It made sense to me today in a way it hadn’t on the pages of a magazine at my dentist’s. Deep down in my body, I had a niggling push rising, too, a desire to go and get a cab, to go to William Ashe. I’d kept my hymen, but I’d lost more than my sandals and my panties the night that Natty happened. Was this what it felt like, to actually want sex? Did it start low in the belly, a buzzing kind of hunger?
Pushed deep into lemon-fresh bedding, pinned beneath the great god Thor, I thought, and there was a trill in my below half, like I was sitting on a speaker and it was blaring out my favorite song at volume nine, but I couldn’t hear it. I could only feel the pulse in the base of my hips.
Had this feeling sent Walcott all the way across the city in a borrowed car full of everything I owned? Did he have this crazy rhythm beating low through all his bones, calling him to his girl? I couldn’t imagine how Walcott’s long, bony body would work, would fit itself to CeeCee’s. She was built rounded and bouncy all over, like a blond me.
I said sweet things to Natty, telling him the story of Pigling Bland, a favorite of his. He was drifting off again, but in my head the pictures I saw were nothing like Beatrix Potter’s pastel talking animals. More like me and William Ashe, with his huge, fast hands and his chest like carved wood, starring in Caligula. Glorious Technicolor. Dolby surround sound.
Bring it.
Chapter 6
At the end of his workday, William’s skull feels hot, and his eyes are grainy. His brain is waxy and tight from subverting the agenda of a being that is not truly alive. Viruses might not meet the definition of life, but William knows these faceless strings of DNA and RNA contain immense will. They invade, change their host, replicate, survive. The trick is placing them correctly so they attack faulty DNA strands with sequences loaded to fix them. Because they invade, because they change their hosts, and because their will is so absolute, they are a perfect tool to correct poorly written human genetic code.
It is interesting work, but after hours of peering at computer screens and down into the microscopy, up to his eyes in the clean, white science of it, his body is a restless animal, shuddering and tense from being still. He runs five miles in loops through his neighborhood, then hits the weight room in the basement before making dinner. He likes the simple chemistry of cooking. He follows recipes exactly, and his food always comes out looking like the picture.
But in the before, Bridget liked cooking, too. She never cracked a cookbook. She dug around in the crisper and the pantry, setting unrelated things out on the counter. Goat cheese, an aging Roma tomato, leftover grilled chicken, some fresh herbs from her garden, maybe an egg. In the end, it would all agree and be a dinner. Her food shouldn’t have been better than his, but oftentimes it was.
On nights she cooked, he would keep Twyla. It was an easy, pleasant job, even though Twyla was a very busy person. He would lie down flat on the rug in front of the fireplace, and she would pad back and forth, toting things from her play kitchen to pile around him, or she’d run in circles, making a buzz sound, or clack Duplos together like huge castanets. She would pause frequently to show him one of her fat plastic animals, or climb him, or simply sit on him, backing up and then lowering her butt in the careful way of little bipeds who are not yet certain of their center of gravity. She’d perch on his side, as at ease as when she sat on her tiny, solid play chair, taking his presence underneath her for granted.
His eyes are closed, but he does not need to see to know that she is perched on his side now. He feels her there, uncharacteristically silent. She weighs one thousand pounds.
He tries to keep so still. She is welcome to crush him, if only she will stay. He wants to reach for her, run his fingers over the familiar planes of her face, feel the sprout of hair Bridget would have gathered up onto the very top of her head, but his arms are so heavy and unwieldy. He manages to lift one toward her, anyway.
“Look who’s awake,” a woman says. Not a voice he knows. “How’re you feeling, Mr. Ashe?”
A nurse leans over him. A few beds away he can hear a woman moaning. Someone is murmuring to her. He orients; he is in a hospital recovery room, with institutional green walls and a row of beds. The light is harsh and yellow, making him squint. It feels as if his eyes have been closed for a long, long time. He remembers being wheeled into surgery, and here he is, apparently out, technically closer to being a living system than a virus is.
“Fine,” he says. His voice is so creaky and weak he doesn’t recognize it.
He still feels that painful pressure on the side of his abdomen. It isn’t Twyla sitting on his side. It never was. It is only the feel of a hole in him.
He drifts until they move him to a room. It is painted the same flat, pale green and has a square, boxy television set hanging on a metal arm in the corner. There is another bed in the room, by the window, but it is empty. A new nurse explains how to work his morphine pump. All he has to do is press the button, and the pump will give him a premeasured dose. He can press it again anytime he needs it after the timer reaches zero. It is set at zero now.
He isn’t interested. Narcotics will make the fuzzy room around him look even fuzzier. They make him grind his teeth.
Then a doctor with a broad, soft-looking mustache over a wet mouth comes in to tell him how lucky he is. The bullet hasn’t hit anything vital. He should, the doctor says, still consider himself to be a person who has had major surgery, though. He will be in the hospital at least another day or two, for observation. Then he needs to take it easy. He will be off work for up to six weeks.
“You can catch up on your soaps,” the doctor says, jovial. He is very satisfied with himself, with the surgery’s good outcome. A pleasing picture appears briefly in William’s head: his own arm snaking out and punching his fist into the doctor’s slick, wet lip.
He holds his arm back as the doctor lists all the things William should not do, which include running and lifting anything over ten pounds. There is more—wound care and medications—but William has stopped listening. He is pressing the morphine button.
The pressure in his side eases as the doctor finishes and goes away. The lights are dimmed. William floats up and off sideways. He drifts along, half sleeping. The morphine is a trick; it can’t fix pain. It only moves pain over a few steps, setting it down at a distance where he can see it as something separate and not all that compelling. His thumb works the button, over and over. He floats on the drug as the endless night winds on and on. His jaw gets so tight from the narcotic that it feels welded shut.
The window takes on a faint gray glow that tells him dawn is finally near. That’s when he smells her coming. Orange blossoms and fresh-cut rosemary, creeping in under the tang of antiseptic. He should have known this would happen when he woke up in the recovery room. There, he’d felt his daughter’s weight pressing him down, so heavy that it should have sunk him through the bed and the floor, through grass and tree roots, until he’d been pushed a good six feet under the red dirt. Of course Bridget is coming.
Her scent is in the ducts, blowing out the vents, moving toward him. The air is full of her. The only strength in his whole body has been wired into his jaw. Even his bones are soft. Tulip colors move and bloom on the ceiling. He closes his eyes, but this will not stop her. He can still see her colors, washing over one another in waves on the backs of his eyelids.
“She’s coming,” Paula hisses at him from somewhere overhead. Paula has climbed a ladder so high she is at the very gates of heaven. She can see everything. She calls down, “Bridget’s almost here.”
He tries to sit up, pushing, straining up so hard he finds himself standing. He is seventeen years old, and Paula is right. Bridget is on the way. He can’t stop her, and why would he want to? He has worked so hard to get her here.
He’s in Ben Caster’s backyard. Ben, the team’s best wide receiver, has gone with his family to a wedding down in Florida. The Casters
’ house is right across from the place that used to be Shit Park. Paula calls it Holy Shit Park now because, holy shit, has it changed over the course of this school year. Old people come and sit on the benches now, to look at all the little things with feathers that have moved into the birdhouses. The birds eat from the feeders and preen themselves in the stone baths. Someone has put in a Japanese cherry. The bulbs Bridget planted last fall are up and blooming: yellow, deep pink, orange.
Paula lies flat on her belly on the roof, watching the impending Bridget’s progress. It is finally time. His jaw is clenched so tight. His heart feels constricted; his chest is one size too small for it.
“What is it with you and roofs?” William asks Paula, as she climbs down the ladder.
“I like to be where I can see people, but they can’t see me. Secretly, I was born a panther.” Paula is amped up, eyes bright with the joy of all this crime they are doing. She looks at the rockets, lined up in perfect rows, their trajectories carefully mapped and set, and asks him, “How illegal are these?”
“In Georgia? Very, very illegal,” William says, and Paula grins, bouncing lightly up and down on the balls of her feet.
William is not bouncing. His eyes are not bright. He ran nine brutal miles today, so he could be very calm in his whole body. Most of his body. Except his jaw. Except his heart. And he has a new, strange buzz in his hands, a tingle like they have been asleep and now the blood is moving again. His hands buzz with the possibility of touching Bridget.
He checks to be sure the lighter works. “You know what to do?” He has to say it through his clenched-shut teeth.
“Yeah. Stand down, Bubba. I got this. Put flame on fuses. How hard can it be?” She eyeballs the rockets. “Are these things going to blow both my thumbs off and burn the Casters’ house down?”
“Probably not,” William says, distracted. He is making sure the backup lighter works.
Paula says, “For the record, this is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen science do. Like, if chemistry was a person, it would prolly be a jack-off pimply kid with a mucus problem. But this here is like if that jack-off pimply kid bought a Porsche and banged a supermodel.”
This makes William smile, in spite of the feel of a wired-shut mouth. Paula seldom says nice things about chemistry. It’s odd, what impresses girls. Given the right equipment, William could make an acid that would eat right through the Casters’ car and smoke the concrete underneath it. But no girl would like that.
This took months to set up properly, but he wanted to make all the pieces, not just the rockets. He even made the paper, using a simple suspension of cellulose fibers in water, with grass fiber for color, and tiny, dried petals off some yard weeds suspended in the paste to make it beautiful.
He already had thirty different invisible inks and catalysts in his notebooks from when he was nine and obsessed with invisible inks and catalysts.
Once it was all finally ready, he took his handmade paper, thick and soft as stiff fabric, and used his own concocted ink to write, Go to your tulip bed in the park and stand by the post where you hung the first birdhouse. Saturday. Just past sunset. Something good will happen. He watched the words disappear, and then he put the note in a plain white envelope from Walgreens. On the envelope he wrote in regular, visible pen, This is not a love note. A love note would be scented. A love note would have words.
William wanted to write more on the envelope, to warn Bridget against throwing the handmade paper away or using it for Civics notes, but Paula said that wasn’t necessary. No girl worth her salt would use his torn-edged, elegant paper for a grocery list, especially when it was so clearly a mystery. William bowed to her superior wisdom, and Paula broke into Bridget’s locker, planting the envelope there.
“You could have put it through the slots,” William told her after.
“Nah. I would have had to bend it. Plus I wanted to have a look, see if she was on the pill. Or if she had a secret stash of porn or cookies underneath her math book.” William started to ask, but Paula shot him an amused look and said, “She isn’t, she didn’t, she didn’t, and wow, you have it so bad, Bubba.”
On Friday, Paula broke in again to place the cranberry-colored glass perfume atomizer. That, he hadn’t been able to make. He’d spent sixty dollars on it at an antiques store. He’d attached a tag with a piece of ribbon, and the tag read, This is not perfume. If it were perfume, it would be sprayed onto a love note.
It smelled like perfume, though. Like orange blossom with green, herbal undertones to cut the sweet. This took longest, as it was a considerable revision of his favorite old formula. When he was nine, he hadn’t cared much if his catalyst had a hard chemical smell, or if spraying it onto a person would blind them or burn their skin off.
Now it was Saturday night, and Paula was right. Bridget did figure out that the perfume should be sprayed onto the paper; she’d read his note. And here she came, to the right park at the appointed hour, in the right frame of mind for what Paula calls “The PG Disney Princess Lips-Only Sex Ambush.”
He holds another three minutes to give Bridget time to cross the park to the flower bed.
“Go time,” he says.
He leaves the Casters’ backyard. Holy Shit Park is no longer the worst park in Morningside, and the lamps on the tall posts lining the path are all in working order. Paula wanted to throw rocks, smash out the bulbs, but William nixed this plan, not wanting to fill up Bridget’s resurrected park with broken glass. So Paula came up with alternative vandalism. They busted into the maintenance shed and William tripped the fuses. None of the lights are working. Now William picks his way carefully across the darkened green, sensing more than seeing Bridget up ahead of him, by the bed.
The sky lights up.
William’s fireworks whistle as they go, then bang open into perfect round blooms of blue and green and gold. They drop in a host of tinted shooting stars. In the flashes of light, he sees Bridget’s face tilt up, sees her lips part. It goes on for almost three full minutes, a barrage of sound and color. He has skipped the traditional show and gone right to the huge, booming finale. In every flash he sees how wide her eyes have gone. She puts back her head, the line of her throat so lovely. She lifts her arms, reaching and laughing as the sky lights up again and again. She dances her feet, opening to all the light and sound that William has made happen for her.
He has summoned the Bridget of the flower beds. The Bridget who believes that tulip bulbs, some black-eyed Susans, and a garage-sale birdhouse can remake a park. The girl who believes it so hard that she becomes right.
William knows that science and magic are the same thing; magic is only science that hasn’t been explained yet. Tonight he has made chemistry into magic for her. He can see it in every line of her body. His heart bangs around, pushing against his ribs. His hands buzz and rumble.
The last array opens up, three small pops that open into green flowers, and then the secondary booms, huge, spraying a gaudy splash of gold across the whole of the black sky.
The final sparks wink out. There is a breathless pause in the darkness. The air itself is hot and soft. A dog is barking, very far away.
He steps toward her. Bridget turns, sensing his approach. This is the time that Paula says will be good to grab her with his shaking hands and kiss her, but he doesn’t. This is not a girl who can be grabbed. He doesn’t have words for all the ways she seems complete inside herself, but the reason he cannot use this moment to simply lay his hands on her is part of the thing that makes him want to so deeply.
As her eyes seek him out in the darkness, he has no idea what will happen next, and he is dizzy with it. He feels the buzz in his hands rising and spreading up his arms, all his blood tingling as he steps in close enough to smell her: Cherry ChapStick. Spearmint gum.
She peers at him, leaning toward him, and then she stops. She recoils, her whole body jerking backw
ard.
“You did this? You?” She crosses her arms across her chest. Her shoulders fold in toward themselves and her spine hunches. She is only a girl now, with pressed-together eyebrows and a down-turned mouth.
William thinks, The squash is disappointed.
She shakes her head and says, with almost no rancor, “You jerk.”
She turns away and starts walking off, cutting directly through her own flower bed, pink Converse high-tops sinking into the loam.
“Wait,” William says. She doesn’t wait, so he follows her. Now the buzz has reached his throat, and his eyes burn in his head. He has fucked it up, somehow. He has fucked it up by the simple act of being him. She glances back over her shoulder and sees that he is following.
“Don’t bother. How stupid do you think I am?” she asks. “What, you think I can’t read?”
“You read all the time,” William says, unable to stop stumbling along in her wake. “You walk down the halls reading.”
“You’re watching me go down the— Ugh.” She speeds up, zooming fast through the darkness so smoothly it is as if she operates on sonar. “I’ve read the back stall in the second-floor girls’ room, and I wondered, you know? I mean, yeah, you’re good-looking. Obviously. And the football thing. But still, I wondered how you got so much play. But I see now. I bet this works great, huh?” Her voice is heating up. The live, electric energy she emits is coming back into her body.
“What does the bathroom say?” William asks, pacing her.
She ignores the question. She keeps talking over him, her words coming faster and faster until they tumble over one another. “I bet this stuff, so super romantic, I bet it really makes the panties drop. You think I don’t see through this? I’m not some shiny piñata, double points if you bang me open. I’m a person. I’m a person. You think this hasn’t been tried? Well, okay, not this, with the magic perfume and the fireworks, so, points for effort, but I’m a living, breathing person.”