This Is Not Your City (2 page)

 

In sixth grade Hanna and I will still be in the same Girl Scout troop. We will sing Christmas carols for the old people at Hillside Terrace nursing home, and in the spring we will sell cookies. I will sell enough to earn a stuffed giraffe, while Hanna sells only enough for a patch to be sewn on her vest. She will already be sick and I will have no idea. She will miss the whole last month of sixth grade, and four Girl Scout meetings, but it will be summer before my mother takes me to visit her. The hospital will remind me of a shopping mall, places to buy medicine and gifts and food, departments for having babies and looking after babies and looking after children and fixing all the different things that can go wrong with them. It is a weighty place but exciting, the way my mother asks the front desk for Pediatric Oncology and I press the button in the elevator.

Hanna's mother and mine will go for coffee, leaving us alone. Hanna will be wearing a violet-colored bandanna. She will say she is a gangster, and I say she would make the worst
gangster in the world, which is true. She says a highwayman, then, which feels a little closer, and when I suggest pirate, we're off. We go once more to Zolaria, the bed rails marking the deck of our ship, and Hanna says climb on, that I won't hurt her, and our kingdom acquires an ocean, high seas. Aweigh anchor, we say, trim the sails, cast off, fore-and-aft, and we are all right for a time. We will be eleven, almost twelve; we will keep looking at the door, hoping no one comes in and sees us. After half an hour Hanna will throw up twice in a plastic tub beside the bed. She will say she leaned over to take a sounding, that the sea is a thousand fathoms deep where we are, that if we don't make it back to port we'll drown for sure. I will ask her if she wants some water. She won't say anything, but I'll fill a plastic cup from the jug on the nightstand.

“I had a dream the other night that Ogan Veen was back,” I will say. “It was in the woods and he was chasing us and when we went out the fence we were saying, ‘I don't hear him, I think we made it,' but then he was right there in front of us smiling and then I woke up.” Hanna will look at me and her eyes will be dark and flat and I will know it was a terrible idea, to tell her this dream. She will sip her water and I will watch her sip it and we will wait for our mothers to come back and when they do we will be glad.

I will be unprepared for how long this sickness takes, for how long Hanna will be neither cured nor desperate. I will visit her once more at the hospital, twice more while she's at home. I will realize I am waiting for her to be either well or dead. She will feel very far away. I will start junior high alone, and when Hanna comes for her first day, in late November, I will be startled to see her. Our morning classes must all be different because I recognize her for the first time at lunch, sitting by herself. I will already be sitting in the middle of a long table by the time I see her, my lunch unpacked in front of me. I will be pressed tight on either side by people who, if asked, would probably say I am their friend. Hanna will be wearing an awful wig, stiff and styled like an old woman's perm. The hair will be dark brown, not black, and will no longer match her eyes. She will be pale and her face swollen and she will not seem like someone I can afford to know.
The summer we are ten we sketch maps of our kingdom and outline its Constitution, its Declaration of Independence, its City Charter. In the end they all become zoological surveys. The Haisley woods harbor griffins, borometz, simurghs. There are dragons on Linwood Street, basilisks on Duncan who turn children to stone. We understand that we have no sway over basilisks and dragons; we understand that they are the minions of Ogan Veen. He has servants now, he has armies, and despite all our efforts Zolaria is not as safe as it was.

We make other lists, too, of “People Who, In Zolaria, Would Be Imprisoned In The Dungeon FOREVER.” Hanna keeps adding her brothers' names to the list and then erasing them until the paper is ready to tear and I tell her to leave them off, if she's going to feel so guilty about it. We make a list of “Animals That Can Be Ridden: Pegasus, Centaur, Griffins, and Space Dolphins.” We decide this is too charitable, and amend it to “Animals That Can Be Ridden By Us.” We decide to hire young men to look after our stable of space dolphins, and when we deem ourselves a little older, and ready for love, we will notice the groomsmen and swoon. We prepare speeches of protest, in which we declare our unwillingness to marry foreign princes, our determination to follow our hearts, until we are disappointed to remember that in our kingdom we have no parents, and may marry whomever we choose.

 

Fourteen years later, when I marry Cal at a Unitarian church that four months later will be sold and remodeled into a bed and breakfast, Hanna Khoury's parents will still be living down the street. My father will fly in from San Diego for the wedding, and he and my mother will agree to pose for photographs together: them, them and me, them and me and Cal, them and me and Cal and Cal's parents, the symmetry of happy marriages. The Khourys won't be at the wedding because I won't have invited them. I won't have invited them because I'm scared of what Hanna might have told them. Not about the way I never sat with her at lunch or talked to her in band, or the way I didn't ever claim, precisely, not to know her, or the way I never said I did.
Not even the way her life got worse and worse and I did nothing to make it better. Or the way when I saw how bad things got for her in school I was glad we weren't still friends. The day I will worry she's told them about will be a Monday in February during sixth period, Phys Ed, one of our two classes together. Hanna will be excused from almost everything except changing. She won't have to run or throw or dribble or swim, but she will have to put on gym clothes. She'll try to get her sweater off and T-shirt on without disturbing her wig, but it will almost always catch, tip, slide to one side. Sometimes it will fall limp onto the bench between the lockers. One day Barbara Zabrodska will steal it and send it flying. Marti Orringer will catch it, and throw it to Naomi Sullivan, who will throw it to Elizabeth Dugan, who will throw it to Jamie Piakowski, who will throw it to Carla Deleon, who will throw it to Mary-Alice, who will throw it to Roberta, who will throw it to me. And instead of giving it back I will throw it to Andrea, who will throw it to Aisha, who will throw it to a girl whose name I don't remember, and another, and another, and another, because there will be thirty girls in sixthperiod gym and I can't remember them all. Then Leah Campo will throw it to Kendra Danielson, who will throw it to Jasmine, who will throw it finally, accidentally, to Mrs. Pendall the gym teacher, who will have heard Hanna crying and come in the back way, through the showers. Mrs. Pendall will give Hanna back her wig and will send all twenty-nine of us to detention, where we fill the room and are sent out into the hall, along the wall like a tornado drill. The detention supervisor will make us crouch the rest of the period, tornado-style, on our knees with our foreheads almost touching the wall, our hands curled around the backs of our necks to protect our spines from flying shards of glass. My knees will hurt and I will think that if a tornado really did sever my spine and paralyze me for life, I wouldn't have to worry anymore about not doing the right things. I will think that the feel of her wig in my hand was like a gutted animal, empty and dry and bristling.

 

Hanna will be in remission by the next fall, but her parents will already have taken her out of Forsythe Junior High and placed
her in a private school. I will not know when the cancer comes back. I will have discovered how easy it is to never see someone, even an eight-houses-down-someone, if you do not wish to see each other. When she passes away, my mother will find out from a newspaper obituary. She will come up to my bedroom, will still be deciding whether to tell me herself or just show me the paper. She will hand it to me and say, “There's bad news, honey.”

It will be my first funeral, and my mother and I will go shopping for black clothing together. As we leave the mall I will thank her for paying, like she's bought me birthday gifts or new back-to-school clothes, and then to fill the silence I will say something about JV field hockey, and then my mother will drop the shopping bags in the middle of the parking lot and hold me tighter than she ever has or ever will again. At the funeral I will be so worried about avoiding Mr. and Mrs. Khoury and their sons that I won't have time to cry.

 

At the wedding Cal's mother will squint at me and ask if I'm really Unitarian, or just needed a cheap place for the wedding. I will tell her that I'm pagan, that I make burnt offerings to forest demons in the Bird Hills Nature Preserve. She won't laugh. Cal and I will go to Toronto for the honeymoon and three and a half years later the doctor will tell us to get ready for twins, girls. I will be terrified. It seems like a sign. It seems like a coin has already been flipped, and we will spend years waiting for it to fall. I will stare at my daughters in matching pajamas and wonder which one Ogan Veen will ask for. Which one he'll try to take. If he will give them ten years, if he will come calling sooner.

One winter the twins, bored, will unearth old photos in the basement: their baby pictures, our wedding, school portraits of Cal and snapshots of my elementary school birthday parties. The year I turned ten there was no one I wanted to invite except Hanna, no one I thought would come if I asked. In the picture there is a cake with ten candles and only two girls grinning above it—they look as if they should be lonely but are somehow perfectly happy. Madison will ask me who the dark-haired girl is, and I will get a look on my face that will make Sophie elbow
her sister into silence. She is the perceptive one, I will think, the one who reads people. And then I will think, please no, not her. And then I will think, please no, I didn't mean the other one.

 

On a July morning the summer before the girls begin kindergarten I will ask them to get dressed in their swimsuits, pull old shorts and T-shirts on over. I will pack a bag with beach towels and dry clothes, and they will ask which city pool we're going to. Wait and see, I will say, and we will all climb into the car. I will drive down the township road that skirts the edge of Bird Hills Nature Preserve; it will be lined with condos but still unpaved. I will park at the lot downriver from the Barton Dam, and we will climb the wooden steps up to the calm pond above the pump station. We will leave the trail to slide down the embankment toward the water. The shore is reedy, the ground spongy with black, rank mud. We will stand ankle deep in the water, and Sophie will yelp when her feet start to sink. I will suggest a short swim, and the girls will look at me with horror. The water will smell warm and spongy and tattered curtains of algae will stroke our toes. Madison will hold her nose, and in the end, I have to push them in. It will be only a moment, I promise, a slice of a second, that I hold them under. And then I will be tugging at their hair and the backs of their T-shirts and wrestling us all into a heap on the grass above the reeds, and a woman on a bicycle will be standing on the embankment trail shouting at me that the pond is no place for swimming. The water isn't clean, she yells. She talks about nitrogen, phosphorus. I'm sorry, I will say. I didn't realize. It's such a hot day, the girls were so hot. They asked to go wading and slipped. My daughters will not contradict me, and the bicycle woman will leave, and I will bundle them into towels, warm and dry. At home we will all stand under the shower, all of us crowded together, and then eat ice cream in the backyard. I will ask Madison if she heard anything underwater, a gnashing of teeth, a creature with eyes like an oil slick and incisors like bread knives, long and serrated. I will tell Sophie that Ogan Veen has a laugh like I-94 and a stink like algae. I will tell her that I have introduced them now, the three of them, Madison and Sophie and Mr. Veen, and if they
ever meet him they must run away. They must tell him that they are princesses, that they are mine, that I will protect them in the only ways I know how.

Cal will get home from work and while I cook dinner the girls will tell him what I did and Cal will shout and I will try to explain myself and Cal will misunderstand and talk to his parents about having the girls baptized at First Methodist. I won't know how to tell him that that won't help, that it isn't what I meant. I won't know how to tell him that I am still bracing for a day when Sophie complains of a headache that turns out to be something more, when Madison reels dizzily in gym class and the teacher sends her home with a concerned note. When a doctor has something to tell me he asks me to sit down to hear. I will be trying not to think about the possibility of a day when I will drive to the dam again, climb the stairs to Barton Pond and wade in. I will walk until I can hear the pressing silence of the water, the rushing, vacuous weight of it. I will say, “Mr. Veen, do you remember me?” I will say, “Mr. Veen, I once ruled a kingdom and left traps for you in the woods. Don't you want your revenge?” I will say, “Mr. Veen, you are an ogre and a thief and the patron saint of Julys, of summer Sundays, of miracles.” I will say, “Mr. Veen, do not take my children.”