Picture Me Gone

by Meg Rosoff

  Gil follows her out to the car, leaving me with Matthew. I am desperate to escape, panicked at the thought of another confrontation. But before I can follow Gil, Matthew stops me.

  Don’t worry, Mila, he says. It’ll be OK.

  I shake my head. No it won’t.

  He tilts his head slightly, inquiringly.

  What sort of person are you? Anger chokes me. Have you even thought about how Gabriel will feel? Or Honey? It’s not just you. It’s not just your life.

  I know that, he says.

  Well, if you know then how can you consider doing it? I cannot bring myself to say the words: killing yourself.

  It’s complicated, he says. You’ll understand someday.

  I understand now, I shout at him. I understand that your life is a mess. But I don’t understand how you think doing that is going to make it better for anyone but you.

  You’re not an ordinary child, Matthew says.

  What about what you told Gil? I say, ignoring him. About not lying down in the snow? Gil always remembered. You’re the one who’s forgotten.

  I haven’t forgotten, Matt says.

  Then don’t do it.

  We stand facing each other, squared off. I’m breathing hard. One minute Matthew is there; the next he has turned inward, as if I am no longer in the room.

  I follow Gil out to the car.

  Suzanne arranges Gabriel in his car seat and clicks the seat belt, which swings over his head in one piece like the roof of a fighter jet. She circles round to the driver’s side of the little blue car (whose?) and then she and Gil talk about the airport and the times of our flights. I lean in to kiss Gabriel’s fat cheek in the dark, tears dripping from my face onto his. He is fast asleep, his hands grabbed into fists, his eyes screwed up as if battling an unseen foe. He opens his eyes for an instant and blinks and smiles, but he’s not properly awake and a second later he’s out once more. I kiss his damp fist and hope his sleep is not always full of shadows, then shut the car door as quietly as I can.

  Over at the front door of the house, Honey and Matthew stand looking out at us, framed in a halo of light, suspended between this world and the next.

  thirty-one

  The following morning, Matthew and Gil take our bags out to the driveway to wait for Suzanne. The two men embrace. There are no speeches, no final words.

  Matthew stands back a little and looks at me carefully.

  Take care of Honey, I say to him, and he nods. And Gabriel.

  He nods again.

  And you, I say.

  And you too, Mila, he says.

  He disappears into the house before Suzanne arrives, alone. Gabriel is at playgroup, she tells us. We pile our bags into her car and set off. No one speaks. At international departures in New York, it is impossible to stop for more than a minute or two, so our parting is brief. A quick hug and Suzanne is gone.

  As we check for passports and arrange ourselves at the terminal, Gil hands me an extra bag to carry, a large one with handles.

  I peer inside and there it is—the cowboy Easter egg, vast and unwieldy, the box a bit shopworn. I look up, astonished.

  He took some convincing, Gil says. Oh yes. Hi-ho, Silver. It took some doing, all right.

  I’m gaping at him. What on earth did you say?

  Gil shakes his head. Shouldn’t tell you, really. I told him I worked for Frommer’s. Updating travel guides for the European market.

  You didn’t.

  Gil nods. I did. It was amazing. He practically forced the thing on me. Wouldn’t take a penny.

  At this moment, I am loving my father almost to distraction. You’re a genius, I say, grinning. I’m so proud. Cat will love it.

  But secretly it’s I who loves it, loves Gil for going back with his extremely clever, extremely dodgy story. His lie, actually.

  How on earth will it go on the plane? I ask him. You could fit a family of four in that egg. We’ll be arrested for smuggling.

  It’s your problem now, Gil says. I’ve done my bit. He picks up the rest of the bags and heads off.

  I refuse to check the egg with my luggage, so they attach a tag and a big red sticker reading FRAGILE, and I lug it through departures and onto the plane and manage to wedge it up in the overhead locker. It takes up nearly the whole space.

  I should have bought it a seat, Gil says.

  We stow our bags and do up our seat belts and the captain says there’ll be a half-hour delay before takeoff. Gil opens his book and is gone from me. I don’t bug him, knowing he will remain silent until he has thought everything through. It might be a few minutes or a few hours or a few days.

  I’m leafing through the in-flight magazine when my phone bleeps. I hope it’s Jake, but when I open the message, it says:

  Good-bye Mila

  I’m glad Gil isn’t paying attention.

  Good-bye Matthew I text back, wishing there were something I could add, something old-fashioned like fare thee well or godspeed. And then, on impulse, I paste Jake’s contact details into the text. And press send.

  Outside of my window the planes turn, speed along the runway, rise up and are gone. Gradually, as we wait to take off, I begin to shed some of the sorrows of this journey. Watching planes take off makes me feel like a child again, like Gabriel shouting Again, again! We’re something like twenty-eighth in line; the repetitive magic soothes me.

  At long last our plane turns onto the runway, the engines roar and I’m about to turn off the phone when it bleeps one last time.

  See you soon it says. And is signed Jake xoxo

  I quickly switch it off and snuggle down in the seat. For the moment, all I care about is this.

  So much of translating, Gil once told me, takes place in an imaginary space where the writer and the translator come together. It is not necessary to sympathize with the writer, to agree with what he’s written. But it is necessary to walk alongside and stay in step. It’s harder, he says, when the other person has a bad limp or stops and starts all the time or moves erratically. It is hardest of all when the story comes from a place the translator himself can’t go.

  We have been in the air for two hours when he turns to me. Very gently, he takes hold of my hands in both of his.

  What a thing to have put you through, he says, shaking his head. I’m so sorry. I should never have brought you here. I thought . . . I don’t know what I thought. I thought that it was just a blip, that everything would be OK.

  Maybe it will be.

  He nods. It’s up to Matthew.

  I look at him. Do you think he was drunk the night Owen died?

  Gil shrugs. Does it matter? The child is dead and everything else that follows has followed.

  For a while we say nothing.

  Well, I say at last. At least he has Honey.

  Yes . . . Gil draws out the single syllable and looks at me. But Honey’s a dog.

  He says this as if it’s something I’ve failed to notice, but I can see what he’s thinking: a dog isn’t the most important thing.

  And I think, OK. So a dog isn’t the most important thing. But a dog like Honey loves one person completely, unwaveringly, with perfect faith. That has to be more important than most things.

  And Gabriel, I say. He has Gabriel too.

  Gil says nothing but I know the answer. The answer is that Gabriel can’t save Matthew any more than Gil can, or Honey. Or Jake. But we are all woven together, like a piece of cloth, and we all support each other, for better or worse. Gabriel is just a baby but eventually he will see the world and his father as they are: imperfect, dangerous, peppered with betrayals and also with love.

  I cannot think about these things any longer. I droop against Gil and inhale the familiar scent of him, and he puts his arm round my shoulders and tells me to go to sleep now, not to worry about anything.

  The world will trundle along, he says, and kisses the top of my head. Despite us thinking it must grind to a halt. The world has seen worse than us, Perguntador. It is not so easi
ly shocked.

  I rest against him, aware of how tightly we are bound together, through thick and thin. For the moment I have stopped thinking of a time when we will no longer have each other. Marieka was right to tell me to take care of Gil. He and I will watch over one another for as long as we are alive, and Marieka will watch over us both, each of us according to our capacity for care. I will not always be happy, but perhaps, if I’m lucky, I will be spared the agony of adding pain to the world.

  And then I close my eyes and drift off to the great white noise of the engines, dreaming of a future I know nothing about.

  meg rosoff was born in Boston and currently lives in London with her husband and daughter. Her debut novel, How I Live Now, won the Michael L. Printz Award and was an ALA Best Book for Young Adults. Her second novel, Just in Case, won the 2007 CILIP Carnegie Medal and was an ALA Best Book for Young Adults. What I Was, Rosoff’s third novel, was short-listed for the 2008 CILIP Carnegie Medal. Her latest novel with Putnam, There Is No Dog, received four starred reviews.

  Visit Meg at www.megrosoff.co.uk

  Follow her @megrosoff