Do you know a girl named Dorit Villiers?”
“No. She was there but then they sent her someplace else. I think she tried to scratch somebody in the face. They had her in lock-up for a while.”
“What?”
“That’s not what they call it,” she said, rubbing her nose. “It’s a farm-looking building they call La Grange—you know, all milkmaid and fake rustic. Nicer than the residence houses. But the doors are alarmed and they have guards and stuff.”
“Well, I mean—” I thought of Dorit Villiers—frizzy gold hair; blank blue eyes like a loopy Christmas tree angel—and didn’t know what to say.
“That’s only where they put the really crazy girls. La Grange. I’m in Bessonet, with a bunch of French-speaking girls. It’s supposed to be so I learn French better but all it means is nobody talks to me.”
“You should tell her you don’t like it! Your aunt.”
She grimaced. “I do. But then she starts telling me how much it costs. Or else says I’m hurting her feelings. Anyway,” she said, uneasily, in an I’ve got to go voice, looking over her shoulder.
“Huh,” I said, at last, after a woozy pause. Day and night, my delirium had been colored with an awareness of her in the house, recurring energy-surges of happiness at the sound of her voice in the hallway, her footsteps: we were going to make a blanket tent, she would be waiting for me at the ice rink, bright hum of excitement at all the things we were going to do when I got better—in fact it seemed we had been doing things, such as stringing necklaces of rainbow-colored candy while the radio played Belle and Sebastian and then, later on, wandering through a non-existent casino arcade in Washington Square.
Hobie, I noticed, was standing discreetly in the hall. “Sorry,” he said, glancing at his wristwatch. “I really hate to rush you—”
“Sure,” she said. To me she said: “Goodbye then. Hope you feel better.”
“Wait!”
“What?” she said, half turning.
“You’ll be back for Christmas, right?”
“Nope, Aunt Margaret’s.”
“When are you coming back, then?”
“Well—” one-shouldered shrug. “Dunno. Spring holidays maybe.”
“Pips—” said Hobie, though he was really speaking to me instead of her.
“Right,” she said, brushing her hair from her eyes.
I waited until I heard the front door shut. Then I got out of bed and pulled aside the curtain. Through the dusty glass, I watched them going together down the front steps, Pippa in her pink scarf and hat hurrying slightly alongside Hobie’s large, well-dressed form.
For a while after they turned the corner, I stood at the window looking out at the empty street. Then, feeling light-headed and forlorn, I trudged to her bedroom and—unable to resist—cracked the door a sliver.
It was the same as two years before, except emptier. Wizard of Oz and Save Tibet posters. No wheelchair. Window piled with white pebbles of sleet on the sill. But it smelled like her, it was still warm and alive with her presence, and as I stood breathing in her atmosphere I felt a huge happy smile on my face just to be standing there with her fairy tale books, her perfume bottles, her sparkly tray of barrettes and her valentine collection: paper lace, cupids and columbines, Edwardian suitors with rose bouquets pressed to their hearts. Quietly, tiptoeing even though I was barefoot, I walked over to the silver-framed photographs on the dresser—Welty and Cosmo, Welty and Pippa, Pippa and her mother (same hair, same eyes) with a younger and thinner Hobie—
Low buzzing noise, inside the room. Guiltily I turned—someone coming? No: only Popchik, cotton white after his bath, nestled amongst the pillows of her unmade bed and snoring with a drooling, blissful, half-purring sound. And though there was something pathetic about it—taking comfort in her left-behind things like a puppy snuggled in an old coat—I crawled in under the sheets and nestled down beside him, smiling foolishly at the smell of her comforter and the silky feel of it on my cheek.
vi.
“WELL WELL,” SAID Mr. Bracegirdle as he shook Hobie’s hand and then mine. “Theodore—I do have to say—you’re growing up to look a great deal like your mother. I wish she could see you now.”
I tried to meet his eye and not seem embarrassed. The truth was: though I had my mother’s straight hair, and something of her light-and-dark coloring, I looked a whole lot more like my father, a likeness so strong that no chatty bystander, no waitress in any coffee shop had allowed it to pass unremarked—not that I’d ever been happy about it, resembling the parent I couldn’t stand, but to see a younger version of his sulky, drunk-driving face in the mirror was particularly upsetting now that he was dead.
Hobie and Mr. Bracegirdle were chatting in a subdued way—Mr. Bracegirdle was telling Hobie how he’d met my mother, dawning remembrance from Hobie: “Yes! I remember—a foot in less than an hour! My God, I came out of my auction and nothing was moving, I was uptown at the old Parke-Bernet—”