by Amy Meyerson
“You lost yet?” I asked when Jay picked up.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re driving home from school. I was wondering if you’d gotten turned around again.”
“Why do you always think I have such a bad sense of direction?”
“I don’t. I was trying to be cute, you know, ’cause I always tease you about getting lost.” I couldn’t believe I had to explain it to him.
“Sure,” he said. We sat quiet on the line, and suddenly I didn’t know why I’d called him. I’d wanted to tell him that I was at Caltech, but he would have asked me why I was there, and I would have had to explain the flyer, that I thought Dr. Cook could tell me something important about Billy, and Jay would have asked me again if I didn’t think it was strange, following clues from a dead uncle I’d never mentioned before. I didn’t want to get into all that with Jay, not at the moment.
“How was camp?” I asked.
“Pretty good. There’s this new kid starting at school in the fall. He’s really good.” I waited for him to ask me about the store. “How’s your mom?”
“She’s fine.”
“Are you being nice to her?”
“I’m always nice to her.” Jay stifled a laugh.
The door to Dr. Cook’s office opened, and the fresh-faced boy who had entered twenty minutes before walked out, a lightness to his step as he sauntered down the hall.
“I gotta go,” I whispered to Jay.
“Call me later?” he said without asking me why I had to get off the phone.
“Sure,” I said, and hung up.
Dr. Cook leaned into the hall to see if anyone else was waiting outside his office. He was significantly puffier than the photographs online and barely resembled the mousy, bearded man displayed on the flyer.
“Dr. Cook?” I asked when he spotted me.
“You aren’t in any of my classes,” he said.
I stood from the floor and brushed off the back of my pants. “I’m Billy Silver’s niece.”
Dr. Cook startled then grew solemn. “I was very sorry to hear about Billy.”
“Were you close with my uncle?”
“When we were kids.” Dr. Cook waved me into his office. It was lined with books, many of which he’d authored.
“I thought you went to college together?” I asked.
“We did, but we’d been friends since elementary school.”
“So, you must know my mother, too?”
“You look just like her.” I blushed. Whenever anyone told me I looked like my mother, it sounded a lot like someone telling me I was pretty.
He studied me like he was just seeing me for the first time. “Your name wouldn’t happen to be Miranda, would it?”
“How’d you know?”
He walked across the room and opened a filing cabinet, picking up a pile of mail and discarding each envelope back in the drawer. “It’s here somewhere. I wouldn’t have thrown it away.” On the bookshelf, he spotted a smaller pile of envelopes. “Aha.” He shuffled over to me with an envelope that read, For Miranda Brooks, in the event she should visit. —BS. “My wife calls it clutter. I like to think of it as disordered order. Every great scientist was ‘messy.’” He put air quotes around the word. “In fact, it’d tell you something about a scientist if he wasn’t a little scattered.”
I tried to recall whether Billy was messy. I’d never been to his office. If Prospero Books was clean it probably wasn’t Billy’s doing. I opened the envelope with Dr. Cook watching.
Whatever happened, I knew I would survive it. I knew, above all, that I’d go on working. Surviving meant being born over and over. It wasn’t easy, and it was always painful. But there wasn’t any other choice except death.
“Billy sent this to you?” I asked.
“I got that a few days ago,” Dr. Cook said. “I thought at first it was a prank, but it’s a little macabre for our sensibilities. Last week, my graduate students repainted the parking lot. I arrived at school to find my spot mysteriously dematerialized. But a letter from a dead man...” Dr. Cook shook his head emphatically. “Back in the day, your uncle was the master prankster.”
“Billy?” Of course he was. A prank wasn’t so different than a scavenger hunt.
“Campus was covered with orange trees. Billy called them sustainable ammunition. Bitter as hell. He made a potato cannon and used to shoot them at Pasadena Community College every day at noon. More often, I was the target of his antics. Twice, he drywalled over my dorm room door. Another time, he moved all my belongings into one of the racquetball courts, recreated my room to a T. I got him back, though. Don’t you worry.”
“Sounds like you two were close.”
“We were,” he said forlornly. “For a long time we were quite close.”
I handed Dr. Cook the flyer from his lecture in Aspen. “Billy left me that.”
Dr. Cook turned the pamphlet toward me so his youthful face stared into mine. “Hard to believe this ugly mug turned even uglier.”
“Did something happen at that conference?” Billy could have left me a picture of them as children or as freshmen in college. He could have left a pamphlet from their graduation or some science competition. Instead, he’d left me a seemingly random flyer from a conference on particle physics, and I knew it wasn’t random at all. “Was Billy there?”
Cook snapped his fingers and pointed at me. “He was.” His face quieted as he gazed into the distance. “He was.” I watched the memory wash over him.
“Dr. Cook?” He turned toward me. “What happened?”
He looked conflicted as he debated what he should tell me. This wasn’t going to be a flattering story. “If we’re going to talk about Aspen, you’d better call me John.”
“What happened, John?” I said, repeating his first name in hopes that it might make him comfortable. “Whatever it is, I want to know.” Dr. Cook—John—wasn’t entirely convinced. I nodded that I could handle it.
“At first, I thought he’d come to cheer me on.” He browsed a bookshelf, stopping when he found a thin red book. He filed through it, and handed it to me, pointing to an article entitled “Anomaly Cancellations,” which he’d coauthored. “My adviser and I had recently published that paper.” I flipped through it, understanding as much as I would have if it was written in ancient runes. “He couldn’t make it to the conference, so I went alone. It was the first time I ever lectured on my own, and boy, was I nervous.”
John said the nervousness had manifested physically in shaky hands and an unsteady voice, threatening to undo him and his carefully researched findings.
Hello, everyone, John began as he adjusted the microphone and assessed the modest crowd. Today I want to share some of the recent advancements we’ve made on modifying an action functional of a quantum field. His heart beat rapidly wanting to tear through his flesh. Relax, he’d reminded himself. Relax.
“And that’s when I saw Billy.”
If he’d stopped to think about it, it made zero sense Billy was there. He studied earthquakes, damage everyone understood enough to fear, while John’s lecture was on string theory, an area of particle physics few understood, let alone believed in, but John was too nervous to be thinking rationally. He continued to detail the 496 dimensions of the gauge group, lecturing to Billy alone, as if they were back in John’s freshman dorm room, not a disappointingly attended lecture hall. He smiled each time his eyes met Billy’s, only Billy didn’t smile back. His cheeks sunk in from the bone. In Billy’s red eyes, John saw the shimmer of death. He rushed through his speech, explaining how the nontrivial coring line bundles on configuration space became trivializable, panicked that something terrible had happened. Something John assumed had to do with him, given Billy was at his convention.
John shook his head sadly at me. “I should have known. I should have known right away that it
had to do with Evelyn.”
“With Evelyn?”
“She was always the only thing that really mattered to Billy.” He said always like he was making a promise.
“What do you mean ‘always’?”
“Poor guy. He’d been hopelessly in love with her since grade school.”
John said, as kids, Billy had lived within the den of his bedroom. He would invite John over to help him rejigger his train set so the cars would travel faster, to watch Billy’s pet snake swallow mice whole. For hours, they would sit in Billy’s dark and odorous bedroom watching his snake coil and uncoil, taunting the trapped mouse.
John laughed. “He called his snake Cleopatra. I’ll never forget that. I always told him it was the closest he’d ever come to having a girl in his room.”
“And Evelyn? Did she meet Cleopatra?”
“Billy didn’t know much, but he knew enough not to introduce the girl he was sweet on to his pet cork snake. No, she’d be outside with your mom playing stickball with the other normal kids.”
Sometimes, they would hear the crack of a bat, a squeal, evidence of the type of fun that had never felt natural to Billy or to John. Billy would shift open the curtains to watch Evelyn below, her white-blond hair trailing her as she ran the bases.
One day I’m going to marry that girl, he would tell Cook.
But it was like saying, one day I’m going to marry Marilyn Monroe, or one day I’ll be the first man to land on the moon. Good luck with that, John told him.
“But Billy was resolute. He never gave up on her,” John said.
By the time John and Billy were seniors, Evelyn was the most popular girl in their high school. She was lanky in the way teenage boys desired. The only sophomore on the cheerleading squad and homecoming queen, Evelyn was also in honors classes and said hello to John when she passed him in the hall, even when she was surrounded by her friends, other beautiful girls who would never have acknowledged his existence. When Evelyn said, Hi! John would stare at her speechless, causing all her pretty friends, including Suzy, to giggle.
“Your mother,” John explained as if I might not know who Suzy was. And she was someone else back then, young, popular and pretty, someone who didn’t belong to me. “Evelyn and your mom made quite the pair. As sweet as Evelyn was, your mom was terrifying.”
“My mom? Are you sure you’re thinking of the right person?”
John nodded. “She’d mouth off to anyone who looked at her for too long, even the teachers.”
John said he and Suzy had been in jazz club together. John hid in the back behind his upright bass. Suzy was front and center, swaying her hips as she sang, making John lose track of where he was in the song. “I would hit the wrong note and she would glare at me like my thoughts were much dirtier than they were. Terrifying.” He shivered. A familiar warmth spread through me. I loved those stories of Suzy. They made me nostalgic for a version of Mom I’d never known.
“So how did Billy and Evelyn get together?” I asked.
“He took advantage of the fact that she was always at his house.” John said that Evelyn’s father wasn’t around much and her mother wasn’t in the picture—he couldn’t remember why. While Billy’s room was still crowded with model airplanes, posters of Einstein and Newton, something important had changed. Billy had grown a foot taller. Muscles had developed along his biceps and back. The girls at school didn’t notice. Except when he bumped into them in the halls—Billy nose-deep in a textbook—he didn’t cross paths with many girls. But Evelyn was at their house all the time. “And he took advantage of the fact that she was terrible at science.”
Evelyn was sitting alone in the dining room, staring down a biology textbook. Suzy must have been in detention or jazz club. Evelyn often spent afternoons in the Silvers’ dining room, reading as she waited for Suzy to return home. Billy stood in the doorway, watching her shake her head in frustration.
Can I help? he asked.
She put her hand over her heart. You startled me.
I’m sorry. He braved a step into the room. If you haven’t noticed, I know my way around a biology textbook.
I’ve noticed, and although she was teasing him, Billy was struck that she’d noticed anything about him at all.
He sat close enough that he could smell the chamomile of her shampoo—How do you know what chamomile smells like? John had asked Billy when he’d recounted the details of the afternoon—and his shoulder grazed hers as he leaned forward to read the chapter. She was learning about mitochondria. He lifted her pencil out of her hand and drew an oval on a scrap of paper, marking the inner and outer membrane, the matrix.
From then on, any time she had trouble with biology, she would knock on Billy’s door, and he would spend the afternoon explaining photosynthesis and DNA replication, forsaking his own homework. You’re a genius, she would tell him, and he’d repeat these words to John. A genius. Can you believe she called me that? John never had the heart to tell him that she was just buttering him up, the poor schmuck who helped her with her homework.
“I guess the joke was on me,” John said. “No one would have ever imagined in a million years that Evelyn would fall for one of us guys in the chemistry club.” Even one of the guys in the chemistry club who happened to look like Billy.
It started over dinner. Evelyn looked even lovelier when she was distressed.
He says he’ll fail me if I don’t complete the assignment, she told Suzy and Billy’s parents. I can’t do it, Evelyn continued. Do you know the frogs are still alive when they put them on the table? It’s completely inhumane.
Let’s start a protest, Suzy suggested.
Now, Susan, her father said. I don’t think you need to insert yourself. You’re in trouble often enough as it is. Billy laughed into his hand, and Suzy threw a dinner roll at him.
You’ve tried explaining how you feel to your biology teacher? their mother asked.
He’s totally unsympathetic. He says that death is part of biology, that scientists have to be comfortable with the cycle of life. But I don’t want to be a biologist. I don’t want to get used to death. She flung her head into her hands in what Billy insisted was true and profound despair.
“So Billy decides this is his big moment.” John talked with his hands, swirling them like he was casting a spell. “He’s going to win her over in a way none of the guys on the baseball or football team can.”
It took him a sleepless weekend. Quarantined in his room, plastic pieces of model airplanes spread across the floor, a cup of green paint and patterns he’d drawn to scale. He didn’t have time to recreate the internal anatomy, so he drew the organs, the entire circulatory system on graph paper, and taped it inside the three-dimensional plastic frog he’d assembled.
On Monday morning, before the first bell rang, he was waiting outside the biology lab, shoulders hunched, swaying foot to foot. He saw Evelyn and her entourage traipsing down the hall. Fortunately, Suzy wasn’t with them. He told John he wasn’t certain he could go through with it if his sister had been with Evelyn.
The other girls disappeared into their classrooms until Evelyn alone walked toward him. She waved when she saw him.
Come to wish me luck before the execution? Evelyn asked. I really don’t think I can go through with this.
You don’t have to. Billy handed her the frog.
You made this? Evelyn held the frog in her left palm, unhooking the hood Billy had assembled on the underside. It’s got lungs and everything.
You don’t have to get used to death to be a scientist, he said.
“Evelyn still ended up failing the assignment, but it was the best thing that could have happened to Billy.”
“I can’t imagine one of my students being that thoughtful,” I said. I couldn’t imagine my boyfriend doing something that romantic, either.
“Your uncle could be quite the gentlem
an.” John shook his head forlornly, and I thought about Billy, the gentleman; Billy, the hopeless romantic; Billy, the widower.
“So Billy came to your convention to tell you Evelyn had died?”
“We hadn’t been close in years, but I was around the first time he lost Evelyn. I guess he must have felt like I would understand.”
“What do you mean ‘the first time he lost Evelyn’?”
“Billy acted like he was the only person in the world to get dumped. At least he’d had a girlfriend. I didn’t even go on a date until my senior year of college.”
John explained that during Evelyn’s last two years of high school, she and Billy had stayed together. Caltech was less than an hour away. Evelyn would visit regularly. Billy would walk her around campus, pointing out the orange trees prematurely robbed of their fruit, the abandoned cans of paint and bricks from the weeks’ other pranks. To twenty-year-old John, they were the image of a love that was lasting.
“But young love is like that,” John said. “It’s too intense. And the fallout is just as bad.” Or, in Billy’s case, worse.
When Evelyn was accepted to Vassar, she had promised to visit each semester, to spend summers in Los Angeles. What was four years apart when they had a lifetime together ahead of them? At first, they spoke once a week. Then winter break approached, and the other girls on her floor were going on a ski trip to Vermont. Evelyn had never been skiing. Just this once, she’d stay on the east coast. She’d be back in the spring. Then there were protests in New York and Washington, a job at a magazine over the summer, and before long the excuses stopped along with the phone calls. It was no one’s fault, Evelyn insisted. They’d simply grown apart.