The Illumination (24 page)

“This isn’t a question. I just want to say that I enjoy listening to you read, the care you take with your pronunciation. Have you ever considered reading your own audiobooks?”

“Thanks, and no, but nobody ever suggested I should until now.”

“If
Twin Souls
were made into a movie, who would you cast as Mary Ruth?”

“I get people wondering that all the time, but I never know how to answer. Why, did you have someone in mind?”

In a theatrical, almost
moony
, tone of voice, the girl who had asked the question said, “I think Julia
Krukowski
would be
perfect,
” which made the friend sitting next to her stifle a smile. Nina nodded as if at the essential rightness of the idea, though she had never heard of Julie Krikowski. She suspected the name might be invented—if not, in fact, the girl’s own. More and more, though, she found that she was required to take the stardom of certain people on faith. The world presented an endless sequence of celebrities replacing celebrities replacing celebrities, like cheap wooden nesting dolls, each bearing a tinier and less persuasive likeness than the one that had come before. It exhausted her.

“My son says it would make a good anime film. So are there any more—” She felt an itch in her sinuses and turned her head. A sneeze tore at her lips with a startling photographic flash. She gasped and closed her eyes, waiting for the pangs of light to subside, for the blood to stop beating in her jaw.
Make me better
. Maybe if she never ate or drank or spoke or laughed or smiled or kissed anyone ever again—maybe then she would be all right. “Are there any more questions?”

The audience took pity on her. She thanked everyone for coming, signed a few books, and phoned for a taxi. Before she left, the manager gave her one of the trading cards he had printed to publicize the event, number 1,972 in the series, with her photo on the front and a description of the book on the back: “In
The Age of Girls and Boys
, Nina Poggione has crafted an elegant collection of love stories and fantasies, unique, lyrical, and haunting.
Whether in the award-winning ‘Small Bitter Seeds,’ with its gifted physician struggling to retain his practice after losing his voice to cancer, or in the daring title story, in which the children of a world sinking into infertility attempt to transcend the circumstances of their lives, she evokes the souls of her characters with compassion and an exquisite clarity.”

She relied on the cabdriver to find her hotel, a narrow brick and stone structure, latticed with balconies, that she recognized from her
Twin Souls
tour the instant she saw the waxed wooden floor that stretched across the lobby in a sunburst of multiple browns. She had gone directly from the airport to the bookstore, so she had to check in at the front desk before she could ride the elevator to the third floor, unlock her room, and open her night-stand. It held a phone book and a Gideon’s Bible, but was otherwise empty. Two years before, in the same hotel—though not, surely, the same suite—she was searching for a stationery pad in her bedside drawer when she discovered a journal someone had left behind. The cloth had been razed from the cover, revealing a kidney-shaped patch of gray board, and a buckle ran through the first thirty pages or so, as if they had been dipped in water. It was filled with handwritten love notes, she discovered, page after page of them,
I love this
es and
I love that
s stacked tight as bricks against one another.
I love the “bloop” sound you make whenever you drop something. I love remembering the evening we sat on the roof at your parents’ and watched the sunset reflecting off the windows of that old church. I love your silver chimneysweep charm, the one you wear around your neck for good luck
. That night, she lay in bed and read the whole thing. Slowly a pair of personalities emerged from the sentences, taking on mass and texture. The man’s name was Jason, the woman’s Patricia, and at first Nina felt like a spy, eavesdropping as he turned the most quotidian details of their life into endearments, but after a while she might
have been their closest friend, sitting between them as he cupped his hand to Nina’s ear and whispered all the beautiful things he wished her to relay to his wife. Maybe the words weren’t meant for Nina, but they were wonderful all the same, if not
I love you
then at least
Somebody loves somebody
.

The next morning, before she left, she asked the concierge if there was a Jason Williford registered at the hotel. He tapped on his keyboard. “No, I’m sorry, ma’am.”

“A Patricia?”

“No. No Patricia Williford either. Perhaps they’ve already departed?”

“Maybe so. Could you find out for me?”

“No Jason or Patricia Williford for the last … six months, at least. I’m sorry.”

So she kept the journal, taking it home with her, and one day, when she was running a fever from the cluster of sores under her tongue, five or six of them scattered along the midline, and the shining vitric crater of an ulcer on her hard palate, she took a Stanley knife and excised a page from the book. Immediately, she felt ashamed. What was she thinking? Why had she done it? Rather than tape the page back in place, though, she folded it in quarters so that she could carry it in her pocketbook.

And now, as she did every so often, she took it out and read it:

I love watching you sit at your desk, the sun striking you through the philodendron leaves. I love that game where you draw a picture on my back with your finger and I try to guess what it is. I love those blue jeans with the sunflowers on the pockets, the ones that hug the curves of your waist. I love your gray coat with the circles like cloud-covered suns. I love the joke you told at Eli and Abbey’s wedding reception. I love how easily you cry when you’re happy. I love your question marks that look like backwards
s’
s, your periods that look like bird’s beaks. I love the way you stand at the mirror in the morning
picking the ChapStick from your lips. I love how you laugh with your mouth open wide, and how you snort sometimes, and how embarrassed it makes you when you do. I love to think of you as that bored little girl designing adventures for herself, riding your sleeping bag down the staircase, or taking a running leap along the hallway and trying to flip the light switch in midair, or walking from your bedroom to the far side of the kitchen without stepping in the sunlight, or else you would die. I love how your eyes grow wet whenever you talk about your grandfather. I love that first moment, at night, when you trace the curve of my ear with your fingernail. I love planning vacations with you. I love how good you are to me when I’m not feeling well. I love the inexplicable accent, from nowhere anyone has ever visited or even heard of, that you use when you’re trying to sound Italian. I love the bull story. I love helping you shave that tricky spot behind your knees. I love the way your hair fritzes out in all directions when you work up a sweat. I love your many doomed attempts to give up caffeine. I love that perfect little cluster of moles on your wrist. I love the yellow tights you wear when you’re feeling—how you say?—sparky. I love every—

There the page ended.

She had not yet shut her curtains, and when a bright light swept across the window, she saw a million raindrops speckling the glass, a column of white beads tilting through them with a minute quiver as the drops along the border vacillated and were swallowed into the center.

Her phone buzzed. She read her home number on the display. It was Wallace, calling to ask if he could have some friends over for Cities in Dust, the role-playing game he moderated. “Do you mind? Tomorrow’s Friday, so there’s no school afterward. We’ll order a pizza, and everyone’ll probably spend the night. It’ll be me and Conrad and Nathan and a few others.”

“Are any of these ‘few others’ girls? You know you can’t have Camarie spend the night if I’m not around.”

“But Camarie is our Forged One!”

“Forged One or no, I’m not comfortable with it. Tell me, has Camarie asked her parents what
they
think about your great coed, unsupervised role-playing extravaganza?”

He changed tacks. “Camarie is only twelve, you know, Mom. I wouldn’t
do
anything with her. It would break the Creep Equation.” This was the lesson his algebra teacher had used the first day of eighth grade to demonstrate the practical value of higher math: you took your age, divided it by two, and added seven, “and that’s your dating boundary,” Wallace had explained to her, hunched over a cherry Danish at the kitchen table. “Any younger than that, and it’s creepy. I’m fourteen, which means I can only date someone my own age, since fourteen divided by two is seven, plus seven is fourteen.”

She had overheard enough heedless mid-game snack-break conversations to know how he and his friends really interpreted the equation.
And that’s your fucking boundary. Which means I can only fuck someone my own age
. She also knew that, like most eighth-graders—or at least the science fiction kids, the British comedy kids—they were all talk, all roostering, their lasciviousness just another role-playing game, a way of trying on their manhood and simultaneously mocking it.

She cleared her throat. “Be that as it may.”

She managed to lay a stress on the last word without making her discomfort audible. Or so she thought. But after four years, Wallace could derive her condition from her voice with some authority. “Your lip?” he asked.

“Mm-hmm. It’s at that hurts-to-talk stage.”

“Would you like to talk about it?”

“Ha ha.”

“All right, listen, no Camarie. But everybody else is g——eah? Hey, there’s another call coming in. I’m gonna take it, Mom, okay? See you Sunday.”

“Sunday. Be good.”

She returned her phone to her purse, then lay back and gazed at the window, waiting for another car to breast the hill, its headlights taking just the right angle to send a field of stars Big Banging over the glass.

37 ÷ 2 = 18, or thereabouts, and 18 + 7 = 25, so a certain overzealous someone who had punctuated her dreams last night by kissing her neck, disquietingly, like a lover, was too creepy for her by one year.

And a half.

A bit of tissue had come loose from between her molars. She tried to dislodge it with her tongue, and a prickle of light appeared where she had scraped the papillae.
Damn. Damn damn damn
. It was yet another tiny injury, almost too small to notice, and yet she worried that, like so many others, it would rupture and lose all shape, growing more and more indistinct as the pain took hold. She brought her travel kit to the bathroom, prepared a capful of hydrogen peroxide, and tipped it into her mouth. She had to be so careful with herself. And here was the question: Was it worth what it cost?

Her house was built like all the others, with its roof projecting over the front door to keep it from opening directly into the rain, and it was her pleasure upon waking in the morning to step out onto the porch and take stock of the day. This particular morning arrived hot and bright, with the sky that oddly whitened blue
it became when there was no moisture in the air. She was surprised to find a fissure interrupting her lawn. She kept the grass carefully trimmed and watered, and she was sure she would have seen the rift if it had been there the day before. It ran as straight as a line on a map. She traced it with her eyes, following it across her neighbor’s yard and a few others before it vanished into the woods at the end of the block, and then back again until it dead-ended at her front steps.

But that was not the strange part. No, the strange part was the sheet of paper that was protruding from it. She picked it up and unfolded it.

Of course I am
, it read.

The handwriting was familiar to her, with its walking-stick
r
and its
o
’s that didn’t quite close at the top. But it took her a moment to figure out where she recognized it from.

She spent the next few hours twisting her engagement ring around and around her knuckle. A potato chip bag was dipping and spinning in the middle of the road, and she watched it ride the breeze until a boy rode by and flattened it beneath his bicycle.

Finally, on a blank sheet of paper, she wrote,
If you are who I believe you are, tell me something only you would know about me
.

She was unaccountably nervous. She knelt on the porch, closing her eyes as she slipped the note into the fissure. Something deep within the ground seemed to wrest it from her fingers like a fish plucking a cricket from a hook.

For the rest of the day, every time she went outside, she expected to see a flash of white paper waiting for her in the grass. But it was not until the next morning that she found one:
I love your gray coat with the circles like cloud-covered suns
.

She stared closely at the breach in her lawn. If she followed it
on foot, she calculated, she would eventually reach the scorched field where she had gone to deposit her letters.

On a fresh sheet of paper, she replied,
Everyone we know has seen me in that coat. It doesn’t prove a thing
.

Early that afternoon, an answer arrived:
I love how you laugh with your mouth wide open, and how you snort sometimes, and how embarrassed it makes you when you do
.

She wrote,
Well, yes, that’s definitely me
.

I love the joke you told at Zach and Christina’s wedding reception
.

She wrote,
If this is a trick … this had better not be a trick. Is it?

I love how easily you cry when you’re happy
.

So the correspondence went on, hour after hour and day after day, pushing across the distance of the soil. All his letters were love letters, delivered while she was sleeping or mopping the kitchen, weeding the garden or out buying milk. When she held them up to the sunlight, the faded marks of earlier messages emerged through the stationery:
Bailey had two kittens last week, and I named the first one Bowtie, and the second one Mike! I hope you’re better now, I truly do, because I am, I tell you, I am. I think there’s something terribly wrong with me
. They came in a variety of hands and were often hard to decipher. She presumed he had salvaged the pages from under the ground, a few dozen among the many hundreds of thousands that had rained down over the generations of the dead.