This Must Be the Place: A Novel (50 page)

Mona smiled through tight lips.

“So tell us about the mysterious Amy, Arthur,” Anna said. “How’d she turn out?”

Arthur looked at Mona, who shrugged, exhausted; then he looked at Bert, who was beaming, so overjoyed was she to see him prostrate himself on the altar of truth. And for the first time since the day Amy
died and Arthur fled Los Angeles; since he came to the Darby-Jones, fell into a dream, and then fell down the stairs; since Mona Jones took him under her wing and to a wedding; since he discovered the truth about Amy, a horrible truth he hadn’t been able to keep to himself, Arthur wanted to tell his side of Amy’s story.

“She went to Hollywood,” he said. “She made monsters. She met me. And she died.”

His voice didn’t shake. His throat didn’t tighten.

“She died,” he said again and shook his head because he could barely believe how good it felt to say the words—to say the words and understand the words and know that everything could still continue. Would go on from here.

“Bravo,” Bert said, clapping softly, withered hands rustling like the beating of bird’s wings. “Bravo, Mr. Rook.”

Arthur Rook, lighter than a balloon, didn’t hear Anna saying
I’m so sorry to hear that
and Sherman coughing gruffly, which he supposed meant he was also sorry. He didn’t hear Max whispering
Was I not supposed to mention her?
and he didn’t hear Ray Harryhausen galloping through the kitchen, his claws skittering across the tile as he tried to round a corner. Arthur Rook opened his eyes and saw the world again. The whole world. And he saw the people in it for what they really were: Anna, tired, a little lonely, and wishing that Sherman were a little kinder, a little more interesting, or, barring that, a little more likely to ever ask her to marry him. He saw Sherman’s terrified old heart, terrified that Anna would leave him and that all he would have to show for the days of his life were a thousand lopsided spice racks and paper towel holders that didn’t even hang in his own kitchen. He saw Bert, who had been beautiful in her youth—so beautiful—and who was enraged with herself for never leaving this town, for never finding a home of her own. He saw Max, in profile, sitting beside him, and saw that Max had a crush on him: a wistful, doomed little crush, and Max knew it, and when Max caught Arthur watching him, he smiled to see that Arthur knew it now too.

Arthur saw Mona and Mona saw him straight back. They both felt they’d already spent an entire lifetime with a person who’d left them, but there were still minutes and hours and days and years left to live.
These weeks, spent here, had been the time between ages. The transition was coming to a close; the bleed was staunching itself. So this must be the place, and this must be the time, Arthur thought; this is where and when the New Age begins.

And what would the New Age bring? Arthur saw his futures shimmer before him, saw all the possible places he could go from here: all the houses he could live in, all the jobs he could have, all the people he’d never met but could know for the rest of his life. He could work in an office in Portland, Oregon, selling customizable office supplies: staplers and rulers and coffee mugs in bright colors, their sides open and blank, yearning to be stamped with whatever the client desired. He could be the head of a portrait studio at a department store in Tallahassee, Florida, with a set of six-year-old triplets and a wife named Millie who worried too much. He could be Mona Jones’s business partner, and Mona Jones’s lover, and he could live right here in the Darby-Jones and go to Oneida’s high school graduation; and one day, while playing a game of Scrabble in the still of the evening, when Mona laid out the letters
MARRYME
, he could play
HELLYES
in return.

Arthur felt his chest seal as the wound repaired itself.

Mona smiled at him across the table. She silently mouthed two words.

Hello, stranger
, she said.

24
Faith

Monday. Day two of the rest of her life.

Oneida said nothing to Mona. She didn’t think Arthur had told Mona about his confession yet, which was a little surprising. Regardless, Oneida didn’t know where to start—didn’t know what to ask her, wasn’t sure she wanted to hear Mona lie to her, as she surely would (why stop now?)—so there was no point in beginning. She’d spent all of Sunday in her room, stretched out on her window seat reading
The Scarlet Letter
. She finished it, a task that was more than a little cathartic. Hester, like Mona, had enough will, enough stubborn self-involvement, as Oneida saw it, to never tell a soul the biggest secret of her life. The secret that
was
her life. She didn’t have to tell Dimmesdale (who just knew) and that creep Chillingworth figured it out on his own. Like Oneida figured it out on
her
own. Keep your damn secret, Mona, she thought; keep it for the rest of your life. Keep pretending that your secret is yours—that your secret isn’t mine, and Amy’s, and Arthur’s, now—and my father’s.

Whoever the hell
he
is.

She felt worse about not going to Eugene. Her secret discovered and ready to share, she’d had to admit to herself that she still didn’t have the guts to call or to visit, to kneel by Eugene’s bed and whisper the truth, discovered, in his pink shell of an ear. That she never had. So she put her head down on her desk and swallowed until she didn’t feel like crying and allowed herself to obsess about the one thing she had no control over whatsoever.

I’m going to go
, she thought.

Go where?

Where
would
she go, if she died? Her own mortality was something she had never thought of in such explicit terms; they didn’t go to church. She half believed in ghosts (easy to do when you lived at the Darby-Jones). She wasn’t an idiot; she didn’t think she would die, as Amy had, of some freak accident tomorrow. It was simple as this: it wasn’t until she learned of a woman named Amy Henderson Rook that Oneida Jones, who thought about everything, understood what it meant that she had to die.

It flooded her with dread. It froze her brain and goosed her heart and whenever she found herself imagining what it would be like to not
be
, Oneida would lose the ability to think. To breathe. To see. Until she talked herself down, until she drew the curtain back over what she knew and wished she didn’t, she was useless.
Distract me
, she thought, glaring at Mr. Wasserman at the front of the classroom.
Show me a theorem. Give me a logic proof. Explain it to me. Take up the space in my brain that’s thinking about what it would be like to not be. How it will feel to go.

Distract me,
she thought, watching Dani Drake make origami frogs from torn notebook paper.
Make those frogs hop across your history book. Launch one off your desk into Cassie Lowe’s ponytail. Make it go away. Make me forget. Remind me that I can’t do anything about it, that this fear is pointless.

Because she couldn’t know where she would go eternally, she was left with no option but to ponder, during math, during biology, during U.S. history—Eugene’s empty desk burning a hole straight through her—where she would go
today
. Where
she
would take herself. Her two feet were hers to control, hers alone, for however much time she had left. And she would damn well tell them where to go while she still had a choice.

Of which there were many. Where first? Where would she go, say, if she skipped ninth period?

The answer came in the form of an origami frog. It landed on her notebook like a silent missile, fired across the chasm between her desk and Dani’s. Oneida looked up, but Dani was watching Dreyer, chin in hand, the other hand doodling notes about the revolutionary war.

Oneida picked up the frog.
DISSECT ME
was written across its back in purple pen. She unfolded it.

I heard what happened. Lu must pay. Meet me in the prop loft ninth period. Yes, I know you go there. You’re not so great at keeping secrets. DD

There were too many shocking things contained in that one note for Oneida to decide which stunned her most. How had Dani found out (about Eugene
or
the prop closet)? What could she possibly want to talk about? Had the universe actually
heard
her plea and provided the most unlikely distraction possible in a world still bound by the laws of physics? And was she right to be slightly frightened to discover what Dani meant when she said
Lu must pay
?

U.S. history ended. Eighth-period study hall lurched from one minute to the next. Oneida was up and out before the first bell stopped ringing, but Dani, who must have come from a room closer to the auditorium, was already in the loft, waiting for her. She wore a black T-shirt with bright white letters that read
ROCK THE CASBAH
and skinny blue jeans that made her legs look like pipe cleaners. She was sitting on one of the beanbag chairs that Oneida and Wendy, no more than two weeks ago, had sat on and eaten lunch.

She was crying.

“I’m sorry,” she said, her breathing ragged. “I’m sorry, let me just pull myself—hold on.”

She tipped her head back and blinked rapidly, waving her hands in the air. Oneida took a seat on the other beanbag, her curiosity matched only by her discomfort. She thought maybe she should give Dani a hug, and then she thought,
I cannot believe you just thought that
. This was Dani Drake: know-it-all, show-off, mean, sarcastic, arrogant, nasty Dani Drake, sobbing and—in the middle of sobbing—trying to talk.

“I just—I found out this m-m-morning. My dad’s on the school b-b-board and they’re having a disciplinary hearing for that—that
asshole
L-L-L-L—”

“Hey . . . um?” Oneida held her arms out in an approximation of an open-ended hoop. Dani looked up, realized Oneida was trying to hug
her from three feet away, and said, very softly, “You should know I have an insane crush on him. For a long, long time, and I—he wouldn’t even look at me, but if he liked you, I mean, I hate you but you must be—sort of cool.”

Oneida dropped her arms. “You like Andrew Lu?”

The suggestion so horrified her that Dani instantly reverted to her old self. “Oh, please, that’s
ridonk
. I mean
Wendy
. He’s the only p-person in this whole retarded school who’s figured it out, who has a purpose, a fight, you know? With the guts to question and t-to
change
things. There’s so much going on here that’s just bullshit. Wendy stood for something different.”

“You have no idea,” Oneida said, rolling her eyes.

“Thanks. Real considerate, Jones.”

Oneida blanched. “What?” she said. “I didn’t say anything.”

“Yes, you did. You said
I just learned you’re desperately in love with my boyfriend, and I’m going to rub it in your face how much better I know him than you
.” Dani pressed her fingers over her eyes. “I’m sorry. I just—I thought you might be upset and want to talk. That’s why I asked you up here.”

“Upset?”

“Yes,
upset
, dumb-ass. Because of what happened?”

Oneida’s stomach, which had been in suspense since the beginning of the conversation, plummeted to her toes. What happened. What
hadn’t
happened in the past forty-eight hours?

Dani continued. “You’re only his girlfriend. I thought you might—I thought you might be scared or, like, upset. I don’t have to be here, you know, trying to comfort you.” Her face crumpled pathetically, and fresh tears leaked down her cheeks.

“
Gah
!” she shouted, making Oneida’s heart leap up her throat. “Why is it
so hard
to be nice to you?”

“I don’t know. Why is it so hard,” Oneida said, her voice rising, “for
you
to be nice to
me
?”

“
I don’t know
!” Dani shouted back. “Look, I just—I should just go. I shouldn’t have—” Dani nudged the plastic cake container left over from Oneida’s picnic lunch with Eugene. A hunk of dried frosting broke free, and she ground it slowly into the floor with the heel of her sneaker.

“Thank you,” Oneida said, after a long, frosting-pulverizing moment. “Thank you for being concerned. I am . . . pretty upset. About everything.”

Dani snuffled. “So what do we do?”

“What do you mean?” Oneida asked.

“I mean . . . what do we
do
?”

“You mean, like . . . rent some movies and eat ice cream? I guess.”

“God, you’re so—”

“
What,
Dani?
What
am I that you cannot leave me alone?”

“All I
do
is leave you alone; what the hell are you talking about?”

“You are really, really unpleasant to be around sometimes, that’s all. You’re sarcastic and you’re defensive and you think you know everything—”

“I’m
sorry
my personality traumatizes you. Get over it, cupcake.” Dani kicked the plastic container. It skittered across the floor and flew over the edge of the loft. “And you’re a ray of fucking sunshine to be around, you know—you’re so friendly and accepting and cheerful all the time, and I can tell that you’re
never
looking at the world and judging every last inch of it as not good enough for you.”