by Margo Rabb
PART SEVEN
THE TRUTH ABOUT LOVE
There’s nothing in this world but mad love.
—Mary Oliver
Reality
The Smartest Girl in America set was bathed in pink light. The sign on the wall sparkled and flashed; even the podiums glittered like crushed diamonds.
I watched the whole thing from the hotel room as I hid under the covers.
The set looked much fancier and glossier on TV than it had in real life. You couldn’t tell that the sign was made of particle board and flimsy plastic.
The host, Rich Cavell, spent a long time getting to know each contestant. He spent the most time with Annie. He leaned against her podium and asked about her parents’ laundromat, and how her family had come to America. “And where do you dream of going to college?”
She looked gorgeous in her bright red dress, her black hair perfect; she answered each question so confidently, fearlessly, talking about MIT and microevolution and all her hopes for her future.
“Microevolution? I don’t even know what that is! Har har har,” Rich Cavell laughed. His hair looked smooth as melted wax; his lip curled when he smiled. “Now I hear you traveled all the way here by bus and car because your best friend, your official companion, has a phobia of flying.”
She nodded. He wanted her to elaborate more, but she didn’t.
“And there must be some genius genes in your DNA, because here we have your cousin Grace.”
Grace’s face was the color of a half-ripe tomato, part red and part green. Sweat patches spread under her arms, darkening her blue dress. Whenever Rich Cavell asked her a question, her lips opened but no sound came out. Her mouth looked like a small empty hollow. It was like watching myself during my dolphin presentation: she was having a panic attack.
“First-time jitters!” said Rich Cavell. The audience laughed.
Grace was the first contestant knocked out. Her father never even got a chance to help her.
Meanwhile, Annie became a force of nature. She kept winning. At the end of each round her eyes narrowed, growing even more focused; she suddenly looked closer to thirty years old than sixteen. Some outside force had taken her over. She must’ve been filled with adrenaline, or several other brain chemicals that she could surely, easily name. She slapped the buzzer so quickly, the girl beside her actually flinched. (Her mosquito-swatting practice with Janet had paid off.) She obliterated the other girls on almost every single question.
Rich Cavell [lip curling]: What are the scientific names for the human tailbone and cheekbone?
Annie: Coccyx and zygoma, respectively.
RC: Which mathematician discovered logarithms in 1614?
A: John Napier.
RC: What is the area of a trapezoid with bases of 5 inches and 9 inches, and a height of 8.6 inches?
A: 60.2.
RC [touches his waxy hair, but hair does not move]: What American sculptor is most famous for his work in South Dakota?
A: Gutzon Borglum, creator of Mount Rushmore.
Questions about geography, capitals, desert flora and fauna, reptiles, celebrities and jazz musicians, famous scientists, and what type of soil is created under weather conditions of less than zero degrees Celsius for at least two years (answer: permafrost). She even knew the first female poet laureate: Louise Bogan. “No woman should be shamefaced in attempting to give back to the world, through her work, a portion of its lost heart”—Louise Bogan. I’d made a notecard of that quote for her, somewhere in Ohio.
By the final round, Annie was ahead of the other girls by two hundred points. She never even needed the Companion Chamber. Then it was time for the final question.
Rich Cavell [in a glacially slow voice]: Who are the four [pause] best-selling [leering expression] writers of fiction [weird eye movements; obviously the man has had botox] in the world?
Annie: I know the first is Shakespeare. I’m sure of that. I think the next must be Agatha Christie. I don’t know the other two. My best friend knows them. She must. I’m sure they’re romance novelists. She’ll know this. She’ll know!
Annie actually bounced up and down above the podium, like a bobble toy.
They flashed to the Companion Chamber. My seat: empty.
I could see the producers practically cackling, as if they’d planned it like this, all this drama.
The camera zoomed on my empty seat.
Again.
And again.
And again.
In the hotel bed, under the blankets, I say the answer to the TV: “Barbara Cartland and Danielle Steel.” Romance novelists. So simple. So perfect. So easy.
The camera switches to the girl from the audition, Lauren, the teen Barbie. She doesn’t know the answer, either—but her best friend does: “Barbara Cartland and Danielle Steel!” the friend chirps.
They flash to Annie’s face. Confused. Stricken. Angry.
Even the night’s talk shows pick it up. The empty seat where I should’ve been. They pair it with a dramatic manufactured sound, like an electronic thunderclap.
I am the Worst Friend in America.
To live is to build a ship and a harbor at the same time
Lulu turned the TV off. She’d stayed in the hotel with me since she’d picked me up in the studio lot. After watching me destroy their lawn, the guard had come over to me and said, “Kid, why don’t you call your mama to come get you?” and held out his phone to me. I’d called Lulu instead.
While we’d been at the studio, Lulu had spent the day napping in the hotel room and having lunch with Janet. She’d filled Janet in on everything that had happened since we’d last seen her.
Annie was staying with Janet at the condo. Annie couldn’t even stand to see me.
At the hotel, I stayed in bed. Occasionally I checked my messages on Lulu’s iPad to see if there was anything from Annie. Nothing. But I got an email from my mother.
You’re not answering my calls or texts so I hope you’ll at least read this. I called the NTSB and told them I’d changed my mind. I asked them to notify me about their findings. They’ve identified all the bodies and Daddy’s was not among them. Please call me back, okay? I need to talk to you. I love you. Mommy
I read it twice, three times, four. The words didn’t sink in. They seemed muffled, far away. I hid deeper under the covers. I closed my eyes in the darkness, thinking that if I could burrow deep enough, then everything, including myself, would disappear.
When I woke up a while later, Lulu was reading in the chair beside me.
I felt like a shell, my insides scooped out. I didn’t want to talk about the email from my mom. I wanted it, and everything, to go away.
Lulu saw that I was awake. “While you were sleeping, I swung by Janet’s and got this for you.” She walked over to the doorway and picked up my backpack, which I’d left in the locker during the show. She handed it to me. My phone. My makeup. My change of clothes. I had the pillowcase of my dad’s things in the bed with me, and now I put the pillowcase inside my backpack again, for safekeeping.
“Call Annie. She’ll understand if you explain it to her,” Lulu said.
What could I say, though? I’m an idiot and a loser and you’re really better off not being my friend. I did something horrible. I’m a horrible person.
“Just apologize. Ask her to forgive you,” Lulu said.
I kept imagining how it could’ve gone differently: I could’ve reasoned with the guard more. Fought with him. While I slept, I dreamed about trying to enter the building again and again, until I finally got back in. Then I’d wake up and realize it was only a dream.
There was no way Annie would forgive me. I couldn’t even forgive myself. Every time I replayed the show in my mind, I hated myself. She had every reason to hate me.
Lulu adjusted the pillows on her red armchair and looked out at the ocean. She called Michael to check in and left him a voice mail.
“You probably need to get back home,” I said.
“I d
on’t—Michael’s gone on his field trip this week, and it’s not every day I get to stay at a beachfront hotel. How are you feeling?”
I shook my head. Images of Will in the parking lot kept flashing in front of me. My body hunched with shame. Why had we planned this whole trip? Why had I ever let myself fall in love with him? Why did I get so carried away? What was wrong with me? I knew what was wrong with me: about a thousand different things.
“If I was prettier, this wouldn’t have happened. Will wouldn’t have said what he said. If I was a better person. My mom is right about me. I’m so stupid. Stupid fantasies.” I shook my head again. “And I’m ugly.”
She put her book down and sat beside me on the bed. “You’re not stupid. You’re not ugly. I used to think during all those years I was single—there were a lot of them—that I wasn’t pretty enough, or thin enough—until I realized I’m just fine. It’s that some people don’t really know how to love other people. Some bad things happened to Will in his life, and those things maybe kind of screwed him up a bit, too. We all have to cope with so much crap. And we’re all kind of screwed up. You have to find someone who, despite all their screwed-up-ness, still knows how to love you the way you need to be loved.”
She glanced down and laughed a little. “Oh, what do I know? I’m just a crazy pregnant lady. A crazy old pregnant lady.”
“I like your crazy,” I said, peeking out from under the covers.
As I looked at her, I thought of her husband, Michael, how he made us tea and bought us ice cream, and the way he looked at her with so much love.
She touched my arm. “You might not really fall in love again for years, who knows—and that’s okay. If you really want to find love and have a life, go out there and see the world. Travel not to see a guy but for yourself. Learn who you are. How can you love anyone else unless you know who you are? Learn how to be alone.” She pushed up her sleeves. “Think of Elizabeth Bishop, traveling, stopping off in Brazil and staying there fifteen years. And writing some of the most beautiful poems ever written.”
I thought of my father. “What would my dad think if he could see me now? He’d be so disappointed in me. In my mom too. He’d hate how my mom’s been since he died. He’d have wanted her to keep his stuff. To talk to me about him. Not to make decisions without me.”
She shook her head. “He’d never be disappointed in you. He loved you. And your mom. He’d know your mom is trying her best, even if she makes lots of mistakes. As we all do.” She paused. “Lord knows I do. My entire first marriage.” She sighed. “Don’t turn your dad into someone he wasn’t. He wouldn’t want his death to have messed up your relationship with your mom.”
I nodded, trying to absorb what she was saying.
“You’ve worried so much about what he felt in those last minutes before he died—but knowing your dad, he probably wasn’t thinking about himself. He was probably thinking of you. Wanting the best for you. Wanting you to be happy. Not wanting to have caused you pain.”
That had never occurred to me before. I’d been so focused on how afraid he must have felt as he died, and whether he felt pain, that I’d never thought he might’ve been thinking of us, of the people he loved.
And to finish the harbor long after the ship has gone down
I felt better after our talk, for an hour or so—Lulu and I ordered room service, and I managed to eat a little despite the churning in my stomach—but then the dark feelings returned and I went back under the covers and fell asleep. The next morning, Lulu opened the curtains and said my wallowing period was over.
She took the bedspread off. “I can’t stand to see you so paralyzed that you can’t get out of bed.”
Stomach bug life.
“Lord knows I wallow too. Usually with Ben and Jerry.” She sat down beside me and smoothed out the blanket. “When I got divorced, I hid under the covers for two weeks. I hid even longer when I lost the baby.” She hesitated, and hugged her elbows.
She was silent for a while. Then she said, “You can use it, you know. The grief. I know it doesn’t seem like it now, but your dad’s death has given you a different way of seeing things—it’s not all stomach bugs.” She rested one hand on her belly, as if steadying a globe. “Sometimes, on good days, I treasure things. Sitting here now, I know how lucky I am.”
She looked distant and gloomy for a moment. “It’s a struggle every day. It’s not like I wake up feeling instantly hopeful. It’s millions of moments of trying. Looking forward.”
Outside, in the parking lot, a construction crane groaned and trucks wheezed alongside the sounds of the sea. I told her how I always felt like I was two different people—the happy-in-love romantic with my books and movies, and the anxious, stomach bug girl. The girl I was today and would probably be forever, now. How I was afraid the stomach bug girl had taken over and nothing else was left.
“It’s okay to have stomach bug days. Or ‘personal health days,’ as we call them at my age. Days when you have to wallow, and let yourself feel all those bad feelings. But then you have to get yourself out of it. Whether it’s reading romances, or traveling, or writing—”
“I always thought my mom would help me more. She could help me get through it.”
“She’s done the best she could. Moms aren’t the only ones who mother, you know. Friends mother. Fathers mother. We mother ourselves.”
I thought of my dad’s trays of tea and the hot water bottle he used to bring me on cold nights. “My dad was kind of a great mom, actually.”
“He mothered your mom, too. She lost that also, when she lost him. It hit her so hard not to have that comfort from him anymore.”
I’d never really thought about her loss before, that she’d lost so many of the same things I had.
“Your dad was such a joyful person—you know, you can honor him by doing the things you love, the things he showed you how to love—great food. A cup of tea. Poetry. Writing, reading books, cooking, enjoying a beautiful place. A beautiful view.”
Her eyes shifted to the window. “Your dad would understand what you’re going through because he loved you. Loves you, from wherever he is.”
I thought of Will’s little brother with his telescope, looking down on their family. I thought of my dad, looking at us from the ocean. My body felt heavy, flooded with sadness.
Lulu twisted her silver ring. “Love is never easy or guaranteed. Real love is a leap, you know. As you get older, you learn how hard it is, how hard everything is, how we never know if there’s any ground beneath our feet, or if we’ll be hurt or heartbroken. But we leap anyway. You have to take that leap.”
The harbor
I still wallowed for the rest of the morning. I surfed from channel to channel, from soap operas to old westerns, but they made me feel worse. (All those cowboys just wanted to be web designers, anyway.)
That afternoon, though, I picked up the old, nearly empty diary Janet had given me, the diary my father had given to my grandmother. I glanced at the quick letter I’d written to my dad on the bus. I’d broken the seal of the journal, the blank page. I’d been afraid to write more since then because I hadn’t wanted the worst feelings and memories to come out. But they’d come out anyway, flooded into my brain on their own. I felt so low now—how much lower could I go?
I opened the diary to the next page. I wrote two words. Dear Daddy again. I wrote a few more lines—another letter to him—well, not exactly a letter. A poem-letter. Then another. And another. I told him about the word remains and Wonderboob and grief group, and Rosamunde Saunders’s voice in my head, and meeting Will and being dumped by Will, and the wreckage in the news and Bubbe 409’s grave and every stop on our trip—the whole story of it, the outside story and the one inside me.
Once I got going, I couldn’t stop. I told him about every fight I’d ever had with my mom. And I wrote down everything Lulu had told me while I hid in the hotel bed. Words that had coasted over my mind now began to sink in. It’s a struggle every day. Your dad w
ouldn’t have wanted to cause you pain. Travel not to see a guy but for yourself. Mother yourself. Learn who you are. Learn how to be alone. Things I needed to learn and to remember. Writing them down made them soak into my pores, seem possible. Seem real.
I kept writing for hours. As I reached the middle of the journal, something changed on the page. I didn’t know where the words were coming from—from this deep buried part of me, or some force outside myself—but suddenly, my dad was writing to me.
Dear Eva,
It’s pretty funny about the hand. And I like the part about the disembodied finger trick,
with the ketchup spots. And the forearm. You have to be kind to Mommy,
you know—she never found dark stuff so funny. Remember the time when you were only six
and I dressed up as Bubbe 409 for Halloween? Scrubbies taped all over my chest.
Mommy made me take them off. And you know what’s funny, too? That I like it here at the bottom
of the ocean. It’s a good place to be, in this giant underworld
of fallen sailors and mermaids, pirates and explorers. In the morning I have breakfast
with Ariel and afternoon tea with the Strauses from the Titanic. Dinner is with
Francis Drake and sometimes we have parties with all the lost souls
dancing. And do you know how quiet it is here, how the plankton flicker like a thousand tiny stars? Scientists know more about the surface of the moon
than the depth of the sea, but that’s the way it should be, to leave something a mystery.
Daddy
I looked at what I’d just written, the tiny print on the yellowed page of the notebook.
I closed the leather cover and held it in my palms.
It had been so long since I’d written, really written, that I’d forgotten what it felt like—how it changed things, shifted everything. I’d forgotten how writing surprises you—how you sit down feeling one thing and come out feeling another—and that I’d never heard my dad’s voice in my head like this before, never known I could feel this close to him again, that this letter from him might ever exist. But here it was.