Painting by painting, I worked my way through the miraculous rescues, the saints snatching infants from the jaws of wild beasts and restoring the pink of life to the ashen-faced dead. One artist seemed to specialize in saints resurrecting drowned children. A baby had fallen into a fountain. A boy had slipped into a river. Both paintings showed the children immersed, their faces blue as water, and then in subsequent panels the boy and the baby stood, dressed in red, their tiny hands clasped in gratitude to the saint who had fished them out. I wondered if the painter had seen something like that, or if he had lost, or almost lost, a child to death by drowning.
Margaret had been born too late. She’d meant too late for the jazz standards, the screwball comedies, the satin gowns. But she’d been off by the centuries. Too late for the lifeguard saint.
Suddenly jealous of the families of the rescued children, I turned to the painting I loved most and saved for last, Saint Nicholas of Tolentino Saving a Shipwreck. Shining through the furry black sky, a celestial searchlight had picked out a boat with notched walls and towers, as if a fortified town had slipped offshore and floated onto the ocean. A storm had ripped the sails from the ship and swept them into the sky, where they whirled and snapped like laundry blown off a clothesline. From the edge of the painting, the saint flew down to save the drenched passengers and sailors huddled, praying, on deck.
Staring at the picture, I found what I’d wanted when I’d gazed into Margaret’s snow globe. I left my body and entered the painting. I felt the sting of salt on my face, I heard the wind moan and the sailors’ shouts, I saw the saint approaching. I focused on the heavenly laser piercing the spiraling wind, and as I cowered along with the shivering crew, waiting for Saint Nicholas to steady the boat and gather me in his arms, I imagined—no, I heard—the tolling of the ship’s bell.
In fact, it was the doorbell. Someone had walked in.
Even when I heard a voice saying, almost fearfully, “Nico?” I raised one arm to ward off the lash of salt spray. I wasn’t ready to leave the roiling sea for the airless tomb of the bookstore.
Someone stood in front of me. A mouth, a familiar face. It took me so long to identify it that when I finally did, my own face lit up, and I blushed. We both acted as if I’d been joking, making believe I didn’t recognize Aaron. We laughed, but it wasn’t real laughter. It was the noise two chimpanzees might make to express something too deep for everyday monkey language.
“Aaron! Aaron! Hi! Hello!” I was practically yelling.
“Hey, kid,” Aaron said. “How are you?”
“Okay, I guess.” Water bubbled out of my eyes. That’s how okay I was. Fighting tears gave me something to focus on, a timeout in which to process the fact that Aaron was actually here. My standing behind the counter would have made it awkward for him to hug me or touch me. He was trying not to look at me—out of politeness, I guessed. The sight of him made me feel a stab of longing for Margaret, from which I was distracted by the startling realization that all this time, all these days and weeks, I’d been waiting for him to walk in.
“You’re still here,” he said. “My mom told me—”
Where else would I be? Was Aaron nervous? About seeing me? About seeing Margaret’s sister.
“Don’t cry,” said Aaron. “Please don’t cry. Forget I said that. Go ahead.”
It was such a huge relief, not having to pretend. Weeping felt like sneezing or like falling asleep. Aaron watched me, not annoyed or impatient but, it seemed to me, grateful, as if I were doing what he would have done if he’d been a girl. Snot roped out my nose. I wiped it with the back of my hand. I wasn’t embarrassed. I didn’t care that he was a boy. An older guy. A relative stranger. At that moment, he was the person who knew me best in the world.
I scrubbed at my eyes and willed the tears to stop. Meanwhile, I shut the art book and slid it under the counter. What if Aaron thought I’d been looking at art just to impress him? But I hadn’t known he’d come in. I’d been looking at a sinking ship, at sailors in danger of drowning. I didn’t want it to upset Aaron. That a boat might remind him of Margaret made me so glad to see him that I started crying again.
By now Aaron was looking at me in a way that I mistook for curiosity about when—if ever—I might calm down. But he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at Margaret’s shirt. He kept wanting to look at my face, but his eyes kept tracking down to the palm trees, then back and forth, nose hula girls, forehead coconuts, trying to put it together. Since he couldn’t focus on me, I could stare at him without having to worry about him staring back. Aaron still had that golden glow, burnished by exhaustion and sadness. He looked wasted, but more attractive: a haunted, insomniac soul. I thought of Aaron’s mother, and I wondered if a stranger seeing our family would think we’d aged drastically, too.
Maybe I wouldn’t have noticed the change if I hadn’t known his face so well, if I hadn’t watched so closely as Aaron and my sister traded tastes of the pistachio that dyed their mouths a matching green. Anyone else might just have seen a handsome boy, innocent and self-admiring. Maybe a little troubled. Screw loose? I didn’t think so.
“That’s quite a haircut,” Aaron said.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Thanks for mentioning it. It was my mom’s idea.”
“So I guess she took you to the butchers at the mall?”
How much had Margaret told him? He must have known all about us.
“You look completely different,” he said.
“I am completely different.” I wondered if I should come down from the platform behind the counter. I stayed where I was.
“I know,” he said.
“But different better.”
“That would be strange,” I said.
“Different really better.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“I don’t know why that would be. I feel different worse. A lot worse.”
“Don’t you think I understand that?” Aaron sounded almost angry. It was a little unnerving, how quickly he got annoyed. Grief was rough on everyone’s nerves. Everyone was edgy.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I mean, I know you know.” I’d forgotten what we were talking about. Better not to talk, better not to call attention to a girl with a bad haircut wearing her dead sister’s shirt. But the longer the silence lasted, the greater the danger that Aaron would leave. Or that my father would come back. If I couldn’t say, “How are you?” what were my chances of saying, “Please stay. I need you to stay”?
Finally Aaron said, “I looked for you at that meeting.”
“What meeting?”
“The meeting about the pond scum.”
“Oh, that meeting. I forgot.”
“I can understand why,” Aaron said.
“You can?”
“My God, Nico.” He finally looked at me, at my face.
“So what’s up with the phytoplankton?” I asked.
“Excuse me?”
“Phytoplankton,” I repeated.
“Also known as pond scum.”
“Excellent.” Aaron grinned and stuck up his thumb.
I watched him as closely as I dared. Was he making fun of me? “I’m not being sarcastic,” he said.
“It’s great that you know stuff like that.”
“So what did they decide?”
“Decide? Since when has this town ever decided anything? They did what they always do. Talk and argue, discuss, blah blah, talk and argue some more, freak each other out. That’s what they like best, they like to feel really scared. They’ve been shaking in their boots ever since 9/11, up here in the middle of nowhere, way off the terrorist radar. Right?”
“Right,” I said. For a second, I wondered, Was Aaron high? I didn’t think so. He just had the unstoppered sound of someone who hadn’t talked in a while.
“But the thing is,” he was saying, “if they’re terrified, at least they’re feeling something. Although that’s not what they think they like. They think they like feeling noth
ing, which is why they live up here where nothing ever happens, where what gives them screaming nightmares is the fucking pond scum. And of course, your sister dying. That really blew them away.”
I heard the breath catch in my throat, the only sound I could make. Aaron understood. He said, “Graduation was hell. Half the town felt they had to come up to me and say how sorry they were about Margaret, and I had to thank them. I knew they meant well, and all the time I wanted to kill them. I wish you’d been there, Nico.”
“We didn’t go,” I said. “We didn’t want to.”
“I understand that,” Aaron said.
“And I respect your family’s decision. I just meant for support. For me.”
“Oh,” I said.
“You would have hated it,” Aaron said. “Everything she couldn’t stand, one thing after another. There was no one I could look at. No one to roll my eyes at. Teachers and kids she didn’t even like were pretending they were her best friends. They were all competing. Who knew her better, longer, telling their personal reminiscences that probably never even happened.”
I said, “Maybe that’s nice. I don’t know. I’m glad I wasn’t there. So what is the story?”
“The story on . . . ?”
“On the phytoplankton.”
“Oh, right. If things keep going like they did last summer, which they will, thanks to El Fucking Niño or global warming or whatever—”
“They definitely will,” I said. How I longed for that other life in which I worried about climate change. And how great that Aaron thought about it, too. I’d never realized that we had anything but Margaret in common. Margaret knew we were headed for ecological disaster, but she liked to pretend I’d invented it to be a Debbie Downer.
Aaron said, “By August we’re going to be sitting on a major sinkhole. Skin rashes, eye infections, liver damage. Sulphury, rotten-egg swamp gas. It’ll be like the black lagoon the creature crawls out of. At least I’m getting out of here.”
“I’m not,” I couldn’t help saying.
“I know,” said Aaron. “Sorry.”
“That’s all right. I don’t want to leave.” Only when I said it did I know it was true. Margaret and I had dreamed of going to Boston, or New York, or even Paris someday. I’d assumed we’d go together. Now she’d found a permanent home, and if I wanted to be near her, I was stuck here forever.
Aaron said, “Trust me. Nico. You’ll want to leave. Get back to me in three years.”
“Okay.” I shrugged. In three years we wouldn’t know each other. But no matter where we were, we’d always have this bond. “I’ll be ready to go by then. Probably.”
“For sure,” Aaron said.
The effort of imagining ourselves that far into the future pitched us into a silence so deep I thought we would never climb out. Aaron looked around the shop, at the books, the floor, the ceiling, his hands, his shoes, everywhere but at me. Which was how he was able to say, “That shirt looks good on you.”
“Thanks,” I said. “It was Margaret’s.”
“I know that,” he said.
Obviously. How stupid of me. Aaron had super vision.
After that we just looked at each other. Margaret’s name was so powerful we expected . . . what? An earthquake to shake the books off the shelves? Actually, I expected my father to walk in and scare Aaron away and leave me alone with the staircase spirit telling me what I should have said.
I said, “My dad’s at the library.” Aaron understood. Whatever we wanted or needed to say, we’d better say it fast.
Aaron said, “I keep dreaming about her.”
“I do, too,” I said.
“In my dreams, she’s always alive.”
“I know,” I said. “Mine, too.” We were jabbering like passengers on a plane about to crash.
“I keep dreaming that they’ve rescued her, or that the whole thing never happened.”
“That’s strange,” I said. “Really strange. I keep dreaming she’s fine, and the two of you are sitting around my kitchen table.”
“That’s sort of like my dream, “ Aaron said. “How bizarre is that?”
“Totally,” I said.
“But actually,” he said, “the strangest part is that she was alive and now she isn’t. That’s the thing I can’t get past. I can’t get my head around it. The absence. How someone can be here one minute, and the next minute they’re gone. You tell them everything in your life and then they . . . can’t be reached. Unlisted number forever. I keep thinking that this little . . . episode, this little trick will end, and she’ll be back again, and it will all have been some cruel joke.”
He was saying what I’d so often thought but never said out loud. I was grateful he’d said it, if only because no one had. I was crying again, but silently now. I closed my eyes. I was afraid that seeing Aaron cry might mean we could never be friends. Which was pointless, because we weren’t friends. But maybe, I thought, we could be.
“I don’t know what to do,” Aaron said. “It’s relentless. Everything I do to cheer myself up only makes me feel worse. I go for a ride, get a burger, I can’t eat. I mean, how are we supposed to get through the day?”
Since when had Aaron and I become we? It was like Dad saying we needed to track down his doomsday cult. They were right. We were our own gang, our own separate tribe. The tiny band of survivors figuring out how to live without Margaret.
“I guess time’s got to pass.” I sounded like every well-meaning cornball who’d ever walked into the bookstore.
“So I hear,” said Aaron. “Meanwhile I can’t do anything I used to do with her.”
“Me, too,” I said. “I mean, me neither.”
“I can’t listen to music,” he said. “Me neither. I can’t watch old movies.”
“I can’t go anywhere near the lake.”
I said, “What’s left?”
Aaron said, “I can’t go through my entire life scared of music and swimming and ice cream.”
“I’ve been thinking that, too.”
There was nothing more to say. Aaron looked around, trying to find a book to pretend he’d come in to buy. I wondered why he had come in. Had he seen me through the window wearing Margaret’s shirt? I’d told his mother to tell him to stop by. His mother made him do it, and now he could tell her he had.
He seemed to be getting ready to leave when he said, “I have an idea. Have you ever heard about these courses they have to help people conquer their crazy phobias? Like people scared of flying. They make them sit in airplanes parked at the gate, they play them tapes of takeoff and landing. Ease them into it, step by step. What if we did something like that? Did stuff together. Little by little.”
I said, “There was a girl in my fifth-grade class with such bad claustrophobia she’d throw up if the teacher closed the classroom door. Her parents sent her to a special clinic. She told us she slept in a coffin. Probably she was lying. When she came back, she still got sick unless the door was open.”
“Autoimmunization,” said Aaron. “I read on the Internet about this guy who works with poisonous snakes, and he shoots himself up every day with teensy drops of venom, and now he can get bitten by a king cobra, it’s like a mosquito bite. That’s how some researcher discovered the cure for ulcers, plus another mad scientist tried it with DDT, sprinkling insecticide onto his family’s cornflakes.”
“That sounds sort of nuts.” I wondered where this was leading. My dad had been gone a long time. If I were alone, I’d worry about him being late. But with Aaron there, I was afraid that my father would walk in and interrupt us.
“We could try doing things we can’t do. Things we used to do with Margaret. We could do it together. An experiment. You’re the scientist, right?”
I thought, Breathe in. Breathe out.
Margaret used the word experiment for the games she invented. Early on, she figured out that the word would persuade me to play. Once, we’d darkened our rooms and lit candles. Margaret cut a deck of cards and wrote t
he card down and knocked on the wall. I closed my eyes and concentrated and wrote down the card I saw. We did it fifty times, reversed direction, did it fifty times more. I didn’t remember our score, but it was very high. We’d been proud of our closeness, our telepathic powers. It never made us feel crowded or spied on, the way it did when our mother knew what we were thinking.
I couldn’t decide whether I should be flattered that Aaron knew something about me—I was going to be a scientist—or insulted that, once again, Aaron and Margaret were the artists and I was the boring math dweeb. I was pleased that Aaron knew I was anything at all. I liked the idea of experimenting with our grief and fears.
Anyway, that’s what I told myself so as not to have to think about how excited I was by the prospect of hanging out with Aaron.
“Like what?” I said. “Do what?”
“Take a ride to the Dairy Divine. Have an ice cream for your sister.”
All the warm fellow feeling evaporated and left me sadder than before. I dream about her, I miss her. What was that about? Now he was suggesting we get in the car and just go get ice cream like we used to when my sister was alive?
“I don’t know if I could do that,” I said.
“I don’t know if I could either,” he said. “That’s why I thought I’d ask. I couldn’t do it alone, but maybe if I had company . . . someone who knew how hard it was, what it took to walk up to the counter and order.” He smiled. “You can get two different flavors, Nico. Three. You don’t have to decide. It’s on me.”
I shook my head.
“Okay,” said Aaron. “I understand why this might be tough. Think it over. Meanwhile, want to hear something else strange?”
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