The Wonder of Us

by Kim Culbertson

  “What?! No—that’s—just, no.” She pushes off from the poolside, diving deep into the blue of the pool.

  Oh, wow. He was about to kiss her. Why else would she be acting like this? That’s just what I need complicating this trip. My stupid cousin kissing Abby. I should have tossed him in the Arno when I had the chance. While Abby’s still underwater, I see Kiara and Tavin heading down the dock toward the ladder and wave to them. Just as Abby surfaces, Tavin scales the narrow poolside and jumps in next to her, sending a surge of water into her face.

  At her sputtering, he gasps, “Oh, hey—sorry about that.”

  Abby wipes water from her eyes, but she’s grinning a wet face at Tavin and splashing him back. I study them. Maybe she’s not lying about Neel? Maybe it’s nothing. Abby squeals as Tavin picks her up and tosses her a foot in the opposite direction. Okay, she seems happy to see Tavin. I’m clearly imagining the thing with Neel.

  Kiara swims up to me, turning to watch them. “Well, they’re disgustingly cute.”

  “I knew they’d get each other.”

  “Did you tell her about London yet?”

  I glance sharply at her, my face reflected in her mirrored sunglasses. “You’re really not giving up on that one, are you?”

  She shrugs, kicking her legs rhythmically in the water in front of her, her slick purple toenails standing out against the blue of the pool. “If it were me, I’d want to know that my friend, who is supposed to be moving home with me at the end of this trip, is actually moving to London instead.”

  “Shhhh!” I check to see if Tavin and Abby heard anything, but they are chatting animatedly on the far side of the pool. I lower my voice even if they’re out of earshot.

  “I am going home with her at the end of this trip.”

  She gives me a withering look. “And then moving to London at the end of August. Same thing.”

  “It would totally wreck the trip for her, okay? And I have this whole scavenger hunt planned out to tell her about it, which she’ll love.”

  Kiara shakes her head, her eyes on the East Harbor skyline. “I don’t know, Riya. From what you’ve told me, she’s had a pretty tough year—”

  “I know what’s best for my friend.”

  Kiara tilts her sunglasses in my direction. “For your friend, or best for you?”

  Anger simmers through me. Kiara’s like a pit bull sometimes: Once her jaws close over an idea, it’s misery to pry them open. “They’re coming over here. Just drop it. Be on my side.”

  “I am.”

  I know she is. The problem is, I’m afraid she might be right.

  When Abby and Tavin swim up to us, Tavin pulls himself out to sit on the side of the pool. “Let’s get something to drink and find some deck chairs,” he suggests, the water streaming off his large frame. Ten minutes later we’re tilting our faces to the sun, sipping the fizzy, fruity drinks Kiara bought as we melt quietly into the warmth of the day.

  Abby’s phone rings.

  She squints at it. “It’s my dad. That’s weird. It’s so early in California.” She answers, and her face shifts from relaxed to worried. “What—when?” She shoots scared eyes at me. Tavin and Kiara sit up, waiting. She listens a few moments more, then whispers, “Henry got hit by a car!”

  “Who’s Henry?” Kiara asks, her brow creasing.

  “Abby’s dog.” We wait as she nods and pauses, saying things like “yeah” and “okay,” and then finally, “call me back.” She sets her phone down on the white canvas of the deck chair, her face like chalk. “Dad’s in Loomis with him. At animal emergency.” Her eyes shimmer with tears. “He might die.”

  I scoot onto her chair and put my arms around her as Tavin and Kiara sit helplessly by in their chairs. “He’ll be okay,” I say over and over, because this is what to say even when it’s most likely not true.

  An hour later at the apartment, Abby sits on my bed, still in her damp swimsuit and a Hogwarts T-shirt, checking updates about Henry.

  He’s in critical condition.

  He’s in surgery.

  Silence.

  We stream a romantic comedy on my iPad that might be funny if either of us could actually pay attention to it. I try to concentrate on the current scene. A man and a woman argue in a restaurant in New York. For some reason, the man isn’t wearing a shirt, and the other people in the restaurant keep looking at him. There is a misunderstanding. It might have something to do with the no-shirt thing. As long as it doesn’t involve a dog, we should be okay. I glance at Abby, who isn’t watching it anyway, only staring at the blank screen of her phone.

  We left Tavin and Kiara behind at the Badeschiff, promising to meet up with them later when we knew more information. Her jaw clenched, Abby stared out the bus window as we threaded the streets back to the apartment, and she hasn’t moved much since.

  Halfway through the movie, Dad comes in with a tray of his famous molasses cookies, still warm from the oven. He sets them down, the room filling with the smell of cloves, cinnamon, and nutmeg. “Any word?” I shake my head. I offer the plate to Abby, but she just stares at a stripe of late-afternoon sunlight falling across my duvet.

  Her phone buzzes again, and she quickly puts it on speaker. “Dad?” Her fear is fully present in that one syllable.

  “He’s going to make it.” Geoff’s warm voice sounds tired. Abby lets out a whooshing sigh of relief. He continues, “The vet says it’s lucky I found him when I did. I need to fix the latch on that stupid gate,” he adds guiltily.

  “I’m just glad you found him.” Geoff had been up early to take out the garbage can he’d forgotten to put out the night before, had found Henry in a heap in the street at the end of their driveway. Whoever hit him was long gone. “Are you still in Loomis?”

  “Yeah. Mom’s here, too.” I notice Abby stiffen at the mention of her, but her dad can’t see. “She was great, talking to everyone, getting everything worked out. She’s with the surgeon right now. I’m outside.” I imagine Geoff standing in the heat of a California July, far from us, but still right here in the room.

  Abby peers at her phone. “I’m so glad he’s okay. Are you sure you don’t need me to come home?”

  I bristle at this, grateful when Geoff says, “Don’t be silly. Enjoy your trip. He’s going to be fine. Might have a limp, but that will make him seem tough,” he jokes.

  “You’d tell me, though, right? If you needed me there, I can be there.”

  Why would she go home? Henry’s fine. Geoff assures her she doesn’t need to come home. “Do you want to talk to your mom?”

  “You should get back,” Abby says quickly, and angles her back away from me on the bed. She switches the phone off speaker, but not before I hear him say, “Abby, could you just talk to her?”

  “I should go. We’re meeting some of Riya’s friends. Love you!” She ends the call and turns to me. “Don’t look at me like that.”

  I pretend I wasn’t. “Like what?”

  “I don’t feel like talking to her right now.”

  “I’m not looking at you like anything.” I take a cookie and push the plate toward her so she can reach one. “It seems like they’re getting along better if they’re talking now. That’s good news.”

  She shrugs. “I should have been there. This wouldn’t have happened if I’d been there. I would have fixed the gate.”

  I bite my lip. Henry might have been hit anyway, he was always finding new ways to escape, but she’s not in a place to hear that right now.

  Later, after we finally abandon the movie, Neel pokes his head into my room. “You two want to go on a covert mission with me?”

  “Just because you’re British doesn’t make you James Bond.” I fluff one of the many pillows on my bed, settling back against the pile, and show him the book I’m reading. “We’re busy.”

  Neel glances at where Abby sits on the floor against my bed, flipping through an old National Geographic of my dad’s. “Yeah, you seem busy. You’re not seriously going to spe
nd your last day in Berlin shut up in here?”

  Abby looks up from a glossy page. “It’s our last day here?” Neel pretends he doesn’t notice the knife eyes I shoot at him. He did that on purpose. To get me back for the whole Moira thing.

  Abby looks eager. “Where’re we going?”

  I shake my head at Neel, but not vigorously enough to stop him from saying, “Next stop—Edinburgh, Scotland!”

  Abby’s eyes practically light up in the shape of old castles. “Seriously?”

  “Surprise.” I glare at Neel.

  “Riya and I used to be quite the Harry Potter nerds.”

  “Right.” I motion at her shirt. “Used to be.”

  “Brilliant.” Neel rubs his hands together. “So, since it’s your last day, what are you doing sitting around here?”

  “Abby’s dog almost died today.”

  Concerned, he steps into the room. “I didn’t realize. Is he okay?”

  Abby blinks up at him. “He’ll be fine. He’s out of surgery now.” She closes the magazine on her hand to hold her place. “What sort of mission did you have in mind?”

  I interrupt her. “Doesn’t matter. We have plans. With Kiara and Tavin.”

  Neel ignores me, directing his answer to Abby. “A collector friend of mine told me there’s a shop here in Berlin that might have a vinyl I’m looking for.” He peers at his phone. “On Oranienstraße.”

  I perk up. “There’s a cute vintage shop on that street.” Checking my phone, I let Abby know we have time.

  Abby tosses the magazine aside. “Covert missions are my favorite kind.”

  She doesn’t know how much I hope those words prove true for us, too.

  Outside the record store on Oranienstraße, the sky shifts toward evening as cars glide up and down the busy street. Inside, it’s hot and stuffy in the crowded space of the shop. Posters of punk and metal bands paper the walls, along with bright graffiti art. Neel seems out of place here. I would have pegged him for Bach or Wagner or maybe even Sinatra. Not bands with names like Danzig or Heavens to Betsy. As we flip through dusty album covers, I ask him, “So it’s really over with the Monster?”

  He pulls out an album, inspecting the back of it. “Listen.” He dials and holds out his phone to me. You’ve reached Moira. Leave a message, unless you’re Neel. In that case you can piss off. She then suggests a number of creative places he could put his mobile.

  “Wow, those are some specific suggestions.”

  “Yes, they are.” He slips his phone into his back pocket. “After all, she’s a technical sort of girl.” He clears his throat, his gaze drifting across the store, to where Abby flips through a bin of old cover art. “Sorry I let it slip that it was your last day.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  He laughs. “You’re right, I’m not. Serves you right. What you did to Moira.”

  “So you ruined the surprise for Abby to punish me. How nice of you.”

  He frowns, studying Abby across the store. “I didn’t see it that way.”

  I flip through more albums. “Did you know her parents split up in January?” He shakes his head. “This trip is supposed to be relaxing, without a bunch of added drama.” I wait, hoping my implication sinks in. Please, I want to add, don’t kiss my friend. Don’t complicate things. But I can’t seem to find the courage to be direct, so I aim for the outer rings of my target and hope he has the shred of intuitiveness to figure it out. “We’re meeting Kiara and Tavin later. Abby and Tavin seem to be really hitting it off,” I say pointedly.

  His gaze slips to me, and he holds it a moment before letting it drop to the albums in front of us. I can’t read his face. “Was the split unexpected? Abby’s parents?”

  He moves down the row with me trailing him. “Out of the blue. At least for her. For me too. I mean, her parents don’t seem the splitting type. And now her mom’s with this other guy, our dentist actually. She moved in with him.”

  “That’s bloody awful.” He motions for me to move my hand from where I have it resting on the anarcho-punk section. They don’t have the album he hoped for, but he wants to dig through their collection and see what else he can find. “Oh, I’ve been looking for this one.” He pulls out a dark maroon album. The Barbarellas. “So, she”—he taps the girl screaming into a mike on the cover—“is the daughter of Bart Krow, the lead singer of Her Majesty’s Pleasure.” He laughs at my confused face. “They were huge in Britain in the eighties.”

  “If you say so.” I study my cousin. It’s funny how you can grow up with someone as a family member and only have a vague notion of him as a whole person. I have spent a handful of days with him over the years—at weddings, at holidays, on a trip to India I barely remember because I was six—but I’ve only ever seen him as this older, bossy, hyperacademic boy evolving through a series of holiday cards and emails his mother sent my parents over the years. His older sister, Darshana, is even more of a phantom to me. Now twenty-seven, she was often away at boarding school and then law school and now lives in Manchester with her husband (also a lawyer) and has a baby on the way. I peer at the cover of the next album Neel pulls out. “I wouldn’t have picked you as a punk fan.” I follow him to the counter so he can pay the intricately pierced, waif-thin girl behind the counter. She snaps her gum, nodding with approval at his selection.

  He tucks the album under his arm. “I’m full of surprises.”

  To his credit, Neel takes a hint and leaves Abby and me alone to meet my friends for our last night in Berlin. First, though, she and I eat dinner at an outdoor café on the boulevard Unter den Linden, enjoying the ease that happens as the sun goes down and everything blurs in the rose-tinted light, the heat lifting from under the weight of the sun. After dinner, we stroll to the Bebelplatz. I’ve saved one of my favorite tourist places in Berlin for tonight because I want it to be mostly dark when we see it; it’s more beautiful and chilling lit up. Ahead of us, I see people standing around, staring down into a pale light.

  “What are they looking at?” Abby slows, her history geek antennae on full alert.

  “It’s called Library,” I tell her, pulling her toward the crowd of people. “It’s an installation by the Israeli artist Micha Ullman. On this spot in 1933, the Nazis burned over twenty thousand books from the Humboldt University library because they went against their political values.” Abby tucks her arm through mine, and edging closer, we find a space to peer down into the glass window set into the cobblestones.

  The room below is full of empty bookshelves.

  “Enough to hold all those burned books,” I whisper.

  “They burned books in the Library of Alexandria, too, destroyed it,” she tells me as we move aside to allow other people to see the memorial. “It was the ancient world’s single greatest source of information, no backups. Just gone.”

  More lights blink on around the Bebelplatz. We wander over to the brass plaques that go along with the memorial. I point out the quote from Heinrich Heine written more than a hundred years before the Nazis burned the books and translate it for her as best as I can remember: “It says, That was but a prelude; where they burn books, they will in the end burn people.”

  Abby shivers next to me. “Whoa.” She has the same reaction as I did the first time Kiara translated it for me.

  “I know.” I shake my head, feeling the wash of sadness I’ve grown used to while living in Berlin, the one always lingering at the edges of my vision. I’ve even grown to savor it because of the way it reminds me to stay aware of the world. “What I don’t get is that you would think a government would want its citizens to be educated and well-read.”

  “Oh, they do.” Abby slips her hands into the pockets of her shorts, her eyes sliding back to the window in the ground. Her expression grows thoughtful; it’s the one she gets when her mind is whirling a thousand miles an hour back through history. “They just want to control the narrative.” Love for Abby floods me, drowning any sadness. Love for my smart and contemplative friend. />
  We stroll through the busy Berlin night. People ride bikes, hurry past us on the street, sit in outdoor cafés drinking and eating with friends. I soak up the energy of it, feel it run the length of my limbs. The city at night is electricity for the senses; I just want to plug myself in and recharge.

  My phone buzzes, and I start to tell Abby, “Kiara found this club—”

  But she doesn’t hear me. “Oh, the river!” She points out the dark Spree glimmering with the lights of Berlin. We stop on a bridge to watch the reflections.

  Abby’s glasses reflect the lights, too. “Remember when you got your glasses for the first time? How old were we?” I ask.

  “Eleven.”

  “We spent that whole weekend taking pictures of them. We named that album ‘Things That Reflect in Abby’s Glasses.’”

  “Oh, yeah!” She remembers. “What made you think of that?”

  “The river, just now.”

  “Henry’s face was one.” Her own face falls. “I feel terrible I wasn’t there when he got hurt.”

  “Oh, Abby, it’s not your fault he got hit by a car. And he’s fine now.” When her brow creases even more, I sigh. “Text your dad to check on him. You’ll feel better.”

  She leans into the bridge railing and says what she’s writing aloud: “I’m standing on a bridge on the Spree wondering about Henry.”

  A minute later, Geoff texts back a photo and caption. It’s Henry on their worn brown couch, his leg in a cast, one of those plastic sad-dog collars around his neck. I’m doing fine, Abby! I miss you!

  kiss him for me! she texts, and sends her dad a picture of the two of us against the darkening river, the spray of Berlin lights behind us.

  Beautiful, he writes. And the river’s nice, too.

  Suddenly, I’m viscerally angry with Abby’s mom in a way I’ve never been before. Not even the time when we were twelve and she canceled our two-night sleepover because she was mad that Abby hadn’t cleaned her room like she’d asked. That time, I even made a rock doll of Stephanie Byrd and kicked it into the river. In this moment, I’m even angrier than when I made rock voodoo. How could she do what she did to Abby’s dad? He might be dorky and quiet and care about things like hiking trails and going to boring city meetings to get better streetlamps installed on their street, but he’s the world’s nicest guy! Watching Abby as she texts her dad, it suddenly dawns on me that she has been taking care of the world’s nicest guy for months now.