The Weight of Zero (8 page)

Where are you, Grandma?

No answer.

Michael sits next to me at a scarred wooden table in the first-floor reading room. This is where I spent most of my summer volunteer time, and I note, a little smugly, that whoever's doing the “Hot Arrivals” display doesn't have my artistic touch. This is my favorite room in the Cranbury Public Library, large but still cozy, with a beamed ceiling, fireplace and scattered Oriental rugs. High shelves of DVDs, audiobooks and magazines give most of the tables privacy, but Michael dumped his backpack on a table right in the center, so we're in plain sight of everybody entering the room this Saturday afternoon. Octogenarian Gary, one of my fellow volunteers, gave a wobbly thumbs-up when he spotted me from behind the circulation desk.

Flipping open his laptop, Michael logs on to the library's Wi-Fi. He glances at his phone to read a new text. “My mom said it's no problem to drive you home.”

I smile politely. But inside I'm furious with Mom.

Michael jogged up to the Accord as Mom and I pulled up to the curb, and before I could shut the door behind me, Mom had already called out hello to him. Michael bent down to speak with her through the passenger-side window.

“I'm sorry for changing the time today,” he said. That was his text to me last night, the one that woke me up and saved me and my troops from discovery. He had texted that he had to meet at two today and not one-thirty, like we originally planned. “I can give Catherine a ride home if you're leaving for work,” he told Mom, unknowingly touching a live wire.

A short battle between Mom and me had erupted this morning, with Mom wanting to call Aunt D to pick me up from the library and me begging to walk the two miles home.

Ignoring the terms of the treaty we had agreed upon (I could walk but needed to text her every five seconds), Mom jumped on Michael's offer to drive me home. “Oh, that would be great! Thanks, Michael. And please tell your mom I appreciate it,” she said, not even checking with me to see if that was okay, if I wanted to drive home with Michael and his mother—which I definitely did not. I turned my back on her and started up the steps. I heard her yell, “Cath, hon, I'll be home around seven. See you then!”

I didn't turn around. Instead I hurried up the stone steps away from her.

Michael had bounded up the steps in front of me, stopping in front of the ornately carved door more fitting for a church than a library. He smiled at me, the sun catching and highlighting the chocolate-brown of his eyes.

“You even run gracefully,” he said.

This threw me. “What are you talking about?”

“You run like this.” Michael stuck both arms out perpendicular to his body, his long fingers pointing up to the sky, and flapped. He resembled a turkey, a not very graceful one, and a laugh burst out of me.

“Can you still do those turns? The ones where you spin on one leg and the other leg twirls you around?” he asked.

“A fouetté turn?”

“Uh…I don't know. Why don't you do one here?”

I laughed again. “Here? On top of the library steps? I don't think so.”

“Well, that's my goal, then,” Michael said, pulling open the door. “To get you to do a
fwetay
turn for me.”

“Good luck with that,” I said, still laughing at the image of me doing one in front of the library's double doors. What if Riley or Dr. McCallum drove by at that very instant? Jesus.

Now Michael opens a Word document on his laptop. “Here's our list of primary and secondary sources so far. I thought you could take a look at them, see if they're good. And then maybe we can check out what they have in the history section downstairs.”

“Sounds good.” I can't in good conscience let this guy do all the work. It doesn't feel right anymore. Even if the odds of me seeing this project completed are basically nil. So instead of just eyeballing the sites and sources, I grab a couple of sheets of paper and a pen from my bag.

“Is this where you work?” Michael asks, picking up a sheet of my scrap paper with the embossed letterhead. The thick, expensive paper is from Mom's law firm. The printers not only got the zip and area codes wrong but also made gross errors in spelling—“The Law Offices of Hefferman & Schletz” morphed into the cheesier “Hosserman & Schlitz.” Mom rescued the boxes of rejected stationery dumped next to the office garbage cans and brought them home. We use this whenever we can to conserve my school loose-leaf.

I nod in response to Michael's question about my fictitious employer and then turn to the computer screen. Michael did a great job with “our” sources. There are three books by local authors on Jonathan Kasia, and a couple of websites highlighting the annual parade, the baseball field in his honor and the statue of him on the Waterbury Green. Michael also listed two non-Kasia names with Waterbury addresses.

“What are these?” I ask, tapping my pen on the names.

“Those are possible Kasia relatives,” Michael says proudly. “I used my mom's Ancestry.com account to look them up.” He leans forward and says, too loudly in the cavernous room that amplifies every sound, “We can interview them. See if they have any pictures or letters. Maybe there's an old uniform up in the attic? Wouldn't that be cool? I found some phone numbers. We should try calling them later, okay?”

A timely shush comes from Gary. He winks at us as he puts a finger to his lips. Michael flushes guiltily, so I distract him with a suggestion that we check out the books in the history section to fatten our bibliography. On the library's research computer, I find a couple of books on Normandy and write down their call numbers on my Hosserman and Schlitz letterhead.

“How do you know how to do that so fast?” Michael asks, pointing to the computer screen with the research results.

“I volunteered here during the summer,” I say. “I had to help out with research sometimes.”

“Wow, Cath,” he says, looking at me with a scaled-down version of awe. “So you worked here in the summer and now at the law firm? Impressive.”

His comments make me feel sweet and sour, because one part of my résumé is the truth and the other is a defensive lie. I wish I had never told him about the law firm. I wish I didn't have to.

We're the only two people downstairs in the dusty history stacks. Michael reads out the call numbers as I hunt the shelves. I'm taking the last book off the shelf when I get a mother of a paper cut.

“Ow!” I cry out before popping my right index finger in my mouth. I hate these little lightning strikes of pain.

Ever the do-gooder, Michael says, “Don't worry. I've got a Band-Aid on me. You really shouldn't put it in your mouth.” He crouches down and rifles through the small pocket on the outside of his backpack. “Here it is,” he says, a small ziplock bag swinging in his hand. It has Band-Aids and, dear Lord, a tube of Neosporin. This makes me laugh. Out loud. For like the third time today.

“Wow. You're prepared,” I say.

“Here.” Michael has ripped open a Band-Aid and squeezed a dot of Neosporin onto it. “This has got a painkiller in it. Paper cuts are the worst.” He looks away as he holds the Band-Aid out for me. “Sorry. I am not good with blood.”

I bandage up my finger. “Thanks.”

He's gone a little pale.

“Let's sit down for a sec,” I suggest. “Look at these books.”

Michael nods and slides his back slowly along the wall to the floor, where he lands Indian-style.

“Do you need some water?” I ask. “Or I can wet a paper towel and you can put it on your neck?”

Somehow, I've morphed into my forty-year-old mother.

He closes his eyes, leans his head against the wall and smiles. “No, I need a stronger stomach. I don't know how to get over this. It's gotten worse since that anatomy class.”

“There wasn't any red stuff,” I say. “No worries.”

His eyes remain shut but his smile grows bigger. “I think you might be lying about that, but thank you.” And then, as if he forgot his manners, he sits upright, eyes snapping open. “How's your finger?”

His concern over my lousy little paper cut gets to me somehow. A wave of feeling rises inside me that's unfamiliar but good. I can't identify the emotion.

“It's fine,” I say.

Suddenly, I have no doubt. My first and last connection will be Michael. He is kind and gentle. Safe. I feel so grateful that he appeared in my life like a parting gift. Just in the nick of time. My clock is running down, and I have no idea when the buzzer will sound, but I know that I
have
to do this. I have to have my first and last connection, before Zero drives me off. And now I don't need to search for an L.V. candidate. I've found him. He is sitting right here, two feet away, and smiling at me like I'm healthy. I feel my lips turn up, returning the smile. What would his arms feel like around me, pulling me close?

Unexpectedly, a riptide of loss courses through me, shattering the moment. What might there have been with this boy, if I were normal?

“I'm…lucky you had your first-aid kit,” I say, battling the sudden flare-up of Zero anxiety. Of grief taking small bites out of me.

“My mom packed it. I think she hopes that if the catastrophe strikes—you know, like me getting a cut—I'll slam a Band-Aid on it and lessen my chances of fainting.”

“Sounds like a good plan,” I say.

“I'd rather just get over it,” he says.

We waste the rest of the afternoon in the history stacks, Michael telling me in detail his unsuccessful efforts to desensitize himself to the sight of blood.

“I stopped trying once I barfed on my laptop. This is a new one,” he says, patting his backpack as the overhead lights blink to inform us of the library's five p.m. closing time.

Listening to Michael talk all afternoon has taken my anxiety down a level, so I'm actually feeling pretty comfortable sitting next to him in the backseat of his mother's Subaru as we pull away from the library.

“Never call me
Mrs.
 Pitoscia,” his mom is saying. “That is my mother-in-law.” She twists to face me in the backseat, to make eye contact with me, to underscore the importance. “I'm Lorraine, okay?” She turns back to the road. “Catherine, I need to make a short pit stop before dropping you off. Won't take more than a minute.”

Michael, seated directly behind his mother, glances at me. “Why, Ma?” he asks.

“Gotta stop off at home first. Nonny needs garlic,” Lorraine says quickly. “She's making gravy and she said the garlic went bad. She can't do the gravy without the garlic.”

Michael leans forward slightly. “Let's just take Catherine home first.”

“Michael, she texted me four times already,” Lorraine says. “I could kill your father for teaching her how.” Lorraine angles her head toward me, explaining. “My Italian mother-in-law refuses to speak English correctly but texts like a twelve-year-old. Look, I'll just get out of the car and run it inside. Won't take more than thirty seconds.”

Michael looks over at me and shakes his head. “Sorry, Cath.”

“No problem,” I say. I'd like to see where Michael lives.

Lorraine weaves the Subaru around the Green, past the restaurants and “shoppes” and Rodrick's on the Green, the site of my long-hair execution. We drive in the direction of the Long Island Sound, where the houses and the egos of their occupants grow bigger as the water gets closer.

Lorraine turns onto a street where identical colonials with symmetrical driveways line up in perfect precision. It's not a McMansion neighborhood but it's nicer than mine. There are sidewalks on both sides of the street and a community basketball hoop at the end of the cul-de-sac.

“Uh-oh,” Lorraine says as she slows down. In the middle of the driveway of a white colonial on our left, an old lady sits on a metal folding chair. Her arms are folded over an enormous mountain of breasts and her spindly legs are crossed at the ankles.