Goldengrove (21 page)

Then I thought of Elaine. She’d be home by now. For the first time, I was almost glad that she was having an affair with my father. It meant that I could confide in her and she couldn’t judge me. It meant that neither of us could pretend that people did things for good or intelligent reasons, or for any reason at all.

I didn’t deserve to find Elaine at home, but there she was, at her kitchen table. She hadn’t washed her hair for a while; the soles of her feet were black. She smiled when she saw me, and her face was as lovely and serene as those of the painted saints being thanked by the resurrected children.

“Is Tycho around?” I don’t know what possessed me to pretend I’d come there, streaky and out of breath, to hang out with her kid.

“In his room,” she said. “Jesus, Nico, where have you been? What have you been doing?”

“Riding my bike,” I said. “Can I talk to you?”

Elaine said, “Oh, my God, Nico. I thought you were finished with that asshole.”

“
Now
I am,” I said. “Believe me.”

“I believed you the last time,” she said.

I told Elaine what had happened. She listened patiently till I was through, then waited to make sure there wasn’t more.

“What a mess,” she said. “Swear to me, Nico,
swear
to me it wasn’t worse than you told me. Swear to me he didn’t—”

“He didn’t. You’re not going to tell my parents, are you?”

“You have to,” Elaine said. “You should have told them already. And you
will
. Immediately.”

“They’ll kill me,” I said.

“They won’t,” she said. “I promise you that. Do you want some iced coffee?”

“Sure,” I said, though what I really wanted was a break in the conversation. Elaine brought me a glass. I was glad I could focus on stirring the sugar when I said, “Elaine, don’t get mad, but I need to ask. Are you having an affair with my dad?”

“No,” she said. I glanced up. Her expression reminded me of how my mother had looked when I’d asked her if they named me after Nico. The look of an adult teetering on the needle edge of a lie.

“I’m not,” she said. “It’s nothing like that.”

“But?”

“But nothing.”

“But something. Something happened.”

“All right. Once. Your dad and I were sort of involved. For about a minute.”

“When?” I said.

“Years ago. Years and years ago. Tycho wasn’t even a twinkle.”

“Was I a twinkle?”

Elaine didn’t answer.

“Before me? Tell me, Elaine.”

Elaine hesitated. “Just before you were a twinkle. Maybe you were. But I don’t think anyone knew it.”

“How
could
you?” I said.

Elaine pushed the hair out of her eyes and blew at it until it fluttered. “I don’t know how to explain. What excuse I can make. You dad was so good-looking. It felt like something I
had
to do. It didn’t seem like a choice. We were all young. I mean, younger.”

“And?”

“And nothing. Nothing happened. Nothing was going to happen.”

For a moment, I almost wanted to slap her friendly big face. Then she turned back into Elaine. And she was right. My father hadn’t left us. Had my mother been pregnant with me? Nothing happened. That was a lifetime ago. My whole lifetime, in fact.

“Why did Dad do it?” I said.

Elaine said, “I’d prefer to think because he liked me. But I don’t know. I really don’t, Nico. I never asked. I didn’t feel I
could
ask. Who knows why anyone does anything?”

I said, “I know what you mean.”

“I
bet
you do,” said Elaine. “Anyway, it stopped as soon as it started. He was in love with your mom. I mean,
is
in love with your mom. And you. With your family. I don’t know, Nico. It’s past. It’s like it never happened. We’re friends. Why didn’t you ask me earlier? Do you think it would have been easy for me, covering for you and letting you hang around here if I was sleeping with your dad?”

I couldn’t do the math. I had to ask, “Is Dad Tycho’s father?”

Elaine looked truly horrified. “Jesus, Nico, what kind of person do you think I am? Have you ever
met
me? Do you think I could not tell you something like that and then one day say, ‘Oh, by the way, meet your little brother.’ For the record, Tycho’s dad’s name was Casey.
Is
Casey.”

“Where is he? What does he do?”

“He taught environmental studies at the community college up in Edgemont. Then he got a better job somewhere else.”

“I didn’t know they had environmental studies at the community college.”

“They do. Or they used to. But don’t even think about going there.”

“Does he ever see Tycho?”

“A couple of times. It didn’t work out. They didn’t get along.”

Neither of us spoke for a while. Then Elaine said, “What I
will
say is that I’m probably the only person in the world who’s read your father’s book.”

“How is it?” I said.

“Really interesting. Maybe a little more than you want to know about the end of the world. But a page-turner, sort of. And we’re not going to let him call it
Eschatology for Dummies
, are we?”

“No,” I said.

“My God, Nico, you could have been hurt. That lunatic could have raped you. What the hell were you thinking? That guy could have killed you. So let me say it one more time. You need to talk to your parents. I’m calling your father right now.”

“Go ahead,” I said. “You might as well. I’ll hang out with Tycho till they get here.”

“Tycho would like that,” said Elaine.

I found Tycho in his room, lying on the floor, staring up at the ceiling.

“Hi, Tycho,” I said.

“Hi, Tycho,” he said.

“What’s up?” I said.

“What’s up?” he said.

“Don’t you get bored doing that?” I said.

“Don’t you get bored doing that?” he said.

“You don’t look all that happy,” I said.

“Hi, Tycho,” he said.

“Never mind,” I said. I waited for him to repeat it, but instead he said, “Hi Nico,” which, from Tycho, was the equivalent of a bear hug.

I said, “It’s suffocating in here.”

“I hate the breeze,” he said.

“Why?” I said.

“I hate it on my face,” he said.

“You need to breathe,” I said.

“I do,” he said. “I breathe all the time.”

“Okay,” I said. “Whatever. Want to play Doom Invaders?”

“Doom Invaders,” Tycho said. “Yeah!”

“Okay, let’s,” I said.

Tycho got up. We played Doom Invaders. I let him win. He would have won anyway. I kept looking over at him. He was inside the game. He and the keyboard were one. Leaving his body and entering another dimension wasn’t a fantasy he was trying out, and failing. I knew his life was hard, that he went to special schools and camps because he’d been beaten up by kids at the public school. But for a moment I envied him, though I couldn’t have said why.

Tycho said, “Your sister died.”

I said, “Yeah. She did.”

“I know that,” Tycho said.

“It’s sad,” I said.

“Please don’t touch me,” he said.

“You know I won’t,” I said.

We played more video games. Tycho won every time.

Finally he said, “Your father’s here. I hear him.”

But it was still ten minutes before my father showed up.

M
Y FATHER SHUT THE STORE FOR THE DAY AND DROVE ME HOME
. Luck was finally on my side. Sally wasn’t at our house, and Mom seemed almost normal. We went out to the porch.

By then, I was calm enough to tell them the least alarming version of the story. I said I’d been hanging out with Aaron, things had spun out of control. Nothing serious, finally. Just a bit scary and strange.

“I’ll kill him,” said my dad.

“That’s not helpful,” my mother said. “Finish, Nico. What do you mean,
a bit
scary and strange?”

“It was like I had a crush on him.”

“A crush? What does
that
mean?”

“Nothing. That’s it. That’s all.” They couldn’t have handled the details. They both would have wanted to kill him.

My father said, “This can’t go on, Nico.”

I said, “It won’t. I swear. I swear it on my eyes.”

“You swear on your
eyes
?” my mother said. “Where did you learn that superstitious crap?”

Dad said, “Shouldn’t we call the police? Shouldn’t we talk to a lawyer?”

I said, “I need you not to do that. If you do, I’ll deny it all. I’ll say nothing happened.”

For the rest of the afternoon my parents and I sat on the porch. It would always be the porch on which we’d waited for them to find Margaret. I wondered if I’d ever confront my father about what Elaine had told me. She was right. Nothing happened. I didn’t want to know more, no more than I’d wanted to hear about Aaron’s sex life with my sister.

Outside the crickets were singing, a regular performance, syncopations, call and response, a cricket hallelujah chorus. I imagined they were singing to us, and that when they stopped, my parents and I should applaud or somehow let them know how much we’d enjoyed it. That was how Margaret would have thought. I imagined correcting her, telling her that the crickets were either calling or courting, the loud chirp was the come-here call from the male to the female, the quiet chirp was his courting song when she was finally near.

During an intermission in the cricket symphony, my father said, “How about pasta with calamari and zucchini?”

“Zucchini?” said Mom.

“Trust me,” said Dad.

“Sounds delicious,” I said.

My father said, “Good. Because that’s what we have.”

Then I said, surprising myself, “I think I’ll go for a swim.”

“Really?” my father said. “Are you sure?”

“Really,” I said. “Be careful,” Mom said. “The algae . . .”

“I’ll be careful,” I said.

I went and put on my bathing suit, which was too big for me now. I’d have to buy a new one. I’d have to gain back some weight.

The water slid apart for me. It was happy to have me back in. It stroked my skin and kissed me. The lake seemed to be whispering in my ear, telling me what I already knew. It said it wasn’t the water’s fault. It hadn’t meant to hurt Margaret.

I flipped over onto my back and skimmed the surface, like a bug. Then I raised my head so I could see the beach. My parents were watching me from the dock. They waved, and I waved back.

Sixteen

L
ITTLE BY LITTLE, WE SURFACED FROM THE DARK, GLUEY DEPTHS
of that summer. Bobbing into the blinding light, we had to relearn how to breathe. Missing Margaret was still painful, but the agony subsided, and someone—perhaps some compassionate angel— had lowered the volume of the siren song that so nearly took us down with her.

I no longer expected Margaret to contact me from the beyond, and I stopped trying to analyze each new stage of my relationship with her ghost. It was hard, letting go. But if I’d learned anything that summer, it was how essential it was to hold on to the here and now, the one thing after the next.

Mom made us go with her to the town dump, where she scattered her pills like ashes. Neither Dad nor I bothered asking why she couldn’t just have thrown them out or flushed them down the toilet.

“Bye-bye,” she said, when the last bottle was empty, and somehow I knew she meant it.

Her friendship with Sally ended. I wanted my father to throw Sally out of the house, like a saint casting demons out of a madman in a Sienese painting. Dad said exorcism wasn’t required, and he turned out to be right. Mom got rid of her prescription meds, and Sally stopped showing up.

Once more, Officer Prozak proved to have been a deep well of misinformation. My mother’s recovery was less difficult and more permanent than the DARE program had warned.

Near the end of summer, we decided to take a vacation. And even though school was starting, we left for two weeks in Rome.

From the moment we got through security, where a guard pulled my underwear out of my backpack for the whole airport to see, everything delighted me, everything made me happy. I loved the gauzy light of the plane filled with glowing passengers waiting to be raptured and set down amid the tall umbrella pines and the pointed shrubs. On the cab ride into the city, we sped past a fountain of writhing serpents spitting diamonds into the traffic.

Our taxi driver stopped and waved us into a market stocked with glossy fruit, iridescent fish, plump attractive vegetables that didn’t exist at home. An old man was demonstrating a vegetable peeler that turned carrots into pig’s tails. At the edge of the market was our hotel, where they were expecting us, and where the handsome young desk clerk let his gaze hover ever so lightly on me, and then flashed me a smile so quick that only I saw it.

None of us were sleepy, and we left the cool lobby and headed back into the broiling city where no one knew us, no one pitied us, no one knew what we’d lost.

I loved the arches, the Colosseum, the monumental reminders of how time layered over everything, cementing in the gaps, repairing or covering over what was cracked and broken, pressing it down into the earth and building on top, and on top of that. At every moment, or, to tell the truth, every
other
moment, I thought how Margaret would have loved it. But Margaret had never been there, and no matter how hard I tried to see it through her eyes, I was the one who twisted through the dark alleys and squinted when a plaza went off like a flashbulb. By the time I blinked, the open space had become a circus. Fried artichokes, mosaics, incense, the spires and domes of churches. Even the car exhaust was sexy. I felt that the city was revealing itself in glimpses that I alone saw—sights saved for me, intended for me, as if the city knew me, because I was someone who
could
be known, who would love certain things and not others.

We were lost more often than not. My father had read all the guidebooks, but Mom had control of the map. Dad and I tried not to fidget or feel embarrassed as we stood on a corner and she turned and turned it.

I was only annoyed at my parents once, for their starchy New England opinion that St. Peter’s was gaudy. Gaudy! I worshipped each curve and scallop, the way the vaulted ceiling sucked the thoughts right out of my head. I even liked the disturbing sexual buzz I got from gazing at the smooth marble arms of the dead Jesus in Michelangelo’s
Pietà
.

In the Sistine Chapel we sat on benches and looked up. I raised one finger like a lightning rod, as if I could make the God of Creation bypass Adam and lean down and touch me. I couldn’t imagine leaving my body and entering
that
painting. What portal would I have gone through? After a while, my eyes began to feel gritty, as if the saints were scratching their dandruffy beards above me.

Our visit to the Vatican was a pilgrimage of sorts. My father had come to see Fra Angelico’s
Last Judgment
in the Pinacoteca. I almost hoped we wouldn’t find it. I was afraid that the picture might remind me of my Sienese art book and all its shaming Aaron-related associations. But the husks of those memories must have dropped away over the ocean, and the
Last Judgment
was only itself, shimmering and enchanted. How astonishing that one painting could tell so many stories. If you’d been good, you died with perfect skin and hair, and you shuffled—with maximum dignity, considering you were naked—in an unhurried airport line ascending into heaven. If you were bad, you burned in hell. The sinners were still wearing their clothes and had just that moment figured out where they were going forever. Salvation, redemption, the afterlife. Aaron would have loved it. Where was my sister in all this? Nowhere, and right beside me.

My father said, “
That’s
my cover.” At first I had no idea what he meant. I’d forgotten about his book. I recalled him saying he wanted to use the painting of the lemon-tree paradise, but he didn’t remember, and I didn’t remind him.

“Good idea, Dad,” I said.

The Roman Forum was my favorite place. It was love at first sight. The first time we went, it was twilight, the air had a bluish cast, and we had to rush because the gates closed an hour before sunset. I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to spend the night there. My parents promised we could come back, but I said I’d meet them in twenty minutes and took off running, like a kid.

I ran and speed-walked till I was out of breath. I leaned against a railing and had a mini-hallucination.

Slowly, the Forum repaired itself, like an animated cartoon. The pillars rose, the weeds receded, the walls piled brick on brick, the Senate and the streets and basilicas recovered their shimmering glory. I saw how the imperial center had looked when men in togas had strolled along the cobbled avenues and plotted assassinations and made plans to rule the world.

The cartoon ended. I got up and wandered around. Every stone was glowing, every patch of moss, every shred of garbage. It was a playground, built and knocked down to my exact specifications, a pleasure garden designed just for me, historic but unhaunted. I wanted to go there every day. I wanted to spend all day there.

The city had risen around it, two, maybe three stories high. That seemed at once amazing, comforting, and scary. The Forum was physically lower than anything in Rome, and maybe that was why we were drawn there, like water, by its gravitational pull. It was where we’d suddenly find ourselves when we’d thought we were lost.

Our hotel was nearby, and my parents let me go to the Forum alone in the early morning if I promised to be careful crossing the traffic circle. On those mornings, the Forum was my own ruined city, and later in the day I managed to feel alone there even when it was crowded.

My father had the
Blue Guide
, and when we went to the Forum together, I had to listen to him read aloud, what god had been worshipped in this temple, what that pillar had supported. It was boring. I felt I knew it somehow. I could have recited it along with him. If I’d believed in previous lives, I would have been sure I’d lived there.

One day, while my dad was droning on, I noticed a woman moving strangely around the Forum, ducking and weaving and looking behind her as if she was being followed. I was sorry she saw me watching. The woman had witchy lamp-black hair and wore an elaborately tied, printed scarf and a shiny silver raincoat. She approached us and said, in a heavy New York accent, “You guys wanna guide?”

“No thanks,” said my father. “We’re fine.”

I liked it that my parents wouldn’t dream of making me take a tour, standing there, not knowing where to look, pretending to listen to an overly talkative stranger. And then at the end there might be some embarrassment about money.

The woman said, as if to someone behind us, “Assholes. They think they know shit about the Caesars.” Then she stalked away.

My mom said, “I think she liked you, dear.”

“Great,” said Dad. “I’m flattered.”

A little later, I wandered away from my parents. As I turned a corner, I thought I heard someone mumbling. I tracked the sound toward a mossy cave that reeked of mildew and rot.

Inside the cave was the witchy guide, bowing toward a stone altar, chanting some gibberish incantation. The sky had darkened. The air smelled of rain. I heard a growl of thunder. Crisscrossing the altar were long-stemmed roses in cellophane tubes, like flowers that boys might buy their dates for the senior prom.

I backed away. On my way out, I stopped to read a plaque. The grotto was the altar on which they’d lain Caesar on the night he was stabbed in the Forum.

As I hurried to find my parents, I had the strangest sensation. It seemed to me that I passed myself, hurrying in the other direction. The filthy, hungry-eyed Nico rushing toward the cave was the girl I’d been that summer. She was running because she’d read about the Roman oracles and because she thought that the crazy guide might have a message from her sister.

I waved to my other, earlier self. I pitied her. I wanted to help her. But I wasn’t her, not any more. I was going the opposite way, and not even the staircase spirit could have convinced me that I was headed in the wrong direction.

I
N THE FALL WE RETURNED HOME
. The minute we walked into the house, all three of us knew we couldn’t live there any more.

The lake smelled like a sewer. The algae had won, after all. The water looked like spinach left to blacken in the fridge.

I went to school for a couple of weeks while our house was on the market. That was when I discovered how short people’s memories are. I was just Nico again, not the girl whose sister had drowned. I wasn’t the same person, but it was too hard to explain.

We sold our house to a retired couple, who bought the bookstore along with it. We moved to Boston. Somewhere along the way, Margaret’s possessions were absorbed or disappeared or went into storage.

Things turned out all right for us. As well as could be expected.

My father’s book was published. It was called
The End of Days
and had the Fra Angelico cover. People bought it and liked it. My mother got a job giving piano lessons in an after-school program for kids. Her arthritis, or whatever it was, went into remission. Every so often my father wondered aloud if her illness had come from the dampness at the lake, and we would all fall silent and wait for the breathlessness to pass.

I finished high school, I went away to college. I looked more like Margaret, and then less like her as I passed the age at which anyone could have said what she would have looked like. There were terrible days, even weeks, when I felt her spirit haunting me, and not in a friendly way. I came to understand that Margaret’s death was an entity, separate from Margaret. My sister would always love me. But her death was a monster that would rip me apart, if it could. Time passed; the monster aged and lost some, but not all, of its power to ambush and wound me.

Occasionally, a stranger would ask if I had siblings. For years, I felt compelled to say I’d had a sister. I used to explain that she had drowned when I was a teenager. I hated the responses. Discomfort and pity, mainly. I started simply answering no, which was, strictly speaking, true. The question was in the present tense: Did I have any siblings?

I moved, changed cities, moved again. Until, after a while, people had no idea I’d ever had a sister.

Of course, my husband knows, as do my close friends. I told my children when they asked about that photo my father took of their grandmother, their mom, and that other girl doing yoga by the lake. My children never asked again, and we don’t discuss it.

I dream about Margaret from time to time, dreams in which she and I are the age we were when she died. Sometimes I wake up in tears. More often than I would expect, I catch sight of her on the street of a city where she never was. There ought to be a word for that: seeing the dead in a stranger. Some special phrase, like déjà vu, or the spirit of the staircase.

When I was pregnant, and everyone in the supermarket felt free to predict the baby’s sex or offer child-raising advice, I’d think of the bookstore customers who told me not to make any decisions for a year. It makes sense that birth and death are what people have in common. They want to think it can teach them something they can pass on to someone else.

The memory of my romance with Aaron faded into a detail of that summer. I never saw him after the day I ran away from his cabin. For a brief period, while my parents were selling the house, I hoped and worried that I might run into him, in town. I have no idea where he went or how his life turned out. I’ve searched for him on the Internet. Maybe he left the country.

M
Y HUSBAND AND
I
ARE GEOLOGISTS
. It’s crossed our minds that, after all the trouble I had early on with water, my attraction to earth and stones might not be accidental. But I think it has more to do with my lifelong worry about the planet and my lifelong desire to help stave off the end of the world.

Our work takes us to foreign countries. For years, we brought our children along. And so it happened that, one afternoon, my husband and I, our daughter and son, found ourselves in a small museum in a provincial French city.

It was one of those sleepy museums in which the smell of dusty velvet, old varnish, and floor polish induces a swampy exhaustion that makes walking from room to room feel like trudging through water. The paintings were grouped, as they often are, by subject matter, so that the many slight variations keep you from focusing on any one floral explosion in a roomful of bouquets, any one windmill or velvety cow grazing by a stream.