The Book That Matters Most (22 page)

“Thank you, Jennifer,” Cate said. “That's an important observation.”

Ruth said, “We don't have to discuss
Go Set a Watchman
, do we?”

“I think that's a conversation for another time,” Cate said. “Honor? Do you agree? This is the book that matters the most to you.”

Honor strode to the front of the room, her multitude of bracelets clanging noisily together, her layers of scarves and necklaces swaying and billowing around her as she walked.

She let her gaze settle over each of them, which took long
enough for Ava to squirm beneath it. Clearly, Honor commanded a classroom. Which was surprising since, as a babysitter, she could never even get the kids to bed at a normal time.

“Actually, Jennifer touched upon the very thing that makes
To Kill a Mockingbird
the book that matters most to me,” Honor said after she cleared her throat and straightened her shoulders. “Moral injustice. Good and evil.”

Ava flashed back to college-student Honor lazily reading
One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish
to Will and Maggie. Her voice had hardly held their attention.

“Imagine me,” Honor was saying, “a little girl growing up in New Orleans, Louisiana, surrounded by the very prejudice Harper Lee so acutely portrays. Like Scout and Jem, in my childish innocence, I assumed that people were good because I had never seen evil.

“That perspective changed,” Honor continued, “when they had to confront evil, didn't it?” She danced her fingers in the air in front of her. “Childhood to adulthood. Innocence to experience.”

“Yes!” Jennifer said. “Hatred and prejudice and ignorance are a threat to innocent people everywhere.”

“But you know,
To Kill a Mockingbird
won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961. The criteria for that prize is a distinguished piece of writing about American life by an American author. It's easy to see why Harper Lee won the Pulitzer at that time in our history,” Honor said.

“Evil destroys Tom Robinson and Boo Radley, doesn't it?” Ruth said.

Honor nodded, then continued, “Actually, Jem is almost destroyed by evil too. The evil of racism.”

“But Scout isn't,” Ava pointed out.

“True,” Honor said. “However, Atticus Finch is the moral compass. I wrote my dissertation on him.”

“That's so cool!” Kiki gushed.

“Yeah, because he never loses his faith in humankind,” Luke said. “He understands that people aren't all good or all bad.”

“I don't know,” John said. “He comes across as almost too good. I don't have kids, so maybe I'm speaking out of turn here. I should ask an expert. What do you think, Ruth?”

Ruth laughed. “Well, I think a moral education is important, and that's what Atticus is trying to give Scout.”

“My favorite thing, actually,” Diana said, “is how Scout's character grows throughout the course of the novel.”

“And Jem,” Luke said. “I could really relate to Jem.”

“What's the symbolism of the mockingbird?” John asked. “I don't get the title.”

“Miss Maudie tells Scout that the only thing mockingbirds do is sing their hearts out for us,” Monique said.

“Exactly!” Luke said. “That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.”

“It's a sin to kill innocence,” Honor said. “The mockingbird is the symbol of innocence.”

Ava saw that summer day, that tree, her sister on that branch. She turned to find Penny, whose calm sure gaze Ava liked. But Penny hadn't come. Ava thought of the plastic tubes and oxygen tank, Penny's dismissive
touch of emphysema
, and hoped she was all right.

When the discussion ended, Ava forced herself to stay and have a piece of the lemon chess pie Honor had made.

Thankfully, John came and stood beside her.

He chewed a piece of pie and shook his head. “I'm learning so much here,” he said. “I read
To Kill a Mockingbird
back in middle school and didn't really appreciate it. Now I'm thinking about this idea of a moral education,”

Ava watched a woman with a frosted bob walk in and look around. She had on a black dress and cardigan, and clutched a black bag close to her chest.

“I wrote something down for you,” John said.

He reached into his pocket and handed her a piece of paper.

“From the book,” he explained.

Cate approached the woman, who tearfully began to talk.

“Thanks,” Ava said.

“Go on,” John said. “Read it.”

“With him, life was routine,” Ava read out loud. “Without him, life was unbearable.”

“That really got to me,” he said. “Except, I substituted
she
for
he
.”

“Of course,” Ava said, touching his arm.

“Excuse me,” Cate announced in a quavering voice. “I'm afraid I have some very sad news.”

The woman in black began to cry, sending small rivulets of mascara down her cheeks.

“Uh oh,” John said under his breath. He glanced toward the exit.

“This is Helen Frost,” Cate said, putting an arm around the woman's shoulders. “Penny's daughter.”

She didn't even have to say the words; everyone knew. But of course, she did say them.

“Penny passed away yesterday.”

“I hate that,” John said to Ava. “Passed sounds temporary. Like she might come back.”

“I know,” Ava said, touching his arm again.

The woman was talking quietly to Cate.

“Helen will send me the particulars about the funeral and I'll email everyone,” Cate said.

Helen whispered something more to Cate.

“Ava?” Cate said, sounding confused.

Helen Frost nodded.

“Apparently Penny has left you something and Helen would like it if you could go to the house at some point to pick it up,” Cate explained.

“There must be some mistake,” Ava said.

But there wasn't. Helen handed her a business card with a phone number circled on it and told her to call before she came by.

“Honestly,” Ava said apologetically, “I don't want anything.”

“I didn't know you two were close,” John said to Ava. “I'm so sorry for your loss.”

“We weren't close,” Ava said.

Her phone vibrated in her purse, and happy to have a reason to leave she pulled it out. The name “Maggie” flashed on the screen.

“It's my daughter,” she said, relieved Maggie was calling, relieved to get out of there.

She pressed the phone to her ear as she headed to the exit.

“Hold on, sweetie,” she said. “I'm here.”

“Madame Tucker?” a man with a thick French accent said.

“Yes?” Ava said, stepping out into the dark night.

He said something in French that she couldn't understand, because he spoke so fast. She thought she heard him say Maggie.

“Maggie?” Ava said. “Where's Maggie?”

The man answered her again in French.

“I can't understand you,” Ava said, panic mixing with the sour taste of lemon in her throat. “Please slow down.”

“La jeune fille,”
he said carefully.

“The girl?” Ava said. “Maggie?”

“Oui,”
he said. “The girl is missing.”

PART SEVEN

JUNE

“We'll leave now, so that this moment will remain a perfect memory . . .
let it be our song and think of me every time you hear it.”

—
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
by Betty Smith

Maggie

Maggie looked at the beautiful boy in bed beside her back at the hostel. He was Swedish or Danish or Norwegian, she couldn't remember, but tall and blond with eyes the blue of icicles. She smiled and sat up, dug her notebook out of the purple net bag, and wrote
His eyes are the blue of icicles
.

“What are you writing there?” he said, his voice thick and syrupy.

“I'm a writer,” Maggie said, happy to lie back down because when she sat up she felt a big whoosh run through her body and her heart pounded too hard. She pressed her hand to her chest,
over the place where her heart raced. “I get these ideas and I have to write them down so I don't forget them.”

“I'm writing a novel,” the beautiful boy said.

“You are? That's awesome.”

“I'm writing the great Norwegian novel,” he said.

“Right,” Maggie said. “Norwegian.”

“Can you name a great Norwegian novel?”

“Um, Ibsen?”

“Those are plays,” he said. He put his hands over his icicle-blue eyes. “I am so fucked up,” he said, not unhappily.

“Me too,” Maggie said. Her heart kept pounding too hard beneath her hand, like something trying to escape.

The boy began to talk about his novel, but Maggie couldn't concentrate. Men were in a boat and there was a storm and maybe a dog or something went overboard. She closed her eyes, let herself fall into the buzzing that ran through her body. Her brain couldn't really land on any one thing. Instead her thoughts flitted from one thing to the next. How she'd met this boy in a café and he'd bought her wine, lots of wine. Then what? Then what? She tried to put the pieces of the last six or eight or twenty hours together, but that buzzing made it hard to think. There was a party. That's right. And in the bathroom they'd snorted some coke.

“And then we learn exactly how the earth was destroyed, right?” the boy was saying. “It's like this enormous climax of explosions and death and destruction—”

Maggie sat up again. She realized she still had the pen in her hand.

“That sounds amazing,” she said.

She leaned over and wrote on his pale hairless chest:
Once upon a time

“Yes!” he said. “Let's write a story on each other! That's brilliant!”

Maggie wrote:
there was a lost girl whose mother said she was coming to visit her in Florence. Who emailed her mother back: Oh no! We're doing farm stay! Agritourism. Slow food. Maybe in September?

“I have a pen somewhere,” the boy said, searching through the drawer of the narrow rickety table beside the bed.

She lay down and waited, the pen in the boy's hand hovering above her naked chest.

Once upon a time
, he wrote,
a girl and a boy wrote the Great American and Great Norwegian novels in invisible ink
.

She liked the way the pen felt moving across her skin, both sharp and soft.

I don't know what day it is
, Maggie wrote.

I'm falling in love
, the boy wrote.

Eventually, words covered their chests and stomachs and arms and legs and feet and hands. He wrote sentences inside her thighs.

Afterward they made love and some of the words smeared. Then he said, “Let's get high, eh?”

Maggie didn't know what kind of drugs he had, but whatever he put in that syringe gave her maybe the best high of her life.

“Come here,” he said.

Maggie stared up into his icicle-blue eyes.

Then he stuck the needle in and her body jumped and her brain exploded and her heart seemed for a minute to stop. She felt suspended somehow, in air, in time. She heard the sound of that seashell back home, the ocean in her ear.

S
he felt a hard slap on her face. “Hey there! Girl!”

Maggie opened her eyes. A man she didn't know was staring down at her.

“You're going to be okay,” he said.

She tried to turn her head but couldn't move. She opened her mouth to speak but only a strange gurgling came out.

“Speedball,” the man said to someone else, someone she couldn't see.

“We're going to move you now,” he said to her. “On the count of three.”

Someone counted
“Un! Deux! Trois!”
For a moment she thought maybe she was climbing the stairs to the loft on rue Saint-Antoine. But then she was lifted up and carried out of the room and through a door and down the stairs and down more stairs and then out the door where it was evening and warm and everything was cast in a beautiful lavender light.

“Am I dead?” Maggie managed to ask.

“Almost,” the man said. “Luckily someone called for help. You're okay.”

She could smell the heavy scent of roses and grass.

“We're going to take you to the hospital, hydrate you, clean you up. Okay?” he said.

Maggie nodded.

“Then we'll let you go home, okay?”

She nodded again.

Home. She thought of her bedroom with the beaded doorway and she started to cry.

“You're lucky someone called,” the man said again.

I
n the hospital they scrubbed the words off her and gave her an IV of sugar water and electrolytes. A doctor with a serious, stern face came in and peered down at Maggie.

“You're in for a week of hell,” he said. “Withdrawal is about the worst thing you can go through.”

Maggie wanted to argue with him, to tell him that she didn't need to withdraw from anything. But her mouth felt like it was full of sand, so she just stared up at him, silent.