Picture Me Gone (5 page)

C
atlin always talked about running away, but not in the usual way where you seek out your real parents who are rich and glamorous and gave you up for adoption by mistake and have regretted it ever since.

She wanted to run away to Brussels or Washington, DC, and head up an international spy ring that would save the world from mass destruction, preferably at the very last second. This she would accomplish by writing an impossibly elaborate computer program involving twenty-eight prime numbers coded into one uniquely high-spec iPhone. I tend to drift off when she talks tech.

All of our spy games involved threats to the free world and invasion by evil enemies while we plotted routes through underground tunnels known to no one but us thanks to a map Cat discovered in the catacombs under the British Museum in an ancient box sealed with a curse.

Untouched for two hundred years, Cat said. Feast your eyes, matey.

I feasted my eyes on an ancient-looking folder, scarred and burned round the edges, and even though I knew she’d used an old iron to burn the edges and make a bit of ordinary card look antique, I was impressed. It did look old.

Wow, I said, reaching for it. But she pushed my hand away and made me put on bright blue washing-up gloves, which had a satisfying forensic appearance when used out of context. With my gloves on, I was allowed to hold the file while Cat dusted it with baby powder for fingerprints.

Just as I thought, she said with a mad gleam in her eye. Last handled by foreign operatives.

Really? How can you tell? I was genuinely curious.

Look closely, she whispered. See how the fingerprint whirligigs go backward? That’s foreign.

I must have looked skeptical because Cat bristled. Fine, don’t believe me. You think I care?

I believe you, I said.

As you should, young Mila. As you should.

And the date? I asked. I didn’t want to piss her off again.

She held one of the pieces of burned paper from the file up to the bare lightbulb in the clubhouse. As I thought, she said. It’s ninety percent linen, distinct greenish hue (that was from the walls in the clubhouse, which were painted green and gave us a greenish hue too), made in Czechoslovania between . . . hmm . . . 1918 and 1920.

You had to give the girl credit.

And then she carefully looked at all the information in our file, while I drew an approximation of a stencil in red pencil at the top of every page:

If we’d managed to hang on to the rats, we could have tied coded notes to their legs, but instead we worked on innocuous-sounding phrases for our code books that would allow us to exchange vital information in public. When I say we worked on phrases, what I mean is that Cat made them up and I said they were good. Here are some examples:

Take an umbrella =
TRUST
NO ONE

I’m thirsty =
I HAVE NEWS

What’s for dinner? =
WE’VE BEEN
BETRAYED

Nice curtains =
WE’RE
DOOMED

If I ever suggested a phrase, Cat would think of a reason why it wasn’t quite right, so after a while I stopped bothering. I didn’t mind though, just continued on with my TOP SECRET lettering, which got more and more professional-looking until you might have thought we had a real stamp.

Are you getting a picture of our relationship? The thing is, I could have chosen a more straightforward friend, but I didn’t. It never really occurred to me that the friends you choose reveal you. Take Matthew and Gil. Gil required a leader and Matthew a follower. With Cat and me, I was the anchor. I would never, for instance, stuff rats into socks.

It was all good fun, except that I never got to be the one who made the twenty-eight-digit prime-number code to save the world, despite understanding prime numbers far better than Cat did. She thought you could just have a mystical feeling about a number, no matter how many times I told her that
prime
meant not being divisible by anything. To Catlin, thirty-nine was a prime number because it looked sinister. Despite it totally not being one.

As for her elaborate save-the-world fantasy—well, maybe it wasn’t a random choice. I would rather have played something else occasionally, like orphans or explorers or hospitals. But if my family had been like hers, I might have been equally desperate to come up with the right combination of prime numbers to make the world safe again.

G
abriel and his babysitter are back from playgroup. Her name is Caryn, C-a-r-y-n in case we were thinking of going with the usual spelling, and she looks uneasy when we tell her that Suzanne isn’t home yet but it’s all right, she can go. She says, No, it’s OK, I’ll just fix his boddle in case Mommy’s delayed.

But Mommy isn’t delayed, she’s back, still looking stressed, but happy to see Gabriel and also—though somewhat less so—us. She asks if I like DVDs and gives me a choice of
Titanic
or
Amélie.
I don’t really care, but choose
Amélie.
I start to watch the movie and it’s fine, but I want to know what Suzanne and Gil are talking about more than I want to watch Amélie save the world.

Gil says, What else? And Suzanne answers with a sigh.

Maybe he’s having an affair with one of his students. I don’t know.

And then I am inside the head of a person with a young child whose husband has gone missing and I am much more upset and panicked than Suzanne. What if he’s
dead
? screams this person with a child. What if I
never see him again
?

But nothing about Suzanne is screaming. When I say this to Gil, he nods as if he’s noticed the same thing. I suspect there’s more to this marriage than we know, he says. And of course Owen changed everything. Most couples who lose a child don’t stay together.

I’ve been thinking about the connection between language and thought. Languages that read from left to right picture the passage of time moving left to right. If a French speaker tells the story of a cat catching a mouse, time starts at the left and moves to the right. Hebrew and Arabic speakers start with the cat and the mouse on the right and time passes to the left. So it’s not just a question of words.

I try to remember this when I talk to Suzanne and imagine how time moves in her brain. Maybe it stopped when Owen died. Or got dammed up like logs in a stream. Or just goes round and round like the clock icon on a computer. She seems like a person made of glass. Tap her and she’ll shatter into a billion pieces.

It is difficult having a conversation with a glass person but she watches patiently when I hold Gabriel and feed him his boddle, even though I can tell she wants him back. Honey desperately wants to protect the baby. She makes a faint noise in her throat and Suzanne shoos her away. Suzanne is not a horrible person masquerading as a nice one, just an angry one pretending to be normal.

Perhaps she is the sort of person who says nothing for fear of exploding with words. In my presence, at least, she doesn’t ever mention Matthew. The language that structures her thoughts seems to be one that no one else speaks. And she avoids the only other creature who shares her loss. I think the dog’s unhappiness frightens her.

Gabriel is too young to notice. I play a game with him where I lower a toy mouse on a string over his face and jerk it up again. He laughs and laughs and then out of nowhere his face collapses and he starts to howl. Suzanne swoops in and picks him up, saying, Mommy’s here. Gil looks at me.

I walk over to the thousands of books displayed on the walls, run my hand along them and pick one out;
Caravanserai,
it’s called. Camels. Women draped in black. Men squatting, drinking tiny cups of tea. Low square buildings decorated with inscriptions I can’t read. It looks hot and quiet and slow.

• • •

Between jet lag and the oddness of being without street noise and other people, the afternoon passes.

Suzanne is going into town for a few things and asks if I’d like to come. Yes, please, I say, and we take Gabriel along too. Gil stays put. He’ll work.

On the fifteen-minute drive Suzanne asks me all the usual questions about how I like school and how is my mother, and where is she performing these days, etc. It is polite adult talk and only just lacks the genuine curiosity that connects people.

Suzanne apologizes for the supermarket being boring but I don’t find it boring at all. To me it’s almost as exotic as Caravanserai. She says to tell her if I see anything I’d like to buy.

I see lots of things I’d like to buy: macaroni and cheese in a box, Band-Aids with cartoons of superheroes on them, peanut butter and marshmallow swirled round in a huge plastic jar. In the bakery department there are cakes with talking clown heads and musical merry-go-round ponies in bright colors. The breakfast cereal section goes on for half a mile and I wonder how anyone ever chooses. I’m looking for Easter eggs but the ones I find are all too ugly or too childish or too similar to the ones I could buy at home. When at last I catch up with Suzanne she’s talking on the phone. Her face looks different from the one Gil and I have seen. It’s younger, suddenly, and her smile is one she has not shown us.

I approach her through the fruit section, where watermelons, apples and bananas all look twice the size of the ones in England. How can this be?

When she sees me she says, I have to go, and clicks off. Her smile has gone all pink and sugary like the clown head on the cake. A friend from book club, she explains, unnecessarily.

A friend? I don’t hate Suzanne but I can’t bring myself to like her either. She’s one of those people who thinks that because I’m young I’m blind to what’s true and what’s not. I see her far more clearly than she sees me, perhaps more clearly than she sees herself.

Suzanne has to go to the dry cleaner and the post office, so we pile the groceries into the back of the car and she says, If you’d like to walk around a bit on your own, feel free. Just meet us here in half an hour.

I wander off to a sports shop and browse the T-shirts, but there’s nothing I want to buy and anyway I don’t have any dollars. Across the road there’s a bench catching the last bit of sun and I sit down.

Hey Cat
, I text.
Wish u wuz here.

I wait for a while but Catlin doesn’t answer. In the meantime, everyone’s running around like crazy, and it’s funny to think that rush hour exists in a town the size of a peanut as well as at home. I sit as still as humanly possible, making myself invisible so I can watch what’s going on without being seen. It works. No one looks.

The only thing worth watching is a man who backs his 4x4 much too fast into a parking spot and smashes the car behind him by mistake. He shouts at his kid, who’s maybe sixteen, for distracting him, and the kid gets out of the car, slams the door and storms off while the guy gets down on his knees to examine the dent in the other car.

Catlin texts back.
Me too. It rains.
Attached is what I think might be a photo of a puddle. It’s hard to tell.

I tear myself away from the local five-star entertainment to meet Suzanne at the car. Gabriel stares at me intently and when I smile at him his entire face lights up.

We drive back to the house without saying much. Suzanne talks to Gabriel, who’s grizzling in the backseat. Who’s Mommy’s tired boy, she says, and then glances over at me like we’re in a conspiracy. Being with her makes me tired. Then I remember Owen and feel ashamed.

Dinner is risotto with peas and Parmesan cheese. It tastes nice but halfway through the meal I excuse myself to lie on the sofa. Honey is beside me on the floor. I close my eyes and rest one hand on her back, feeling the rise and fall of her slow breathing. Gil covers me with a blanket. He thinks I’m asleep.

So, he says in a low voice, sitting back down at the table. What are we going to do?

Suzanne doesn’t answer right away. Eventually she says, I can’t leave. Surely you can see that. I can’t leave Gabriel and my students and . . . everything.

I hear Gil sigh. Suzanne, tell me please. There must be more.

There is a silence. I can almost hear the fizzing of Suzanne’s nerves.

Tell me, he says.

She begins to speak, quietly, so I have to strain to hear. I don’t know, she says. He says he’s fine but he’s not. He blames himself for Owen. Her laugh is bitter. I blame him too. I hoped Gabriel might make it better, but surprise, surprise, it’s worse. So it’s true what everyone says about save-the-marriage babies. Who’d have guessed?

Gil says my name. He was not born yesterday. I make a noise like a sleeping person, a kind of grumbly sigh. It works. I was not born yesterday either.

And?

Who the hell knows? He doesn’t speak much, your friend.

My father doesn’t speak much either. He uses words sparingly, as if they’re rationed. It’s what comes, I think, of knowing so many words in so many languages. Too much choice.

You knew that when you married him. Gil speaks gently, without reproach.

Yes, of course. But knowing it, and then living for sixteen years with a man who doesn’t speak . . . it’s different, surely?

There is an edge to her voice, like a knife. For the first time I realize how much older Matthew must be than Suzanne. If Matthew is Gil’s age, he’s nearing sixty. And if Suzanne’s just had a baby, can she be much more than forty?

Marieka always says fondly that she has to read Gil’s mind. I’ve become very good at it, says she. And then she kisses him on the back of the neck if he is bent over his work, and he reaches up one hand and buries his fingers in her thick hair and she turns her head and kisses his wrist. There is something in this gesture that makes me feel completely safe. Despite the fact that the scene does not include me, it does not exclude me either.

I feel a sudden rush of pity for Gabriel with his glass mother, his glass house, his radiant baby smile.

Take the car, please, Suzanne is saying. I don’t need it. I have a friend nearby; she can take me to college.

She? I think. Whoever visits isn’t a she.

I close my eyes once more and when I open them again I realize that time has passed and the conversation has moved on.
What have I missed?

It’s late, Gil says. Good night, Suzanne.

I don’t have to pretend to be woozy now. I lean on Gil till we get to my room and he folds back the covers of my bed. That’s all I remember.