All Souls (13 page)

And how did Astra Dell look? She was very thin; she wore dark clothes; she often whispered when she talked. She said, “I still get tired very easily.”

Her father said he had known all along she would get well. He said what he thought Grace would have said, that he had always been sure of Astra's recovery, convinced of it from the beginning, as who could imagine such a girl as this to be extinguished so young? No, he insisted he had always believed she would get well. In truth, he had mostly expected her death to arrive as her mother's had, mercilessly. Nothing he could do, nothing he could do, and he would offer up his life for Astra's; he was ready to take on her disease, whatever it was. He had never fully understood Dr. Byron. To stand in almost any corridor of the hospital was to stand in a cleaned-out closet with a lot of unused metal hangers jangling. That's what it had felt like to him, and all of the flowers and imported decorations, posters, teddy bears and photographs, the schoolbooks and books for pleasure, a deck of cards, a game of Scrabble, a computer—nothing could change the room where his daughter had slept for half a year. Penitential furniture, hose down, easy to clean. Mr. Dell had rarely sat in Astra's room but stood leaning against the window even
when he read to her. Reading to Astra had been a pleasure he was sure to miss, but he would not miss Dr. Byron's dull blows—”She is young; her vitality works against her; the cells thrive.” Dr. Byron's dour view of his daughter's future:
no guarantees, no guarantees.
For now Mr. Dell was saying, “My daughter is at home.” Whose business was it, besides, to know more? “My daughter is at home, thank you,” Mr. Dell said to all the well-wishers, and there were many.

The changes in Marlene Kovack had happened slowly over several months, so that her mother didn't notice until after Christmas that Marlene was in perfect uniform. (All those detentions of tenth grade over the Goth look Marlene had perfected.) Now the white shirt was white and very girlish, round collared, soft. Now Marlene wore dark tights, and her shoes were simple and thin heeled, no longer threatening. Alone of all the seniors, Marlene was taking notes in near-perfect uniform, eschewing a second-semester senior's freedom to come to school every day out of uniform. Why? “It's easier,” she said whenever asked. Marlene had reviewed for exams with Astra and had done well. Marlene was not dumb after all; she had only been lazy, as some of her teachers had always suspected.

(She hadn't thought of herself as lazy, only bored and alone.)

Was she as smart as Astra? This was a question Marlene asked herself, and though her answer was no, she was not as smart, Marlene nevertheless felt she was like Astra, growing ever more like Astra. Astra had faith; miracles were possible. On her near death, the crazy fever that might have caused brain damage, Astra said, “All I know is that the cancer cells were either cooked or my immune system finally recognized what it had to do. The scans before the fever showed new growth and after showed nothing.

“I don't want to fall behind.” Astra said, “I've had to give up on AP calculus.”

She sat up straighter and shook her head. After the hivey heat and hurt of chemo, she believed she was getting better. Clean of cancer, she believed. Faith and love and her mother's watching over her. “She was there.”

Astra said, “I had a community of faith,” and by this she meant Walden and the wider Unitarian Universalist communities and its congregants who prayed for her and with her father. She wrote in her college essay, “The leaps of faith that we take as a community or as individuals do not necessarily lead us away from suffering or strife, and they often lead us toward hard work, but they are the risks that enable us to grow, to heal, and to struggle for something better.” Was she quoting someone when she wrote, “Just as long as I have breath, I must answer, ‘Yes,' to life”? Saintly girl.

 

The tooth? That happened. Chemotherapy patients often lost or broke teeth. She smiled at Marlene and said, “See? All fixed.” Then she said, “You're completely weird, Marlene. Now that you don't have to be in uniform, you're in uniform.”

Marlene came forward and bent to the ball of her forehead and kissed Astra and touched the top of her head, Astra in her Joan of Arc hair. Would she let her hair grow as long as before?

“I don't know,” Astra said. “Short's awfully easy.”

“I am really, really glad you are home and feeling better.”

“Best ever,” Astra said, and she frowned a little. “Only I get tired,” and she shut her eyes, and by the time Marlene reached the door, Astra had fallen back against the pillows of her plump and quilted girlish bed. Marlene could tell by the way Astra was breathing just how deep a sleep it was, and when she turned back to look into the room again, Astra opened her eyes and said . . . What did she say? “Lucky I was sick.” Was she talking in her sleep? Did she say, “Don't take my mail, Marlene”?

Marlene walked uncertainly out of Astra's lobby and bumped into others and must have seemed a tourist or a stroller or a stupid, fucked teenager. Sick, sicko, fucked
teenager. She was fucked; she felt fucked. She wanted to walk into oncoming traffic.

Kitty Johnson said she was glad not to be in Mr. O'Brien's elective but that Mrs. Godwin's Families in Distress class was grimmer than she had expected.
King Lear
was not in the course description. “It's a bummer to start the day with somebody scooping somebody else's eyes out with a spoon or however the guy did it. And the quizzes. I hate to think how many of mine are on the wall of shame in the senior lounge. Besides, we're seniors. Isn't this supposed to be the slack-off, fun part of high school?”

Ufia said, “Some of us want intellectual engagement.”

“Wait until you get to Harvard, Ufia. You'll see a lot of engagement then.”

“What a dirty mind you have, Alex,” Krystle said.

“Rub my back.” Suki sat herself between Alex and Krystle, and bumped against Alex, saying, “Would you please rub my back? I'm so sore.” And Alex stopped looking at Krystle and pounded Suki's back until the girl said, “Not so hard.”

Jade, the dance coach, said, “It's too late now to think of cutting.” Instead Jade's finale included each girl giving herself a window.

“What does that mean?”

“If you'd come to rehearsals,” Krystle said.

“Bite me.”

“Nothing should happen on the extension,” Jade was saying to Lisa. “And if you have trouble with the lean and lunging, well . . . Terry will clean up on Monday.” Jade looked at the seniors. “If you feel uncomfortable, see me, but I'm not spending hours on any one dance. Those days are gone.” Then she circled the room in address. “Every choreographer,” Jade said, “you're now a dancer. Hand your dance to your people. Amen. I love you guys.”

Kitty said, “Will everyone remember etiquette backstage? Nothing back there belongs to us. Not one bobby pin. It's the drama department's. You've got to organize yourself. Put your gear in a little corner, so you know where your stuff is, all of it.”

“The show is less than an hour and a half,” Jade was saying to Lisa.

Ufia said, “Seventy-eight minutes.”

Krystle walked around the gym with a garbage bag picking up the afternoon rehearsal's refuse, the empty water bottles and candy boxes left mostly by the middle schoolers, she guessed. The coffee refuse was theirs, surely, the juniors and seniors. Upper school's indulgence: expensive coffees from the seafaring shop on the corner, the one with perfect cupcakes and, outdoors, pretty foliage in all the seasons.

“I'm sick of you guys,” Jade said to some girls lingering in the folds of the curtain. “Go home,” Jade
said, but she was not so emphatic, seeming drugged by the hallucinatory nonsense of their nonstop talk now that rehearsal was over.

“Did you know a sneeze travels a hundred miles an hour?”

“A lot of moose or a moose so no fishes.”

“But what's the plural of rhinoceros?”

“Oh, Kitty, why so sad?”

Kitty spoke quietly and out of Jade's hearing. “Seniors, don't forget your money for the flowers.”

“I'm serious. Chapters nine through eleven in
To the Lighthouse.”

“Oh great! More chapters where nothing happens.”

“Don't fret!” Suki jostled against Alex. “We'll stalk Will Bliss,” she said, and the two, bumped up against each other, shouldering past the younger girls, lugging stuffed feed bags on their backs.

“I need a suitcase,” Alex said. “This is ridiculous. I'm carrying my life.”

All of the dances had meaning, however difficult it was at times to discern given the distraction of the music, but Ufia choreographed a dance set to a smoky voice in a song about skin color. Ufia and three black dancers—Mr. Dell knew only the seniors—in yellow dresses onstage.
The dance involved something made up to look like a brownstone stoop. The girls changed places on the stoop, but their attitudes were by turns sultry, submissive, dismissive, and independent. The song played these same changes. The next dance involved girls in pajamas—Mr. Dell recognized no one, but his daughter, seated next to him, explained that Gillian Warring, the leggy girl in the blue babydolls, was only in eighth grade, which he took to mean the girl was good, but none of the girls had his daughter's grace. He sat through Alex Decrow's shrill, head-banging solo—“Is she mad?” he asked—and endured “Unbelievable” by EMF and was attentive to even the clumsiest dances, but nothing put him into a gaze, and he was taken aback by Lisa Van de Ven's aggressive movement and wondered at how thin Suki Morton was and why hadn't the dance teacher taken out a few of the weaker dances? His daughter, seated next to him, fully enjoyed herself. After spring break she hoped to come back to school every day—a half a day. “Now and again” was a phrase Grace Dell would have used, but what would she have said to Astra's friend? Car, seated next to her, was too thin by half. The other girl, Marlene Kovack, he knew from the hospital. And in the rest of the auditorium, Mr. Dell saw others from the class. Let-tie Van de Ven, of course, was there in the third or fourth row with flowers. She waved at him during intermission but seemed disappointed to see Astra. (Later he wondered if it wasn't the damn wig the woman had been hoping to
see.) Teachers came up to Astra during intermission. Mr. Dell recognized Dr. D and Dr. Meltzer and Miss Hodd and Mr. Weeks. The woman from the English Speaking Union contest, that woman, wasn't there; Mr. Dell could not remember her name, but he had seen her at the hospital. Miss Brigham came forward and talked to him: The froth of school goodwill, but Mr. Dell was grateful to the school. His daughter had always been happy in it, and the school returned his daughter's affection. The teachers who visited—and so many had come to the hospital, he couldn't get over it, by which he meant . . . he meant he couldn't get over everything that had happened. He had the sensation that he was standing in the middle of a desolate summer road and that the heat waves, the watery kind a person sees from a distance, were really waves of love, and that he was standing in this water, braced by waves of love from his community—at work, the hospital, Siddons, his wife's church; from all sides came this heat. He hoped never to forget how he had learned to love God, which was what his wife had wanted for him all along. His daughter's near extinction had left him no choice but to have faith.

“Oh, for Christ's sake,” Mr. Van de Ven said to his wife when she thrust the flowers for their daughter into his
arms at the end of the program so as to catch up with Mrs. Quirk, the college counselor. The woman was already moving down the aisle, and Mrs. Van de Ven only wanted to say hello, to say wasn't the Dance Concert splendid and how hard the girls worked. Lisa was president of dance; of course, Mrs. Quirk must know that.

“You didn't?”

Mrs. Quirk smiled. “Of course, I know.”

Mrs. Van de Ven told Mrs. Quirk how glad she was that the last applications had been mailed off; the temperature in the house was cooler.

“I should hope so,” said Mrs. Quirk, who was quick—she often put these words together—quick Quirk was quick at turning away.

Poor woman
was all Mrs. Van de Ven could think, but who poor?

The first person Lisa Van de Ven wanted to see after the concert was Josh, who said he would come, but the first person she actually saw was Astra, who waved at her and Jade. All the seniors in Dance Club received the ritual rose that marked the end of their dancing careers at Siddons, and most of them were crying. Lisa, as Dance Club president, received a bouquet as well, and for this Astra and Car were shouting, “Way to go,
Vandy!” Which was so generous of them considering, considering Astra had been Dance Club president until she took sick. But somebody had to replace her, so Lisa had put herself forward. No one else wanted the job. “Josh!” Lisa shouted out to him, and he bobbed or nodded or whatever boys did. “They're so queer,” she said to no one in particular. Damn. Her mother was in the dressing room. “Mom!”

“I'm sorry, I couldn't wait. You were all so beautiful.” Mrs. Van de Ven, jostled, backed away from the door, watching. Far-fetched hair, lots of hair, spectacularly flying free of popping hair bands, hair astonishingly clean and glassy. If she could touch it . . .

“Mother, please, we're all getting changed here.”

“All right, all right, all right, all right,” and she walked out to where the other parents were waiting with flowers.

Lisa said, “Everything looks like shit to me after my mother has seen it.”

After the Dance Concert, Marlene walked with Car and Astra and Mr. Dell to the corner. Astra was saying she was tired but happy to be out-of-doors in an unaccountably springlike spell—a spring snap—and she feeling springy, though she leaned against her father.
Marlene could not look at him; once before she had been a stranger and now? At the corner the old cut opened: She was not going their way but east, as far east as the river, though she couldn't see it from where she lived. Marlene would have liked to have explained why she stole Astra's mail, but she was afraid. Part of the reason she stole the letters was to ward off being afraid, also curiosity, jealousy. What did Car do for Astra? And the hair clip? The hair clip was to be brought nearer to Astra. It was a comfort for Marlene to hold the barrette in her pocket, the way she might a bit of bone, to caress it and so find strength enough to talk.