After the Moment (16 page)

"Astra, don't cry, please," he said, not caring that people could hear and see, only desperate not to have done this. "I'm not worth it."

"No, I know, of course you're not," she said, wiping her eyes with napkins they had each pried from a box on the table. "Oh, God, I didn't mean that, because you are, and you'll spend your whole life with girls bursting into tears at the end."

She wiped her nose with the back of her hand and Leigh thought how Maia would never be able to do that—the germs involved would horrify her. Then he yelled at himself for thinking of Maia. Then he prayed that it would never end with Maia. Then he yelled at himself again.

"I just ... I've been a mess," Astra said. "I don't want us to go out anymore if you don't, of course not."

She looked at him, her eyes bleary, but her face full of its usual perfection.

"The crying is something I've been doing."

"You could never be a mess," he said, wondering if she really didn't know what she looked like while moving down the halls of school.

Behind her back, boys called her Xena for the TV show about a warrior princess that they had all watched fanatically in the sixth and seventh grades.

"Yeah, right," she said. "Perfect Astra Grein. Never met a problem she couldn't solve."

There was a force of sarcasm and bitterness in her voice that alarmed him.

"Astra, what happened in Vermont?" he asked.

"Oh, God," she said, tears starting again. "How did you know?"

"You didn't sound happy," he said. "Were the French daughters mean to you?"

"No, it wasn't them," she said. "It wasn't even my poor father, who thought he was doing such a good thing by including me in the family and all."

"Is he getting married?" Leigh asked.

"I don't know," Astra said. "I didn't ask. He just—he was so great with those girls, you know, and ... he tried—he really tried with me, but every time I looked at him, I got mad."

"At him?"

"Well, I'm not sure if it was at him or at the idea that he was doing all these things for them that he never did with me," she said, wiping her nose again. "And these aren't even his kids."

"Being mad about that is normal," Leigh said, trying to imagine how Maia would feel if she had to spend a summer watching Ned Morland lavish attention on another man's children.

"I'm almost eighteen," Astra said. "We go to college next year."

Leigh knew this, but he hadn't a clue what these inescapable facts had to do with Mr. Grein.

"I can't blame him forever, you know," she said. "I'm angry and crying all the time, and ... it's ridiculous."

"No, it's not," Leigh said, wanting to cover her clenched hand with his but not able to trust such an instinct. "It won't be forever."

"It's already too long," Astra said. "My father sucked as my father. I just want to get over it."

"Look, I know you've got a really busy day," Leigh said, "but—"

"Yeah, I should get going," she said. "It was good of you, you know, to come and tell me. I would have—"

"Maybe I could take you to dinner tonight," Leigh said, getting out his half-formed idea. "We'll go someplace really nice and eat eggs. And get your mind off whatever it is."

"Really?" Astra said, smiling for the first time since she'd seen him outside her building. "Just to hang out?"

"Yeah, of course," he said. "Please. Let me do this."

Astra wrapped her hair into a knot held together with the same butterfly clips both Maia and Millie had.

"So is she nice?" Astra asked, gathering her bags, and he'd have given anything not to answer, because nice wasn't what Maia was, but Astra didn't need to hear
She's everything.

He nodded. Yes. She's nice.

Astra nodded back. Okay. Good. She should be nice.

"If you mean it, I would love dinner," Astra said. "I could stand to be distracted."

Leigh would have months and years to wish he had simply gone home that night, although he would always be glad he had taken Astra Grein to dinner when she needed a friend she could trust.

~~~

School was weird when he got back from New York. There was no other word for it. Partly, it was due to Maia's having the flu, full blown with fever, chills, and vomiting, and not being in school for a week. And partly, he was scrambling to finish his art project, to do research on the Industrial Revolution for history, and to rewrite his college essay. People at school, even the ones who had been making a big effort to befriend him, seemed to have vanished into a fog of weirdness, being either overly friendly or ignoring him.

Only Millie and Franklin, who sat with Leigh during lunch, seemed the same.

When she got out of bed and came back to school, Maia was also weird, but that he could put down to her having lost four pounds. She was not happy about having to return to a weight-gaining food plan.

For three Saturdays in a row she said she was too busy with homework to drive to the prison, and that of course Josh would rather she studied. But when Leigh spent time with her, ostensibly for both of them to study, he was the only one doing homework. Maia stared out the window and chewed on her fingers or fidgeted with the ends of her hair.

Whenever he asked her if anything was wrong or if he could do anything to help, she smiled and said, "It's nothing. I'm just on edge." Or, "I think one of my meds needs changing. That's what my shrink said this week."

Leigh could see for himself that she was on edge, and he was in no position to know anything about her meds, but she was lying about her shrink. He knew for a fact that she had missed all of her appointments for at least three weeks. He'd heard Charles Rhoem tell Maia that her psychiatrist had phoned wanting to know where she'd been. Leigh didn't want to call her a liar, or think of her as one, so he told himself she'd just mixed up her dates a little.

The only times she was still or peaceful were when he held her without moving. He didn't even let himself kiss the top of her head where her hair swirled away from its part. It wasn't that she wouldn't or didn't kiss him, but her body was so full of jumps and sharp inhalations that, for now, he preferred how she felt when she was still, his arms wrapped quietly around her.

He tried to make a list of things that might bring her some comfort. Things that would do for Maia what nice sheets and blankets had for Millie. Food and chocolates were out, as were flowers in a vase. Maia said that cut flowers looked like prisoners and reminded her of death. He'd already bought her plants. What did you buy for someone you thought needed comforting?

Leigh wrote down
earrings, shoes, handbag,
and
sweater
before deciding he knew nothing about girls. But Millie did, and she happily went with him into D.C. to shop. In Georgetown, Millie selected a brush imported from Germany and a set of barrettes made from a material that looked like ivory but was, the salesgirl said, more flexible.

Together, he and Millie picked out two wrought-iron rabbits, each weighing nine pounds, for Maia to put in her flower beds.

In one store, Leigh got totally sidetracked by a small boat you could sail from land, using all sorts of controls. Millie laughed and told him that there was a new kind of kite Franklin had read about.

"It has a motor, I think," Millie said. "Maia likes bright colors—you could fly it for her."

"We'll buy Franklin the kite another time," Leigh said, but the colors gave him an idea, and at a flower shop he arranged for a dozen helium balloons to be delivered to Maia's house.

~~~

She pushed against the brush's bristles and ran her hands over the barrettes. They found what she decreed
perfect spots
for the rabbits. But, as he had suspected, it was the balloons that made her laugh, that made her look happy. Maia watched them settle against her ceiling and then said she wanted to take them outside and release them into the sky.

"Is that okay?"

"They're your balloons," he said. "Of course."

One by one, she let go of them, holding on to the silver one.

"At school last year, on the September eleventh anniversary, we each got a balloon with the names of six people who had died attached to it," Maia told him.

Leigh remembered Millie telling him this, that everyone had sent off their balloons, the victims' names written on paper and tied to the string, as a kind of memorial.

"They told us we could put our own prayer underneath the names, if we wanted," Maia said.

"What kind of prayer?" Leigh asked.

"I wrote,
May you be free from suffering and know God.
"

"I didn't know you believed in God," he said.

"I don't think I do," she said, "but we were honoring the people who had died and they might have, so I did half Buddhist and half Jesus, just in case."

Leigh remembered the moment of silence that his school had observed the year before on the one-year anniversary of the attacks. He had wanted to pray for the people who had died, but felt uneasy about it because of the whole business of souls. Even if they existed, how would praying be a way to reach one?

"We probably don't have souls," Maia said when he asked her this, "but maybe our bodies have a silent space that absorbs everything important and precious. Maybe that silence hears prayers."

Maia let go of the silver balloon and they both watched as it flashed its way into the clouds, quickly becoming impossible to see.

"Will you tell me what's wrong?" he asked. "Because it seems like something has happened, something that isn't your medication."

Maia took hold of his hand and held it for a long time without speaking. She had guessed correctly that he would not push or pry if they were touching.

"I don't want to lie to you," she said. "But the thing that's happened is pretty much my own screwup."

"And I can't help," he said.

"Right," she said. "I have to figure this out myself."

"And Josh can't help?"

"I don't know yet," she said. "Maybe."

Leigh didn't say anything, but he had never so hated his inability to be decisive. To know. It seemed to him that he would never know the right thing to do until he decided what it was. This, perhaps, was why Lillian was forever harping on his not doing enough of what he wanted. It didn't seem possible, though, that his hazy desires could ever lead him into knowledge, clarity, or action.

Leigh had been staying late at school for a few days, trying to finish his art project. He'd screened a rough version for Preston, Maia, Ms. Kestell, and Diana Jane, each of whom had different ideas about what to change. And then it was finished and he turned it in, getting mentally geared up to focus seriously on college applications. He'd done his research paper and was as caught up as you could get in a school that assigned more than three hours of homework every single day.

Leigh would start his college plan of attack by showing his list to Maia, asking how she felt about Ohio, and seeing how the conversation went from there. He didn't feel as if he could ask her to start thinking about where she wanted to go. He barely wanted to think about it, and he was a year closer to having to make a decision.

The day he meant to show her the list, Maia came to find him after the last bell and said she needed to skip poetry, could he bail on art class? She wanted to speak to him.

In the car, she seemed almost giddy. She had a possible way, she said, to fix her screwup. The other people had screwed up even bigger than she had, and now she was almost positive she could set things right.

"What other people?" Leigh asked.

He realized that all this time, he'd been assuming that she'd hurt herself again (using God knows what) and that he simply hadn't seen or found the mark left on her skin.

"Just people," she said. "But look: I'm going to need a huge favor, because I think Josh has enough to worry about."

"Yeah, anything," Leigh said. "Whatever."

"I might have to borrow some money," she said. "Or talk to your father, if that's okay with you, because I'm going to need a lawyer."

"A lawyer? Jesus, Maia, what the hell happened?"

She was silent and he refused to say anything else. He tried to think of anything he wouldn't tell her. There was nothing. He had even called from New York and told her exactly why he was staying an extra night, that Astra had a family problem and he wanted to take her out to dinner. He'd hesitated over saying that but decided that explaining the truth proved he had nothing to hide.

Which was how he suddenly knew that Maia did. She'd slept with somebody. Jesus Christ. No. Yeah. No. But it had to be. She'd slept with someone, and the thing that had been upsetting her, the thing she needed
to figure out,
was how to tell him about it. Hadn't she said, before getting in the car, that she needed to speak to him?

But before he could be the king of all jerks and ask whom she had slept with, he remembered that she needed a lawyer. A lawyer about a secret problem that Leigh suspected had something to do with sex.

If he was right, this wasn't good.

When a girl needed a lawyer because she had had sex, it was because she'd had it against her will. Leigh thought of the night over the summer when Maia had walked alone through the park. Jesus, what had happened to her? When?

He stopped the car. They were a block or so from her house.

"Maia, who hurt you?" he asked. "If you've been raped, this is not your screwup."

She closed her eyes, exhaled softly, and bit her upper lip. "You know. How do you know? Are they talking about it at school? I didn't think they were as stupid as that."

"School?" he asked. "This happened at school?"

"You don't know?" she asked him, turning around in her seat so that she was facing him. "You're just guessing?"

"Am I guessing right?"

"No, not exactly." she said. "It's all ... Everything's a mess."

"You're going to tell me," he said. It was not a question.

"Do we have to do this here?" she asked. "I like your car. I don't want to talk about this here."