Goldengrove (14 page)

Eleven

I
WAS BEGINNING TO UNDERSTAND WHAT ANY CERTIFIED
DARE graduate should have realized long before: Mom had blackmailed our former pediatrician into prescribing a ton of pain medication. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t noticed, but it took me a while to admit that the problem wasn’t going away, or spontaneously improving. She was taking more pills every day, and they seemed to be working. Something was working. She was playing the piano again, but with fewer of the mistakes that built to the crescendo of her pounding on the keyboard. It was painful to hear those ghostly notes floating out over the lake, but at least she didn’t play Chopin or Brahms, nothing mournful or lush, only the crisp Bach preludes that made me think of prairie dogs popping in and out of their burrows.

Mom and Sally were partners in crime. In the evenings when Dad was cooking, I’d hear them laughing up in her study until Sally swanned downstairs, as glassy-eyed and wobbly as Mom, only minus the apology and with twice the brassy defiance. She’d swoop past me, a salon-streaked stoner cockatoo. She’d say, “Nico, darling, how are you?” But she was only asking the air and didn’t wait for the air to answer.

By dinner, the clarity that let my mother practice in the morning had melted into a puddle slicked with an oily film through which she regarded us without particular interest. The mouthfuls Dad and I ate seemed gluttonous compared to Mom’s. One night, she announced that she was thinking of getting a harpsichord, which might have seemed like a good sign except that she couldn’t pronounce “harpsichord.” She stared us down as she struggled to get the word out, and my father and I stared back, two deer trapped in the wavering beams of her blinky attention.

I wondered what would happen when Dr. Viscott retired. Officer Prozak had taught us that addicts would stop at nothing to get the substances they craved. I’d imagined an unshaven guy in a dirty T-shirt nodding off with a needle in his arm, not my elegant, sad mother, playing Bach on the piano. It felt as if Mom had decided to go on a long journey alone, and I had to say good-bye to her, every afternoon. Sooner or later, sooner, I would have to talk it over with Dad.

One afternoon, I went to meet him for lunch, and he wasn’t in our booth. I told myself he’d be there soon, but after five minutes, then ten, then fifteen, I felt as if I’d ordered a hard-boiled egg and swallowed it whole. By the time I left the restaurant to go find him, a blazing star of pain throbbed inside my chest. I wondered if Margaret had felt that pounding heat when the lake had let her in and refused to let her out. Even after I saw my father through the bookstore window, my heart took a while to slow down.

Elaine and my father were standing near the counter, checking over some papers. Dad had his hand on Elaine’s shoulder, and she was smiling up at him, her face transfigured and beautified by amusement and adoration.

“Excuse me?” I said. I could have been throwing pebbles at pigeons. Dad and Elaine scattered. “Where were you? I was waiting.” My father looked at his watch.

“We were going over some figures,” he said.

“I’ll bet you were,” I mumbled.

“What?” said Dad.

“You guys go get lunch,” Elaine said. “I’ve still got another half hour till Tycho gets home from day camp.”

As the day wore on, I kept recalling the look on Elaine’s face as she gazed up at my father. The more I thought about it, the more I began to suspect that Dad and Elaine were having an affair. No wonder Elaine knew all about my meltdown in the poetry aisle. But why would a handsome guy like my dad fall for lumpy Elaine? Because Elaine was serene and cheerful, everything Mom wasn’t. Elaine had loved Margaret, but Margaret wasn’t her daughter. Elaine still had Tycho, and every day she performed the heroic tasks—making the bed, cleaning the house—that neither my father, my mother, nor I had the strength or the courage to do. I understood all that, but it didn’t make me any less furious at them both.

By dinner, the pain in my chest was so strong that I had to press both hands against my rib cage. It made it hard to eat or even push food around my plate.

“What’s wrong?” Mom’s spaceship docked momentarily on Planet Dinner Table.

“My heart hurts,” I said. “It’s hurt all day.” I beamed Dad a murderous look. But he wasn’t picking up on my silent communication.

After that, I made a point of showing up unexpectedly at the bookstore. I’d barge into Dad’s office—Elaine did seem to spend a lot of time there—but they were never touching, never even close. My father would be sitting at his desk, while Elaine stood so near the door that several times I nearly slammed into her when I burst in. I kept mentioning them to each other, but they didn’t go for the bait, or else they had perfect grown-up control over their reactions.

One day, Elaine was leaving, and my father said he’d walk her to the corner. I watched them from the window. As they said good-bye, Dad leaned down, and his lips disappeared in the frothy nimbus of Elaine’s hair. Elaine’s hand shot up and touched the place where his lips had been. Didn’t they care that the whole town could see? Or did they imagine that the neighbors would think that this was how every boss said good-bye to his favorite employee?

In the middle of the night, I woke up wondering if Dad could be Tycho’s father. It didn’t seem possible, but nothing that was happening to us would have seemed possible only a short time before.

I’d imagined that Margaret’s death had drawn our family closer, but now I understood that it had blown us apart. I told myself not to be angry. But they were the adults. They weren’t supposed to leave me alone with my dead sister’s grieving boyfriend. The truth was, I wanted that so much that I was willing to accept the risks that my parents were taking with our future. The distraction of their own problems, and their separate solutions, kept their attention diverted safely away from my secret life with Aaron.

By now, I could hardly not notice how much I thought about Aaron, how often I talked to him in my head and remembered things to tell him. And there was that trick he did with time, making it speed up when we were together and drag till I saw him again. The memory of him was like medicine: two drops in the dead of the night when I woke up missing Margaret. Then I’d remember that Aaron and I were going to watch
Trouble in Paradise
, and for a moment I’d feel better.

I’d had crushes on boys in my class. One day, a boy would be just like any other boy, and then some overnight change made my attention fly toward him like filings to a magnet. After that I always knew where he was, even in a crowd at recess. He alone stayed sharp and clear while everyone blurred around him. Suddenly, I couldn’t speak when he was anywhere near. I imagined holding his hand. I pressed my lips to my wrist. Then, just as mysteriously, the crush would disappear, and I couldn’t understand why I’d been foolish enough to think that one boy, that boy, was different from the rest.

It wasn’t like that with Aaron. I could talk, I could think, I could be myself, or at least the version of myself that most resembled Margaret. But if it wasn’t a crush, what was it? Maybe it
was
love. Not boy-girl love, not waiting-for-him-to-call love, not wondering-if-it-was-too-early-to-let-him-kiss-you love. It was something purer and deeper. No one could know how it felt to be us, to have lost and found what we had. Aaron was going away in the fall. We would only have this one summer.

On the weekends we had plenty of time. I’d pretend to be at Elaine ’s. Weekdays were more rushed. I couldn’t just vanish for hours without telling my mother where I was going. But gradually, the weekday visits lengthened. Dad was in the bookstore, and Mom was leaving on her drug holidays earlier in the day.

I knew the reason Aaron liked being with me was that I reminded him of my sister. I’d catch him squinting at me, searching for traces of her. I knew it, and I didn’t. Some part of me believed that Aaron liked the part of me that was Nico, whoever that was. I felt as if Margaret were a plant inside me that, nurtured by Aaron, had begun to blossom. Mostly, it was fine with me, but sometimes—usually when I was tired or lonely—it scared me. I felt as if I, and not Margaret, was the one who had disappeared, or as if I’d become a petri dish in which my sister was growing. There were days when I wanted to say, “I’m the living sister.” But when I ran out of vanilla oil, I asked Aaron to get me more. He always nodded and didn’t talk. Those were always good moments.

One night, after my parents had gone to bed, I put on
Flying Deuces
and fast-forwarded to the end. The plane Laurel and Hardy have hijacked crashes, and as Stan crawls out of the wreckage, Ollie’s ghost flutters up toward the sky.

In the final scene, Stan is walking down a country road with a little hobo pack. He looks calm and happy, his simple-minded old self. Has he gotten over Ollie? A voice calls him—it’s Ollie’s!— and he turns to see an irritated-looking horse with a bowler and a Hitler mustache. Ollie the horse is as foul-tempered and peevish as Ollie the person. He snarls, “Look at the mess you’ve gotten me into.” But Stan is so thrilled to see him that he grins and throws his arms around the horse’s neck. Stan hadn’t gotten over his friend’s death. Ollie was lost, and now he was found.

The film ended. I wasn’t crying or crumpled up in pain on the sofa. I got up and went to bed and closed my eyes and slept.

M
Y MOTHER NEVER GOT A HARPSICHORD
. Maybe she forgot, or maybe the trouble she’d had trying to pronounce it had dampened her desire. Now, at meals, she played with her food, extracting one shred of cabbage from the tangle of coleslaw, one curl of pasta from the mac and cheese. Then she’d lose interest and grow abstract, listening, as if a voice, inaudible to my father and me, was calling from another room. A dim gleam, a sort of fish-tank glow, would flicker in her eyes, and, waving her fork like a baton, she’d say something like, “I’ve just figured out the whole thing about Mozart.”

We’d pause from our pretend-eating and wait, but the light in her eyes would sputter, and after a while she would ask, with rising anger, why we were looking at her.

“Because you’re so beautiful,” my father would say, at which point she would stand unsteadily and drift out of the room.

At those moments, I hated how grown-up I needed to be in order to keep reminding myself that they were doing their best. But their best wasn’t good enough. It was in our interests to let the others hide, lest, in the flood of confession, our own secrets might spill out. It was terrible, how Margaret’s death had put everything in perspective and trumped everything that might seem huge to a normal person. Margaret’s death said, None of that counts. Every problem can be solved as long as the people involved are alive.

July and August mocked us from the calendar on the kitchen tackboard. Every square used to be filled with Margaret’s spidery writing, notes about a party or school event, music lesson or rehearsal. It was eerie that some of the boxes were already filled. But we couldn’t take the calendar down, no more than we could dismantle Margaret’s room. Someone must have canceled my sister’s dentist appointment.

One calendar box was marked with a new red X. I would have remembered without it. That was my appointment with the heart specialist in Albany. Every time I thought about it, I saw a gloomy, faceless person in a white lab coat telling me that I had only weeks to live.

Biking to meet Aaron, I’d think, I could die like Margaret and wind up in a ditch. If I didn’t show up, how long would it take Aaron to work up the nerve to call my parents? How long would it take them to find me? The grief I felt on their behalf was so overwhelming that I had to remind myself it hadn’t actually happened. Did I need to warn Aaron that my heart could stop even when we were just quietly watching a movie? In fact, when I was with him, the pain disappeared. I would have thought I was cured, if I’d been thinking about it.

Mom offered to drive me to the doctor’s, but a few days before, Dad announced we were all going in the Jeep. He shot my mother a nonnegotiable look filled with information—no accusations, just facts—about her ongoing romance with prescription medication.

How could Mom have driven? It was all she could do to hold on to the directions to the hospital. Who would have imagined that there were so many ways to misplace a sheet of paper? Each time she lost it, she went insane, scrabbling under the seat, and my father’s shoulders would stiffen. But I didn’t think she’d taken any pills that day. She used to get nervous before. We’d forgotten what we used to be like, forgotten what was normal.

The hospital was outside the city, a short distance from the highway. I didn’t get a chance to look at the shops and the traffic or to enjoy the twisted fun of my parents getting lost and fighting. But maybe I wouldn’t have liked it without Margaret there to enjoy it with me.

We were all so relieved to find the hospital that we were practically ecstatic until, one by one, we remembered why we were there. As we drove through the gate, Mom said, “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”

Dad muttered, “That’s not funny.”

The cement road had a bumpy stretch where a group of workers with earth-moving equipment were enlarging the parking lot.

“Good thing we brought the Jeep,” said Dad.

“Brilliant,” said Mom. “We need to find the Newton Pavilion. Pavilion? Whatever that is.”

“I know that, Daisy,” said Dad.

I thought of Dr. Viscott, and of the electric train chugging its reassuring circuit around his waiting room.

“Watch out,” Mom called to me, as we crossed the oddly deserted parking lot.

Dad said, “Watch out for what?”

“Watch out on general principles,” said Mom.

A cop with an orange mustache scrutinized Mom and Dad’s driver’s licenses as if we might be terrorists plotting to blow up the ICU.

“Picture ID?” he asked me.

Mom said, “She doesn’t drive. She doesn’t have a passport. Should we have brought her birth certificate? Would that have been enough?”

The guard held up his hand. Enough. He gave each of us a long, hard look. Then he waved us through.