This Must Be the Place: A Novel (13 page)

Mona flipped the phone shut and didn’t speak.

Arthur felt Mona looking at him but couldn’t look back. He was so ashamed. Of everything he’d done and been planning to do—of everything he would still do, given the chance. He was so close. He could almost see—he could almost see
everything
.

“Give me the picture,” Mona said, holding out her hand.

Arthur’s arms refused to let go of the frame and brought it back to his chest, pressing cool glass against his warm skin.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and fumbled along the railing in the direction of his room. He was still looking back at Mona when his bare foot caught fur and he heard a wild gut-ripping shriek; the noise was horrible, and so close that Arthur wasn’t sure if it came from himself or the cat. Then he felt his center of balance shift, felt gravity yank his chest and pull him down. His shoulder hit the first stair. He curled protectively over the frame, rolled forward so that his tailbone connected next, and then: over to his shoulder again. This pattern repeated several times until it stopped with an abrupt collision with something cold and unforgiving. He hit his head. His elbow hurt.

He heard a thudding and then Mona’s face was hovering, darting back and forth with unnatural speed. He squinted and closed his eyes, but that prompted Mona’s head to shout
No don’t do that!
so Arthur didn’t. His arms were still hugging the photograph close to his chest, but it no longer felt cool and smooth: it was prickly, sharp, warm, and sticky. Mona’s voice faded in and out; he heard a series of electronic beeps like a heart monitor, and as his vision grayed and blurred, he saw—something.

Just to the right, just—there.

What was that? It was—

Arthur Rook, who could see in the dark, closed his eyes. And when someone shouted
Stay awake, Arthur!
he didn’t listen.

He saw Amy, but she was different this time.

She was actually there.

He heard a metallic rattle and tried to move his head, but something stiff was binding his neck like a collar and he couldn’t look. He stopped trying. Amy was leaning over him. Her hair and her eyes were darker than the last time he saw her, and the space around her head was smeary and soft. She looked like a senior portrait, or a studio still from the forties, a photograph taken through a lens coated with Vaseline.

“Hi, Amy,” he said, or he thought he said. Amy didn’t act like she understood him. She looked up, away from him, and asked a person Arthur couldn’t see a question he didn’t understand.

“I missed you.” He tried again. “I missed you so much.”

Amy leaned in closer and Arthur, who had never been in love with anyone the way he was with Amy, felt perfect relief flood his veins with warmth. He had found her. He was flying. Oh, thank God. He smiled.

“He’s smiling,” Amy told the invisible person. “Is that good or really, really bad?” Her eyes were afraid.

“ ’S good,” Arthur said. “You came back.”

“Amy never came back,” Amy said, strangely. He felt her thumb passing back and forth over his hand as she held it. She spoke again to the invisible person. “Can I have a hit of that?”

There were so many things to tell her. There were so many things to say, so many . . . and he was so tired, suddenly, and so calm. He was going to take a nap, but first—

“Hey, Amy,” he said, “I met Mona. She’s . . .”

His throat clicked. He was so thirsty.

Amy cocked an eyebrow. “She’s what, Art?” she said, and grinned.

“She’s beautiful.” Arthur sighed and fell under.

6
The Relativity of Normal

“My mom is insane.” Oneida couldn’t stop once the first words were out. The tremor in her voice was a warning even she couldn’t heed. “I mean, totally crazy, gone, taking the red-eye to Nuts Vegas. So this weird new guy falls down the stairs from the second floor, right? His blood’s still probably in the front hall. Mom rides in the ambulance with him, waits around till the doctor’s all like,
He’s going to live but he might have some memory issues
—like it matters, since he’s a
complete stranger
and we know
nothing
about him—plus his chest is all torn up and bleeding, because he fell on a picture frame that he tried to steal, like, off our wall. So he’s got all these disgusting stitches all over his body, but here’s the part where Mom goes completely off the deep end: he’s
here
. He’s still living
here
! She helped him back up to his room and she’s
taking care of him
. She’s
insane
!”

Andrew Lu was completely silent. Oneida wondered if she’d called the wrong number.

“Andrew? Are you there?”

“Uh. Yeah. I’m here. That’s pretty . . . crazy.”

Oneida rolled back on her bed, wedging her head between the pillows. “I know, right? It’s like she
wants
us to get hacked to bits in our sleep by this psycho. I mean,
he lives in our house
. And he’s . . . all fucked up.” It was a kick to say
fuck
on the phone to Andrew Lu. “Do you think I’m safe? God. I braced my desk chair under my door, but if he wanted to get in here—like, really wanted to—that chair would only slow him down.”

“I wouldn’t worry.” Andrew cleared his throat. “Actually . . . it doesn’t sound all that crazy to me.”

“What?” Oneida was hurt. She finally had an exciting story to tell, to catch his attention, and her worthy soul didn’t get it?

“She probably doesn’t want to get sued by this guy. If he fell down her stairs, he could go after her with a lawyer or something. Maybe she thinks that if she helps him get better, he won’t press charges.” There was a clicking sound in the background, like Andrew Lu was typing. Probably talking to his friends on the computer, Oneida thought, flushing; probably telling them that she, Oneida, was bat-fucking insane.

There was a long pause. Robbed of the only interesting thing Oneida could think to talk about, or think about, even, she chewed her lip in silence. There was more clicking from Andrew Lu’s side.

“Sorry about that,” he said. “I was just finishing up an e-mail to my grandmother in Hong Kong. She expects me to respond to e-mails in, like, less than twenty-four hours. If I don’t, the next time I talk to her she’ll be all
you have no respect for me
and blah blah blah.” Oneida didn’t know what to make of that information, so she stayed silent. She felt as though she’d wandered out into the middle of a frozen lake just in time for a thaw.

The clicking had stopped. “So,” Andrew said, “what’s up?”

“Not much.”

“So you . . . called to tell me your mom’s insane.”

Yes,
she thought,
I had to tell somebody, and the somebody I normally tell these things is the one who’s lost it.

“Did you have a question about the history project? Something you wanted to talk about without the other guys around?”

If she had ever loved Andrew Lu before, it was a pale imitation of the tidal wave of affection that washed over her at that moment. She sat up and dangled her legs over the side of the bed.

“Yes,” she said. “You’re right.”

“I’m good like that,” Andrew said. “Don’t you kind of wish it was just the two of us working on this thing? You know, Lennon and McCartney, together again.”

Oneida stood. One hand held the portable phone to her ear while the other flapped and spun wildly at her side, a downed live wire. This was the most astonishing conversation she’d ever had with anyone. She
watched herself in the mirror to make sure it was happening, to see her pantomime of jubilation for herself.

“Yes, I do!” she said, pointing up at the ceiling. “This is why I hate group work. Inevitably, someone like you or me has to carry the dead Wendy—oh, did I say that out loud? I meant dead
weight
.”

Andrew kind of chuckled on the other end and Oneida dropped to one knee, made a fist, and pumped her free arm triumphantly.

“It felt like you were holding something back in class the other day,” Andrew said. He wasn’t wrong; when they’d spent class time meeting on Wednesday, Oneida had felt particularly in love with Andrew, particularly aware of the blue-black of his hair, particularly invested in the way his arms and shoulders moved under his red Cornell University hoodie. That she was holding back an intense desire to touch him, and not a piece of group business, hardly seemed relevant.

Oneida hopped in place. “Here’s what I was thinking,” she said, and hopped again.

“OK, go ahead,” said Andrew.

Oneida sprang from leg to leg, willing her spontaneous calisthenics to provide their own divine inspiration. She hopped over to her dresser, scanned the pile of books and the dusty bag of little-kid makeup she hardly used—the ninety-nine-cent lip glosses and nail polish that showed up in her Christmas stocking every year—and saw her music boxes. Her four favorites stood side by side in a row. Mona, tucking her in at night, used to wind all four up simultaneously, filling Oneida’s room with a hideous twinkly cacophony. Sometimes they’d sit side by side on Oneida’s bed and slingshot underwear at them, which was how Oneida learned of her mother’s abiding love for Tom Jones.

“We should form a band,” Oneida said, and sucked in a breath.

“Like, a
band
band?” Andrew sounded less than enthused.

“Early Beatles songs are pretty simple, right? How hard can it be to learn to play one? It’ll make our presentation absolutely awesome.” She wiggled her fingers in the air. “So much extra credit, you won’t believe it. It’ll be like we’re drowning in extra credit. Extra credit from heaven. Think about it.”

There was a pause.

“You’d do that? You’d sing in front of the whole class?”

“That’s the point: we’d all sing.” Oneida was bouncing around her room like a rabbit on speed; the more she bounced, the more genius her idea seemed, the less it even mattered what Andrew thought of it. “We’d have to rehearse ahead of time, of course, but it’ll be fun. And Dreyer will think it’s amazing. You saw how happy she was when we told her we’d picked the Beatles. She loves them. She probably went to one of their concerts, like, fifty years ago.”

“Why couldn’t you bring this up in front of Dani and Wendy?”

Oneida stopped bouncing. “Come on, Andrew. You know Dani hates everything I say, no matter how kickass it might be. So if when we get together tomorrow, you and I are a united front—bam! We’re a band.” Oneida threw herself backward on her bed and curled happily on her side. She could already see the two of them in Andrew Lu’s garage, strumming lazily and singing “Love Me Do,” which sounded so simple, so easy. Hour after hour, rehearsing with Andrew Lu—after school, on weekends. Taking a break in the Lu kitchen, his mother handing Oneida a fresh-baked chocolate chip cookie and a glass of milk. The promise of standing in another kitchen, with another family, appealed to Oneida with a ferocity that would have been frightening had everything with Mona been normal—rather, had Mona never revealed herself to be a secret-keeper, and an insane one at that.
Get me out of here,
she wanted to say to Andrew Lu.

“OK, then,” Andrew said. “Bring it up when we all meet together and I’ll totally support it.”

“Perfect!” said Oneida.

“So I guess this ends our clandestine group meeting,” Andrew said. “I’ll see you tomorrow at Wendy’s.”

“That’s so weird,” Oneida said, unable to let the conversation end. A long Saturday afternoon stretched out before her, with very little homework to distract her from the image of her mother sitting on the edge of Arthur Rook’s bed, checking the bandages on his chest and spooning chicken soup into his mouth. Saturday afternoon was the time for watching dumb movies on cable with her daughter, not babying a creep.

“Going to Wendy’s house? Seriously,” Andrew said. “I mean, I’m the
new guy and even
I
know that guy’s unstable. I bet he volunteered because his parents need fresh meat.”

“Last year’s stockpile is running low.” Oneida twisted her hair around her finger and pulled it taut from her head. “We should show up at the same time and never let each other out of sight.”

“I think we’ll be fine. We can toss ’em Dani.”