Handle With Care (58 page)

We didn’t see Piper, and Amelia and Emma weren’t friends anymore. The sign in front of the building that used to be her office didn’t have her name on it now. It said GRETEL HANDELMAN, CHIROPRACTOR, instead. And then one Saturday morning my dad and I went out to get bagels, and there was Piper in line in front of us. My dad said hello and she asked how I was doing, but even though she was trying to smile, it looked all wrong, like a wire that was bent out of shape and wouldn’t ever really be straight again. She told my dad that she was working part-time at a women’s free health clinic in Boston, and that she was on her way there right now. Then she knocked over the cup full of straws at the cash register, and she was in such a hurry to leave that she forgot to pay until the girl who had brought her her coffee reminded her it wasn’t free.

I missed Piper, but I think my mother missed her more. She didn’t really have any friends now. She didn’t hang out with anyone but me, Amelia, and Dad.

It was kind of sad, actually.

“Wanna bake?” I asked.

My mother rolled her eyes. “You cannot seriously tell me you’re hungry. You just had lunch.”

I wasn’t hungry, but I was bored.

She looked up at me. “Tell you what. Go get Amelia, and we’ll figure out a plan of action. A movie, maybe.”

“Really?”

“Sure,” my mother said.

We could treat ourselves to movies now. And we went out to restaurants. And I was going to get a sports wheelchair so that I could actually play kickball in the gym with my class. Amelia said the reason we could spend money all of a sudden was the check that was still on the refrigerator. At school there were jerks who said we were rich, but I knew that wasn’t really true. I mean, after all, my parents had never cashed the check. We still had a rusty old car and our little house and the same clothes. A lot of zeros didn’t mean anything, really, except security—my parents could splurge a little, because if their funds ran out, there was a backup. That meant they didn’t fight nearly as much, which wasn’t something you could buy at a store anyway. I didn’t know much about bank accounts, but I was smart enough to realize that checks didn’t do you any good unless they were deposited. My parents, though, didn’t seem to be in any great rush. Every few weeks my mother would say, I really ought to bring that to the bank, and my father would grunt in agreement, but somehow it never got done, and the check stayed tacked on the fridge.

I went into the mudroom to get my boots and my coat, my mother’s voice trailing behind. “Be—”

“Careful,” I finished. “Yeah, I know.”

It was March, but it was still cold enough out for my breath to make funny shapes through my scarf: one that looked like a chicken and another that was a hippo. I started down the slope of the backyard carefully. There wasn’t snow anymore, but the ground still crunched under the soles of my boots. It made a sound like teeth biting.

Amelia was probably in the woods; she liked to draw the birches because she said they were tragic, and that something so beautiful shouldn’t have to die so quickly. I dug my hands into my pockets and tucked my nose under the edge of my scarf. With each step, I thought of something I knew:

The average woman consumes six pounds of lipstick in her lifetime.

Three Mile Island is really only two and a half miles long.

Cockroaches like to eat the glue on the backs of stamps.

I hesitated as I came to the edge of the pond. The reeds were nearly as tall as I was, and I had to work hard to push myself through them without
tangling one of my arms or legs. Right now, for the first time in months, I had no healing fractures, and I planned to keep it that way.

My father told a story once about how he was out in his police cruiser when he realized all the cars in front of him were stopped dead. He slowed down and put the car into park, then opened the door to see what was going on. The minute he stepped onto the pavement, though, he landed flat on his back. Black ice; it was a miracle that he had even managed to brake safely.

The ice on the pond was like that: so clear that I could see the weeds and sand right through it, like it was a pane of glass. I got down carefully on my hands and knees, and inched forward.

I’d never been allowed on the ice, and like most things that you aren’t allowed to do, it was all I thought about.

I couldn’t get hurt this way—I was moving so slowly, and I wasn’t standing up. My back was hunched like a cat’s, my eyes staring down at the surface. Where did the fish go in the winter? Could you see them, if you looked carefully?

I moved my right knee, and my right hand. My left knee, and my left hand. I was breathing hard, not because it was so difficult but because I could not believe it was this easy.

There was a moan that rippled across the surface of the pond, as if the sky was crying. And then suddenly, all around me, the ice became a spiderweb, and I was the bug stuck at its center.

Grasshoppers have white blood Butterflies taste with their hind feet Caterpillars have about four thousand muscles…

“Help,” I said, but I couldn’t yell and breathe at the same time.

The water sucked at me all at once. I tried to grab for the ice, but it broke away in sheets; I tried to swim, but I didn’t know how without a life jacket. My jacket and pants and boots were a sponge, and it was so cold, cold like frostbite, cold like an ice-cream headache.

An armadillo can walk underwater.

Minnows have teeth in their throats.

A shrimp can swim backward.

You would think I’d have been scared. But I could hear my mother, telling me a story before I went to bed, about a coyote who wanted to capture the sun. He climbed the tallest tree, and he put it in a jar and brought it home. That jar, though, it couldn’t hold something so strong, and it burst. See, Wills? my mother had said. You are filled with light.

There was glass above me, and the runny eye of the sun in the sky, and I beat my fists against it. It was like the ice had sealed itself on top of me again, and I couldn’t push through. I was so numb, I had stopped shivering.

As the water filled my nose and mouth, as the sun got tinier and tinier, I closed my eyes and curled my fists around the things I knew for sure:

That a scallop has thirty-five eyes, all blue.

That a tuna will suffocate if it ever stops swimming.

That I was loved.

That this time, it was not me who broke.

Recipe:
(1) a set of instructions for preparing a dish; (2) something likely to lead to a certain outcome.

Follow these rules, and you will get what you want: it’s the easiest prescription in the world. And yet, you can observe a recipe down to the letter, and it will not make a difference when the end product sits in front of you and you realize it’s not what you wanted.

For a long time, I could only see you sinking. I pictured you, with your skin pale blue and your hair streaming out behind you like a mermaid’s. I would wake up screaming, beating the mattress with my hands, as if I could reach through the ice and drag you to safety.

But that wasn’t you, no more than the skeleton you’d been given was you. You were more than that, lighter. You were the steam that fogged the mirror in the morning when Sean dragged me out of bed and forced me to take a shower. You were the crystals painting my car windshield after a night’s frost. You were the heat rising off the pavement like a ghost in the middle of the summer. You never left me.

I do not have the money anymore. It was yours, after all. I slipped the check into the silk lining of the coffin when I kissed you good-bye for the last time.

Here are the things I know for sure:

When you think you’re right, you are most likely wrong.

Things that break—be they bones, hearts, or promises—can be put back together but will never really be whole.

And, in spite of what I said, you can miss a person you’ve never known.

I learn this over and over again, every day I spend without you.

WILLOW’S SABAYON, WITH CLOUDS

SABAYON

6 egg yolks

1 cup sugar

2 cups heavy cream, whipped

½ cup light rum or Grand Marnier

Whisk the eggs and sugar in a double boiler. Once they are completely mixed, fold in the whipped cream. Remove from the heat, pass through a sieve, and add the rum.

CLOUDS

5 egg whites

Pinch of salt

1/3 cup sugar

2 cups milk or water

Place the egg whites and salt in a mixing bowl; on low speed, mix until smooth. Gradually increase the speed and sprinkle in the sugar. Beat until the whites hold a soft peak—this is meringue, the cloud I imagine you resting on nowadays. Meanwhile, simmer the milk or water. Take a spoonful of the meringue and gently drop it into the simmering liquid. Cook the meringue for 2 to 3 minutes and, with a slotted spoon, turn it over and continue cooking for another 2 to 3 minutes. Transfer the poached meringue to a paper towel. The clouds are fragile.

SPUN SUGAR

Cooking spray

2 cups granulated sugar

1 teaspoon corn syrup

Spray a baking sheet with cooking spray, wiping any excess off with a paper towel.

Place the sugar and corn syrup in a saucepan and cook over low heat. Stir occasionally, until the sugar is dissolved. Raise the heat to high and bring the mixture to a boil, until a candy thermometer registers 310 degrees F (hard-crack stage). Remove from the heat and cool slightly. Let the syrup stand to thicken, about 1 minute.

Dip a fork into the sugar syrup and wave it back and forth over the baking sheet to paint long threads. The syrup will begin hardening almost immediately. With practice you can form the strands into lace, swirls, the letters of your name.

To serve, spoon some of the sabayon sauce into a shallow bowl or onto a large plate and top with 2 poached meringues. Gently place a few
threads of spun sugar around the meringue, not on top, or it will deflate.

The outcome of this recipe is a work of art, if you can make it through the complicated preparation. Above all else: handle everything with care. This dessert, like you, is gone before you know it. This dessert, like you, is impossibly sweet.

This dessert fills me, when I miss you the most.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Willow’s trivia came, in part, from The Book of Useless Information, edited by Noel Botham and the Useless Information Society (New York: Perigee, 2006).

If you’d like to learn more about osteogenesis imperfecta or to make a donation, please visit www.oif.org.

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The best way to peel peaches is to cut a small cross at the base of each peach and drop the fruit into a pot of boiling water for 1 minute. Remove it with a slotted spoon and immediately place the peach in ice water. Peel the peach—the skin will come right off—and slice into thin wedges or small pieces for the buckle.