After the Moment (9 page)

The idea, as Janet explained it, was that starving changed your brain and made you incapable of reason. It didn't really matter
why
you had stopped eating. In fact, it was a waste of time trying to discover if not eating meant you were depressive or anxious or afraid of your developing body. All that mattered was to stop starving your brain, and that could be done only with calories.

The flaw in this plan, as Clayton had quickly seen, was that girls who become anorexic are not so very anxious to eat. They need a reason to do so, and someone to sit with them through the ordeal of eating. Which was why Josh had agreed to allow Maia's visits only if he heard from Clayton, in messages conveyed via the prison warden's office, that she was eating. And it was also how Millie came to be Maia's eating companion, a job now partly taken over by Leigh.

He learned all of these things in bits and pieces and from sources both obvious—Janet and Millie—and less obvious—Franklin and Kevin Staines. Based on what Kevin said about Maia, Leigh had the impression that she was not too popular at school. This made his opinion of Millie, already high, go up. Good for her that she adored the girl she liked best instead of the one whom everybody else liked.

In his car, he gleaned a detail or two from Maia herself, although she mostly didn't like to talk about how odd she was. She didn't have any embarrassment about people noticing that she couldn't, for example, open a door unless she placed a tissue or the hem of her skirt between the handle and her hand. But she didn't, understandably, volunteer what a huge head case she was.

She provided information when Leigh asked directly about her germ phobia or food issues. The not eating had started innocently enough when she'd joined her mother on a low-carbohydrate diet, and the germ fear was from watching Josh's house be searched by the D.A.'s office. At first, Leigh assumed that her wearing socks no matter how hot it was had to do with germs. She said her feet got cold easily, and she had a vast collection of socks.

They were either smooth with a pattern (trees, paisleys, triangles, happy faces) or solid colored and ribbed. She folded them over three times until they were ankle length. When Leigh asked why she didn't wear tights or something like that in the winter, her answer had nothing to do with germs.

"I don't like clothes to touch my skin," she said, and he refrained from pointing out that socks did, in fact, touch her skin.

Often, Maia made no sense about what she did, but Leigh could tell she believed in her own logic.

He mostly didn't care, because being in the car with Maia was like living in a separate universe. Even when Millie came along, happily buckled into the back seat, it seemed as if a rare and precious privacy existed between him and Maia Morland. He was, in a clear and concise way, devoid of all of his usual doubts and hesitations, both nicer and smarter. He felt more interesting and less judgmental.

He did sometimes wonder, though, about her mother. By all accounts, Esme Green (her maiden name—she'd dropped Morland two marriages ago) was a charming and delightful person who was simply surprised beyond description that her daughter had become too thin.

"She hadn't known there could be such a thing," Maia said once, but her voice was kind and full of gentle amusement.

"I think she's had a hard life," Janet said. "Her parents are dead, and Maia's father left her without a dime."

Leigh didn't think this was quite true, as Maia had mentioned that until her mother married Josh, Ned Morland had sent money.

"But never a letter or anything, except on my birthday," she said. "I have sixteen postcards from him. They all say
Hey, baby doll, have a great year, with love from your father.
"

Leigh had the impression, although he wasn't sure, that Ned Morland had stopped sending money because Josh had requested to take over all financial responsibility for Maia.

"He was thinking of adopting me, I know," she said once when talking about Josh. "I was in fifth grade, but then he started getting investigated and there was the trial and, you know, he and Mom kind of went ... It didn't work out."

Leigh had not shared Millie's reluctance to Google Josh Pierce, but doing so hadn't told him much. Josh had apparently pioneered a tactic in mutual fund investments called market timing. As far as Leigh could understand (and it was not far), this was illegal, but allowed. It made certain people very rich, but it made others incapable of gaining on their investments. Josh had refused to cut a deal with the Justice Department and was now at a federal prison in Cumberland, Maryland, about two and a half hours from Calvert Park.

Josh's office, which continued working in his absence—making Leigh think of an elevator that no one ever used—paid a car service to pick Maia up, drive her to the prison, wait, and then drive her home. Millie said that Maia was often miserable on the way back from the prison.

"She says she feels like she's leaving behind the one person in the world who loves her."

Millie's pronouncements of what Maia said or did were no longer amusing bits of evidence that his sister viewed her friend as a goddess. Instead, they gave Leigh information that he was starting to need. He knew, in a hazy way, that he was becoming a little too interested in Maia Morland. It appalled him that in his phone conversations with Astra he was talking around what was preoccupying both his thoughts and his time: a strange girl who had to be coaxed into eating and who had a fierce attachment to a man in prison.

So he started looking for a job, wondering if he simply needed to be distracted from thinking too much about Maia.

Plus, Leigh needed money, as his savings had been completely wiped out by the car. He knew he had too much time and not enough to do, because he'd started using Clayton's digital camera to make stupid little movies of Millie reading romance novels or Maia weeding. Maia had an immense flower garden that she took care of as if it were a child, and he liked to zoom in on her pulling out weeds or raking smooth any disturbances in the mulch.

She allowed him to film her as long as he kept most of her body out of the shots. She told him she didn't want to see what she looked like, so he filmed her hands, her hair, and the flower beds. Millie let him film whatever he wanted, mostly because she hardly paid attention to what he was doing with the camera.

He needed a job both to earn money and to keep busy. One of Millie's friends worked in the Calvert Park tennis club and said he'd be glad to help Leigh.

"Preston Gavenlock is great," Millie said, hunched over her computer as she and the great Preston Gavenlock e-mailed back and forth about getting Leigh a job. "He'll be a senior, too."

"Do you only have friends who are older than you?" Leigh asked her, and Millie turned around to study her brother.

"I admire people who deserve it," Millie said briskly. "That usually means they're older and they never mind my age. Daddy always said he never met a teenager who didn't need a fan."

"He was right," Leigh said, kissing the top of Millie's head.

~~~

Preston Gavenlock turned out to be almost exactly Leigh's height and weight. He picked Millie up as if she were five, saying, "Look at you, kid."

"I teach tennis three mornings a week, and bus tables almost every night," Preston told Leigh. "They aren't the jobs that colleges love, but the money is good, and I'm saving for a car."

"Preston smashed the one his dad gave him in May," Millie said.

"Hey, I thought we agreed that the fence jumped into the middle of the road and ran into that other car," Preston said. "Don't make me look bad in front of your brother."

"Right, I forgot," Millie said, and Leigh made a mental note to never let her into any car that this boy was driving.

Through Preston's connections at the club, Leigh was hired to bus tables, which was not the most thrilling job in the world, and which would not improve his value as a college applicant, but it was good to be busy.

He liked how when they counted out tips he was able to judge his own worth at the end of a shift.

It meant he missed dinner at home three or four nights a week, and to make it up to Maia, who was still eating at his house, Leigh offered to drive her to the prison. He thought that maybe it would be nicer for her if she went, as he put it, with a friend instead of a stranger.

"I think it would," she said, "but you'll be awfully bored."

"It's just a two-hour ride," he said. "And you're not boring."

"No, I mean during the visit. You know, you can't come in. And even if Josh only lets me stay an hour, the whole going-in-and-doing-the-paperwork and all, it can take two hours."

"I'll read," Leigh said. "It's okay."

Calvert Park Prep, just like his old school, had rather elaborate and unrealistic ideas about how students should spend their summer break. Lists had been compiled of specialized camps, SAT tutors, and college essay writing workshops. Reading lists were sent out—one for each grade—and Leigh's sat on his desk next to a stack of untouched books.

Although aware of how important it was to make a good impression on all those people who were lined up to judge him as college drew near, Leigh found it impossible to take seriously the idea of summer homework. But he could certainly read in his car while Maia Morland visited her reason for eating.

Leigh picked Maia up at eight on a Saturday morning, and she kept him entertained by going over the ridiculous list of what was and was not allowed in the visiting room (three diapers, but no diaper bags).

"He misses cigars, but no one can smoke," she said. "I can't even bring him food."

"Are they nice to you?" Leigh asked, meaning the guards.

"They mostly just seem glad that I don't hate them," she said. "And now that I'm sixteen, I'm less work."

She used to need the driver to go into the prison with her because she had been a minor, requiring an escort and extra paperwork.

The prison looked like an old factory or a huge hospital in the middle of a field, and there was nothing terribly dramatic about the visitors' parking lot. Maia said that the out-of-doors exercise facility was in the center of the compound so that no one could see when, exactly, the inmates were allowed out.

"Josh always says that the sky is enough," she told Leigh as she got out of the car.

It was ten-thirty.

"I should be done by, well, I want to say noon, but one is more like it."

"I'll wait," he said.

"You could find a Starbucks or something," she said. "I think downtown Cumberland is not too far away."

"Go," Leigh said, not particularly loving the idea of her waiting around a prison parking lot.

She couldn't take her cell phone in because it would mean leaving it at the control desk, and she didn't like to think of it sitting in a box collecting germs from the phones and diaper bags of other visitors.

The diaper regulation took on new meaning as he watched the number of women with babies and small children get out of cars or off buses. He tried to read his book or listen to the radio (he kept the car running, even though it meant burning through gas, because it was too hot without the AC). He didn't think it was polite to study other people whose misfortune had brought them to a prison during visiting hours, but he saw enough. Everyone looked tired, as if no amount of money or time could ease their exhaustion. Even the kids seemed subdued, maybe by the sun's bright glare, but maybe from recalling a previous visit.

Hard to say. Or imagine. Leigh sent a silent prayer to the God he was fairly certain didn't exist, thanking Him or Her for the simple fact that his parents were not in prison.

It was about twenty to one when Maia came back to the car. He got out and opened the door for her, something that felt unnatural, as if he were doing something he'd seen in a movie, but it also felt ... proper.

She was quiet, only asking if he could turn the radio off and mentioning that it was stupidly hot out and why didn't they live in New Hampshire. Or Canada. Or anyplace cool.

Leigh, who had lived through one entire August without air conditioning (the wiring in his and Lillian's apartment had fried and there had been enough money to fix it but not enough to replace the window units), didn't say anything. He hated the heat, too, but he thought maybe Maia had something else on her mind. They stopped for lunch and he had the satisfaction of watching her eat a cheeseburger, although he was on his own when it came to the fries. She drank a Diet Coke, but he put that down to her being a girl, not just a girl who was crazy on the topic of eating. None of Leigh's friends on the soccer team drank Coke, and most of them were careful about how they ate, claiming that this or that made them slow.

Back in the car, Leigh told her she could put her seat back if she wanted to sleep.

"No, I'm not tired," she said.

He tried talking to her about Millie's reading list, which was the only school list Leigh was willing to follow. Millie, who was normally a straight-A student, had recently reported that she couldn't concentrate when trying to read any of the books the school had "suggested."

"It's like my brain is a slug," she said.

"It's too many romance novels," Janet said, but she didn't have the heart to ban them, because, as she told Leigh, she thought "escapist reading" was of special comfort to Millie just now.

Hoping, once again, to find himself useful, Leigh said he'd read with her and picked a book from her list that he'd already read:
The Bridge of San Luis Rey.
Janet said she'd read
To Kill a Mockingbird
with Millie, although Leigh thought they should let her just watch the movie, and Maia volunteered to reread
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

So far, only the three of them were doing the reading, with Millie feigning interest in their thoughts and comments. Leigh talked to Maia about the Thornton Wilder book, how it seemed different to him now, overly obvious in its concerns with happiness and misery.

Silence.

He asked about
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,
wanting to tell her about an e-mail from Lillian in which she had gone on at some length about her memory of the book, how she had always meant to read it again, hoped Millie would love it, and thought Maia sounded like an admirable person.