“A Patricia?”
“No. No Patricia Williford either. Perhaps they’ve already departed?”
“Maybe so. Could you find out for me?”
“No Jason or Patricia Williford for the last … six months, at least. I’m sorry.”
So she kept the journal, taking it home with her, and one day, when she was running a fever from the cluster of sores under her tongue, five or six of them scattered along the midline, and the shining vitric crater of an ulcer on her hard palate, she took a Stanley knife and excised a page from the book. Immediately, she felt ashamed. What was she thinking? Why had she done it? Rather than tape the page back in place, though, she folded it in quarters so that she could carry it in her pocketbook.
And now, as she did every so often, she took it out and read it:
I love watching you sit at your desk, the sun striking you through the philodendron leaves. I love that game where you draw a picture on my back with your finger and I try to guess what it is. I love those blue jeans with the sunflowers on the pockets, the ones that hug the curves of your waist. I love your gray coat with the circles like cloud-covered suns. I love the joke you told at Eli and Abbey’s wedding reception. I love how easily you cry when you’re happy. I love your question marks that look like backwards s’s, your periods that look like bird’s beaks. I love the way you stand at the mirror in the morning picking the ChapStick from your lips. I love how you laugh with your mouth open wide, and how you snort sometimes, and how embarrassed it makes you when you do. I love to think of you as that bored little girl designing adventures for herself, riding your sleeping bag down the staircase, or taking a running leap along the hallway and trying to flip the light switch in midair, or walking from your bedroom to the far side of the kitchen without stepping in the sunlight, or else you would die. I love how your eyes grow wet whenever you talk about your grandfather. I love that first moment, at night, when you trace the curve of my ear with your fingernail. I love planning vacations with you. I love how good you are to me when I’m not feeling well. I love the inexplicable accent, from nowhere anyone has ever visited or even heard of, that you use when you’re trying to sound Italian. I love the bull story. I love helping you shave that tricky spot behind your knees. I love the way your hair fritzes out in all directions when you work up a sweat. I love your many doomed attempts to give up caffeine. I love that perfect little cluster of moles on your wrist. I love the yellow tights you wear when you’re feeling—how you say?—sparky. I love every—
There the page ended.
She had not yet shut her curtains, and when a bright light swept across the window, she saw a million raindrops speckling the glass, a column of white beads tilting through them with a minute quiver as the drops along the border vacillated and were swallowed into the center.
Her phone buzzed. She read her home number on the display. It was Wallace, calling to ask if he could have some friends over for Cities in Dust, the role-playing game he moderated. “Do you mind? Tomorrow’s Friday, so there’s no school afterward. We’ll order a pizza, and everyone’ll probably spend the night. It’ll be me and Conrad and Nathan and a few others.”
“Are any of these ‘few others’ girls? You know you can’t have Camarie spend the night if I’m not around.”
“But Camarie is our Forged One!”
“Forged One or no, I’m not comfortable with it. Tell me, has Camarie asked her parents what they think about your great coed, unsupervised role-playing extravaganza?”
He changed tacks. “Camarie is only twelve, you know, Mom. I wouldn’t do anything with her. It would break the Creep Equation.” This was the lesson his algebra teacher had used the first day of eighth grade to demonstrate the practical value of higher math: you took your age, divided it by two, and added seven, “and that’s your dating boundary,” Wallace had explained to her, hunched over a cherry Danish at the kitchen table. “Any younger than that, and it’s creepy. I’m fourteen, which means I can only date someone my own age, since fourteen divided by two is seven, plus seven is fourteen.”
She had overheard enough heedless mid-game snack-break conversations to know how he and his friends really interpreted the equation. And that’s your fucking boundary. Which means I can only fuck someone my own age. She also knew that, like most eighth-graders—or at least the science fiction kids, the British comedy kids—they were all talk, all roostering, their lasciviousness just another role-playing game, a way of trying on their manhood and simultaneously mocking it.
She cleared her throat. “Be that as it may.”
She managed to lay a stress on the last word without making her discomfort audible. Or so she thought. But after four years, Wallace could derive her condition from her voice with some authority. “Your lip?” he asked.
“Mm-hmm. It’s at that hurts-to-talk stage.”
“Would you like to talk about it?”
“Ha ha.”
“All right, listen, no Camarie. But everybody else is g——eah? Hey, there’s another call coming in. I’m gonna take it, Mom, okay? See you Sunday.”
“Sunday. Be good.”
She returned her phone to her purse, then lay back and gazed at the window, waiting for another car to breast the hill, its headlights taking just the right angle to send a field of stars Big Banging over the glass.
37 ÷ 2 = 18, or thereabouts, and 18 + 7 = 25, so a certain overzealous someone who had punctuated her dreams last night by kissing her neck, disquietingly, like a lover, was too creepy for her by one year.
And a half.
A bit of tissue had come loose from between her molars. She tried to dislodge it with her tongue, and a prickle of light appeared where she had scraped the papillae. Damn. Damn damn damn. It was yet another tiny injury, almost too small to notice, and yet she worried that, like so many others, it would rupture and lose all shape, growing more and more indistinct as the pain took hold. She brought her travel kit to the bathroom, prepared a capful of hydrogen peroxide, and tipped it into her mouth. She had to be so careful with herself. And here was the question: Was it worth what it cost?
Her house was built like all the others, with its roof projecting over the front door to keep it from opening directly into the rain, and it was her pleasure upon waking in the morning to step out onto the porch and take stock of the day. This particular morning arrived hot and bright, with the sky that oddly whitened blue it became when there was no moisture in the air. She was surprised to find a fissure interrupting her lawn. She kept the grass carefully trimmed and watered, and she was sure she would have seen the rift if it had been there the day before. It ran as straight as a line on a map. She traced it with her eyes, following it across her neighbor’s yard and a few others before it vanished into the woods at the end of the block, and then back again until it dead-ended at her front steps.
But that was not the strange part. No, the strange part was the sheet of paper that was protruding from it. She picked it up and unfolded it.
Of course I am, it read.
The handwriting was familiar to her, with its walking-stick r and its o’s that didn’t quite close at the top. But it took her a moment to figure out where she recognized it from.
She spent the next few hours twisting her engagement ring around and around her knuckle. A potato chip bag was dipping and spinning in the middle of the road, and she watched it ride the breeze until a boy rode by and flattened it beneath his bicycle.
Finally, on a blank sheet of paper, she wrote, If you are who I believe you are, tell me something only you would know about me.
She was unaccountably nervous. She knelt on the porch, closing her eyes as she slipped the note into the fissure. Something deep within the ground seemed to wrest it from her fingers like a fish plucking a cricket from a hook.
For the rest of the day, every time she went outside, she expected to see a flash of white paper waiting for her in the grass. But it was not until the next morning that she found one: I love your gray coat
with the circles like cloud-covered suns.
She stared closely at the breach in her lawn. If she followed it on foot, she calculated, she would eventually reach the scorched field where she had gone to deposit her letters.
On a fresh sheet of paper, she replied, Everyone we know has seen me in that coat. It doesn’t prove a thing.
Early that afternoon, an answer arrived: I love how you laugh with your mouth wide open, and how you snort sometimes, and how embarrassed it makes you when you do.
She wrote, Well, yes, that’s definitely me.
I love the joke you told at Zach and Christina’s wedding reception.
She wrote, If this is a trick … this had better not be a trick. Is it?
I love how easily you cry when you’re happy.
So the correspondence went on, hour after hour and day after day, pushing across the distance of the soil. All his letters were love letters, delivered while she was sleeping or mopping the kitchen, weeding the garden or out buying milk. When she held them up to the sunlight, the faded marks of earlier messages emerged through the stationery: Bailey had two kittens last week, and I named the first one Bowtie, and the second one Mike! I hope you’re better now, I truly do, because I am, I tell you, I am. I think there’s something terribly wrong with me. They came in a variety of hands and were often hard to decipher. She presumed he had salvaged the pages from under the ground, a few dozen among the many hundreds of thousands that had rained down over the generations of the dead.
I love the way you stand at the mirror in the morning picking the lip balm from your lips.
I love the inexplicable accent, from nowhere anyone has ever visited, you use when you’re trying to sound French.
I love that first moment, at night, when you trace the curve of my ear with your fingernail.
Soon the situation no longer seemed strange to her. It was as if the two of them were kneeling on opposite sides of the bedroom door, sliding notes to each other along the floor. Then it was as if the door had vanished, vanished entirely, and they were simply sitting in the bedroom together. When she had crossed the threshold she could not say, only that she had. He was her fiancé—she did not doubt it—but what had brought him back to her?
It was one of those peaceful mid-April evenings with a coral sky the uniform hue of a paint sample, and from the hills of Los Angeles came the shick-shack of insects, and from the highways came the gusting sound of traffic, and because of a broken stoplight at Sunset and Laurel Canyon, she was fifteen minutes late to the bookstore, so one of the cashiers escorted her directly to the reading annex, a dimly lit room lined with shelf after shelf of remainders, where twenty or thirty people sat in poses of quiet thought or conversation, their shoulders touching as they swiveled around in their chairs, and he was not there, or at least she did not see him, and Once there was a country where no one addressed the dead except in writing, and Who was she? Who had she become? and She sensed that every word had demanded some mysterious payment from him, a fee that could only be understood by those who had already been laid to rest, and by the time she finished presenting the story, reaching the ever and the after, her eyes had adjusted to the darkness and she knew for certain—he had given up on her. It was just as well. The ulcer on her lip was still stinging, but a seal had begun to form over it, a clear bandage of skin with the texture of overlapping threads. She was recovering in spite of herself. She gave her mouth a quick investigation with her tongue. Deep in the pocket of her gums was the firm polyp of a sore, like an unpopped kernel of popcorn, that had developed without ever quite breaking the skin. On one of her cheeks was a minuscule dimpled lesion, and on her tongue itself was the same small scuff she had noticed the night before. None of them had become painful yet, though. If, after the reading, she spoke as little as possible, there was the slim possibility they would die away without getting any worse, and the ulcer on her lip would heal, and she would be graced with a few days of well-being before the next outbreak began.
She would bake a pizza—or better yet: a lasagna—and eat until she was stuffed.
She would have a long conversation with Wallace about his father.
She would find someone to fuck and she would fuck him.
A woman in the front row asked, “So that part where the dead begin to glow—is that supposed to be because they’re in pain? Because they don’t seem to be in pain. Are they?”
Well, there was physical pain, Nina answered, and there was emotional pain. This particular story offered little evidence of the former, maybe, but abundant evidence of the latter. Ever since she was a child, she answered. English Lit, she answered, with a minor in biology. No, she answered, not yet. She was afraid that as soon as she decided to incorporate it into her stories, the phenomenon would end as mysteriously as it had begun, and everything she had written would be cemented to a particular time and place. Now, she supposed. Now and here. (What else could she mean?) Constantly, she answered. At least two or three books a week. In fact, it was reading that was truly at the center of her life—experiencing stories, not making them. She was sure most other writers would say the same. No, she answered. Usually, she answered. Once or twice, she answered. Certainly she had changed since then, in innumerable ways. With her first book she had seen the world as a narrative, seen human lives as narratives. Now, instead, she saw them as stories. She wasn’t sure what had happened. Maybe she had experienced too much sickness. Maybe her sickness had made her less intelligent. Maybe her sickness had made her more sentimental. Maybe her sickness had returned her to the simple receptiveness of her childhood, when fitting people together seemed more important than taking them apart. No, it wasn’t that, she answered. She was just as interested in characters as she had ever been. But somehow she’d come to believe that characters were made up of their ideas and perceptions rather than their actions. A mistake, perhaps. She couldn’t argue with that. Yes, exactly, she answered. The traveling, she answered. The fact that she could go to work in a T-shirt and shorts, she answered, along with the privilege of participating in other people’s dreams, and most of all the thrill she got, the feeling of wondrous correctness, when a handful of words she had been organizing and reorganizing suddenly fastened themselves together, forming a chain that seemed to tug at the page from some distant, less provisional place, as if through an accidental pattern of sounds, rhythms, and insinuations she had linked herself to the beginning of the world, a time when words were inseparable from what they named and you could not mention a thing without establishing it in front of your eyes. It was the same feeling, she was convinced, that painters experienced through color, dancers through movement, photographers through light. The same feeling that mathematicians experienced through equations and actors experienced through emotion.
The sun had fallen behind the audience. In the deepening shade of the room, it was easy to see their wounds and contagions: the wrenched backs and sciatic hips, the legs cramped with heat lightning, a glittering pathology of sprains, rashes, and carcinomas. Nina sat at the table by the lectern and signed the books she was handed—a half-dozen Girls and Boys and twice that many Twin Souls, plus a mint-edition copy of her ancient small-press poetry chapbook, Why the House Loves the Fire, preserved in an acetate sleeve for the store’s first-editions case.
She had spent too much time talking and had worn the seal off her ulcer. She could feel it shining through her lips. You’ve been stung by a bee or a wasp before, haven’t you? she answered. You know how at first it’s only a faint irritation, and you can almost disregard it, but then the venom spreads and suddenly, in the smallest division of a second, the injury blossoms open and becomes alarmingly, almost hyperphysically, bright? Well, it was like that blossoming-open moment, continually renewing itself, for days and days. Yes, she answered, she had seen a doctor about it. The problem was that nobody knew what caused them. Rumors, she answered. Rumors and folk remedies. Flaxseed oil. L-lysine. Hydrogen peroxide. Warm saltwater. For a while she had tried burning them
closed with a sulfuric acid compound that left a cap of white crust over the top, but every time she used it her mouth filled with the sickening taste of aluminum foil, and often the sores would keep expanding underneath the cauterant and absorb it anyway. All the time, she answered. Because words on paper didn’t hurt. No, she answered. No. They had made a ruin of everything she cared about. She didn’t want adulation anymore. She didn’t want love. She only wanted to carve a small path of painlessness and blunted feeling through her life until she came out the other side.
Back at the hotel, before she phoned Wallace, she stood at the mirror practicing her diction. “Hello. Hello. Make me better. Make me better. This is your mother. Mother. Mother.” She would wait for him to ask her how she was doing, and “I’m better,” she would say. Which was true, or very nearly. She would be better soon. She was sure of it. The trick was to speak deliberately enough to rid her consonants of that lunging electric quality that gave her condition away, but not so deliberately that it sounded unnatural or calculated. Even the slightest measure of strain in her voice, and Wallace would pick up on it. He was like a hero in a classic detective novel: Father Brown, Hercule Poirot. She worried sometimes that she had passed her syndrome along to him, that one day in his mid-thirties he would wake to discover that his immune system had broken apart inside him like a crossette, bursting open in an eruption of pus and cankers, and everything he loved had become difficult. She hoped the thought would never occur to him. She didn’t want him to dread growing up.
She called her home number. Someone answered on the first ring, speaking with the heavy gravel of a smoker or a barroom blues singer. She thought she heard him ask, “Who am I, and how can I help you?” but in the initial air pocket of the connection, she might have been mistaken.
“I’m sorry?”
There was a whispered flurry of dudes, and then the man said, “This is the wrong number. Say good-bye. Hang up,” and the line went silent.