Althea and Oliver (3 page)

The kitchen smells like Nicky, like jasmine and rosewater and tobacco. She uses her forearm to clear a space on the table, which is littered with old copies of
The New York Times
and the rubber balls she uses to exercise her hands. Oliver's art projects from elementary school, yellowed and curling at the edges, are still well represented on the fridge. Items that have been in one place for too long resemble artifacts from volcanic areas, covered in a thick layer of dust and ash. Potted plants and ceramic figures of geckos and bullfrogs line the windowsills under the sun-bleached strawberry curtains. The rusted watering can is perched on the edge of the kitchen sink, propped up against the tower of dirty dishes. The toaster oven, filled with crumbs, is notorious for periodically catching fire.

Nicky's cigarette smolders in a carved wooden ashtray. She's not even forty, and though it's been over ten years since Oliver's dad died, widowhood has not aged her. If anything, it seems to have trapped her in a severely extended postadolescence, full of cigarettes and mood swings and antisocial behavior—despite a steady stream of would-be suitors, Nicky hardly ever goes out. And though she complains about the neighbors' silent judgment, she does sometimes give the impression that she is daring them to come over and suggest she brush her hair, mow her lawn, or empty the ashtrays. Any fleeting thoughts Althea and Oliver had entertained as children of setting up their respective single parents had been quickly dismissed by an incompatibility so incontrovertible, it was obvious even to a pair of eight-year-olds. The only company Nicky ever entertains is Althea, who loves to hear tales of her long-ago life in Manhattan, when she lived in a place called Alphabet City, walked dogs for a living, and bought her clothing for a dollar a pound at a thrift shop way out in Brooklyn. There are also occasional visits from Sarah and Jimmy, her best friends from that life. In this one, she is a massage therapist at a fancy spa, spending her days opening the chakras of North Carolina's wealthiest denizens, and her evenings stationed on the front porch with the cordless phone between her ear and shoulder, talking to Sarah.

Althea sips her smoky tea. She can see the outline of Nicky's nipples through her thin cotton thermal, and looks away.

Nicky takes a deep drag of her cigarette and exhales with a shaky breath. “I'll take him back to the doctor tomorrow—later today, I mean. Not that I even know which doctor to see. But he's not going to show up at your house in the middle of the night again.”

That doesn't sound like good news to Althea. Would she rather have this Oliver or no Oliver at all? It's so obvious, it doesn't even count as a question. “He would hate it. If he could see the way he was tonight, he would hate it. He'd be so embarrassed.”

“If embarrassment turns out to be his biggest problem, I'll be thrilled. No one ever actually dies of humiliation. I swear.”

A silence falls between them, and Althea is sure they are doing the same thing: enumerating all the invisible things that could, in fact, be fatal to a teenage boy, or at least fuck with his mind. After a moment, Nicky shakes her head and puts out her cigarette.

“Let's not get melodramatic,” she says. “It's only happened twice. Now, don't you have to go get ready for school?”

• • •

That afternoon at track practice, Althea takes her place at the starting line, tightening her shoelaces and then her ponytail. Four of her teammates are staggered across the line beside her, and though she isn't willfully ignoring them, she makes no attempt at conversation, either. Oliver has always suggested that she try lacrosse or field hockey because she might enjoy a sport where she is given a stick and instructed to wield it against others, but she isn't interested in teamwork or strategy. Her tall, slim frame is built for speed, so she sticks to track. Althea has no desire to stand in a huddle.

Dirty gray rain clouds are blowing in off the Atlantic, and there's a clamminess to the air, the kind of wet cold that gets into your bones. Althea pinwheels her arms to get some blood flowing, lazily looking over the hurdles spaced out around the track. Hurdles and sprints are her best events, the ones that are hard and fast and turn off her brain with a nearly audible click.

The first time she'd ever hurdled had been on a walk downtown with Oliver late at night, when they came across an orange-and-white sawhorse abandoned on a side street where the construction was obviously long finished. There had been a dare, or a bet, or some prize had been offered, and within moments Althea was charging down the street. She saw herself leaping flawlessly over the sawhorse when she was still several strides away, the way you know a dart will find the board's center as soon as it flies from your hand. And then she did it, hair bannering out behind her, scarcely hearing Oliver's exclamation of delight.

Today is only practice—the season's inaugural meet is still two weeks away—but she looks to the bleachers anyway, where Oliver would normally be watching. He isn't there, of course, but Coach is raising the whistle to her lips, so Althea crouches into her starter's stance. Her stomach feels like it's being thrown down a flight of stairs over and over again.

Coach blows the whistle and Althea sprints forward, pumping her arms and legs as she heads for the first hurdle, but for the first time she can't see herself making the jump, and when she leaps she's stunned to feel her toe catch and the hurdle tip behind her. She's still processing her mistake when she reaches the next one, and though she doesn't falter going over, her timing is thrown off and she's trailing all but one other girl on the track. Instead of speeding up, she approaches each hurdle with more and more caution, trying to regain some sense of mastery or confidence, but she only succeeds in overthinking something that shouldn't require any thought at all, until finally she rolls up to the finish line in last place, her face hot with shame.

She is sweating hard, not from running but from nerves and barely stifled panic. None of the other girls offer encouraging smiles or rallying cries, and Althea realizes her lack of interest in the rest of her teammates may have sown an active dislike on their part. No one is openly laughing or even smirking unsubtly, but she knows enough to understand that on a purely mathematical level, the odds are good that at least one of the four new girls lining up is totally enjoying this public display of abrupt and relentless incompetence. Althea is so busy trying to divine which one it is—she is leaning toward Mary Beth, who has had a crush on Oliver for years—that when Coach calls her name, it takes a full beat to even register.

“Carter,” Coach yells, and beckons her to the sidelines.

Althea jogs over dutifully. She likes Coach as much as she likes anyone who is not Garth, Oliver, or Nicky, and therefore relegated to the vast etcetera of humanity that constitutes “everyone else.” A middle-aged woman with short, wiry gray hair and a clavicle so pronounced that Althea finds it slightly nauseating to look at directly, Coach preceded the era of teachers who cheerfully befriend their students. She has never revealed her first name or a single personal detail or indulged in a moment of locker room gossip with the girls on her team, nor does she regard them with the thinly veiled parental affection that seems to run rampant on other sports teams. Their mutual lack of interest in the more sentimental aspects of high school athletics has contributed to an easy, brusque rapport in which Althea takes a strange pride that, even from her coach, she requires so little.

“Yes, ma'am,” says Althea.

“What's going on out there?”

“I can't see it.”

“The hurdles?” Mystified, Coach looks out to the track, as if to confirm that an obscuring fog has not swept over the campus.

“No, ma'am. In my head—I can't see the jump in my head, the way I usually can.”

Coach nods immediately. “You're choking. Overthinking it. Stop doing that.”

“I can't focus.”

“You're focusing too much.”

“Yes, ma'am. How do I stop?”

On the track, the other hurdlers have circled around and are congregating at the starting line, chatting idly while awaiting further instructions. The rest of the team is spread out on the grass, stretching their hamstrings and inner thighs.

“You need to let your mind go soft. Like when you close your eyes to go to sleep at night. Like that, except standing up. And with your eyes open.”

Miserably, Althea thinks of all the sleepless nights she has lain awake in her bed, held hostage by her inability to do exactly what Coach is describing. “Yes, ma'am.”

Althea jogs back to her place on the line.

Crouched in position, she tries to unclench her brain. Staring down at her fingers splayed lightly over the clay-red ground, she lets her vision go fuzzy the way it does when she and Oliver have their staring contests, but her mind refuses to follow. Something is different. She can feel her vanished talent like a phantom limb, the empty ache of its subtraction from the short list of her assets, and she knows with spiteful certainty that it is gone for good.

Coach blows the whistle again, but this time Althea ignores the Pavlovian urge to lunge forward, fists pumping at her sides. Instead, she watches the other girls circling the track, then she turns, ignoring Coach's shouts, and walks off the field.

“THE BAD NEWS,
Oliver, is that it happened again. The good news is that the doctors can't find anything wrong with you,” Nicky says.

“You mean they still have no idea why I keep falling asleep?”

“According to them, you're perfectly healthy.”

Sitting at the porch table, Oliver's mother is compulsively rolling her entire pouch of tobacco into slim, identical cigarettes and stacking them in a pyramid next to her half-empty bottle of pinot noir. The sun is well past its zenith, but still shines weakly through the branches of their street's namesake magnolia trees. Nicky's ashtray is already filled with a day's worth of tiny white cigarette ends—too delicate, Oliver has always thought, for a word as crass as
butts
. Her wineglass is resting on the front page of today's
New York Times
. She lifts it, revealing a series of overlapping red circles where the fibers have greedily sucked up the liquid. Bringing glass to mouth, Nicky does the same.

“What's with the alarm system?” He'd noticed it on his way out the front door, the pristine electronic keypad a disconcertingly futuristic addition to their living room. “We didn't have that before. When did we get that?”

“A couple of weeks ago,” Nicky admits. “Just to make sure you don't wander off.”

The phrase “wander off” makes Oliver think of six-year-olds on leashes in shopping malls. “But I was asleep.”

“Sometimes I have to wake you up so you can eat and go to the bathroom. Sometimes you wake up on your own, and I find you in the kitchen making sandwiches or eating ice cream until there's nothing left. When you're done, you just go back to sleep.”

“How did you get me to the doctor's office?”

“With great difficulty,” says Nicky.

“How come I don't remember any of this?”

“I don't know. You didn't last time, either.”

“What about work? Did you just not go to work for three weeks?” Oliver asks.

“I set up a massage table in the spare room, saw a few clients here.”

The sunlight makes Oliver's mouth feel strangely metallic, like he's biting down on a piece of tinfoil. He's barely been awake for an hour, but already he's anxious to the point of fatigue. Though this is his mother, his porch, his block, it all looks the same but wrong, like an elaborate set constructed to trick him into thinking he's in the right place. It's early April now, officially spring, and though he understands that it's been three weeks since he'd fallen asleep in chem lab, it's one thing to see the date on Nicky's newspaper and another to truly accept that he's misplaced twenty-one days as easily as a set of car keys. A strong breeze rolls over them like a wave before dissipating, setting the bamboo wind chimes in motion. He hates their weird clicking sound, which Althea can imitate perfectly when she's in the mood to be irritating. Wind chimes are supposed to sound like church bells for your house, Oliver's always said, not this eerie clacking that makes him think of the articulated skeleton hanging in the biology classroom. His headache pulsates grotesquely right above his eyebrows.

The first time he got sick, it was more strange than scary. For two weeks he was ravished by sleep and fever—and then it was just gone. He had come to with the feeling that he had slept unsoundly. He knew he had had a long series of uninspired dreams that weren't worth trying to recall, but also had the sense that he had spent more time in bed than his mother would normally allow. The one fragmented memory that remained was the image of Nicky sitting on his bed with her back to him, then turning abruptly to say, “Are you on drugs? If you are on drugs I will fucking kill you,” in the same exasperated tone of voice she used if he stood in front of the refrigerator for too long with the door open. And then he'd been subjected to spinal taps and MRIs and CAT scans, and after everything came back clean, the doctors had written it off as some kind of fluke. He'd missed midterms and the last two weeks of the soccer season, but catching up hadn't been unmanageable, and he did his best to go on like the whole thing had never happened.

The second time feels a little different. The idea of twice has some gravity, some weight to it, enough to frighten Nicky, he can tell. Having already been assured that it's not a brain tumor or an aneurysm or anything that involves a lot of his cells rapidly multiplying, he's not scared of the tests as much as what life will be like while they're waiting for the results. And the more time he spends at the hospital, the more they'll both start thinking of him as sick. He would be her sick child. She would be the mother of a sick child. It's too miserable even to contemplate.

Oliver's what everyone calls a “smart kid,” the kind you show your math homework to so he can check the answers right before class starts. The grades come easily; even his extended absences can't jeopardize his scholarship to Cape Fear Academy. He loves science the most. What sounds like philosophy—chaos theory and string theory, the ceaseless searching for the unified field theory that would, at last, happily marry relativity and quantum physics, hyperspace and dark matter and the universe's fundamental grand design—is exhaustively underwritten by equations and formulas. It's all still science and math. Every proven scientific principle originated with some daunting mystery that had, against all odds, been solved. This knowledge, unfortunately, brings Oliver little comfort when another bewildered doctor pulls Nicky aside to ask her if she's sure Oliver's not on drugs, then writes him a prescription for Ritalin.

The phone rings. Oliver checks the caller ID. He hands it off to Nicky, saying, “It's alternate universe us”—his nickname for their mirror family who stayed in Manhattan, unburdened by children, when the McKinleys moved to Wilmington, North Carolina, and who remained intact when the McKinleys were fractured by the loss of Oliver's dad. Once, they had all been friends up north—Sarah, Nicky, Jimmy, Mack—and sometimes Oliver wonders what would have happened if he'd been raised in a city of eight million, if Nicky had not left the place she so loved and then been widowed before she'd turned thirty. If he'd grown up riding subways and buses instead of bicycles and skateboards, how much of Oliver would he still be? And how much of Nicky had been subtracted the day his father died in that car accident?

“I'm going over to Althea's.” Just descending the porch steps makes his calves ache, an unnecessary reminder that he'd been atrophying for three weeks. He turns to his mother, who is staring at him, ignoring the still-ringing phone in her hand. “Why do you look so worried? The doctors say I'm perfectly healthy.”

• • •

Althea's house is filled with antiques and artifacts—crystal vases perched on mahogany end tables, casting their prisms of wintry light onto Persian rugs; clay pots and arrowheads and ancient terra cotta tiles propped carefully on glass bookshelves—items her father, Garth, has casually acquired during his many travels. Althea has never accompanied him. Oliver navigates the first floor with obsessive caution, still unsteady on his feet as he follows the scent of fresh popcorn toward the basement stairs.

Althea's on the couch with her sketchbook laid out across her lap, eyes comically widened and hand hovering over the cup of pencils on the coffee table, frozen in place at the sight of Oliver. “I don't care how hungry you are, we're not going to Waffle House.” She indicates the red ceramic bowl of popcorn. “Eat that if you're hungry.”

“Who said anything about Waffle House? Waffle House is disgusting,” he says.

“Oh thank Christ, you're back to normal.” She throws open her arms and he dives onto the couch, into her embrace, sending her pencils and sketchbook flying. “You're Real Oliver again, thank you, sweet merciful baby Jesus, thank you, thank you. How are you doing? Are you okay? Did you just wake up?”

He breathes deeply, savoring the moldy-sponge smell of their informal headquarters. Althea's basement is where furniture goes to die, where food can be spilled and the rug trodden upon with abandon. The couch cushions are dried out and cracked in places, their fake black leather flaking off into the gray shag, although that doesn't stop Althea from sleeping down here most nights. Battle-scarred side tables sit on either end of the couch, across from the television that takes a full minute to warm up while the tube shivers audibly inside it. There are cardboard boxes piled in the corners, mangled from surrendering their seasonal contents year after year—Christmas ornaments, Halloween costumes, camping gear. Even the duct tape holding the recliner's seat together is coming apart, unraveling on the sides in sticky silver threads that Oliver sometimes finds on his clothes long after he's gone home. Squeezing his eyes shut, he buries his face in Althea's neck, where he can best smell her coconut shampoo and the dull, clean scent of her soap. She strokes his hairline and murmurs a series of indistinct soothing noises.

“Why did you think I wanted Waffle House?” he asks.

“I guess Nicky didn't mention our excursion?”

“No, but apparently she installed an alarm system so we wouldn't have another one. What happened?”

“You woke me up in the middle of the night and you said you were hungry. You wanted Waffle House. I tried to pick the one with the fewest health code violations. And then it was like—Do you remember that obesity study we learned about in biology? The one with all the fat mice? It was like that.”

In the study, scientists removed the gene that tells animals to stop eating when they're full. The control group, chromosomes intact, remained trim and lively, while the experimental mice grew in size until they resembled furry scoops of mashed potatoes. In the pictures, their feet didn't even show. There had been a close-up of a fat mouse's face, its eyes haunted and insatiable, as though it were pleading “Help me” and “Feed me” at once.

“That's what I was like?” Oliver asks. “A voracious rodent in distress?”

“If I were to list everything you ate that night, you would never stop throwing up. It wasn't just the eating, though. You were all id without the lid. Here,” she says, picking up the sketchbook. “I drew it for you.”

He snatches the book from her hands, paging past old drawings of the two of them driving in her car and lying on the beach and dancing in the pit at Lucky's, random moments she's chronicled from the previous year. She narrates the story as he absorbs her visuals of that night's events. Here he is, wandering into the basement; here they are, walking down the side of the highway under the streetlights; here is a mortified Althea, watching as he throws the syrup across the restaurant; here is his own face, unrecognizable. Althea has added a close-up of the fat mouse for comparison.

He thinks of the homeless people he sees downtown sometimes, a dozen garbage bags filled with cans and bottles strapped to their shopping carts, forming a hulking structure they coax along like a reluctant circus elephant while carrying on twitchy, one-sided conversations. No one comes out of the womb like that; it happens later, and Oliver wonders if it's starting to happen to him.

“So it was some sort of psychotic break, right? I'm crazy, I'm literally one hundred percent bona fide batshit crazy. I'll end up one of those sketchy guys who sits in the library all day, rocking in my chair and writing in my journal about my imaginary enemies until Nicky shows up begging me to take my medication.”

“Don't start making your tinfoil helmet yet, please,” Althea says. “I really don't think you're going crazy.”

“How do you know?”

“Because you're lying here worrying about going crazy.”

“That's it? That's all you have for me?” Oliver asks, annoyed.

“Look, I wish I knew more, I wish I had more answers, but I don't. I'm just as scared as you—”

“I seriously doubt that,” he says, and regrets it immediately.

Sitting up, she pushes him away so roughly, he almost tumbles off the sofa. “The only thing that could possibly be scarier than not remembering the last three weeks is remembering them fucking perfectly.”

“Okay, I get it, I'm sorry—”

“I watched you disassociate over hash browns,” she shrieks. “It wasn't cool.”

“Okay, okay, please, calm your jangled nerves. I'm sorry.” He holds her tight until he feels the outburst gently halt, like a car pulling into a parking spot, and her rigid body relaxes as though she has just turned off the engine and engaged the parking brake. He knows she's right. There is not a single injury that has befallen him—his broken wrist when they were nine, the fiery case of chicken pox that confined him to his bedroom for ten days the following year, every disfiguring sunburn, bubbling runny nose, and strawberry-skinned knee—that she has not suffered with him, either in actuality or in her heart. “Nicky wants to take me to another doctor.”

“But you're fine now.”

“I'm fine
for
now,” he corrects her.

Althea chews a piece of her hair, a nervous habit that replaced the illicit thumb-sucking of her childhood but abated, mostly, when she joined the track team freshman year. It flares up when she's sleep-deprived, overcaffeinated, or stuck in traffic. Watching her absently work the lock between her molars, he thinks—and not for the first time—that it's a small miracle she hasn't started smoking yet, and also a foregone conclusion that she will. She pulls her sketchbook back onto her lap.

“What are you working on now?”

She turns back to the present. “It's a dead frog,” she says. “It's good, right?”

Her illustration of an ill-fated dissection frog is only half-finished, but rendered thus far in the eerie, Victorian style of old-fashioned anatomical drawings and vintage medical textbooks. She's even drawn the thin silver pins stuck through the webbed feet to keep the creature stretched out and firmly in place. The skin of the belly has been sliced down the middle and peeled back to reveal the internal organs, which she's labeled with Roman numerals. He studies the illustration for a long time.