“Knew about what?” I said. “We all made those birds in Mrs. Akins’s class. I did. You did too, Aaron. Remember?”
“Swear to me you didn’t know,” he said. “Swear it on your eyes. Swear you’ll go blind if you’re lying.”
Had Margaret mentioned the crane? If I woke up blind tomorrow, I would know I had forgotten.
“I swear,” I said.
“Then that’s that. End of story.”
“What story?”
“Just keep quiet a minute, okay?” He tipped back his head and shut his eyes. I knew I should get out of the van and get on my bike and go home.
Aaron said, “We called it the carrier pigeon. Your sister always wanted to play these little . . . games, these dramas with secret codes and signals. She’d gotten the carrier-pigeon thing from some cheesy spy film. When she could meet me that evening, she’d slip the bird between the grates of my locker door. And I was supposed to give it back so she could use it again.”
“Why couldn’t she just have told you?” I asked. “You were in the same classes. Why couldn’t she have called you, or e-mailed?”
Aaron winced, just as Margaret used to when I was too literal-minded, too one-thing-after-the-next. It hurt my feelings, just as it always had. I considered telling him about Mrs. Akins coming into Goldengrove, but he’d just think it was another lie I’d made up as an excuse to see him.
“I guess she means you to have it now.” I noticed I was talking about Margaret in the present tense.
Aaron draped the bird over his rearview mirror like angora dice.
“You knew about it,” he said.
“I didn’t,” I said. “I promise.”
“What else did she tell you?”
“Nothing,” I said.
Aaron grabbed the paper crane, yanked it off the mirror, crumpled it, and put it in his pocket.
“Hey, I should probably go,” I said. “My parents are expecting me back. I just sneaked out for a minute. I can bike home from here.”
He said, “You got somewhere you have to be?”
“No,” I said. “Not really.”
“Good,” he said. “Because I’ve got something to show you. A little surprise of my own. Let’s go.”
“My bicycle,” I said.
He popped the hatch and got out and walked around and threw my bike in the van. He’d always treated it so tenderly. Did he know it used to be Margaret’s?
Aaron got in and started the engine. He took the first curve too fast. I wanted to tell him to slow down, but I couldn’t speak. We drove through an insect storm. Winged corpses slimed the wind-shield. Aaron didn’t mean it. The bugs didn’t want to die.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Where do you think?” said Aaron.
I faked a stupid-me laugh. I opened the glove compartment. I wanted soothing Charlie Parker sliding from phrase to phrase. I pulled out a handful of CD cases. Aaron had gotten totally new music. Gangstas in leather jackets and chains scowled into fish-eye lenses. Every cover had its shiny parental-advisory sticker still attached. In one photo, two women in thong bikinis were draped, caveman style, over a fat man’s shoulders so that their asses looked like epaulets.
“A little mood music?” Aaron said.
I nodded. Anything was better than silence. Aaron took one hand from the wheel, and with the other slipped in a CD.
Music blasted out of the speakers. I reached for the volume control.
“Leave it up,” said Aaron. “That is, if you don’t mind, Nico.” The bass thrummed through me, shaking every inch of flesh that was capable of wobbling. Someone was going to fuck up the bitch and she wasn’t going to like it. Where was silky Lester Young? Where was dying Nico?
Aaron said, “Not your kind of music. Not your sister’s music. What’s the matter, Nico?”
I said, “Isn’t it great how the guy uses his voice as a rhythm instrument?”
“What the fuck does that mean? It sounds like something your sister would say.” He tromped harder on the gas. We nearly missed another curve. I thought, Margaret wants us to join her.
“Where’d you get that watch?” Aaron said.
“You like it? My parents got it for me in Boston.”
“Boston. I’ve got a full tank. We could go to Boston.”
“Please, no,” I heard myself say.
“I was joking, Nico,” Aaron said. “Can’t you take a joke?”
Was I being kidnapped? We still had to drive through town, through two traffic lights. One would stop us, and I could jump out. Unless Aaron ran a light. I watched the bookstore slip by. Elaine stood behind the counter.
We stopped at the second traffic light, in front of the public library. Two mothers, chatting over their strollers, were probably going to story hour. My mother used to take us there. Grief pinned me to the seat.
We spun into Aaron’s driveway and pulled up to the cabin. Aaron followed me down the path. All the curtains were drawn, and in the humid darkness, the cabin smelled worse than ever. How bizarre, that I used to find this stench so touching and romantic. Aaron paced the room, throwing open the curtains, then led me to the glassed-in porch.
“What happened to the postcards?” I said. “All those pictures of the Last Judgment and—”
“I took them down,” said Aaron. “I didn’t want that tired crap getting into my head. Anyhow, forget about that. Look at my painting.”
On the easel was the painting of my father and me in the doomsday parking lot. Aaron had totally ruined it. The fireworks had been painted out and replaced by angels. That should have made it more like the painting of Saint Nicholas saving the sailors at sea, except that the angels, the man, and the girl had grotesque, monstrous faces.
All the hope and sweetness were gone. I wanted to cover my eyes. But I kept looking, then gasped when I saw that one of the angels was a dragonfly with a human face—a clownish cartoon of Margaret. I’d thought it would have been hard to make someone so beautiful look so ugly, but Aaron had found some part of her that was witchlike, harsh, and vengeful. It was as if I was seeing back through the years to when we were little kids and had knockdown physical fights, and I saw her enraged, implacable face growing larger as it came toward at me. As the dragonfly-angel dive-bombed the man and the girl, its mouth drooled pistachio green.
I couldn’t look at it anymore. I turned toward Aaron. He was crying.
“I fucked it up,” he said.
I touched his arm. I said, “Can’t you fix it?”
The staircase spirit said, Tell him he didn’t ruin it. Tell him it’s better than before. But I hadn’t thought quickly enough to lie, and now the spirit sat down on the stairs and watched, delighted by the harm that a few words can do.
Aaron flushed red from his hairline down, until the blood had nowhere to go and pooled in the whites of his eyes.
“Fix it?” he said. “Fix it? How would I do that? Roll back time to the day she drowned and bring her back to life?”
“I just meant the painting,” I said.
Aaron went into the living room and sat down on the couch. I sat beside him and leaned my head against his shoulder and talked into his sleeve in the voice I’d used with the little kids who skinned their knees when I’d worked at my old nursery school.
“Everything will be all right,” I said. “Right now we don’t believe it, but time will pass, we’ll get over this—”
It made no difference what I said, or that I didn’t believe it. What mattered was the soothing tone, the silky reassurance. He could fix the painting, or he could paint something else.
I said, “It’s only a painting.”
“Only a painting? Come on, sugar,” he said thickly. “Look who’s talking. What would you say if I said to you, It’s only a song? Only a performance.”
I said, “Aaron, I’m not Margaret. I’m Nico, remember?”
“Whoops,” he said. “Sorry about that.”
Why didn’t I get up and run to Aaron’s
parents’ house and beg them to save me from their drunken, screw-loose son? Maybe because of the pitiful way Aaron’s shoulders slumped. I was afraid to leave him. I felt as if he was falling, holding on to my hand, and if I let go, he would plummet into the abyss.
After a while he shook himself and remembered I was there. He half fell, half lunged at me. His fogged-over eyes didn’t seem aware that his lips were smashing into mine. He pushed me into the couch. I struggled against the solid wall that Aaron had become. Holding my shoulders, he fastened his lips onto my neck—first like a nursing baby, then like a bloodsucking vampire. I went limp. I couldn’t stop what was happening. I just had to get through it and pretend I was somewhere else.
I didn’t know where to pretend I was, so I let myself be carried back to that last afternoon with Margaret on the lake. I heard our mother’s piano rippling over the water. I watched Margaret blow smoke rings. We talked about suntans and weight. I asked her about sex, which seemed doubly weird, now that it seemed I might be about to have it with her boyfriend. She stood and gave me that inscrutable look and that funny salute. But this time I understood that she was waving good-bye. She was telling me I was on my own. She was making a promise. Everything would turn out all right. What was lost would be restored.
But it would be up to me. I had to take credit or blame. Responsibility, maybe just that. I had wanted to come here. I didn’t really believe in ghosts, so if you subtracted dreams and spirits from the equation, it meant that calling Aaron had been my idea. I’d wanted to be haunted, but I’d failed even in that. Margaret was gone. I saw that now. It was time for me to wake up from the long fever dream in which my sister sent me messages for her boyfriend.
Aaron was squeezing my breast the way he’d squashed Margaret’s paper crane.
I yelled, “Wait! This is totally twisted!”
Aaron didn’t hear me, but the pain in my breast receded as I slipped back into the rowboat where Margaret was still waiting. I felt as if I were floating into some ethery state in which I could hear her singing “My Funny Valentine.”
Is your mouth a little weak? Is your figure less than Greek?
Was it a hallucination, or was I dying? Was this the sound track behind the scene of your dear departed loved ones waiting in the white light at the end of the tunnel? This time, Margaret didn’t sound sexy so much as confident and funny. This time, the song was all about laughter, and a future in which every laughable unphotographable person found someone to love.
Aaron stopped grabbing at my shirt. He froze, as if he was listening, too. And then he let me go.
I checked my clothes. He hadn’t undone a button or zipper.
We sat side by side on the couch, like strangers waiting for a bus.
Without looking at me, Aaron said, “Let me tell you something about your sister. This was maybe a year ago. We were hanging out on the dock by your house, and I said I couldn’t imagine painting anything as corny as a lake. She laughed. You remember that laugh. She said, ‘It depends how you do it. You can make paintings of the lake that are total works of genius. Let’s make a bet. You paint the lake, and everyone will love it. And I’ll take some sentimental piece of crap like “My Funny Valentine” and sing it so the whole school has one big collective orgasm.’ ”
Did I believe him? Ninety percent. True or not, it was what Aaron remembered.
Then he said, “The night we had that conversation was the first time we had sex.”
I said, “I don’t want to hear this.”
He said, “There’s no one else I can tell. Every time we had sex, I could never figure out if your sister was actually getting off or if she was working out some amazing new way to sing that song.”
Aaron fumbled for my hand, and I thought the whole thing might be starting all over again. I wasn’t even scared anymore. I just felt tired and sad.
“Aaron,” I said, “I’m Nico. I’m the sister, remember? You’ve got to leave me alone now. This has got to stop.”
Aaron said, “I know that, Nico. I know perfectly well who you are. You’re the younger sister. I always thought you were cute. I told your sister I’d want to date you if I wasn’t dating her. She got really mad at me, and she stayed mad even after I told her I was kidding.”
“When was that?” I asked.
“Not that long before she died. Right before. That morning, actually.”
I said, “Were you going out that night? The night she died?”
Aaron said, “I don’t know. She was still mad at me. She was supposed to call, and she didn’t. And then . . . Jesus Christ, Nico, imagine how I feel about that. I didn’t really think you were cute.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“You were sort of cute. I mean, you did those cute movie-star imitations.”
So that was it. I did imitations. I could imitate Margaret.
“But not cute that way,” Aaron was saying. “Not like cute as in hot. I never thought that, believe me. I just said it to piss off your sister.”
I said, “Aaron, I’m thirteen.”
“Screw that,” said Aaron. “In most countries you’d be married. You’d have two kids already.”
Aaron reached under the cushions and pulled out an ancient pink rubber ball and threw it across the room. We watched it bounce away. I thought, Even the ball doesn’t like me.
I said, “Why did you want to piss her off?”
Aaron put his face in his hands. “I don’t know,” he mumbled through his fingers. “I guess I got sick of feeling that if she had to choose between me and her music . . . She’d already chosen. She was going to Ohio.”
Aaron was leaving, too. But before I could point that out, he lifted his head and said, “Sometimes I think that’s the worst part. That we were fighting when she died. I didn’t have time to say I was sorry. You know what I mean?”
I did. But I didn’t want to say so. Not to Aaron. Not now.
The cabin smelled sweetish and rotten, like a dead mouse in the wall.
“Can I open a window?” I said.
“Go ahead,” said Aaron.
It was hard work, unsticking the window from the blistered frame. Hot air flowed in through the dusty screen, along with the smell of bacon. Was Aaron’s mother cooking? The thought of bacon made me think there might be a reason to go on living.
From across the room, Aaron said, “Maybe you rowed right over her body. Did you ever consider that?”
“I did,” I said. “I mean, I thought of it. But I don’t think it happened. Aaron, I have to go now.”
Something or someone—a force—propelled me toward the door. Not Margaret, not Saint Nicholas of Tolentino. It was me, only me. I walked out onto the shady path. I popped the latch on Aaron’s van and got my bike out of the back. I considered stopping at Aaron’s parents’ house. I decided against it. I hoped they weren’t watching as I detoured around their yard, then pedaled as hard and fast as I could down to the end of the driveway.
When I heard a car come up behind me, I dragged my bike into the woods and hid behind a tree. I had to lean over and grab my knees because I felt so faint. But it wasn’t Aaron’s van. If Aaron was coming after me, he would have caught up already.
Maybe he’d fallen asleep or passed out, or maybe his better self had talked him out of doing whatever he was planning to do. I would never know what that was. Maybe he didn’t, either. I would never have to know, and I didn’t want to.
My face was soaked with sweat and tears. There was nowhere I wanted to go and no one I wanted to talk to. I looked at my new watch. The spider’s jerky, regular hop from second to second calmed me. It was almost two thirty. My dad would be at the bookstore. I couldn’t imagine telling him. My mother was probably home, but our house was twice as far, and she’d probably already left on her daily drug vacation.
Then I thought of Elaine. She’d be home by now. For the first time, I was almost glad that she was having an affair with my father. It meant that I could confide in her and she couldn’t j
udge me. It meant that neither of us could pretend that people did things for good or intelligent reasons, or for any reason at all.
I didn’t deserve to find Elaine at home, but there she was, at her kitchen table. She hadn’t washed her hair for a while; the soles of her feet were black. She smiled when she saw me, and her face was as lovely and serene as those of the painted saints being thanked by the resurrected children.
“Is Tycho around?” I don’t know what possessed me to pretend I’d come there, streaky and out of breath, to hang out with her kid.
“In his room,” she said. “Jesus, Nico, where have you been? What have you been doing?”
“Riding my bike,” I said. “Can I talk to you?”
Elaine said, “Oh, my God, Nico. I thought you were finished with that asshole.”
“Now I am,” I said. “Believe me.”
“I believed you the last time,” she said.
I told Elaine what had happened. She listened patiently till I was through, then waited to make sure there wasn’t more.
“What a mess,” she said. “Swear to me, Nico, swear to me it wasn’t worse than you told me. Swear to me he didn’t—”
“He didn’t. You’re not going to tell my parents, are you?”
“You have to,” Elaine said. “You should have told them already. And you will. Immediately.”
“They’ll kill me,” I said.
“They won’t,” she said. “I promise you that. Do you want some iced coffee?”
“Sure,” I said, though what I really wanted was a break in the conversation. Elaine brought me a glass. I was glad I could focus on stirring the sugar when I said, “Elaine, don’t get mad, but I need to ask. Are you having an affair with my dad?”
“No,” she said. I glanced up. Her expression reminded me of how my mother had looked when I’d asked her if they named me after Nico. The look of an adult teetering on the needle edge of a lie.
“I’m not,” she said. “It’s nothing like that.”
“But?”
“But nothing.”
“But something. Something happened.”
“All right. Once. Your dad and I were sort of involved. For about a minute.”
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