The Best People in the World (23 page)

“We can't do that,” I said.

“Did you give them your word that we'd look after her?” Shiloh asked.

I said I did. “She's only going to be here for a few days,” I repeated. “Gregor's brother came by to drop her off.”

“Goger!” shouted Sonya, transforming the name.

Alice picked the girl up and cradled her.

“Where's your mommy?”

Sonya sucked on her pointer finger and then aimed it at Shiloh.

Alice said, “I don't believe that they take children away in tax cases.”

“You're wrong,” said Shiloh. “That's what the government does. They get one thing on you and then they use it to tear you apart.”

“Thomas did the right thing,” said Alice.

“How do you mean?” Shiloh asked—we were both surprised to hear she'd reached that conclusion.

“God only knows where she might have wound up if he'd refused to take responsibility.”

The girl's head dropped onto Alice's shoulder. She was asleep.

Alice rolled her eyes. “We'll take her back in the morning.”

“Wait a sec,” said Shiloh.

But no amount of waiting would be sufficient for him to find an argument to counter Alice.

The three of us went upstairs. Shiloh and I laid towels out on the floor. Alice placed the girl on the makeshift bed.

We all tiptoed downstairs. What we found was a changed house. It moved all around us; breathing it in made us feel like better people. The temperature had dipped, which provided the excuse for us to crowd around the stove. Shiloh made a pot of coffee. Our spirits were high. I would never have friends like the friends I had in that room.

14

The Tale of Foolish Curiosity

In the early morning Sonya got into bed with us. As if auditioning for the role of a sleeper, the little girl took to assuming different poses, holding them for only a few seconds. It was as if she meant to demonstrate a comprehensive familiarity with sleep, or a mastery over it. She could sleep draped over our legs or sitting up, with her hands clasped in prayer or thrown wide. The performance ended when Sonya fell asleep on her stomach, her arms extended, making her as thin as a needle, like a swimmer diving into a pool.

I got up to make breakfast and discovered Shiloh camped outside our door.

“I was afraid she'd wander off and fall down the stairs,” he said.

He knew the world was full of danger. People had to face that: children fell down stairs, aspirated bottle caps, mistook pills for candy. What did I think houses were full of? he wanted to know. Electricity. Water. Fire. Knives.

“You've been up all night thinking about that?”

We heard giggling inside the bedroom.

Alice came out with Sonya slung over her shoulder.

“Breakfast,” said Alice.

“Breakfast!” said Sonya.

Shiloh and I did our best to please them.

 

Afterward, Alice and Sonya went out to play in the meadow. Some type of moth had taken up residency in the field and Alice and the girl ran about trying to catch them in their hands. When Alice finally caught one, she gently placed it on Sonya's head. This got no response from the girl, who could not see where the insect was perched and seemed to lack the capacity to imagine it. Alice placed a second moth on her own head and this caused the girl to shriek delightedly, both at the initial contradiction of an insect on a young woman's head and again when the insect ended its complicity and flew off. With a schoolteacher's fondness for repetition, Alice placed another moth on
Sonya's head; she only brushed it away, frustrated. It makes my heart sick to remember them. Their game stopped when Sonya began to braid Alice's hair, which had grown and lightened over the summer. I stood watching this and my first thought was one of regret, that it wasn't me braiding Alice's hair; that I didn't know how to braid hair struck me with real poignancy. Sonya got up and walked around Alice to admire her handiwork. Lightning quick the girl clapped her hand on the top of Alice's head. It was apparent what had happened even before the girl collapsed with laughter—Sonya had caught a moth. In her exuberance, she had killed it; the humor was the same for her. Alice's brushed the top of her scalp.

 

Later that day Alice made a top for Sonya out of a single handkerchief. The four of us piled into the car and drove to the lake. I bought ice cream and sodas for everyone from a guy in a truck, spending forever my last three dollars. After he served us we milled around the truck with our sodas. Alice had to lick Sonya's cone whenever it threatened to drip (if the ice cream touched her hand, she was inconsolable). The guy in the truck was maybe ten years older than Alice, wearing a baseball cap and a cheap-looking watch. On the counter was a book he'd been reading about real estate sales. Shiloh tried to draw Sonya away from the truck, but the truck had a hole for trash painted to look like the toothy mouth of a shark and Sonya was fascinated. “Shark fish,” she said. She stooped to pick up pull tabs and bottle caps and green triangles of glass just to push them through the mouth.

When she ran out of trash, Sonya threw away her cone.

The guy offered to replace it.

Alice handed me her soda and picked Sonya up with her free hand.

“Where you from?” the guy asked.

“We're on vacation,” answered Shiloh.

The guy reached under his counter and got a candy ring for Sonya. “Here you go, sweetie.”

Sonya looked at the candy, perplexed.

“What do you say?” prompted Alice.

“You're welcome,” said the girl, taking the ring.

“You say, ‘Thank you,'” the ice-cream man corrected.

Alice bounced the girl in her arms.

The ice-cream man raised his hand to show that he also wore a candy ring. “Now we're married,” he said.

“What do you think of that?” asked Alice.

Sonya tried to kick her shoe into the shark's mouth.

I bent down and picked it up.

Alice thought we had better get to the beach. We thanked the ice-cream man, who kept waving like an idiot, even while Sonya refused to acknowledge him.

 

The four of us wound up on an exhausted-looking beach; grass sprouted up through a thin blanket of sand and everywhere there were muddy pits children had excavated. A swing set dangled pairs of chains (I suppose someone collected the seats after Labor Day). Charcoal grills dotted an otherwise empty field, like speakers at a drive-in. In the shallow water yellow perch fanned pale stones. The air didn't move. Rafts of ducks huddled together on the still water. Beyond them a central channel shimmered where the occasional sailboat or yacht passed.

The sun, in its vanity, had forced all the birds from the sky.

Alice and Sonya explored the edge of the lake.

Shiloh and I stretched out on the grass. The sun made me sweat. At some point I fell asleep. I was wearing a uniform that I wanted to get out of, but there were no buttons or zippers. It was a brown uniform and people seemed unimpressed with it. Try as I might I couldn't get it off. It was a very straightforward dream. Then I was hiding in my closet back at my parents' house. I couldn't say whether they were one dream or two. I woke up feeling sick.

Shiloh leaned over me, so his head shaded mine from the sun.

“You up for a swim?” he asked.

I sat up.

Alice and Sonya hadn't disappeared anywhere obvious. It bothered me that Alice would choose to abandon me on consecutive days. Then it bothered me that it bothered me.

“Come on,” said Shiloh. He'd waded out to a spot where he could stand still, lean his head back, and just the high points of his face poked above the surface. He looked like a grotesque water lily, his pale arms floating out from his shoulders.

I called to him, but his ears were underwater.

On top of my shirt, I laid my flip-flops and my cutoffs. I just had on Jockey shorts when I went in.

I waded over to Shiloh. The water only reached my Adam's apple.

“It's nice. Isn't it?” He maintained his posture; one arm floated out and brushed against me.

“I'm going to try and swim across.”

He pirouetted to take a look across the water. “I think it's too far.”

I had no idea how to judge distances. The opposite shore seemed a long way off, but not too far, not unreachable.

“It's fine.”

I made a dozen crawl strokes, but that thrashing wore me out. I switched to the breast stroke and Shiloh came up along my side.

“What's the farthest you've ever swum before?” he asked.

“This will be a new record.”

“Great,” he said, “for me, too.”

We kept at it for a while, our chins prowing through the water. The important thing was to stay relaxed. As long as I breathed deeply, there was no way I could sink. I looked at Shiloh to see how he was doing and I saw him check me out. The hard thing was allowing my body to find a natural attitude in the water—my feet wanted to sink into the colder depths, where they felt vulnerable and separate. My body seemed aware of the lake bed retreating. There were two rhythms: stroke and breath. The ducks, noticing our approach, squawked and paddled away.

Shiloh tapped me on the shoulder; I hadn't noticed him getting so close.

“If you get tired swim on your back awhile.”

I spit water at him.

We'd reached a point where the lake opened up, showing where we'd come from as a sort of promontory; Alice and Sonya weren't on
the shore waving frantically for us to return. If we hadn't reached the halfway point, then we'd at least come to a place where retreat was as miserable as going on.

My arms grew heavy. I swam sidestroke for a while. Shiloh stayed close to me, still breaststroking, his eyes looking a little disengaged. There was nothing to look at out there. The sun glared into your eyes.

“How many people have swum across Lake Champlain?” I asked him.

He didn't answer right away and I saw that we'd drifted apart.

“How many?” he asked.

The next time I checked on our progress it seemed unlikely that a person could swim to either shore. This, I convinced myself, was only an optical illusion—what I thought of as the shore was probably a point far inland.

“Swim on your back awhile,” Shiloh instructed me. “I'll keep us pointed in the right direction.”

I allowed myself to roll onto my back, conducting myself along with great sweeps of my arms. From time to time Shiloh would come up beside me and get me back in line. Swimming ceased being an activity that my mind took any interest in; my body was fully in charge of the project. My mind was free to return to the problems it had encountered in my dreams. A powerboat roared past; I didn't connect the boat to its sound until its wake washed over us.

“Here,” said Shiloh.

I followed his voice. Stroke and breath.

I was relieved when something came between my eyes and the sun and more relieved to see it was a tree. I turned onto my stomach.

Shiloh stood up.

A dozen feet short of him, I tried to do the same and went over my head. I had to summon all my energy to fight back to the air.

“Welcome to New York state,” he said.

Whether because we were out of the sun or the water had turned colder, maybe just because the swim had exhausted us, we both shivered.

“You're not a very strong swimmer,” he said.

“I made it here.”

“Halfway.”

I pushed off the silty bottom and pointed myself toward the far shore.

I hadn't been in trouble, just sidestroking, checking my progress when I remembered to, correcting my course. My body didn't feel tired, just distant and inattentive. Nothing in the world felt threatening. I could consider lying on the bottom without it causing a corresponding anxiety. The bottom seemed a beautifully remote place carpeted with cold algae, impenetrable to light and sound. I could imagine the white bellies of fish and the way the stones would taste if you sucked on them. So when Shiloh touched me, I didn't care whether he wrestled me to the bottom or towed me along. My back brushed against his chest and I could feel the warmth coming off his body.

“I got you,” he whispered in my ear.

My feet trolled beneath us.

 

“You want to go to shore under your own power?” he asked; it could have been a hypothetical question, because he knew we would never stand on land again.

‘I'll swim.'

He released me.

It wasn't far, a hundred yards. We swam side by side, like we'd started. The point of the exercise seemed to be patience. No amount of effort made us move any faster. I closed my eyes and held my breath and took a few strokes and the next time I checked, I was in the same place. Once my body forgot when to breathe and I sucked in a bit of water, but by then I'd already reached the shore's gentle apron. I crawled out of the water like some dumb animal. My heart was pounding and my arms twitched like they were still pulling me along. There were rust-colored stains on my hands from the cheap sand that covered the beach.

Shiloh lay on his back and laughed. “The next time I get a case
of gloom I've got to remember to try a stunt like that. That was misery.”

I said, “A lake would make an awful bed.”

“You're not even an average swimmer,” said Shiloh, lifting his head enough to look at me. “You're a liability.” He dropped his head in the sand.

I apologized.

“That's okay. If I'd known, then we never would have tried it.”

“Did you ever swim in the Ohio?”

“About a million times. Never across it, though.”

I closed my eyes to keep the sun out. Water running down my scalp formed little pools in my ears. I felt a responsibility to remain perfectly still and preserve them. It might have been the first week in September. I wasn't just a runaway anymore. I was a dropout, too. The difference was that running away required decisive action, while dropping out didn't require anything at all.