by Hilary Reyl
I have no idea how to respond to Simon.
Someone has found a way to make the music louder. It’s starting to bug me again. I reach for a cube of cheese on a toothpick. It’s full of holes, so it’s probably Appenzeller.
Simon keeps talking. He says he is especially angry a lot of the time because of his dad. So maybe that’s why he doesn’t get how someone like me can forgive things. “You can’t know what it’s like to have a dad in jail.”
“But I told you! My dad is in jail!” I exclaim. I want him to see that we have this in common.
He takes his arm away from my shoulders and gives me a look I recognize as hostile. “Yeah, that’s right, my dad is in jail. Why do you keep trying to copy me? Are you trying to be funny, or what?”
“No, I’m not trying to be funny,” I say, forcing myself to stay calm. “My dad is in jail too. I mean it.”
Simon turns his back on me.
I’m stunned. I was trying to bond with another boy my age whose dad is also in jail. I was finding common ground. And for once my pronoun wasn’t even wrong.
Simon goes stiff for a few seconds, then he turns around. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”
I nod.
“If you want me to believe you, you’re going to have to tell me what he did to end up there.”
“He was working in finance, and he got confused and stole some money. Not on purpose. What about your dad?”
“He wasn’t confused at all. He was an asshole. Very much on purpose. He sold amphetamines from his truck and didn’t give his family any of the money. He probably spent it on whores. He got addicted himself. It was a nightmare.”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“Me too,” he says.
Alice appears. She’s wearing a white halter top with white jeans, big hoop earrings, and green liquid eyeliner. Her lips are glossy. She is, for sure, not Gilberte anymore.
She glances around, then gives me a quick kiss. The gloss stays on my mouth. She says she’s glad I decided to come. She says, let’s go to the kitchen to hang out. Since the techno music is coming from the kitchen, I ask if she minds if we stay outside. She says fine. We go to a corner of the hedge that separates Simon’s house from his neighbors’.
Here Alice takes both my hands and kisses me. Her kisses have already become a habit, and it would hurt if they got taken away.
“Is Simon being okay to you? It looked like he was yelling there for a minute.”
“No, we’re okay.” I start thinking of a way to explain about our two dads and the similarity of their being in prison and the difference in their crimes.
But she keeps talking, and what she says makes me forget what I am going to say.
“It’s not you, Martin. Don’t take it personally. He needs to get mad in general. He gets mad at all of us. That’s why I stopped going out with him. He was too angry all the time.”
“You went out with him?”
“You didn’t know?”
I shake my head.
“That’s okay,” she says. “It was for a few weeks and it didn’t work out.”
“I’m sorry,” I say reflexively. This is not true. I am not sorry that Alice does not go out with Simon anymore. I wish she had never gone out with him at all. The wish is a throbbing in my temples. I pull Alice close to me, only the pull is harder than it should be.
“Don’t worry,” she says, not pulling away even though I am squeezing her. “It was ages ago, like last year.”
Unlike Mr. Swann, I do not assume she is lying.
Kevin and Marianne come to us with plastic glasses of red wine from a box with a spigot. I let go of Alice. We follow them back out into the party.
There are a couple of kids not from school, but who aren’t completely foreign. They must be from the pool. We all stand around. I don’t talk. I can’t get over the fact that Simon used to kiss Alice. Still, I am happy to be the one holding Alice’s hand tonight, although I notice she is looking around the yard a lot, searching for someone. Mr. Swann would be paranoid, but I think I can handle it.
Marianne opens a pack of cigarettes, and everyone except me starts smoking. There are plumes of smoke rising into the night. Alice offers me a drag. I nod and take the burning cigarette between my fingers the way I see the others do. When I suck on the filter, I start to choke so hard that I throw up beer and wine, chips and cheese, right into the middle of the circle of kids. Because of the carbonation in the beer, it all comes up fast, like sea spray. It splatters on some of the kids’ shoes. Everyone backs away, scraping off their feet in the trampled grass.
“It’s okay,” Alice says, letting go of my hand. “I’ll go get you a towel.”
I don’t run away from the others because I am ashamed. That’s not the reason. I run away because I need to be in a safer place, by myself. After the circle around my vomit breaks up, I do not wait for Alice with the towel. Instead, I disappear into a narrow, calm space between the other side of Simon’s house and the hedge. The place where we were talking before. She will understand. She will know where to find me.
I can breathe here, under the eave of Simon’s roof and the branches of a plane tree spreading over from the yard next door. Eventually, I stop shaking and rocking. I pull out my phone and text Elisabeth.
Elisabeth texts back that she’s leaving the cottage now and will be here in fifteen minutes.
I send her back an emoji of a speeding runner, which means “Hurry, please.”
While I am waiting for her in the shadows, I see Alice leaving the party with another boy on the back of a motorcycle. They are talking and laughing. I cannot make out individual words. As they pull out into the rue Racine, she grabs him tightly around the waist and burrows her face in his neck.
Even though I have been conditioned from Search to expect betrayal, I’m surprised. Shouldn’t I be in a different story by now, where Alice and I are falling in love instead of me imagining things?
Guess not.
Suddenly, I picture Layla alone in her basement with her old Downton episodes, feeling jealous of my new friends and specifically of Alice. I want to tell her that there is no point in being jealous, because probably none of it is true. Not the friends and not Alice either.
I groan softly. I scrape my knuckles against the rough hedge until they start to bleed.
11:30 p.m.
Today, at 1:05 p.m., I got a text from Simon saying Alice had an accident last night. Meet us at the hospital.
I screamed. I started to cry.
I ran to Elisabeth.
When I showed her the text, Elisabeth stopped her work, even though she was in the middle of an online exam. She held me and gave me Kleenex and drove me here, which took twenty minutes. We arrived at 1:40 p.m. Elisabeth said it was no big deal about her exam. She said she was worried about Alice and about me. She didn’t ask questions because she sensed I couldn’t answer.
There were two reasons I couldn’t answer questions about Alice.
1. I could not say what exactly had happened to her, although I figured that the moped she’d left Simon’s party on had crashed.
2. I don’t understand what my relationship with her is.
I assumed that because she kissed me, gave me compliments, wrote me the honest letter about the party, and made sure we stayed okay after the robot fiasco, we were falling in love. I was starting to believe that the heartbreak from Search would not happen for me. Then it did. After mentioning that she once dated Simon, she left me at Simon’s party with a boy who drove a moped. Even if I become the most general-ed kid on the planet, I will never drive a moped.
Elisabeth offered to come into the hospital to help me find Simon and the others, and I said yes because I doubted I could negotiate the desks and corridors full of strangers. If a staff member found me banging my head against a wall or rocking in a plastic chair, I would never make it to Alice.
While Elisabeth was parking the car, Simon texted me again, telling me to come to the fourth floor. He
gave me Alice’s room number: 4254. Elisabeth said that this meant that Alice wasn’t being operated on and must be stable. I wasn’t sure I understood her logic, but I did not ask her about it. All I cared about was getting to see Alice. My heart was racing and my palms were sweating. I started running through the parking lot. Instead of trying to slow me down, Elisabeth kept up, which I was grateful for.
The hospital is old and sad. It is built out of concrete.
We rushed through the sad corridors. I could feel Alice suffering. She was in a lot of pain, and I needed it to go away. Elisabeth asked directions. I ran on autopilot, the way some kids play video games.
It was 2:07 p.m. when we found Simon, Marianne, and the Giotto boys here in the fourth-floor waiting room. There was also a man holding a sleeping baby in a sling. He was wearing black Nike sneakers. He was Alice’s father. Alice’s mother was in the room with her. Only her parents have been allowed to see her.
When we first got here, the group told Elisabeth and me the story. People kept talking over one another and interrupting. I concentrated on the thread of what happened by translating into English for Elisabeth, even though she could understand.
Alice had looked for me at Simon’s party, they said, but she figured I must have gotten embarrassed about the puking thing and decided to take off. So she left with her cousin Max to buy cigarettes. Max was blotto. He swerved off the road into a field. He was only scratched. Alice hit a rock and had a concussion, so she had to stay in a room with no light and no sound. Two of her ribs were broken. The doctors had been worried that her lung might be punctured, but the X-rays came back fine. They were almost positive there was no brain damage, but they wanted to be safe.
Elisabeth didn’t need me to translate all this for her. It was a way for me to deal with what I was hearing. It bought me time.
No matter how much roaring there is inside me, I can appear like a stone when I’m stressed. I touched my face for a clue about how I seemed to the others, but only noticed that my skin was rougher than before.
I asked, “Is Gilberte awake?”
“Who is Gilberte?” asked Marianne.
“She’s Alice,” said Simon, looking straight at me. “Gilberte is Martin’s name for Alice. I guess she reminds him of a Gilberte he used to know.”
This was very kind of him. When I looked straight into his bloodshot eyes, he smiled. Alice is going to be okay. Because if Alice was dying or in big danger, he wouldn’t be able to smile.
Understanding this was a huge relief. I was so grateful to him that I smiled back.
Our exchange might look general-ed, but it wasn’t. There is no such thing as general-ed.
Elisabeth asked me if I wanted to stay at the hospital, even though no one would be allowed in to see Alice today. I said I wanted to stay no matter what. She said to text her when I was ready for her to come back.
Simon, Marianne, Kevin, Michel, Georges, and I sat in the waiting room. They were mostly on their phones. Marianne did three Snapchat stories about us waiting. We drank oily shots of coffee from a vending machine out of tiny brown plastic cups. I had two, with lots of sugar, which made my heart gallop. I didn’t mind. A speeding heart was right for the situation.
At 3:10 p.m., the others went outside to smoke. When they came back, it was 3:42 p.m.
I started listening to my sonata over and over.
At 6:00 p.m., I took a break from listening to send Layla a text about what had happened.
At 6:25 p.m., I got this reply: How is Gilberte doing? She is not going to die. This hospitalization does not have any of the elements of Matthew’s accident or of Sybil’s preeclampsia, which effectively killed off their characters. Gilberte will survive.
Layla still calls Alice “Gilberte” on purpose. Layla hasn’t moved on. I didn’t comment on this. I said, Thank you, Layla.
At 6:40 p.m., she sent me a video of herself playing “Here Comes the Sun.” I unplugged my headphones to show my friends, who said that it was very cool and that their grandparents loved that song.
At 7:20 p.m., Alice’s mother came in to say that Alice was awake, but was not allowed to open her eyes or talk yet. Alice’s mother was wearing a large pink T-shirt and soft gray shorts, which I guessed she’d been sleeping in when she was woken up with news of the crash. She introduced me to Alice’s father, Bruno Corot. I decided not to focus on the major differences between him and Mr. Swann, because there were too many to count. The fact that Mr. Swann would never wear a baby in a sling was enough for me to let go. Madame Corot introduced me to Monsieur Corot as a “friend” of Alice’s, an intime.
Both Alice’s parents had deep shadows under their eyes and gray skin, but they did not look terrified.
Once, I saw the father of a girl from The Center rush to see her in the street after she was hit by a car. I did not see the girl get hit, but other kids did. They said her teeth flew out of her mouth. Her father was howling. His face was contorted. His face was the worst thing I have ever seen.
Monsieur and Madame Corot were not contorted, but they were exhausted and anxious. They looked like me: shaken but also grateful.
Madame Corot left with the baby, who had woken up. Then Monsieur Corot disappeared down the hallway toward Alice’s room.
After so much time in the waiting room, I started getting used to it. There were two blue plastic sofas, six blue plastic chairs, and two framed posters of Chenonceau. A row of windows looked out on the parking lot, which was half full of small European cars.
At 8:56 p.m., while the dusk was falling outside, a nurse came in and told us we would have to go because there were no visitors allowed after 9:00 p.m. Her voice was friendly. She said that we could come back tomorrow, but that she did not know if we would be allowed to see Alice.
I texted Elisabeth to please come pick me up. Simon offered to wait with me in the parking lot.
I said, “Thanks.”
In the parking lot, I said, “Do you miss your dad?”
He looked at me with a flash of anger that disappeared right away. “I do miss him, but I wish I didn’t.”
Then something strange happened. Instead of Elisabeth in the blue Smart car, Asparagus Man appeared, driving his giant black equipment van. This was the worst surprise. My guts began to pull in different directions. I got this powerful image of Alice dead on the side of the road, even though she isn’t dead. I was getting irrational. What if Elisabeth was in an accident too? What if she was the dead one?
I have finally gotten used to having Asparagus Man around the house. I treat him like part of the scenery that will disappear when we leave. I have made my peace. Still, the thought of riding beside him all alone was too much. Where the hell was my sister? What happened to her?
“Hey, Martin!” Asparagus Man called out through the window, all creepy-friendly. “Your sister went out to dinner with Arthur. So she asked me to grab you.”
I froze.
“Ça va?” Simon asked me, meaning, “What’s wrong?” Instead of echoing back Ça va, I whispered, “Non, ça ne va pas.”
“You don’t want to get in the van with your mother’s boyfriend?” he asked softly, so that Asparagus Man, who did not look impatient or uncomfortable, because he is so damn sure of himself, would not hear.
Simon got that Asparagus Man is Mom’s boyfriend, when I’m still not even sure it’s a fact. Since Layla has told me that moths are very detail-oriented about the lives of the people they orbit, I wasn’t surprised Simon is clued in. So, Asparagus Man is Mom’s boyfriend. This made me want to get into the van with him even less.
I stared at the tailpipe. It became my world. I would remember what it looked like for the rest of my life.
I don’t know how long I stared. When Simon yelled, “Martin, wake up!” I looked at my watch to see that it was 9:31 p.m. “I’ll come with you,” Simon said. It’s like his mom has strangers leaving shoes around his house and eating all his rhubarb jam, and he hates it as much as I do. “You get in the back, Ma
rtin, and I’ll get in the front with him, okay?”
Then he said, in broken English, “Hi, Joe, I will come in the house of Martin with you in your camera truck.”
“Fantastic,” said Asparagus Man. “Samantha will be delighted to have you.”
I wished I was the kind of kid who hits people.
On the ride home, Asparagus Man asked Simon about what had happened to Alice and how she was doing. He didn’t bother to ask me.
When we got back to the cottage, Fuchsia was there, in the kitchen drinking red wine with Mom. “I’m so sorry to hear about your friend,” Fuchsia said. Her eyes were extremely wide and moist. “Is she okay?” Her emotional response was appropriate in an exaggerated way, like a kid at The Center practicing concern.
As Simon told Fuchsia about Alice, her face moved along with his narrative, like a camera panning through a landscape. She bit her lower lip and furrowed her brow as much as she could through her Botox. Three times, she sighed.
Mom asked Simon if he could stay for dinner. She said someone could give him a ride home later. He said he would love to. She asked him how he had enjoyed shooting the funeral scene at Chenonceau. He told her it had been very cool.
For dinner, we had couscous that Bernadette made, with lamb, carrots, zucchini, turnips, cabbage, tomatoes, and chickpeas.
After his first bite, Asparagus Man said, “This is great.”
My body clenched.
Simon, who was sitting next to me, nudged me and whispered, “Don’t think about it. Stay calm.” Maybe he guessed that Papa loved couscous, and also that I wished Papa could be here eating it with us instead of Asparagus Man. And even if Simon didn’t get all the specifics, he understood that I was missing my father. Simon is a gifted generalist. I admire him.
Tuesday, June 21
6:00 p.m.
At 9:00 a.m., Simon texted to say that Alice’s parents have asked us not to go to the hospital today. At first, I was scared this meant she was doing worse. So I called Simon. He promises she’s getting better, but they don’t want her to be stimulated yet because of the concussion. Her parents feel bad for us missing school for nothing. They hope we’ll be able to see her tomorrow.