Undercover (9 page)

I
GOT A FEVER, then, and I couldn’t leave my bed. I couldn’t turn, I couldn’t talk, I couldn’t see except for swirls.

If I lay perfectly still, I wasn’t dead, but if I moved a single fraction of one microscopic inch, my brain did a giant lava slide and I had to concentrate very hard, else I’d fall right off my bed. If I breathed too deeply, I’d drown with air. If I thought of anything at all, I’d get ship-on-stormy-waters sick.

Time wasn’t real, so time didn’t pass, but for every once in a smoggy while, when I felt my
mother’s hand on my flaming head or could see Jilly sliding in through my door with a bottle of pink aspirin in her hand, and a glass of juice, and something like worry on her face. Somebody I didn’t recognize asked questions I couldn’t answer, and then I slept, and then I woke up again because something shut or something snapped, and when that happened it was like bullets going off, bullets being shot straight through my head, and then I crawled to the bathroom, or it felt like crawling, I don’t know which. And then I climbed back into my bed. Ever have all the shapes and all the colors in the universe collide? Ever know that your head has become a giant black hole, even though you can’t remember what Mr. Sheepals said a black hole is?

Could have been hours, could have been days. Don’t ask me; I was sick. I was sick for what seemed such a long time that, when finally I opened my eyes again, I saw through my window that new snow had come—tall piles of it on the telephone wires, high drifts on the roofs of the Garlands’ and
the Blockleys’. It was as if the world were wrapped up in white cotton candy, and there wasn’t any sound except the sound in the white webbing of sound—the garble of the downstairs TV, the faraway whistle of Mom’s teapot, a bird in the yard, a tree limb groaning. My T-shirt felt stiff as cardboard against my skin, and my sheets were stiff, too. My hair was knots and toilet-brush bristles.

I was silly putty, spineless. I tried to fold my pillow into an
S
and to sit up halfway, but that was harder than Olympic weight lifting, and when I woke again it was dark, and someone had plugged a night-light in, put another glass of juice on my nightstand. There was a thick leather bracelet of jingle bells with a note saying
Ring me if you’re hungry
, but I couldn’t have lifted that thing even if lifting it would win me a million dollars, so I closed my eyes, and I dreamed that the house was falling down to dust, the house was raining down. Rafter and plank and every nail and every pantry shelf, and the books, and the pink insulating hair that
may or may not have been asbestos. Then I dreamed that the mind was the moon’s first word, and then it was morning and there was a star instead of the sun, and then the star hung by a strand.

When I opened my eyes again, there was Mom at the edge of my bed, her creamy hand against my forehead. “Elisa,” she said, “you have to eat something.”

“I can’t do that.” My tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth. My words formed limp and fuzzy.

“You have to,” she insisted. “It’s been two days.”

“What happened?” I managed.

“You’ve been sick,” she said. “A very high fever, but it’s broken. Dr. John was here, and he said you’ll be fine, but you have to eat. You have to drink; you’re dehydrated.”

“Dr. John was here?”

“He was doing me a favor.” She pulled her hand away from my forehead and handed me the plate of toast that she’d brought with her. “That’s honey and butter,” she told me. “It’ll help.”

The plate felt heavy as bricks, and my eyes were playing blur-her tricks on Mom in her red-and-green sweater, her pair of black wool slacks. She’d pulled one side of her pale hair back and put it in a clip, and I thought right then, despite everything, how pretty she absolutely was, and how there’d never been a bit of resemblance between us. I couldn’t look into her and see me, and I guess things were the same from her perspective, and probably that’s where the trouble between us lived, or at least where it had started.

“Where’s Jilly?” I asked her.

“Downstairs, Elisa.”

“What’s she doing?”

“She’s reading.” She crossed her arms to show she was serious. “Honey,” she said, “is as good as medicine.”

She’d sliced the toast into four triangular pieces. I pinched the smallest slice between my fingers. My mouth felt hot and gluey inside. The toast was strange and sweet. I hate the sound you make when
you’re chewing and swallowing, and you’re the only one for miles who is.

“There’s a fresh T-shirt and pair of sweatpants at the end of your bed,” Mom told me, after she’d stood there and watched me force three toast triangles in, some swallows of juice, which must have taken a week or two. “You’d probably feel better if you changed.” She slipped the almost-empty plate out of my hand and picked up the glass of sippedat juice. She headed for the door, then turned. “You ring the jingle bells if you want anything,” she said.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Now get some rest.” She closed the door behind her with one slippered foot. I could hear the downstairs TV go loud and grow soft again, and I could hear Jilly talking, and I could feel my heart grow envious of whatever they were saying. If I turned, which I did, I could see my neon clock: 5:38 and all darkness outside. Only a wedge of moon in the sky, and the constant shimmer of a star.

T
HE FIRST FEW DAYS of January I stayed home from school. Dr. John said that I’d had a scare and that I needed time to get strong, and he told Mom to make a pot of chicken soup and a tray of cherry Jell-O cubes and to let me sleep however much. I still had weird rubber legs, and when I came downstairs each day, I came downstairs for good—curled myself up in front of daytime TV and let my mind go whirring. Mom insisted on keeping the Christmas lights on, and they throbbed worse than a headache, on and off and on and off, and then the chase of white to gold
then back to white again. Sometimes I fell asleep and I woke up, and I’d been skating. Sometimes I was chasing a baby through the snow, or telling Theo my personal theory about the frozen girl inside the pond. Sometimes I sat with the Book of Words on my lap, writing down words that fit:

I’d have given anything to talk to Dad, to know that he wanted to talk to me. I’d have given anything to know how Mom and Dad were, but you can’t ask your parents such questions. You have to wait for them to tell you what it is that will happen next, and all I knew was what Mom had told me—that Dad had called several times when I was sick and that he loved me and was writing me a letter.
That’s all I knew, but I also knew this: That it was taking Mom a long time to get dressed in the morning, and she’d started doing the simplest things with her hair, and now when the phone rang and she could see it was Mrs. Garland, she just let it ring some more. More than anything, Mom just sat and stared, and still she wouldn’t open the presents Dad had brought her from Gump’s, which I was thinking might have helped, at least somewhat. She left them where they were, beneath the wilting tree.

Jilly brought my homework home and didn’t make a scene about it, didn’t even make fun of me for my messy hair. I’d already missed labs in science and the debate in social studies, and in Spanish I knew I was falling far behind. But the thing I minded missing most was Dr. Charmin’s class, where Theo was, and where they were working on poems. Because maybe poems really are just what some one person writes and one somebody else picks up to read, but you still have to find the line between the two. You still have to imagine the lonesome place
the poem begins and how it wants to be remembered, and all I got in the packets Jilly carried home were the poems, and not the explanations, not the stuff Dr. Charmin knew and I could not. There was a poem about a thought fox. A poem about eating poems. A poem called “Notes on the Art of Poetry,” where words were sandstorms and ice blasts and things you had to believe went splash, and I needed Dr. Charmin to help me. On the fifth day of my absence there was a poem of our own we had to write—a poem about what a poem is, as best as I could tell.

“Is Archibald MacLeish telling the truth when he writes that a poem is ‘palpable and mute’?” Dr. Charmin’s instructions read. “Is it ‘Silent as the sleeve-worn stone / Of casement ledges where the moss has grown’? Can a poem be
wordless
? What is a poem? What can a poem be?”

“Mom,” I said, “can we turn off the TV?”

“Won’t it be good”—she sighed—“when you’re all the way well?”

That night we had chicken soup for dinner, and I sat at the table since I was well enough for that. Mom and Jilly talked about a show they watched on TV, guessing what would happen to their favorite characters as if they were next-door neighbors or people you could call up on the phone. Mom had turned down the kitchen lights and lit a candle, to celebrate, she said, my getting off the couch, and I wished I wasn’t wearing sweatpants and an old sweatshirt, because Mom had put her fake-pearl necklace on and Jilly had all her earrings in—four on one side, three on the other. This was their conspiracy—they were trying. Anyone looking in on us would have thought I was the guest of a pretty people’s family. But they wouldn’t have guessed that my mother’s heart was broken. That she was putting on a show so none of us would get sick again with missing Dad or worry.

The flame of the candle had sunk deep into the wax. Outside, the fallen snow had started blowing, and it looked like more white stuff was coming. Jilly
was talking about a pair of boots she had seen in the mall that was finally on sale, and Mom was saying that they could go tomorrow after school and see if the boots were worth what they were asking, and Jilly said, Well, then, can I drive? Because she had her permit. My thoughts were far away from boots and cars. I was trying to imagine Theo without his Lila poems, and Dad in San Francisco. I was wondering whether you really could write a poem about a poem without saying what was obvious or had been said before.

“Mom,” I said, “I think I’m going up to bed.”

“Okay,” she said. She nodded.

Only later, after I’d turned off the lights and curled under the quilt and listened to the wind kicking around outside, did I hear Mom talking with her sister, Georgia, who lives half a world away.

“It’s my fault,” she was saying. “I said things I shouldn’t have said. I went too far. I hurt him. I ruined Christmas. Maybe more than Christmas.
And Elisa’s been sick, and did I make her sick? Is such a thing possible?”

“No, Georgia,” my mother said after a pause. “That isn’t it.”

“No. That isn’t true. I’m to blame for it, too.”

“No, Georgia, this isn’t helping me. I love him, see? I blew it.”

Then I didn’t hear my mother saying anything at all, only the sound of her sobbing, then the sound of Jilly’s “Mom?” And then the star in my window shuddered, as a cold wind blew through the night.

T
HERE’S A MIRROR in my parents’ room that runs floor full up to ceiling, and that’s where Mom has always gone to verify which colors are becoming. When I was little and knew nothing about what qualified for beauty, I’d sit on my parents’ bed with Jilly and watch her get dressed for Friday nights. Over her sheeny slip she’d zipper dresses. With her long, skinny fingers she’d fix her hair. She would put slightly gray shoes with slightly blue blouses and dark, mysterious skirts, and Jilly would clap her hands and say, “Mommy, you look exactly like the weather.” Standing tipped forward, toward
the long mirror, Mom would draw on her eye powders and scroll her mascara, and always Dad would wait downstairs so he could see her, as he liked to say, all at once and all together. Just before she’d leave, Mom would cup one hand beneath Jilly’s chin and one hand beneath mine, lift our eyes to hers, and make a promise: “Someday, girls. Someday.”

Jilly was the best student Mom ever had. She knew all the secret places in Mom’s closet, all the compartments in all the boxes, all the shoes in the hanging sleeves of shoes, all that was hidden behind plastic; Jilly knew lipstick. “Don’t tell, Elisa,” she’d say. “You have to promise”—fitting herself into one of Mom’s fancy dresses and slicking it down across her hips. The silk or the cotton or the nylon would fall like water falls, spilling past Jilly all over the floor, and whatever shoes Jilly chose would be gallons too big, impossible to walk in. “Elisa, what do you think?” she’d say, and I’d say, “Jilly’s beautiful,” and when I said that, she’d smile like a movie star and blow me juicy kisses.

Jilly understood about prettiness—that it’s not just a gift, it’s a talent. That it’s cracking the code of your face to find its sweetest side, doing the math regarding standing, walking, sitting, waiting. Pretty people practice pretty. They turn their gift into a talent.

That afternoon I was alone without the TV on, and nobody calling. Outside, the snow was banked high against the house but the streets were clean from plowing. Jilly and Mom had gone to the mall in search of boots, and I knew the way they shopped, the way they’d now be out for hours. Anywhere I wanted to go in the house was mine to go. Anything I wanted to do, I could. But I’d been boiled down to nothing by the fever—a pile of bones in a bunch of oversized clothes—and even my freckles seemed fainter than they’d been, and I felt old. I sat and then I roamed—an operative. I lay on my bed and then I went downstairs and ate half a box of Lorna Doones. I looked at books inside Dad’s office. I scribbled words into my book of
words. I went downstairs, and then I went downstairs again, to the darkness of the basement.

It’s the smell of a basement that makes a basement, and that’s one hundred percent of the truth. The old termite tunnels, the monster mold on ancient telephone books, the sour whatever it is that rises up from the round metal plate in the concrete floor. Dad was always too tall and light for our basement, but that meant absolutely nothing, because the basement always belonged to him. It was where he put his tools and his storage boxes, where he had his shelves filled up with treasure. I learned Stash O’ Nature from Dad, who left his Nature in full display, on his hand-built wooden shelves. The tiny white skulls of moles and mice. The nest a robin had made of Christmas ribbons. The oddest collection of naked twigs. Dad was in a contest with himself to find the most outstanding twig, he said. The most perfect and unblemished of all twigs. “What do you do when you win?” I once asked him. “I start over,” he replied.

On the farthest, darkest basement wall was Dad’s spice rack—a black iron shelf with a little lip and a bunch of jars. He had aniseed and cardamom, juniper berry and caraway, cumin, turmeric, and mint. He had leaves and flecks of leaves and seeds—all these things he’d picked up from wherever Point of View had taken him. Dad said the spices were his memories of the places he had been, his way of keeping track, and that afternoon, alone in the house, I unscrewed the lid of every one of Dad’s jars and buried my nose in the distance. He and Mom had talked late, late last night. She had hung up crying.

By the time Mom and Jilly got home, it was dark, and by then I was lying on my bed, beneath my covers, just watching the sky through my windows, the last band of pink, then the blackness. Tomorrow I’d be well enough for school, for the new year that had crept in with me hardly noticing, and there’d be Margie with her gossip, and Bolten with his nose, and every Spanish conversation I had not had and
wouldn’t now, for forever. There’d be Theo, who would or would not be wrapped up in Lila, Theo who would or would not have made a choice, who would or would not have been missing me. There’d be so much catching up to do, so much fitting back in, but I had changed. I wanted more than I had before, and that would make things harder.

Downstairs Jilly and Mom were murmuring about something—wrestling whatever they’d found out of bags, throwing down their purses. I pulled the covers up over my head, and the night went even darker, and their voices were more faraway, and I was floating, hovering. I don’t know if time went by, or if I slept. All I know is that after that, I sensed both their faces peering down from high above my bed.

“What are you doing with the covers pulled up like that?” It was Mom who was asking. She’d had her face made over at the mall, it seemed, and the sky above her eyes was brighter. She was backlit from the hallway light and looked a lot like glow.

“You could have suffocated,” Jilly said. She was standing on the opposite side of the bed from Mom, looking down like you see TV doctors do, the blondest parts of her hair coming forward, her mouth twisted with either dismay or concern; I was too foggy-eyed to tell. And then the phone rang and Jilly was sure it was for her, and she practically skipped out of the room.

“Jilly found her boots,” my mother said.

“That’s good.” I had pushed myself up on my elbows by then, was taming the bristles of my hair with three fingers. I was looking at her face, and the subtle lift of it.

“And there was this,” Mom said, “that I got for you.” She was holding out one hand, then opening that hand to show her palm. Perched on its center, like some magnificent butterfly, was one of those hair clips you see the pretty girls wearing, with bits of cut glass that you could swear were jewels, and the most complicated filigree.

“You got that for me?” I said, confused.

“I did.” She nodded.

I took the clip from Mom’s hand and came up higher in the bed and turned it over and over, to catch the hallway light, to count the jewels and the colors of the jewels. It was the prettiest thing I’d ever seen, and I had no clue how to use it. Mom must have been reading my mind. She went down the hall, and then she came back with a mirror in one hand. “Sit up,” she said, laying the mirror and the clip on my lap, and as I sat up straighter, she put her fingers in my hair, lifting it up over my
W
ear. When she had gotten whatever effect she was seeking, she picked up the clip and sunk it in. Then she stood back and assessed her work like I wasn’t even there. Shaking her head, she took out the clip and started again.

“I think it needs to go higher,” she said. That was all. She kept working my hair, working her fingers through my hair, placing and re-placing the clip, and then she told me to take a look, and she lifted the mirror from my lap so I could see. All of a sudden
there were two of me in bed, each of us looking at the other. We saw surprise in each other’s faces. We saw confusion, and wonder. “What do you think?”

“I think…” I said, “I think…” But neither of me knew what to say. Neither had a word for the moment. We were the same small mouth, the same uncommitted chin, the same sturdy nose, the same completely unexceptional cheekbones. We were the same, except there was something different. There was something lifted up in us, and not only the left side of the wild auburn hair.

“It brings out your eyes,” my mother said, “is what it does.”