But now his eccentric enthusiasm charmed me less than it used to. Now it just seemed silly and sad. Spacey old hippie theater. I told myself to enjoy it, or at least remember every detail so I could tell Aaron.
Dad said, “October. It had to be cold. Those poor suckers were out here for days, long before Gore-Tex parkas were invented.”
“How do you know about Gore-Tex, Dad?”
My father didn’t answer as he nosed into the traffic. Then he said, “Nico, don’t patronize me, okay?”
He went back to telling me more things he’d told me before. I zoned out and tried to visualize Disappointment Hill. I pictured a ranch house with vinyl siding nestled under a buzzing web of cancer-causing power lines. Or a shack to which hermit rapists lured girls with bogus garage sales. I saw a door riddled with bullet holes, and two slobbering rottweilers whipping out to greet us.
Dad said, “Nico, look around you. Some of this scenery’s lovely.”
“Lovely,” I said. A gas station, trees, more trees. One nice house, a cluster of trailers.
Dad said, “Before his death, Williams Miller wrote, ‘Were I to live my life over again, with the same evidence that I then had, to be honest with God and man, I should have to do as I have done. I confess my error and acknowledge my disappointment.’ ”
I said, “Wouldn’t it be better if you opened your eyes and looked where we were going?” I’d been worried about Mom’s driving. Now I decided that neither of them should get behind the wheel. They had all been excellent drivers before: my father, my mother, Margaret.
“Sorry,” he said. “I was trying to get the quotation right.”
“I understand. But you’re driving,” I said.
“I apologized,” he said.
“Anyway, I don’t get it. Was the guy saying he’d do it all over again the same way, or was he saying that he wouldn’t do it again no matter what?”
“I don’t know,” said my father. “I thought I understood it, but now that you ask, I’m not sure.”
Dad kept consulting his hand-drawn map. He claimed that if you drew a line between the river and the Davenport Revolutionary War Monument and extended it into a triangle, Disappointment Hill was at the apex.
“Right,” I said. Wrong, said the staircase spirit.
As we approached the X on the map, Dad turned onto a smaller road that heaved up into the mountains, then turned into one of those two-lane head-on collisions waiting to happen, a corridor lined with overgrown junkyards and filling stations begging to get robbed or about to start leaking and poisoning the aquifer.
“Are you sure this is right?”
“A lot happens in a hundred and fifty years,” Dad said.
“I think the apocalypse blew through here, and we missed it,” I said. “Too bad,” said Dad.
“Certain longitudes and latitudes have a certain hard-luck karma.”
“I wish you wouldn’t talk like that,” I said.
“Like what?” he asked.
“Like karma.”
“Here it is, I think,” said Dad.
I said, “I think not, Dad.”
We’d dead-ended in a dying strip mall, five dusty storefronts lined up like an Old West town: a convenience store, a dry cleaner, a video rental place. Two empty retail spaces with white swirls on the windows. A handwritten sign propped against one boarded-over door said, “Used tires,” and listed two phone numbers.
“Lovely,” I said. The three battered cars in the parking lot must have belonged to the desperate losers who worked there. Who would have picked this spot to watch for a divine visitation? People whose angel didn’t come. I thought of Miller’s Point, and it made me feel protective of my dad, who seemed suddenly older and sadder and smaller.
He said, “I guess everybody was raptured some time in the early eighties.”
I said, “This place scares me. Can’t we just leave?”
“Come on, Nico. As long as we’re here . . .”
We shuffled around the parking lot. The smelly black asphalt stuck to our feet. Blinding sunlight ping-ponged off the grimy windows. Anyone could have been hiding inside. I hoped no one was watching. We must have looked pretty strange, separating and wandering around and getting back together like two guests at a party at which no one else had shown up.
Aaron had warned me about looking in the wrong direction. But how did you know which direction was wrong? I looked at the sky, as the Millerites must have done as they’d waited for a distant speck to appear and grow larger. My father was looking up, too.
I said, “I’m getting back in the car.”
Dad said, “Roll down the windows. I’ll be there in a minute.”
I kept the windows all the way up. It was broiling, broiling. I thought I might pass out. I tipped my head back against the seat. I tried not to breathe. I let the heat bake my brain until I saw the Millerites shivering in their white wedding gowns. I saw their pale lips and chapped hands. I watched them shifting from foot to foot, pretending they were dancing. To flutes, my father had said, but I heard bagpipes playing “Amazing Grace.” I was lost, but now I’m found. The Millerites had stayed lost. They’d stayed here, and no one found them.
How could my father have gotten into the car without my noticing?
“Nico!” he was shouting. “Are you insane? This is how dogs die—”
I said, “Can we go home now, Dad?”
My father said, “I don’t know what I was thinking, to want to come here.”
“It wasn’t such a bad idea. I mean it, Dad. It wasn’t.”
My father said, “I guess they didn’t call it the Great Disappointment for nothing.”
As we pulled away, my father said, “In another hundred and fifty years, this is going to be a real mall.”
I said, “That’s the best-case scenario. Wal-Mart’s the best we can hope for.”
“Meaning?”
“No ozone. No water. Poisoned soil. No air. No humans.”
“That’s pretty bleak,” said my father.
“I didn’t know you felt that way.”
I hadn’t either, exactly. What scared me wasn’t the prospect of planetary extinction but the fact that it no longer scared me. Which scared me a lot.
I said, “I don’t know. You tell me, Dad. You’re the end-of-the-world guy.”
After a beat he said, “The fact that I’m writing about it doesn’t mean I think it will happen. If I thought the world was ending, why would I write a book? Why would I have kids?”
He put his sunglasses on.
I said, “Dad, please, can we just drive for a while?”
We were silent for miles. How strange that my father was writing the book about the end of the world, when I was the one who believed that it was going to happen. I thought about the cult members waiting to be zoomed up into the sky. They should have been more patient. Because now they were there, or somewhere. But not all together. Maybe they’d joined the robed angels in the Sienese orchard paradise. Maybe they’d been sent to hell for trying to get a free pass so they could spend eternity with all their loved ones, instead of losing them, one by one. I wondered how they’d really felt on the night they went home. Maybe some of them liked their lives and didn’t want to leave them.
The road reminded me of the route Aaron took to the grove of foxgloves. At one point I was almost sure we were passing the turnoff. I wondered if the flowers were still in bloom. I wished we could have stopped to see. I twisted around and stared.
“What are you looking at?” Dad said.
“Nothing,” I said. “How come you’re going this way? It’s taking forever.”
“Shortcut. It’s marked on the county map.”
“Goldengrove,” I said. “What?” said Dad.
“Goldengrove,” I repeated.
“Fucking Goldengrove fucking unleaving.”
We passed the feed store, then the nursery.
“I used to love that poem,” Dad said. “Fleeting youth, mortality, time, age,
innocence, death—the whole metaphysical enchilada. What did I think life was going to be, some kind of . . . English paper? What did any of that have to do with . . . this? How could we have named her that? What the hell were we thinking?”
I said, “It doesn’t matter. What happens is going to happen.” It was strange to hear my father saying what I used to believe. I felt as if Aaron was helping me to stop thinking that way, helping me turn back into a rational human being.
I checked my watch. I still had time to call Aaron. I could bike to our field and get back to town in time for lunch.
My father dropped me off at home. I called Aaron, he answered. I changed clothes. I’d gotten sweaty shuffling around the parking lot. I splashed on the aromatherapy oil. The bottle was almost empty. I would have to ask for more.
Aaron was waiting at our spot. He said, “You look like a train wreck. What happened?”
Maybe I should have been insulted that he would say that, first thing. But the truth was, I felt happy that Aaron knew me well enough to tell the daily train wreck from the spectacular smashup.
I said, “My father made me go to this hideous place.”
“Hideous,” Aaron said. “What a girl word. I love it.” I made a mental note to say hideous as often as I could.
Aaron drove up a narrow dirt lane and parked, and we leaned against the van. The forest was still misted with dew, even though it was almost noon. We didn’t talk and didn’t talk, and then Aaron said, “What happened?”
I wanted the story to come out right. I didn’t want to make Dad sound idiotic. In the end, it spilled out so fast, how could Aaron have put it together? Trolling a strip-mall parking lot for leftover doomsday vibrations? Aaron nodded when I mentioned Dad’s book. Once again I wondered what Margaret had said about us. I thought, I must trust Aaron to be telling him this.
Aaron said, “Your poor mom and dad. This has got to be hard.”
“I know,” I said. “I forget that sometimes.”
“They’re in hell,” Aaron said.
“They are,” I said. “I forget.”
“Maybe your dad wants to know what it feels like to believe in something.”
“You think he wants the angel to come and take him away?”
Aaron said, “More likely he wants the angel to give him a reason to stay here.”
I said, “That’s what I want.”
Aaron said, “That’s what we all want.”
I said, “How do we find it?”
After a while he said, “You know that Sienese art book? Show it to your dad. That painting of the angel appearing to the shepherds and the sailors. Heaven and hell. The Last Judgment. Isn’t that what he’s writing about? It could be a cover for his book, if it ever comes out. Show him the painting you like. The one with the flying saint and the ship on the ocean.”
I said, “That’s a great idea. I’d better go. My dad’s waiting.”
Aaron said, “He’s probably worried the angel raptured you without him.”
Dad did seem a little anxious when I showed up ten minutes late at our booth in the Nibble Corner.
He said, “That was a waste of gasoline. I apologize, Nico.”
I said, “I liked it, Dad. Honestly. It had its own wacky charm.”
We ate our sandwiches. We didn’t talk.
As soon as we got to the store that day, I showed the art book to Dad. I paged through for my favorites, though not Saint Nicholas and the shipwreck. That one was mine, only mine. I turned to the painting of the blessed souls in the lemon-tree paradise.
I said, “Wouldn’t this make a beautiful cover for your book?”
I wished I’d thought of it, I wished I deserved the gratitude on Dad’s face as he looked at the citrus-grove heaven. It was as if I’d offered to publish his book. I was glad I could cheer him up after our sad morning. I felt like I had when Aaron said he’d started thinking about painting again. Maybe that’s what I had become, a messenger of recovery, helped by Margaret to help Aaron, who was helping me help Dad. It made me feel closer to Aaron, as if he and I were siblings conspiring to comfort our grief-stricken parents.
Eleven
I WAS BEGINNING TO UNDERSTAND WHAT ANY CERTIFIED DARE graduate should have realized long before: Mom had blackmailed our former pediatrician into prescribing a ton of pain medication. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t noticed, but it took me a while to admit that the problem wasn’t going away, or spontaneously improving. She was taking more pills every day, and they seemed to be working. Something was working. She was playing the piano again, but with fewer of the mistakes that built to the crescendo of her pounding on the keyboard. It was painful to hear those ghostly notes floating out over the lake, but at least she didn’t play Chopin or Brahms, nothing mournful or lush, only the crisp Bach preludes that made me think of prairie dogs popping in and out of their burrows.
Mom and Sally were partners in crime. In the evenings when Dad was cooking, I’d hear them laughing up in her study until Sally swanned downstairs, as glassy-eyed and wobbly as Mom, only minus the apology and with twice the brassy defiance. She’d swoop past me, a salon-streaked stoner cockatoo. She’d say, “Nico, darling, how are you?” But she was only asking the air and didn’t wait for the air to answer.
By dinner, the clarity that let my mother practice in the morning had melted into a puddle slicked with an oily film through which she regarded us without particular interest. The mouthfuls Dad and I ate seemed gluttonous compared to Mom’s. One night, she announced that she was thinking of getting a harpsichord, which might have seemed like a good sign except that she couldn’t pronounce “harpsichord.” She stared us down as she struggled to get the word out, and my father and I stared back, two deer trapped in the wavering beams of her blinky attention.
I wondered what would happen when Dr. Viscott retired. Officer Prozak had taught us that addicts would stop at nothing to get the substances they craved. I’d imagined an unshaven guy in a dirty T-shirt nodding off with a needle in his arm, not my elegant, sad mother, playing Bach on the piano. It felt as if Mom had decided to go on a long journey alone, and I had to say good-bye to her, every afternoon. Sooner or later, sooner, I would have to talk it over with Dad.
One afternoon, I went to meet him for lunch, and he wasn’t in our booth. I told myself he’d be there soon, but after five minutes, then ten, then fifteen, I felt as if I’d ordered a hard-boiled egg and swallowed it whole. By the time I left the restaurant to go find him, a blazing star of pain throbbed inside my chest. I wondered if Margaret had felt that pounding heat when the lake had let her in and refused to let her out. Even after I saw my father through the bookstore window, my heart took a while to slow down.
Elaine and my father were standing near the counter, checking over some papers. Dad had his hand on Elaine’s shoulder, and she was smiling up at him, her face transfigured and beautified by amusement and adoration.
“Excuse me?” I said. I could have been throwing pebbles at pigeons. Dad and Elaine scattered. “Where were you? I was waiting.” My father looked at his watch.
“We were going over some figures,” he said.
“I’ll bet you were,” I mumbled.
“What?” said Dad.
“You guys go get lunch,” Elaine said. “I’ve still got another half hour till Tycho gets home from day camp.”
As the day wore on, I kept recalling the look on Elaine’s face as she gazed up at my father. The more I thought about it, the more I began to suspect that Dad and Elaine were having an affair. No wonder Elaine knew all about my meltdown in the poetry aisle. But why would a handsome guy like my dad fall for lumpy Elaine? Because Elaine was serene and cheerful, everything Mom wasn’t. Elaine had loved Margaret, but Margaret wasn’t her daughter. Elaine still had Tycho, and every day she performed the heroic tasks—making the bed, cleaning the house—that neither my father, my mother, nor I had the strength or the courage to do. I understood all that, but it didn’t make me any less furious at them both.
>
By dinner, the pain in my chest was so strong that I had to press both hands against my rib cage. It made it hard to eat or even push food around my plate.
“What’s wrong?” Mom’s spaceship docked momentarily on Planet Dinner Table.
“My heart hurts,” I said. “It’s hurt all day.” I beamed Dad a murderous look. But he wasn’t picking up on my silent communication.
After that, I made a point of showing up unexpectedly at the bookstore. I’d barge into Dad’s office—Elaine did seem to spend a lot of time there—but they were never touching, never even close. My father would be sitting at his desk, while Elaine stood so near the door that several times I nearly slammed into her when I burst in. I kept mentioning them to each other, but they didn’t go for the bait, or else they had perfect grown-up control over their reactions.
One day, Elaine was leaving, and my father said he’d walk her to the corner. I watched them from the window. As they said good-bye, Dad leaned down, and his lips disappeared in the frothy nimbus of Elaine’s hair. Elaine’s hand shot up and touched the place where his lips had been. Didn’t they care that the whole town could see? Or did they imagine that the neighbors would think that this was how every boss said good-bye to his favorite employee?
In the middle of the night, I woke up wondering if Dad could be Tycho’s father. It didn’t seem possible, but nothing that was happening to us would have seemed possible only a short time before.
I’d imagined that Margaret’s death had drawn our family closer, but now I understood that it had blown us apart. I told myself not to be angry. But they were the adults. They weren’t supposed to leave me alone with my dead sister’s grieving boyfriend. The truth was, I wanted that so much that I was willing to accept the risks that my parents were taking with our future. The distraction of their own problems, and their separate solutions, kept their attention diverted safely away from my secret life with Aaron.
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