After Eli

by Rebecca Rupp

  So one day along the middle of August, I rode the green bus into town as part of my job, to order chicken wire and four yards of mulch for the blue-potato farm and to pick up prenatal vitamin pills for Emma, which was an aside. The twins came along too, because they were going to the library in hopes of finding out how to make nitroglycerin. They were both wearing T-shirts and jeans. Journey’s shirt was covered with little rhinestone hearts, and Jasper’s said GOOD MORNING — I SEE THE ASSASSINS HAVE FAILED.

  Also on the bus were Henry Jones’s friend Clarence Carmichael, who always went along for the ride to keep Henry Jones company, and the entire membership of the Fairfield Women’s Book Club and Coffee Circle, who were going to Bev’s Caf to drink coffee and discuss Othello, Evelyn Perry’s divorce, and pasta recipes.

  Back before Eli died, my mom belonged to the Fairfield Women’s Book Club and Coffee Circle. She used to like it a lot, particularly on the last Friday of every month, when it turned into the Fairfield Women’s Movie Club and Wine Bar and they met at different people’s houses to watch chick flicks and do manicures. They’d come home all giggly, with funny-colored fingernails, smelling like cabernet and popcorn and acetone. I thought of my mom now, just lying there alone at home, and I wished she were back in the Movie Club and Wine Bar. I thought if she’d just be that way again, I wouldn’t make fun of her purple fingernails, and I’d even agree with her about how great Julia Roberts was in Pretty Woman, though I am not a Julia Roberts fan.

  We all got off the bus and I walked the twins to the library. It was hotter in town. Some little kids in the park wearing nothing but underpants were jumping in and out of the fountain, while their mothers sat off under a tree. Eli said I used to go in that fountain bare naked, back when I was too young to remember. I’d always hoped he was making that up.

  “So what’s with the nitroglycerin?” I said.

  “Jasper read about it in The Golden Book of Chemistry,” Journey said. “Nitroglycerin is a powerful and dangerous explosive.”

  “If I knew how to make it, I would win the science fair,” Jasper said.

  “Nobody’s going to tell you how to make it,” I said. “Why don’t you just build paper airplanes or something, like everybody else?”

  “Because I am exceptionally intelligent,” Jasper said. “I need a challenge.”

  After I dropped off the twins, I went all the way to the east end of Main Street to Fournier’s Farm Supply and ordered chicken wire and mulch like Jim told me, and then I trudged all the way back to the west end of Main Street to Whitman’s Drugstore for Emma’s vitamin pills, by which time I felt like a desert explorer dying of sunstroke. When I passed the library for the second time, the twins were sitting on the front steps, looking dismal and forlorn due to not having found any instruction manuals on the manufacture of death-dealing explosives. Instead, the children’s librarian had collared them and made them check out a copy of The Wind in the Willows. She said they could learn a lot from studying the reckless character of Toad.

  “If I were in The Wind in the Willows, I would not be the reckless character of Toad,” Jasper said bitterly.

  “You would both be the reckless character of Toad,” I said. “Let’s go to Bev’s Caf and get some ice cream.”

  I figured ice cream should make up for them being deprived of the opportunity to blow up the county, or at least the Sowers carriage house. Also it was really hot.

  Bev’s Caf has little tables with umbrellas on the sidewalk where you can sit outside in summer, but those were all full of people with shopping bags having iced tea and a guy with a briefcase doing the crossword puzzle on the back page of the newspaper and Henry Jones and Clarence Carmichael having lemonade and arguing about Chevrolets.

  “There’s Walter!” Journey said.

  “Where?” I said.

  “Right there!” Journey said, pointing. “See? Hey! Hey, Walter!”

  And there was Walter, sitting in Bev’s window and having a Coke, which usually wasn’t the sort of thing Walter would do, except it turned out later that he’d come into town on the green bus too, only earlier, because his mother had called from work to say that she’d forgotten her wallet, and then he’d brought her the wallet, and then he’d gone to the library, only before the twins, and now there he was, sitting in Bev’s Caf and waiting for the green bus to take him home.

  “Hey, Walter!” Journey yelled, jumping all around and waving.

  Walter looked up and saw us and gave us a sort of funny little smile.

  “I bet he knows how to make nitroglycerin,” Jasper said.

  “I bet he won’t tell you,” I said. “Now shut up about it unless you want to spend the rest of your life being escorted to the bathroom by a social worker.”

  The twins went racketing up the steps and into the Caf, with me following along with my bagful of prenatal vitamins.

  Bev’s Caf isn’t fancy, but it’s nice. There are booths along the wall, upholstered in some stuff that looks like leather but is more resistant to spills, and tables with flowered tablecloths in the middle of the floor, which were all shoved together just then for the Women’s Book Club and Coffee Circle, and a lot of photos on the wall of all the people Bev likes. Some of them are famous people, like Katharine Hepburn and Johnny Cash and Martin Luther King Jr. and Princess Diana, but there are pictures too of all Bev’s kids and grandkids, and one of her and her husband, Roy, both a lot skinnier and wearing headbands and fringed jackets, back in 1969, the year they went to Woodstock. Eli’s picture was up there too, with him wearing his football uniform and giving his crookedy grin.

  “Why, hi, Danny,” Bev said. “We haven’t seen you in a while. How’s your mom?”

  “She’s okay,” I said, which I knew and Bev knew and I knew Bev knew was a lie. Everybody knew my mom had been kind of nuts ever since Eli died.

  The twins were scrambling into the booth with Walter.

  “How do you like working for Jim?” Bev said. “That going pretty good?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “They’re good kids, Jim and Emma,” Bev said. “Jim’s mom says they’re having a baby. I guess she’s counting on a girl, because last time she was in here, she had this great big sack full of pink yarn. You tell them I said hi, okay? And tell them not to be such a pair of strangers.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “No,” I heard Walter saying to the twins.

  “You going to sit over there with your friends?” Bev said.

  I looked where she was looking, which wasn’t toward the twins and Walter. Peter Reilly and Amanda were sitting in a booth across the room. Peter was wearing a T-shirt with the sleeves torn off, and it looked like his biceps had gotten even bigger over the summer, what with hauling all those boards and cement blocks around. Amanda was wearing a strapless sundress, and it looked like parts of her had gotten bigger too. I hadn’t talked to Peter since Ryan Baker’s party, but he waved me on over anyway.

  “Have a seat, Anderson,” Peter said.

  I looked over at Walter and the twins. Walter was staring down into his Coke like he was sighting sea cucumbers at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. I knew he’d just told the twins to pipe down and leave me alone, because Jasper was saying, “Why do we have to pipe down and leave him alone?” and Journey was saying, “Isn’t he going to sit with us? He said we’d get ice cream.”

  Tell the twins: tell the world.

  “Or are you too busy?” Peter said. “Or do you need to go read some Play-Doh? What’s with you, Anderson? Am I smelling weird?”

  “Oh, stop it, Peter,” Amanda said.

  Walter hadn’t taken his eyes off that Coke. Like if he didn’t watch it, the Loch Ness monster or something might jump out of it.

  Then I knew that Walter telling the twins to leave me alone was like giving me the go-ahead to sit with Peter and Amanda. He was telling me it was all right to pretend he wasn’t there. And I thought how easy it would be to just pretend and go ahead and sit down.

&n
bsp; And right off I started rationalizing how it was okay really, how Walter wouldn’t mind. I could make it up with Walter later. Peter Reilly and I would still be friends, and I’d still sit on the back seat of the bus, and I’d still be on Peter’s team. I thought how lousy I’d feel if I got off the bus and Peter and Mickey and Ryan and all were going whoo-oo-oo together and laughing and flicking jelly beans at me.

  Then I thought how I’d promised Emma I’d quit being scum and how back when I was eight and under the dining-room table, Eli had said never to wimp out on a real friend. For a minute I thought about my pirate ship, which I hadn’t thought about in years. I wondered if there were still pirates out there and how you got to be one. Right now seemed like a good time to run away to sea.

  But instead I said, “Come on, Reilly, give it a rest. That Play-Doh thing isn’t funny anymore.”

  Which doesn’t sound like much as life-changing statements go, but then when you think about it, a lot of life-changing statements probably aren’t very grand. Like how Rosa Parks wouldn’t get up out of her seat on the bus. What I bet she said was something like “I’m staying right here; my feet are tired.” And then the whole civil rights movement started.

  Not that my statement was as life-changing as hers. But it was a lot for me.

  Then I thought, This is dumb to get in a fight over.

  So I said, “Hey, why don’t you guys come over and sit with us?”

  “No, thanks,” Peter said.

  Then he said, “You sit with whoever you want, Anderson. You hang out with any weirdo you want to. I could give a rat’s ass. But don’t try crawling back later. I don’t do weird.”

  And when I just stood there, thinking what to say next, he said, “Go on, get the hell away from me,” and he grabbed a bunch of those sugar packets that Bev keeps in little bowls on the tables and threw them at my face. So I grabbed him by the T-shirt and he jumped out of the booth and we started punching each other back and forth and Amanda started screeching. Walter told me later that the twins were trying to stab Peter in the kidneys with a couple of Bev’s forks, but he nabbed them in time. Then Bev’s son, Arnold, who’s built like a tank, came out of the kitchen and threw us all out, but not before I got a black eye.

  Walter says this isn’t because Peter hates me all of a sudden. Peter acts that way because he needs to be in control of stuff because he’s insecure.

  But for whatever reason, that fight pretty much ended life as I’d known it.

  I wasn’t in anymore. I was jelly-bean bait.

  Here’s my question: Is there free will? Do we decide things for ourselves? Or is everything all preprogrammed and we just toddle along down the track, sometimes falling into stuff by mistake like those cartoon characters falling down manholes?

  I guess what started me thinking about this was when Walter told me about the Butterfly of Doom. The Butterfly of Doom is why you can’t go back in time and fix your life and make everything come out better.

  The butterfly comes from this quote that says a butterfly flapping its wings in New Hampshire can set off a typhoon in the China Sea. The butterfly flap makes some tiny little change that causes another tiny little change that causes another and another, and it all keeps multiplying until finally you’ve got palm trees snapping all over Indonesia and you’re in the middle of a typhoon. But if you went back in time to try to stop the typhoon, you couldn’t, because you’d never find the butterfly.

  The butterfly thing really creeps me out, to tell you the truth. It’s like you don’t eat your Cheerios one morning and just because of that, forty years later a grand piano falls on your head. Somewhere maybe there was some tiny little thing Eli did that set him on the way to his roadside bomb. That’s chaos theory, Walter says.

  Which only confirms my belief that the worst thing that ever happened to the human race is math.

  Isabelle was leaving on the last day of August.

  I had it marked on the calendar on the back of my bedroom door. The calendar came from Ernie’s Bait and Tackle, and every month had a picture of a fish. The August fish was this really mournful-looking largemouth bass. Every day I’d cross off a day, and it would be that much closer to Isabelle going away, and that fish would just look at me like it knew how I felt. That bass was one sad fish.

  I still had all these plans for how I’d persuade Isabelle not to leave, how I’d get her to stay, and I’d play them over and over like little movies in my mind. I’d tell her I loved her, and suddenly she’d see me like for the very first time, and then we’d fall into each other’s arms and the music would come up and there’d be this really gorgeous sunset.

  We’d pledge ourselves to each other, like she and Simon Dewitt Paxton did, only this time it would be forever and for real. Even if she had to go back to New York for a while, because of her father’s job, we’d write to each other every day, because Isabelle thinks letters are more romantic than e-mails, and I could see myself at our dented-up mailbox, getting her letters in the mail, all in her swoopy red handwriting. “Darling Danny,” they’d begin, and they’d end, “Love always, Isabelle.”

  Then, maybe after we graduated from high school, she’d come back and I’d build a little house for us over at the blue-potato farm. I’d plant a garden for her with roses and daisies, and we’d have a little porch where we could watch the full moon and the fireflies.

  “They’re magic,” Isabelle would say, looking at the fireflies. And I’d reach out and take her hand and say, “No, that’s you.”

  That’s the kind of stuff I thought about. I’d lie awake at night making plans, each one dumber than the last.

  The days on the calendar kept filling up with X’s. It was five days, then three days, then two days. Then it was hours.

  And it wasn’t anything like I’d planned.

  On that last night, we were all there, me and Isabelle and Walter and the twins, on the old Sowers porch. It was still summer, but you could tell summer was over really, done with us, on its way out. You can always tell. The light changes and there’s this feel to the air.

  The twins were all droopy and subdued, sitting close to each other on the porch steps and speaking only when spoken to, which was weird, since getting them to shut up would ordinarily take a sledgehammer or one of those drugs that the wildlife guys use to down rogue elephants. Jasper was wearing a T-shirt that said hope is for sissies. Journey’s shirt said i hate people.

  Walter looked like the fish on my calendar, and I probably looked worse. But Isabelle was all lit up and kept talking faster and faster about all the marvelous things there were to do back home and all the marvelous places she’d take us when we came to visit.

  Suddenly marvelous was one of Isabelle’s words.

  “You’ll love it, darlings,” she said over and over. About the Guggenheim, the Met, the Cloisters, the Russian Tea Room, Times Square. The lions, Patience and Fortitude, in front of the New York Public Library.

  I thought Patience and Fortitude were lousy names for lions. Lions should have more active names, like Simba and Leo.

  “Did you know the Harry Potter books are over?” Journey said mournfully. “This summer was the very last Harry Potter book.”

  “Journey was sad when Voldemort died,” Jasper said. “If Journey was a Harry Potter character, she would be Voldemort.”

  “Nobody liked Voldemort,” I said.

  “I did,” Journey said.

  “Do you think you’ll be back again next summer?” Walter said.

  Say yes, I thought.

  But Isabelle just shrugged and shook out her silky hair.

  “Who knows where we’ll be next summer?” Isabelle said. “Anything could happen. Maybe we’ll meet next in some foreign city, where there are temple bells and palm trees and the air smells of cinnamon.”

  “If Jasper was a city,” Journey said, “he would be Detroit.”

  And I knew right then that it was over. We’d never go to visit, and we’d never meet in a foreign city full of t
emple bells, and Isabelle wasn’t coming back. She was trying to patch it over with all the marvelous talk, but I knew she was done forever with Fairfield and with Walter and with me. She was leaving us behind, going back to the symphony and the art museum and her fancy private school. Her father the professor had finished his monograph, and her mother was done with painting boxy orange cows. It was over, and I was too old to go back to Neverland.

  Everything I’d imagined about Isabelle and me was just dumb.

  “We’re coming back,” Journey said. “Jasper and I buried a time capsule behind the carriage house, and we’re coming back to dig it up. We’re coming back in twelve years, when we’re twenty-one. Will you still be here when we’re twenty-one?”

  Probably, I thought.

  “It’s romantic, really, being forcibly torn asunder like this in our youth,” Isabelle said. “We should send a token each year to show that in spite of everything, we’ll always be true. A single red rose, like in The Prisoner of Zenda.”

  “You could just post on your Facebook page,” Jasper said.

  Then we sat there not saying anything much, because there really wasn’t anything left to say, just watching the fireflies blink off and on in the tall grass. I had a pain in my chest that felt like my heart was going to explode. This is what a broken heart feels like, I thought. My heart is blowing up like a Japanese octopus trap and I’m going to die and the last thing I’ll see will be Isabelle with the stars behind her, looking like fireflies in her hair.