The Whole World Over (67 page)

Alan had warned Greenie that, physically, Saga was a "lopsided"
woman, that she'd had an accident years ago. She did not look so peculiar
to Greenie. She had a crooked smile, and she walked with a subtle
lope, but these quirks seemed nothing more than colorful to Greenie.
Saga's age was hard to guess; was she twenty-eight or forty? With her
intense blue eyes, she was taking a cat's measure of Greenie. (How much
had Alan told
her
?)

Greenie laid aside the towel and shook Saga's hand. In a cowardly
way, she was glad to have someone else there, a chaperone to protect
her, for at least a few hours, from facing Alan alone.

"I have a present for you," Greenie told George. From her pocket,
she pulled a small parcel of newspaper, now damp.

George did not seem to care about the wrapping or the ink that came
off on his fingers. "Mommy, it's a knife! Thank you!"

"Yes, I know it is, and you must be careful with it. There's a note,
George. It's not from me." She sat on the couch—the same old beat-up
blue corduroy couch—to warm herself by the woodstove. She invited
George into her lap.

After picking up the note, which he had dropped, George sat beside
her instead. He allowed her to put an arm around his back. On a piece
of hotel stationery from a Pittsburgh Days Inn, it read,
From me to you,
Small Man. Keep the faith. Come visit. 5 up, 5 down, 5 twist around!
Tall.

It was a modest Swiss Army knife, with a single blade and a few extra
gadgets, but to Small it was a magnificently grown-up object, one that
promised transformation. This was obvious in the reverence with which
George squeezed and stroked it. Before Greenie and Tall had parted, he
had taken the knife off his key chain.

"I miss Tall," said George as Greenie showed him how to pull out the
nail scissors and the elfin tweezers.

"You'll see him again. Don't worry." She removed her arm from
around his shoulders. Her jeans were soaking the cushion. She excused
herself to change.

She went into the downstairs room where her parents had slept. She
stopped in the doorway. The double bed was gone; two bunk beds stood
against opposite walls. The same painted bureau was there, but in its
drawers she found not her parents' extra sweaters, the tar-spattered
khakis her father had worn when he worked on his boats. Instead, she
found board games, a scruffy electric blanket, a set of souvenir lobster-claw
pot holders still wrapped in plastic, two flashlights, and a faded
Red Sox baseball cap. Next door, the smaller room where Greenie had
slept was furnished with a crib, a changing table, and a rocking chair.

"You probably want to sleep upstairs." Alan was standing behind
her. "Unless you want to sleep in here with Saga and George." A tangle
of George's clothing spilled from a bag in the corner. A small suitcase lay
open beside it.

"My things are in the big room up there," he said. "Borrow anything."
That's how it was now: she needed permission to wear Alan's
sweaters. Was another woman wearing his sweaters and shirts? This
hadn't occurred to Greenie before. She looked down, so Alan wouldn't
see her face, and passed him to go upstairs.

The four-poster bed—the one her mother had found at a yard sale off
Route 1 and painted white out on the rock above the dock—now occupied
the big bedroom on the second floor. This arrangement did make
more sense; grown-ups should take the best view. Here was the familiar
loose-jointed bookcase, but its collection of paperbacks—the plump,
ruffled copies of
Hawaii, Future Shock,
and
Tora! Tora! Tora!
—had
vanished. A dozen newer books leaned along one shelf—novels by
authors that her scholarly father would not have heard of: young, stylish
New York City authors. The other shelves were empty.

The top dresser drawers were empty too, but when she opened the
bottom drawer,
here
were her parents' sweaters, her father's work pants.
She let out a sob. She lifted an Irish cable-knit sweater and held it open.
It was pure white and smelled of rich dark cedar. Greenie cradled it to
her face.

George called up to her. They were hungry; wasn't she hungry too?

"Yes I am!" she called back. "I'll be down to cook in a minute!"

She changed into a T-shirt of Alan's, her mother's sweater, and a pair
of anonymous sweatpants drooping from a closet hook. Beneath her
father's trousers, she found a pair of blue fleece socks.

As she left the room, something Greenie had not seen in ages caught
her eye: on a bedside table, the small leather book in which Alan had
once, every morning, written his dreams.

Downstairs, a meal was already on the table, bowls of fragrant
brown soup and a loaf of bread. (Was it lunch or dinner? She'd lost
track of time, not just hours but days, perhaps entire eras.) "Oh my,"
she said. "Thank you."

"We're very good at shopping, aren't we?" Saga said to George.

"I know how to use a can opener. Saga showed me," he told his
mother.

"In the right place at the right time, a can opener might just save your
life," said Greenie. It was something Charlie had said when she teased
him for using canned foods in the meals that he had insisted on preparing
for her. She could count those meals on one hand.

George was alarmed. "What do you mean, save my life?"

"That's a joke," said Alan. He did not look at Greenie.

After dessert—made by Sara Lee—Greenie put George to bed while
Saga and Alan washed the dishes. When she pulled out
Owl at Home
—
which she had found behind her sofa in Santa Fe and carried with her
across twelve states—his eyes widened. "Mrs. Rodrigo's book! Did you
take that from her?"

"No, that's our copy. Do you remember that I bought it for you?"

He shook his head.

What else had he forgotten? Greenie asked if he wanted to read it
to her.

"You read it," he said. "I missed you reading."

He leaned against her for all five tales, which related the neurotically
foolish mishaps of a character who was a literalist yet also a romantic.
In Greenie's favorite, Owl made himself a pot of tear-water tea by thinking
up, laboriously, as many sad things as he could: chairs with broken
legs, forgotten songs, clocks that had stopped, mornings that no one
witnessed because everybody was sleeping. More than sad, they were
invisible, neglected, or simply lost to memory.

When she finished reading, George asked, "Can I sleep with my
knife?"

"I don't think so, honey."

"Please? Please?"

Greenie saw the knife on the dresser. She brought it back to the bed,
along with a T-shirt of George's. "Listen, George. I'll wrap it in this shirt
and tuck it under your pillow, but you must promise me not to take it
out, all right? Just like when you leave your tooth for the Tooth Fairy."

"I promise," he said.

For the first time that day, she indulged in simply gazing at her son.
Though she had braced herself, he hadn't changed so much. The great
difference was that he felt more separate from her than ever before. His
promises would grow increasingly complex, along with what he understood
about the world. His secrets would deepen too, and one day his
mother would no longer be the one who knew him best.

On the third day of their marathon drive, Greenie and Tall George
had talked about Small. Before then, she had worried that to ask anything
about her son would be to violate a private friendship, but Tall
didn't see it that way. He told her several amusing stories about Small,
and Greenie was pleased to hear in this man's voice an echo of her own
pride in her son's curiosity and oddball logic. Tall became serious, however,
when she asked what he knew about the incident involving Diego.
Tall had never seen the boys together, he had to admit, but from what
he had gathered, he believed that Small George had been desperate
for something to change. When Greenie asked urgently, "For what to
change? What?" Tall had given her a long, almost insolent look and
then shrugged. "Your guess be as good a mine," he'd said. "Come to
think of it, better." If he'd meant her to feel shame, he had succeeded.

"Can I give you a really big hug?" she asked her son now. He laughed
and told her yes. She lay beside him on the bed for several minutes until
he said, "Mom, you can go now."

Before she left the room, he said, "Mommy, I like this place. Have we
ever beened here before?"

"Yes, we have," she answered from the doorway, "but I'm pretty sure
you couldn't remember. It was such a long time ago."

"We'll come again, won't we?"

"Yes," she said.

When she returned to the main room, Saga and Alan were sitting at
the table by the woodstove. On the table was a game of Scrabble. It was
the original edition she remembered from her childhood, in the dour
cardboard box that Greenie had always thought precisely the color of a
scab. It came from an era when fun did not have to look garish or even
shiny. Here were the baby pink and blue Chiclet squares, the dowdy
beige letters like scraps from a carpentry project, the racks like dollhouse
church pews.

Greenie's parents had been clever at Scrabble. On the island, they had
played every night after Greenie went to bed. She had heard their murmurs
of surprise, frustration, triumph, disgruntlement; they concentrated
so hard on the game that they rarely exchanged words other than
those on the board. For long stretches of time, if the ocean was still,
Greenie could hear the tiny clatterings of the wooden letters in their
racks. Once in a while there would be a challenge—generally from her
mother—and out would come the dictionary. (She'd never known of a
word from her father that did not pass the test.) Olivia and George had
kept score year by year for their entire married life. Every New Year's
Day began with a tallying of the score; the winning spouse would
choose where they'd go on their next big vacation. Greenie's father (who
generally won, though never by a landslide) was the one who had chosen
Scotland.

As Alan turned the letters facedown in the lid of the box, he told
Greenie and Saga about the work he would be doing with Jerry, at the
clinic for people traumatized by Tuesday's attacks. Though he might
have seemed relaxed to anyone else, Greenie knew he was nervous,
because against his very nature, he was working to fill every silence.
From across the table, she looked at him now the way she had just
looked at George. He was thin and uncharacteristically tanned, as if he
had spent the summer sailing or hiking. Alongside his ears, his hair was
almost entirely gray. He looked more beautiful to Greenie than he had
in years—unattainably beautiful, as if she had found his picture in a
magazine.

Saga went first, laying down the word
SOFA
, descending from
the star at the center of the board. Alan, almost immediately, put down
SELKIE
.

"Well," said Greenie. "Well, I forgot how good you are at this." Now
she remembered that they had played two or three times with her parents.
Her mother had been tense—amusingly, at the time—when Alan
beat everyone the first time they played.

"What's that?" asked Saga, her question one of genuine curiosity.

"A selkie is a creature from Irish folklore, part seal, part woman."

"How could you think that up so fast?" asked Greenie.

"George had a book from the library.
The Selkie Girl.
A fisherman
falls in love with a selkie and forces her to marry him by hiding her pelt."

"Something terrible must become of him," said Greenie.

"No, not really, but he does have to let her go in the end. It's your
turn."

Greenie had a decent assortment of letters—enough vowels, no wallflower
consonants—but she could not concentrate. She laid down three
letters. "Onto."

"That's all you want to do? That's five points."

"Yes, Alan," she said. "I need to warm up."

He wrote down her score. She recognized his neat handwriting, his
straight columns. In his precise way of doing things, he wasn't unlike
Charlie; yet they were so different, Charlie so much more expansive,
someone who looked ever outward. She wished that she and Charlie
had been together long enough that some of the things she admired
and loved about him had become cause for irritation—that his ardent
resourcefulness had come to seem like rigidity, his sense of adventure
like restlessness; that his playfulness could look immature, his lack of
sentimentality cold instead of wise. But they had not been together that
long. To recall even one of those qualities made her feel as if her heart
would crack in two.

Saga placed
ARMY
at the tail end of
SOFA
. "Double word score,"
she said, as openly pleased as a child might have been. (This was a
woman in crisis? Greenie inspected her critically for a moment, but
what could you really know from the surface? Alan had taught her how
well people hide things, often for the sake of their own survival.)

"Eighteen," said Alan. "Excellent." He began to fiddle with his letters.

"Can I ask you a nosy question?" Greenie said to Saga. "Can I ask
you about your name?"

Saga laughed, self-consciously. "It's really Emily."

"Mine's really Charlotte," said Greenie. Alan looked up at her,
briefly, then back at his letters.

Saga told Greenie that when she was five years old, she'd run away
from home. "I sat with my stuffed dog behind a bush at a bank down
the block. I wanted them to be good and sorry. You know, like kids
always do when they feel wronged. So nobody came, and nobody came.
It felt like I was there for hours. A lady I thought I knew from my school
saw me there and asked me what I was doing. But she was nice. So I told
her. She said she'd take me for a treat. We walked down the street,
and we stopped to look in a toy store window, and she bought me an ice
cream cone and we sat at a table while I ate it. I thought for sure my mom
would show up then, or maybe pass me in her car and be shocked to see
me with somebody else. Then she'd be sorry. But no. So then I went with
this lady while she bought herself a pair of sunglasses in another store—
I tried a bunch on myself—and then she walked me home. She didn't
take me in, she just waved to me while I walked to the door."