Her eyes fix on me for a beat and I wonder if she’s going to start laughing. Or if she’ll just drive me back to the library, patting herself on the back for attempting to be friends with me, but c’est la vie, I ended up being too weird, and, well, she tried.
She squints, looks toward the café and then back at me. I hold my breath. “Do you want to eat in the car? I could just run in and get some sandwiches to go.”
I try to hide my surprise and nod. “That would work.”
Ten minutes later, Madison is back in the car, presenting me with a sandwich wrapped in wax paper. I reach for it with my gloved hand.
“Do you like tuna? I should have asked. I also have chicken salad.”
“This is fine,” I say.
While we eat, she tells me about Hannah punching a boy who pushed her off a swing. “I mean square in the chest,” she says, laughing. “I know I’m supposed to be upset, and of course I pretended I was in front of the other mother, but really I’m proud of her. I like that she won’t let anybody mess with her.”
I nod and turn a vent away from me, as it’s getting unnaturally warm in the car now.
We chew our sandwiches in silence for a few minutes.
“It’s not because you forgot your coat, is it?”
“What?”
“Why you wouldn’t go inside?”
I don’t say anything, concentrating on the last two bites of my tuna sandwich. I actually don’t like tuna—or maybe it’s just that it doesn’t taste right without pickle relish in it, the way I grew up eating it. I swallow. How do I explain—not just my condition, but my illogical fear of new places, new people? It sounds ridiculous to say it out loud, so I just give my head a small shake.
“Is it . . . are you . . .” She stutters over her words, and I realize it’s the first time I’ve seen Madison H. falter. “I mean, there were rumors at school, but I wasn’t ever sure which ones were true.”
I stare at her, unsure what to say. “What were the rumors?”
“I think the most common one was that your skin was completely burned from the neck down in a house fire when you were little. Hence the gloves.” She gestures to my hands. “Some said you were an alien, but most people didn’t believe that. Hmm . . . let’s see. I think someone said you were Mormon? And that’s why you couldn’t show any skin. Is that the Mormons? Or Muslims. I don’t remember. But then, you didn’t cover up your face, and that’s what was most confusing to people, I guess. And then after Donovan . . . well, you know.”
At the mention of his name, my face catches fire. I know immediately she’s referring to the Incident and part of me wants to bolt from the car. Oh, the irony that I can’t.
“He said you were allergic. To people.”
She peers at me as if trying to suss out the truth of it from the expression on my face. “I don’t think anyone really believed him, but I did.” She pauses and then scoffs. “God, I believed anything he said back then. But there was something about that explanation—as crazy as it sounded—that seemed particularly true. Or I just thought he was too dumb to make something like that up.”
She looks at me again, and I wait for the feeling. The one I used to get in high school, like I was a curiosity. Something on display, like the two-headed snake floating in formaldehyde in the biology classroom. But it doesn’t come.
I stuff the last bite of sandwich in my mouth under her watchful gaze and chew it slowly, while crumpling the wax paper into a ball in my hand. I swallow, then turn to meet her eyes. “It’s true.”
“What Donovan said?”
“No, the alien thing.”
She laughs, and a warmth spreads through my belly, different from the warmth that was occupying my face. I like hearing her laugh and knowing that I caused it. It’s like the satisfaction of planting a seed and then harvesting a tomato. But better.
“So, seriously. What’s it mean? You can’t, like, touch people?”
I get such a spectacular sense of déjà vu, my head feels as if it’s swimming backward through time and I’m sitting on a rock in the courtyard of my high school staring into Donovan’s questioning eyes instead of Madison’s.
My stomach lurches.
I will myself back to the present.
“Yeah, that’s the gist of it,” I say.
Madison’s eyes grow wide.
“So you could die from being touched?”
I shrug. “Hypothetically. Mostly, I just get a bad rash. I did have anaphylactic shock a few times as a kid, but it was before I was diagnosed, so they don’t know if it was too much skin-to-skin contact that overwhelmed my system, or if I somehow ingested skin cells, like sharing an apple with my mom or something.” I pause. “And then, of course, what happened with Donovan.” I expect her to say something then, but she remains silent, so I keep talking. “The problem is, allergies are unpredictable. There’s this girl who was allergic to milk, so her parents made sure she never drank it. Then one morning at breakfast, a gallon of it got knocked over and some milk splashed on her arm, and she went into anaphylactic shock and died. Just like that. Her parents couldn’t get her to the hospital in time.”
“Jesus.”
I know a ton of these horror stories. My mom used to tell them to me like other parents read bedtime tales to their children. They were meant to be cautionary, but all they did was terrify me.
After another few minutes of silence, she says: “I wish Donovan had that. An allergy to people.”
I raise my eyebrows at her. Who would wish this on anyone?
“He cheated on me when we were married,” she says. “A lot, I think.”
Oh. “I’m sorry.”
“Me, too.” She shrugs, then turns her attention back to me. “Did you really almost die?”
I nod my head.
“Geez,” she says. We sit in the still of the car while this sinks in. “Wait, but then what? You didn’t come back to school. You weren’t at graduation. It’s like you just dropped off the face of the earth. Some people said you did die, but I knew it would have been in the paper.” She pauses. “Where did you go?”
My lips part as she talks, then grow dry from my slow breaths. I can’t believe she noticed that I wasn’t at school. At graduation. People did stare at me in high school—like I was a curiosity—but I didn’t think anyone ever noticed me. It’s a strange feeling, to be seen but invisible at the same time. I always felt a little like an apparition. There, but not there. Until Donovan kissed me, anyway. Afterward, I just felt foolish.
And then I wonder: did she look for me in the paper? For my death? I shiver at the morbidity. Madison is staring at me, waiting, her mascara-clumped lashes fanning out from her round eyes like peacock feathers.
“I didn’t really go anywhere,” I say. “I just sort of stayed in my house.”
“What—for a couple of months?”
I hedge, my shoulder blades tensing. “A little longer.”
“How long?”
I hesitate again. “Nine years.”
Her eyes fly open. “Nine? But, I mean, you went out, right? Didn’t you have to work? I just don’t understand why nobody has seen you. Why I haven’t seen you. Or heard about you. This isn’t exactly a huge town.”
A Walcott-ism from my sixth-grade teacher enters my mind: “In for a penny, in for a pound.” I take a deep breath and decide I might as well go all in with Madison H. “I didn’t leave my house at all. Ever. For anything. I’ve been a bit of a hermit, a recluse. Whatever you want to call it. And then, I sort of got a little agoraphobic, I guess, and couldn’t leave my house. For anything. But by then, I had to. I had no money and I needed to work. But I still don’t like being out”—I gesture toward the tea shop in front of us—“like this. With other people. The library’s been hard enough.”
I keep my eyes trained on my lap waiting for her reaction, but out of the corner of my eye Madison is a statue. She’s silent for so long, I wonder if she heard me at all. Or if time is somehow being manipulated
and what seems like minutes for me is just seconds for her. I turn my head a smidge toward her to check and that’s when she speaks.
“So,” she says. “You don’t, like, go to Starbucks? Or the movies? Or to get your hair done?”
I raise my eyebrows at her. “Does it look like I get my hair done?”
She smiles.
“Anyway, I couldn’t get my hair done if I wanted to. Can’t be touched, remember?”
“Oh my god—so you’ve never had a manicure?” She glances at her own shiny talons, painted a shimmery purplish color today.
“Nope.”
“Or a massage?”
“Un-uh.” I shake my head.
And then her eyes get big and she holds out her hand as if to stop me, even though I’m not doing anything. “Wait. Oh my god. You’ve never had sex.”
She whispers the word “sex,” which strikes me as funny, considering she nearly shouted the word “fucking” in a library not a few days earlier. I’m perplexed by how she decides when to be discreet.
I shake my head no.
She gasps and her hand moves to her chest, her manicured fingers splayed over her heart, as if to make sure it’s still beating. “Don’t you want to?”
I consider this question as if no one’s ever asked me it before. Mainly because no one’s ever asked me it before.
“I don’t know,” I say.
But then, I think back to those teenagers secretly devouring each other between the stacks at the library, and my body gets all tingly, and I wonder if, maybe, that’s not true.
PEDALING HOME, THE biting wind whips through my coat, as if I don’t even have one on. I make a mental note to look into thermal underwear, and some kind of face mask, seeing as how I can’t feel my nose. And maybe a headlight? Do they make those for bikes? At five thirty p.m., it’s still light out now, but I know it’s only a matter of time before that changes. As I approach the Passaic River Bridge, I’m wondering when the first snow will come, and what I’ll do about getting to work then, when I notice a figure standing just underneath the bridge, on one of the support beams. I slow down and squint, while two cars pass in quick succession. It looks like a young boy, but I can’t understand how he got there—or what he’s doing. And suddenly, he’s airborne—body flat out, like a skydiver without the parachute, and then he hits the water with a slap that I know even from my vantage point must have hurt like the dickens. I gasp and look around for other kids. Maybe he’s on a dare? But I don’t see another soul. The cars that drove past me are already on the bridge headed away, and it doesn’t appear that they noticed the boy. I look back in the river, where I see his arms flailing, his eyes wide in panic, and his mouth opening and closing like a fish’s, searching for air as he surfaces. Come on, I silently urge him. Swim to the side. But his little body stays in the middle, the slow-moving current steadily whisking him downstream.
And then he goes under.
I stand there staring at the murky water, too stunned to move. It feels like I’m in a movie or maybe my mind is playing some bizarre trick on me. I look around again for someone—anyone—who can help, but I’m alone. My mouth dry, I look back at the water, in time to see the dome of his black-haired head break the surface, bobbing like a buoy. And I know I have to do something.
I drop my bike on the shoulder and stumble down the grassy embankment, keeping my eyes trained on his floating head, while throwing off my coat. When I reach the river, I run parallel with it until I’m past the boy, then jump in, bravado pumping through my veins like I’m a goddamn superhero—until my body hits the icy water, stealing my breath. I let out an involuntary scream and start flailing my arms, mimicking the boy’s own reaction when he fell in. Then I put my feet down and realize, with some relief—especially since I haven’t been swimming in more than ten years—I’m able to touch bottom. I stand up, the cold water grazing my chest, and, training my eyes on the boy again, start pumping my legs toward the middle of the river. With growing alarm, I watch his body coming faster—the current must have picked up—and I’m not sure that I’ll reach the interception point in time. I pump my legs harder, using my gloved hands to propel my body even faster through the water. Then, at the last possible second, I launch myself forward, stretching out my fingertips as far as they will go and grasping on to the wet material of his sweater. I get a clump of it in my hand and start pulling him toward me—surprised at how light his waterlogged body feels—while searching for purchase with my feet again in the silty earth. His head now out of the water, the boy sputters, expelling a surge of water from his lips, but then his head rolls over to one side, lifeless.
The return to the shore seems illogically faster—perhaps propelled by my eagerness to get out of the cold water, or my panic at his motionless form. Grunting, I push his tiny body onto the muddy bank and pull myself out after him.
Shivering—and my heart galloping at what feels like the same pace as my chattering teeth—I crouch over him. “Hey,” I say, poking him in the arm with a gloved finger. He doesn’t respond. I know the next logical step is CPR. I’ve seen it in a thousand medical dramas, but it always looks so intuitive—like it’s an inherent skill encoded in your DNA. I wait for my body to take over, to do what needs to be done, but the only thing my gut is screaming at me right now is that if I don’t do something immediately, this boy will die. Looking at his blue lips, I wonder for an instant if he already has. I tentatively put my palms on his chest and push, but I have no idea if I’m in the right spot or applying the correct amount of force. After ten or so pumps, I hesitate. I know what I need to do next. I also know that it could kill me.
Shit. Shit. Shit. I tilt his head up with a gloved hand and cover his nose and mouth with mine. I exhale into his lungs. Once. Twice. And then go back to pumping on his chest, while my lips begin that all-too-familiar tingling. I hear a shout and look up. A few cars have pulled to a stop right before the bridge and a man is getting out of one of them, waving his cell phone in the air. Relief floods through my numb body. I open my mouth to yell at the man to call an ambulance, but my throat is suddenly too tight to expel the air. I wheeze, trying to inhale, while still pumping away on the boy. My vision starts to blur, dark spots floating in at the edges, as I look up at the boy’s face to see if my ministrations are making any difference—and that’s when I realize I recognize him. I’ve seen this boy before. The phrase “serial killer,” of all things, floats in my mind, unbidden.
The man from the car is suddenly beside me and I stumble back, watching as he immediately takes over pumping on the boy’s chest. Clutching my own throat, silently begging my airway to open, I fall down on the grass. I hear coughing, but I’m not sure if it’s my own or the boy’s. Somewhere beyond that is the siren of an ambulance in the distance. My whole body feels warm and I let it sink farther into the ground, while the panic over not being able to breathe strangely begins to subside.
And then everything goes black.
eleven
ERIC
WHOEVER CREATED THESE little hospital chairs that fold out into sleeping cots should be executed. After lying on it for five hours, the muscles of my back have now constricted into a long string of knots, like that rope we used to climb up in gym class. I’m amazed the chairs haven’t gone through any major improvements in the fourteen years since I last slept on one, when Ellie was born. My heart seizes as I think of her scrunched-up face, the tiny mews emanating from her puckered lips. That night, I couldn’t sleep, not because of the uncomfortable chair, but in the event something happened with Ellie—what if she suddenly stopped breathing, or rolled over, or somehow managed to wrangle her way out of the straitjacket swaddle, up and over that terrible plastic encasement that was supposed to stand for a crib, and onto the floor? I lay awake for the entire night, listening to her every tiny breath and whimper, wondering how I would ever rest again. Now I peer through the darkness at Aja’s peaceful face, as if to remind myself that it’s this child I’m keeping vigil for.
/> His chest rises and falls with sleep, and I review the day’s events in my mind: driving all over the city with Connie searching for Aja, the relief and alarm flooding me instantaneously when I got the phone call alerting us to his location at St. Vincent’s Hospital following a near-drowning incident, the doctor telling us he was a “very lucky little boy” and would only need to be kept overnight for observation.
I’m trying to stay focused, on the hard lumps of the chair digging into my spine and hips, on the methodical beeping of Aja’s heart-rate monitor, on the footsteps of the janitor in the hallway, the swish of his mop sliding back and forth across the linoleum tile, on the streetlights peeking in through the gaps between the shoddy plastic blinds—on anything but the fact that Aja almost died. That I’m spectacularly failing at parenting with not just one but two children. That I would give anything for Ellie to start speaking to me again—if only to counteract some of my guilt over the current situation with Aja. In a moment of hopefulness, I wonder if maybe she tried to text during the evening while I was dealing with Aja. I sit up and dig my cell out of my pocket. The screen announces the time in glowing numbers—3:14 a.m.—but nothing else.
My fingers twitch over the keys, wanting to text her, but I know it’s much too late.
THE NEXT MORNING, the first thing I see when I open my eyes is Aja sitting up and licking chocolate pudding off a spoon. I blink, shocked that I actually fell asleep at some point.
“Hey, tiger,” I say, groaning as I try to maneuver my stiff body into a sitting position. Forgetting my hand injury, I push up on my bandaged palm and wince at the sharp pain.
“Hi,” he says, keeping his eyes trained on the pudding cup.
“How you feeling?”
“Good.”
I was bursting with questions by the time Connie dropped me off at the hospital last night before she went to get The Dog, but Aja was already asleep, his tiny body worn from exhaustion. Now that he’s awake, in the morning light, I have no idea what to say to him. Do I yell at him? Ground him? Hug him? Ask him what the hell he was thinking? I’m a jumble of emotions, the foremost being the familiar fear that I’ll say the wrong thing. That I’ll push him even further away from me. I made that mistake with Ellie, and I can’t afford to make it again.
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