A Sense of the Infinite

by Hilary T. Smith

  Algonquin Paddle-o-Rama, said the first entry. Day Uno. Saw three moose, a bear, and a beaver. Tipped canoe, cookies lost, hot dogs salvaged. Rachel and Claire sang a war song, Pete and Gary banged the drums. Leslie cooked bannock with chocolate chips, yum.

  I smiled at the mention of Mom, a smile that froze at the next sentence:

  Our Fearless Leader Scott “J-Stroke” McLaughlin can’t read map, driving everyone crazy with inane route suggestions. Must cast him onto next mosquito-infested island, lighten load.

  I sank onto the foldout bed, my ears ringing.

  Scott McLaughlin. Mom. Canoe trip.

  I wasn’t sure I could read this.

  Day 2 yielded blue herons and lily pads, Day 3 Lev stung by a bee, Doctor Pauline administered dose of whiskey, Day 4 Green Canoe Crew fell victim to Galloping Trots, Day 5, snapping turtles and seven-foot moose, Whiskey flowed at campfire, all were raucous and wild. much hooting and dancing. stumbled to bed.

  Day 6, Leslie acting weird, says she got her period. offered secret chocolate stash to no avail. Day 7, rain, thunderstorms, everyone miserable. Day 8, heading in.

  There were some loose photographs tucked into the back of the journal. Pauline and Lev, paddling canoes. Mom building a fire. And one of the whole group: Mom, Pauline, Lev, a few women I didn’t recognize, a few men who couldn’t possibly be him (too young, too old, wrong skin color), and one boy in red swim trunks with hairy legs, who was the right age and the right color and had a face shaped just like mine. I found his name in the list written under the photograph.

  Asshole, I thought to myself as angry tears pricked at my eyes. Asshole. Asshole. Asshole.

  Could a word reach through space and time to burn someone? I hoped it could. I hoped he could feel the heat of it on the back of his neck. I hoped wherever he was, he knew how thoroughly he was hated.

  I slipped the journal into my backpack and lay on the bed.

  All I knew was I wanted to go home.

  67

  IN THE MORNING, THE CRAMPS HAD dimmed. My phone was crammed with texts from Noe:

  are you ok???

  so worried.

  where are you???

  Noe seemed to think I’d come close to dying. I wasn’t sure why. Maybe there was a famous movie where the girl died, or she was imagining a more dramatic procedure than had actually taken place.

  i’m fine, I texted back.

  i have to call my mom now.

  poor dear.

  thinking about you.

  call me as soon as you get home.

  When I ventured into the kitchen, Pauline was boiling a pot of herbs on the stove for me to drink. I thought of Ava’s roommate. I guess some of that stuff was good to do and some of it wasn’t. Pauline said it was mostly chamomile, with valerian to help me relax.

  “Sometimes I forget what it feels like to be seventeen. I fought with my mom all the time,” said Pauline.

  “What about?” I said.

  Pauline rolled her eyes. “Clothes. Music. Swearing. Lev.”

  We sat in her kitchen eating muffins that Lev had baked that morning. I started to think that Pauline had changed her mind about calling Mom and the knot in my stomach relaxed, but after we’d finished our muffins Pauline reached for the phone.

  “Are you ready?” she said, then shook her head. “Stupid question.”

  Mom drives a lot faster than a bus, especially when she’s angry.

  She cried, called me an idiot, and said she would be there in five hours.

  68

  WHEN I HEARD THE CAR DOOR slam in Pauline’s driveway, my heart jumped. A few seconds later, Mom burst into the house without knocking. Her hair was disheveled and she hadn’t taken the time to grab a sweater even though it was ten below. Our eyes met, and it was like someone had switched on a heat lamp. My body went hot all the way from my hair follicles to my intestines.

  “I can’t believe you,” she shouted, and then she wrapped me in a hug that almost knocked me down.

  69

  I WANTED TO ASK HER ABOUT the boy in red swim trunks.

  I wanted to tell her about the cold hand and the sandwich halves.

  I wanted to explain that ever since Ava had told me (I only ever thought about Ava telling me, even though the two tellings happened within a week), my body couldn’t always summon the energy to eat or bleed. That it wanted to shrink, even though I coaxed it to grow.

  I wanted to explain that if I hid things from her, it was because I couldn’t stand to see Mom hurting any more than she could stand it in me.

  It was winter-mixing. Rain mixed with snow. The trees were a runny green slurry coursing past the car windows. After the initial explosion, things had calmed down, and we’d all gone out to lunch. Mom and Pauline had griped about the stupidity of teenage boys and talked about the things they’d tried to hide from their parents in high school. Afterward I took a nap, and Mom and Pauline had talked in the kitchen for another two hours. Pauline wanted us to stay over, but Mom had to work in the morning. We drove to Ava’s dorm to pick up my things, and I’d scrawled a note for Ava on the back of an envelope.

  Thanks for everything. Half Moon Mountain was the best. Then we’d left.

  Now Mom was being too quiet.

  “Where does he live?” I said.

  “Who?”

  “Scott.”

  Long pause. I looked down at my lap, conscious of having invoked a demon. At the sound of his name I could feel the car fill with icy air. Sorry sorry sorry, I thought, wishing I could take it back.

  It was always like this, on the extremely rare occasion I tried to talk about him with Mom. Like lifting a rock to see the insects underneath, and seeing them scurry around in a panic. Feeling bad because all they wanted to do was stay safely hidden under their rock. Sometimes I felt like Mom regretted telling me. At least my questions back then were dumb and harmless, not these ambushes that made her think about a person she’d rather forget.

  Sorry sorry sorry, I thought, sorry sorry sorry.

  I don’t know why I thought it was a good time to try for a conversation. Maybe because things were already so raw.

  Mom named a suburb of a suburb of a big city an hour and a half from our town. “Why do you want to know?” she said tightly.

  “No reason,” I peeped.

  I squished myself against the window and stared at the road.

  70

  FALLING ROCKS, SAID THE SIGNS, AND I wanted to be one, tumbling angry forever.

  YOU ARE IN BEAR COUNTRY, said the signs, and I wanted to lumber down riverbeds in pajamas of meat and fur.

  ICE ON ROADS, said the signs, and I wanted to be that deadly, to kill without warning, out of nowhere, invisibly.

  The city said ENTER, the bridge said MAX WEIGHT 1.5 TONS, and I felt myself heavy, breaking the spans.

  I flinched when we passed a sign that said the name of his town.

  I could feel him in the car with us, sucking up all the air.

  I wanted to push him out the door, but I didn’t know how.

  71

  WHEN IT GOT DARK, WE STOPPED at a diner in a town I didn’t recognize. We ordered tomato soup. Neither of us was very hungry. It came with hard white bread rolls and frozen packets of butter on a plate.

  “Are you mad at me?” I said.

  “I don’t know yet.”

  We ate our soup in silence. The waiter came by with more coffee for Mom. I listened to it splashing into her mug. Behind us, a pair of truckers was watching a football game on TV. I thought about the regional park. It seemed like there was always a sports game going on in the background when Mom and I were having a bad time. I snuck a peek at her face. The emotions there were too complicated for me to read. Strain. Exhaustion. Exasperation. Hurt. I looked back at my soup and felt the minutes drag.

  “I guess it’s my fault for embarrassing you with the condoms,” Mom blurted at last. “How were you supposed to tell me after that?”

  I blushed. I couldn’t stand to se
e her feeling guilty for something I’d done.

  “How long did you know?” said Mom.

  It was a relief to be talking again. Better than that long, strained silence in which God-knows-what thoughts could be lurking. “Only since the day before I left for Maple Bay.”

  Mom shook her head. “Jesus,” she said. “Well, at least you were somewhat responsible. Ava’s not the worst person you could have asked to help you. And Pauline says you didn’t even try to lie to her. I’m just sorry you didn’t feel like you could tell me.”

  “I’m sorry too.”

  Our eyes met over the empty soup bowls and then we both looked away, as if the pain of connection was too piercing to sustain. My mother and I loved each other with eyes averted, like birds circling a pile of grain but never coming close enough to peck. As if love was a mirage that could shimmer and vanish if you looked at it too closely, or a tree with sorrow nesting in every branch: shake it too hard and your heart would break.

  We walked to the cold car and got back on the road.

  It was too dark to see the trees now, and soon we were home.

  72

  I TOLD NOE IT WAS TOO late to come over, but she insisted.

  “Mom?” I said sheepishly, hovering in her bedroom door. “Noe’s coming by for a few minutes. I think we’re going to go for a walk.”

  Mom grumbled her acquiescence, and I went downstairs to wait by the window until I saw Noe appear at the end of the block. I slipped out the door and ran to meet her. Our bodies collided, and I thought of the loons who wheeled through our town on their annual migration until one year, for no reason anyone could discern, they didn’t come back.

  “Bethy,” she gasped.

  “Noe,” I wailed.

  The street at night was empty and quiet, the moon a sliver.

  I wondered what it would be like not to know her anymore.

  73

  THE WEEK AFTER CAMPUS VISITS, OUR school was buzzing with stories of what everyone had gotten up to. Michael Lavelle had gotten drunk with a college basketball team and woke up with a string bikini drawn over his nipples in permanent marker. Eleanor Watchless had attended a 400-level physics seminar and astounded the professor by turning in the solution to every problem she had written on the board. Mallory Davis had cheated on Tim Xiu with her campus tour guide.

  Steven had taken the train south to NYU to check out their drama department. In Art, he chattered about it nonstop. “It’s like an entire school full of pee sisters,” he confessed gleefully. “Perhaps an entire city.” He’d stayed with his rich uncle in Manhattan, and the uncle had taken him to see The Lion King, Avenue Q, and a ballet called Petrushka. He brandished a pink slipper the lead dancer had signed for him after the show. After Art, we went to the bathroom together to wash the paint off our hands, an endeavor that proved to be surprisingly labor-intensive.

  “What about you, Annabeth?” Steven said. “You’re being awfully quiet about Northern.”

  “It was—very interesting,” I said.

  “Interesting how?”

  “A lot of ways. Every way.”

  I pumped more soap into my hands and scrubbed at my fingernails, which were caked with tenacious blue paint. I thought we’d reverted to friendly silence, but after a moment Steven said, “Are you going to tell me about it, or is the privilege reserved for first-degree friends?”

  “Steven—” I groaned.

  “I’m right, aren’t I? Whatever it is, you probably told Noe the minute you saw her, but I’m just the person you kill time with in Art.”

  I froze, hot water blasting over my hands. “We are friends,” I said. “We talk all the time.”

  “I talk all the time,” said Steven. “You demur.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I guess I’m a private person.”

  “A picket fence is private. You’re the freaking Berlin Wall.”

  I blushed hard. I remembered the way Noe’s gym friends had badgered me at the restaurant, the night of the homecoming dance: Why are you so quiet? Why don’t you ever talk? I hadn’t managed to make a connection with them, and apparently I’d been kidding myself about making a connection with Steven.

  “Don’t you think I’d talk if I could?” I said.

  “Why can’t you?”

  The bathroom tiles were flecked with shiny bits of copper. I’d never noticed that before. My hands were red and throbbing from being under the hot water for too long. I was thinking about Scott’s face in the camping trip photograph. Maybe I’d never be normal. Maybe I’d never have a real friend. Steven was right. Friendship was more than laughing at someone’s jokes. It was more like skinny-dipping: if you cheated and kept a piece of clothing on, you’d never experience the wonder of the water against your bare skin, or be a full participant in the trust that binds naked swimmers to one another.

  “I’m not like you and Noe,” I said. “Sometimes I feel like everyone else has this thing that I’m missing.”

  On thing, my hand moved to the place on my rib cage where my heart used to live. I drew it away quickly.

  “Do you really believe that?” said Steven.

  “If someone amputated your leg, would you believe that you still had it?” I said.

  The bathroom door creaked open, and Kaylee and Rhiannon walked in with a few other girls. I busied myself with the paper towel dispenser.

  “Hey, Kaylee, hey, Rhiannon,” I said.

  “Hey, Anna—gross, what’s he doing in here?”

  I glanced at Steven. “Pee Sisters Convention,” I sighed. “We were just leaving.”

  On the way down the hall, Steven gave me a high five. “That was great,” he said.

  “What was great?”

  “We had a fight. You said things.”

  He seemed to consider this a victory, but my shoulders slumped.

  “I still haven’t told you about Northern,” I burst out. “And I’ve never made it . . . okay . . . for you to be anything other than a funny person in Art. You could be going through hell right now and I wouldn’t even know, because I’ve made it so clear that funny person in Art is the only part you’re allowed to play.”

  We paused outside the cafeteria. The bulletin boards were cluttered with announcements for the winter talent show and the holiday concert and sign-ups for the annual ski trip.

  “I suck,” I said. “It’s like I’m not even human. You’ve been trying so hard to be friends with me, and I haven’t been a friend to you.”

  Steven could tell he’d triggered something bigger than he’d intended. He reached out and gently touched my sleeve. “The thing that’s actually wrong with you is probably tiny to nonexistent compared to the things you’ve made yourself believe are wrong with you. At least, that’s what Ricardo says.”

  “What if the thing is big?” I said. “And it’s not in your imagination?”

  The bell began to ring for fourth period. We turned from the cafeteria without going in and walked back down the hall. For once, the space between us was heavy and quiet instead of being filled with witty banter.

  It felt strange, the heaviness and quiet. It scared me.

  Some kinds of scary are better than others, I guess. When I sank into my desk for Media Studies, I felt like a swimmer come in from the sea.

  74

  DECEMBER WAS COLD AND WHITE AND blinding. The trees bent and creaked under the weight of the snow. I tried to get excited about exams and Secret Santas and all that stuff, but it was hard.

  In Art, Mr. Lim called me up to his desk. “Ms. Schultz, you have a redo outstanding on your self-portrait.” At lunch, I filled a jar with rocks and left it in his office with a title card that said, RAW MATERIALS II: Portrait of the Artist as a Jar Full of Stones. It would make a nice diptych, I thought.

  I got an email from Loren Wilder, my tour guide from Northern. Thought you might be interested in this poem by Wilda McClure. He signed the message with a smiley and his initials. I wondered how he had gotten my email address, then remembered
it was on the form Mom had filled out to book the tour.

  The poem was about wolves in a castle of wind. I tried to read it, but zoned out after a line or two.

  I guess I wasn’t in the mood for poetry just then.

  Noe was always busy studying with friends from her classes. In Art, Steven showed me the Christmas present he was making for her: a leotard with purple and silver feathers, which he was calling the Noe Suit. I told him about Ava and Pauline, and let him smell the bottle of lavender oil Ava had given me before the abortion. He wanted some on his wrists. I dabbed it on carefully.

  “Who smells like perfume?” Noe said later as we walked down the hall.

  I was feeling bad about putting off Bob for so long, so I stopped by his office with a list of vegetarian food requests for the cafeteria. He was in the sagging swivel chair studying for a nutritionist exam and listening to a program on NPR.

  “What happened to Kingdom of Stones?” I said.

  “I finished it. Do you want to borrow the CDs?”

  I was going to say no, but changed my mind. “Sure.”

  He rummaged around in the desk and handed me a five-disc box. “Don’t start listening before you’ve finished exams. The story is very addictive.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  On the last day of exams, Noe, Steven, and I went downtown to use up my pizza coupons. It turned out the pizzeria in question was a dingy joint beside the Anaconda Nite Club. The hairy-browed guy at the cash register looked at my coupons, flicked them back across the counter, and said, “Nice-a try, kids. These-a been expired for three years.”

  “Trust a fake nutritionist,” Noe said as we trudged out.

  “I thought it was weird that he had so many,” I said.

  I told myself I was doing okay. I went skating at the rink and Christmas shopping at the mall and even to a party at Lindsay Harris’s house. I pulled the craft supply box out of the closet and made Noe a jeweled box for the talcum powder she put on her hands for uneven bars, and Steven a sparkly headband that said PEE SISTERS in purple sequins.