She spent most of Sunday in the playroom in her cousin’s home. Martin was in a 42nd Street phase, and so they devoted a sizable part of the afternoon to tap dancing. His mother had recently found him a black top hat and cane at a vintage clothing store, and the two of them sang “Young and Healthy” a half-dozen times. Martin was almost a head shorter than Laurel, the difference in their heights attributable both to his Down syndrome and the reality that Laurel was a lanky five-nine. He had deceptively broad shoulders, however, and one of those male frames that seems designed for formal clothes. He looked dashing in blazers, and danced with a charismatic abandon. Laurel had the sense from the embraces Martin received from the young women he knew with developmental disabilities that he had the potential to be a real heartbreaker, but the truth was that those young women—like the young men—hugged absolutely everybody. Whenever she had been a volunteer timekeeper for the Special Olympics, an awful lot of the athletes sacrificed precious seconds so they could wrap their arms around her and tell her how much fun they were having or how much they loved her.
“You dance divine,” said Martin gallantly. Then, perhaps because he had just said something of emotional consequence and was embarrassed, he added quickly, “You’re so silly,” a non sequitur he used to fill any conversational silence that made him uncomfortable. That night the two of them watched Snow White for the third time together that Laurel could recall, skipping all the scenes with the witch and the apple and the thunder that Martin found frightening.
Laurel felt it was the perfect way to spend the afternoon and early part of the evening. The year after she had graduated had been a leap year, and so the actual anniversary of the attack would not occur until tomorrow. But the assault had taken place on a Sunday, and so this year she was especially grateful to be away from Vermont. She loved the Green Mountains, but as sunset approached she found herself short-winded and anxious. She was relieved she was six hours to the south—in a world where she could tap-dance with her joyful cousin, while wondering about a series of eighty- and eighty-five-year-old snapshots of a romanticized bootlegger and a mysterious little boy.
PATIENT 29873
…speech is rapid and intense, but can be easily interrupted—not at the level of pressured speech. (Note: Patient speaks/socializes very little outside interviews.) Inferred mood is moderately irritable, affect full, thought process coherent.
Thought content: denies ideas of hurting self or others. Still preoccupied with unusual beliefs, not willing to discuss much else. Denies hearing voices—though occasionally observed on ward talking to self (insists just “reviewing” material).
Beliefs still cause functional impairment; little interaction with others, either in hospital or with friends outside, evidently out of concern that discussing beliefs would lead to disagreements and feeling invalidated. Moreover, appears unwilling to focus on practical issues such as future community treatment and discharge planning.
From the notes of Kenneth Pierce,
attending psychiatrist,
Vermont State Hospital, Waterbury, Vermont
CHAPTER SEVEN
A GIRL, ELEVEN, SQUATTED on the ground in the apple orchard and held in her hand the McIntosh she had just picked from one of the lowest branches of the tree. Then she took a bite, surprised at both how tart and how juicy it was. She was wearing an elegant jumper the color of jade, with a horseshoe-shaped headband that matched it. Her hair still had the sweet, clean aroma of her strawberry shampoo.
Her sister, six, now tried to roll toward her, but the hill in this part of the orchard really wasn’t very steep. Moreover, the ground was littered with fallen apples. Consequently, the younger girl had to push her way toward her big sister with her elbows and her feet, and she moved more like a box than a wheel on the small incline.
“That’s stealing, Marissa,” she said, rising and motioning toward the slightly gnawed apple in her older sister’s hand. In the sky behind her were undulating waves of white clouds, a series of wings against an otherwise blue sky. It reminded Marissa of the venetian blinds in the windows of the bathroom in her father’s apartment.
“What is?”
“Eating an apple that Daddy didn’t pay for.”
Marissa sighed and took another bite. This time she chewed with a great, exaggerated motion, moving her chin like a mechanical stamp press. She noted that the younger girl’s mouth was covered with caramel from the candy apple she had eaten when they had first arrived at the orchard—one their father had paid for—and the front of her white sweatshirt was dotted with spots from the rotting apples in which she had just rolled. She looked like a kid from a TV commercial for a laundry detergent.
“I should tell,” the younger girl added.
“You should do a lot of things,” Marissa said after she had swallowed—again with an obvious dramatic flourish. She had been acting with grown-ups, most bankers and teachers and hairdressers by day, in community theaters for three years now. She hoped that someday she would get to do even more: She fantasized about Broadway. “Maybe you should start by not rolling around on the ground like one of those pathetic messy kids from the preschool,” she continued. “Or maybe you should think about washing your face every couple of months.”
The younger child—a plump girl named Cindy—seemed not especially stung by the rebuke. She shrugged. Then she used her sleeve to try to wipe the caramel off her face, but already it had coagulated like blood. It was going to take a lot more than a dry sweatshirt sleeve to clean up that mess.
When their father had suggested they go to the orchard this afternoon, Marissa had expected that his new—newer, anyway—girlfriend would be coming along, too. The one named Laurel who their mother dismissed for being so young. But Marissa liked Laurel, and so she was disappointed when their father had said it was just going to be the three of them and they would not be picking Laurel up at her apartment on the hill by the college. “You still have caramel on your face,” she said after a moment.
Once more Cindy tried wiping it off, this time licking her fingers and rubbing the mess that framed her lips like clown makeup.
“Is it gone?” Cindy asked.
“Much better,” Marissa lied. No point in driving home to her sister the reality that she was a complete slob. Still, Marissa wasn’t sure why she felt so cranky this afternoon. She and her sister and their dad had had a reasonably nice weekend so far. After going to the lawn sale yesterday at one of their mom’s neighbors, they had seen a surprisingly unbabyish movie that they’d all liked a lot and then gone out for pizza for dinner, (a slice of which, predictably, Cindy had managed to spread on the cuffs of her sweater, resulting in the sort of stain that would cause Mom to roll her eyes in frustration and say something snarky about Dad when she noticed it). Their father had made waffles for breakfast this morning. She hadn’t done her homework yet and that was vexing her slightly from the very back of her mind. But she could always dive into her math when they got back to Dad’s, and do her reading in the bath after dinner.
She wondered if her bad attitude at the moment had something to do with Mom’s plan to marry Eric Tourneau in November. She had overheard her parents squabbling about the logistics on the phone this morning, arguing over where she and her sister were supposed to be in the days before and after the ceremony. (Unfortunately, she knew precisely where she was expected to be on the big day itself.)
“Are you gonna eat all that?” asked Cindy.
In the distance, easily seventy-five yards away, their father was standing on his toes as he stretched for a cluster of apples on a particularly spindly tree. When he had dropped another pair in the wicker basket at his feet, he glanced over at them again. Marissa really wasn’t sure how and when she had wandered off here. She knew she had been working on a different tree from her dad and then had passed over a series of ones that didn’t have apples low enough for her to reach. She had no idea how this chasm had appeared between her father and her.
“Okay, you tell
me,” she asked Cindy. “Which would be worse? Eating all of this apple, which would be stealing a whole piece of fruit? Or not finishing it, which would be wasting food?”
The little girl thought about this, but only for a second. Then she smiled and did a somersault in the sloppy ground, crushing an apple against her back and leaving a long cider stain along her spine. This kid, thought Marissa, is hopeless. Completely hopeless. Sometimes, she knew, Mom’s fiancé seemed to think Cindy was cute. But that was probably because Eric didn’t have any kids of his own yet and didn’t know any better. He didn’t know what to expect from a six-year-old. Besides, he really didn’t have a choice: He had to like Cindy because he was marrying Mom.
Marissa had a sinking feeling that he and her mother were someday going to have more children. This, too, made her dislike Eric—and made her angry with her mom. It also caused her to like Laurel even more. Her father had told her that she and Cindy were his priorities, and he had no intention of dating any woman right now who wanted children. This further endeared her to Marissa.
“Think Daddy will buy us another candy apple when we leave?” Cindy asked her the moment she finished her tumble, her eyes wide with pride from her small gymnastic accomplishment.
“I didn’t have a first one.”
“Yeah,” said Cindy. “’Cause you wanted to wait to steal the regular ones from here.”
This was it, the last straw: the final petty, stupid, completely illogic, totally childish remark. It was time to silence her sister—or at least send her packing.
“I did,” said Marissa, aware on some level that she needed to be careful now in her anger not to narrow her eyes. That would ruin the effect. Instead, she looked back and forth slowly, histrionically. She was slightly amazed that the waves of clouds high above them were cooperating on cue and bunching together to block out the sun. The orchard was growing darker before their eyes.
“What?” her sister asked. “What?”
“Shhhhh. Don’t move.”
“Tell me!”
“I will. But don’t move—just for a second. Okay? I’m listening. This is very important.” She added a tiny, warbling quiver to her voice that she hoped sounded at once pleading and…scared. Really, really scared.
It worked. The kid stood like a statue. Then, almost desperate, her voice little more than a whisper: “What?”
“I heard something. And then…then that apple tree behind you. It just…moved.”
“’Cause of the wind.”
“No. Not because of the wind. It started to reach…and stretch.”
Cindy paused, trying to decide whether her big sister was teasing. “Did not,” she said finally, but she had spoken in a nervous murmur that was only faintly audible. Marissa knew that the child still believed in fairies and trolls and some bizarre prankster dwarf she’d read about in a picture book called a Tomten. It was a wonder the girl didn’t believe the Teletubbies were real—though it was possible she believed in them, too. Best of all, Marissa knew that Cindy was terrified of the angry, talking trees in The Wizard of Oz—a dread that absolutely dwarfed her fear of the flying monkeys. They had watched their DVD of the movie just the other day, and the moment the trees had started hurling apples at Dorothy and her pals, Cindy had (once again) burrowed underneath the throw pillows on the couch until it was over.
“It did,” Marissa said softly, ever so softly. “I would not lie to you about something this important.”
“You’re making this up. Trees can’t move.”
“Of course they can. How else could they have filmed that scene in Oz? They went to the apple trees and asked them, and the trees said—”
“No. They did not!”
“Laurel has pictures!” Marissa had no idea where this whopper came from, but both sisters knew that Dad’s girlfriend was a photographer and the lie was almost reflexive.
“Of trees talking?”
She nodded slowly, almost imperceptibly. “Of apple trees. And they look…furious.”
Cindy seemed to digest this, and to build in her mind a portrait of furious apple trees that combined what she recalled from the movie (and, in truth, it couldn’t have been much since she had had her head buried for most of the scene) with what she could see in the orchard around her. The talonlike claws made of twigs. The long, grabbing reach of the branches. The angry faces that formed in the bark. When you were six, it didn’t take much imagination to become deathly afraid of an apple tree. Marissa sensed that her sister didn’t completely believe that the tree behind her had moved, but Cindy probably had just enough doubt that it was worth running to Daddy—if only to tell on her big sister and get her in trouble. Abruptly, almost like a time bomb, the little kid exploded. “Dad-dy!” she wailed, her voice a two-syllable ululation of desperation and panic, and then she turned and sprinted toward her father as fast as her pudgy legs would carry her. She looked like a terrified munchkin.
Marissa guessed that her father would say something to her about frightening Cindy, but she didn’t think he would be all that stern. After all, torturing a sibling was practically in a big sister’s job description. She wondered if, by any chance, her dad’s girlfriend really did have any pictures of apple trees. Not likely, but you never knew. She made a mental note to ask Laurel what kinds of things she photographed the next time they were together. Maybe Laurel could even take her picture. A headshot. A really professional headshot. She didn’t have one, and it frustrated her every time she went for an audition. And there were a couple of shows coming up at a theater in Burlington that had parts for a little girl, and so she had to be ready.
Laurel, of course, was a girl with a serious secret. Marissa didn’t know quite what it was, but it wasn’t a happy one. She guessed that someday she’d know, especially if Laurel and her dad continued to date—which she hoped they would. Laurel was more like a big sister who never bossed you around than her dad’s current squeeze. They’d gone shopping for clothes a couple of times, just the two of them, and had a blast. And Laurel had a cousin who was into musical theater, too, and so she actually knew the words to some of the songs from the shows Marissa had been in. But Marissa had also spent just enough time around Laurel to get a glimpse of the darkness behind the curtain.
She took a final bite of her apple and then hurled the core toward one of the posts on a nearby split-rail fence (missing it completely), and started walking up the slope to her father and her sister. She realized she was facing an especially gnarled old apple tree, one with twin knots a foot or two above her that looked more than a bit like eyes that were weeping: The eyebrows were arched, there were tears descending the runnels in the bark. Before she knew it, she was running hard to catch up to Cindy and her dad. She decided when she got to them she would have to tag her sister and act as if this sprint had all been a part of a game.
CHAPTER EIGHT
SUNDAY NIGHT, LAUREL detoured into the room that had been her father’s study and sat down at the computer she’d helped her mother pick out when she’d been home for Christmas just about nine months earlier. On the Internet, she had an agreeable time surfing the Life magazine Web site—she spent forty-five minutes looking at old covers—but there was no trace of the old photographer who had died in Vermont. Of course, this really meant nothing: The Web site only offered covers and a smattering of classic images. Then she expanded her search by Googling names for over two hours. She found a great many Robert Buchanans, including a nineteenth-century British poet and a twentieth-century American actor. There were Robert Buchanans who were radiologists and real estate agents and professors at colleges great and small. Likewise, there was a Bobbie Buchanan who was a writer as well, still alive it seemed, and residing somewhere in Australia. There were also a half-dozen high school students with that name who had their own Web sites—some impressive, some prurient and offensive.
Next she went to the Crockers—the Roberts and the Bobbies. There were only thirteen Bobbies, and they seemed all to be high school athlet
es or security guards (two, as a matter of fact, one in New Mexico and one in West Virginia). On the other hand, when she tried Robert, she found almost fifteen thousand possibilities, including field-target shooting champions, wrestlers, and all manner of expert or professional—including a Cambridge-based Platonist and a scientist with an impressive knowledge of an insect called a white grub. Even scrolling quickly, she viewed the Google summaries of only a tiny fraction of the page possibilities.
Consequently, she tried narrowing the field with other words: “photography” or “photographer” or “Life magazine.” Eventually, she was able to narrow her search to a workable number of entries—in some cases, as few as eleven.
When she was done, however, she had found absolutely no references to the fellow she thought might be the son of Tom and Daisy Buchanan. And it was after midnight. Three hours of work and she had discovered no one who could have been her once homeless man in Vermont, no photographers anywhere near the age of the former BEDS client. Laurel’s Bobbie Crocker—or, perhaps, her Robert Buchanan—seemed not to exist on the infinite, virtual world that existed online.
HEAT HAD BEEN added to the pool at the club in West Egg just before Laurel had left for college, and so although the air was brisk Monday morning with the first serious taste of autumn, she went for a swim. She swam a mile and change, and even dove a half-dozen times from the one-meter board, savoring the way she would fly abruptly from the crisp air into water that was downright balmy. She was out of practice and not nearly as limber as she’d been when she was fifteen, but it felt good to soar high off the board.
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