After Eli (10 page)

Then Isabelle showed us the room where her father was writing his monograph, which had a big mahogany desk with a computer on it and piles of books and papers, and the room where her mother did her interpretive paintings. The paintings were propped up around the walls and were all in shades of purple and orange and looked like no cows that I’d ever seen.

“It’s a series. She’s calling it
Atomic Moo,
” Isabelle said. “She’s going to have a show next winter in New York.”

Which, though I did not say so to Isabelle, is the only place you could show cube-shaped orange cows without everybody laughing themselves sick. People in New York don’t know beans about cows.

Then she took us out to the kitchen, which had an old iron coal stove the size of a steam locomotive, with a new microwave perched on top of it, and then through to the butler’s pantry, which was mostly empty except for a couple of soup tureens big enough for baby baths.

“This is the only room in the house that has a plain white wall,” Isabelle said. “Stand over there. This will take a minute.”

So Walter and I stood against the plain white wall, and Isabelle took a few steps back, took a deep breath, and squinted at us.

She looked so beautiful standing there, and I thought that if Isabelle had an aura, it would probably be all silver and glowing like moonbeams and new snow.

She stared and stared until I started to fidget. Then she said, “There!”

“What?” I said.

“Yours is royal blue, Walter,” Isabelle said. “That means you have a strong balanced existence and you’re transmitting a lot of good energy.”

Walter said “Umf” in a noncommittal sort of way that managed to sound pleased and skeptical at the same time.

My aura wasn’t blue. It was yellowish brown.

“What does that mean?” I said.

“It means that your life is in difficulty,” Isabelle said. “Your psyche is suffused with pain and anger.”

Great,
I thought. I felt like I’d flunked another math test. I could feel that aura hanging around me, full of bad energy and looking like old mustard.

Then the twins came busting in, yelling that we had to come out and see the moon, and so we all went back outside again.

And it was one fantastic full moon.

It was so bright that it made shadows on the grass. Everything looked all glazed with moonlight like sugar frosting, the trees and the bushes and the grass and the porch steps and the stone pillars at the end of the drive. And it was huge, like something out of a science-fiction movie. Like the moon the kid rode past on his bicycle in
E.T.
when the alien made everybody fly. It was so fantastic that I almost forgot I had an aura the color of baby poop.

“I think I’m turning into a werewolf,” Jasper said. “I feel itchy all over. I think I’m growing fur.”

“I think you’re not,” Isabelle said.

“And my eyes feel hot,” Jasper said. “My eyes feel really hot. Do my eyes look glowing and yellow? Like the eyes of a fierce wild animal?”

“No,” I said.

“I feel an urge to howl,” Jasper said.

“I feel an urge to howl too,” Journey said.

“I feel a need for silver bullets,” Isabelle said.

The twins started running around and howling, “AaaOOOOOO! AaaOOOOOO!” They sounded like wolf cubs who had maybe had their tails slammed in a door.

Isabelle said, “When I was little, I thought there were Moon Elves. I thought they’d fly down to earth on nights when the moon was full and perch on my windowsill. They had silver wings and silver hair and pearl-colored eyes, and they made little cheeping sounds like baby birds. I used to leave them things I thought they’d like to eat. Moon food. Necco wafers and dragées — you know, those little silver balls they use to decorate wedding cakes.”

We all looked at the moon.

I said, “When I was little, my mom showed me how to find the face of a man in the moon, but then Eli showed me how to find a rabbit, and after that all I could see was that rabbit.”

Walter said that there wasn’t any man or rabbit.

Walter has a very limited moon. All he sees are the Mare Imbrium, the Mare Tranquillitatis, the Oceanus Procellarum, and the Tycho ray crater.

Isabelle said, “Later I used to worry about the Moon Elves, that they’d gone away because I’d grown up. Like Wendy did in
Peter Pan.
I always thought that part was so sad, when Peter comes back for her, years later, and she’s too old to go back with him to Neverland.”

For a moment she looked sad, and then an instant later she was laughing again, and she threw up her arms and shouted, “Moon Elves! It’s me, Isabelle! Come back! Come back! I’m still here!”

And suddenly I remembered Eli. You know how memory sometimes comes in flashes, like a little video clip in your brain? Just a little piece of something, and you can’t remember what happened before or after, but the middle bit is really clear? I remembered sitting on the back porch steps with Eli and looking at the stars.

Clear nights where we are, it looks like there’s a million stars, though Walter, who has probably counted them and done a statistical analysis, says only six thousand are visible to the naked eye. But it sure seems like a lot more. There are so many, and they’re so far away, that it’s hard to look up at them without realizing that you’re really pretty incredibly small. Like Walter says, mathematically we’re nothing.

So Eli and I are sitting there, and there are peepers peeping —
squee-squee-squee
— like tiny little accordions, and fireflies blinking greeny yellow, and the Big Dipper dangling down over the barn, and I’m feeling small. Maybe Eli was too, because all of a sudden he jumped up and started to yell.

“Hey, universe! It’s me, Eli! I’m here!”

And he grabbed me and yanked me up.

“Come on, Danny! Make first contact!” he said.

So then we’re both yelling up at the sky, “I’m here! I’m here!”

Like the tiny little people in that Dr. Seuss book,
Horton Hears a Who!

Suddenly I missed Eli so much that my stomach twisted up. I thought how I’d do anything to have him back again, even just for five minutes. Even for two.

“Danny?” Walter said. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”

“Let’s dance!” Isabelle said.

She ran out into the grass and started spinning around and around on her bare feet in the moonlight, with her arms held out and her silky hair flying and her Indian skirt flaring around her knees, so that she looked like a twirling silvery flower.

So the twins stopped howling and started spinning too, and then so did I, and even geeky Walter, looking like a gawky human windmill, and then we were all spinning around and around together under that huge silver moon. To look at us, you’d think the moonlight had made us all crazy.

Walter says that in ancient times, people believed that moonlight did make you insane, which is why words like
lunacy
and
lunatic
come from
luna,
which is Latin for “moon.” You even got a lighter sentence for a crime if you committed it while there was a full moon. Which frankly gave me some ideas involving Mr. Engelmann, who teaches Algebra I.

In this case, though, it wasn’t just the moonlight. It was Isabelle.

Finally we got so dizzy with all the spinning that we just fell over in the grass, everybody laughing like zanies, and lay there, getting sopped by the dew and staring up at the spinning stars. I could hear the twins, who had fallen over on top of each other next to me, bickering about what stars would taste like if you could eat them, and Journey thought they’d be fizzy like ginger ale and Jasper thought they’d be tangy like lime sherbet, and then Journey said she thought she was going to throw up, but luckily she didn’t.

Isabelle reached out and touched my hand.

“Let’s always be like this,” Isabelle said. “Let’s be wild and free and young. Let’s believe in magic and wishing wells and fairy godmothers and love at first sight and doors in closets that take you into Narnia.”

“If Journey was in Narnia, she would be the White Witch,” Jasper said.

Isabelle wrapped her fingers around my hand and squeezed.

“Let’s promise that we’ll come back here to this very spot fifty years from now and we’ll dance in the moonlight again, all of us, because even when we’re old, we won’t have changed. Promise that we’ll never change.”

“Never,” I said. I would have promised her anything.

“Let’s always remember this night,” Isabelle said. “Let’s memorize everything about it so that we’ll never ever forget it and all the rest of our lives we’ll be able to close our eyes and it will come back to us just the way it was.”

So we lay there memorizing, which must have worked, because I can still remember how that night smelled of wet grass and roses and maybe a little whiff of pig manure, with the twins giggling and poking at each other, and Isabelle lying there, gleaming, with one arm behind her head, and Walter with his big bony knees bent up and his glasses white with moonlight.

The full moon always makes me think of Isabelle.

But at the same time I think about Li Po from my Book of the Dead. Li Po was an ancient Chinese poet who wrote more than a thousand poems, many of which involved heavy drinking. He was known as one of the Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup. One night, after a whole lot of wine cups, he drowned when he jumped into the Yangtze River, trying to embrace the reflection of the moon.

Thinking back, I guess that was what I was like with Isabelle, except without the cups of wine.

The truth is that everything always changes.

And some things you just can’t have.

W
alter’s least favorite period of history is the Dark Ages, due to bubonic plague, lack of computers, general ignorance, and the divine right of kings.

Isabelle’s least favorite is the Victorian era, due to whalebone corsets, turgid novels, and the unavailability of birth control.

This last was why Queen Victoria and Prince Albert had nine kids. Queen Victoria lived to be eighty-one, but Prince Albert died of typhoid at the age of forty-two. The queen never got over his death. She wore nothing but black for the rest of her life. She even pretended that Albert was still around.

She ordered the maids to lay out fresh clothes for him every morning and to bring hot shaving water to his room. Visitors to the palace still had to sign Albert’s guest book as well as the queen’s, so he could see who had come to call. Everything was kept as if he was still alive and had maybe just gone out for a stroll around the garden before lunch. It was like the death version of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” I mean, everybody knew Albert was dead as a doornail, but they pretended right along with the queen.

That’s what my mom did too, with Eli. Everything in his room was just the way he left it. All his clothes were still in his bureau drawers or on hangers in his closet, and his posters were still on the wall, along with the big tacked-up piece of brown paper that he used for writing down messages and phone numbers and important thoughts. His brown paper said things like “Jar Jar Binks Must Die!”

His clock radio was still set for his favorite station, though it never came on anymore, and all his books were still in his bookcase. Even the couple of books he’d had on his bedside table when he went off to war were still right where he’d left them, with the bookmarks stuck in them.

I didn’t go in there anymore, though, because once when I did, rummaging around for a pencil, my mom totally freaked. She came running down the hall with her bathrobe undone and her hair snarled up and witchy and her eyes all wild.

“What are you doing in here?” she said. Then she said it again, louder.
“What are you doing in here?”

And then when she saw the open desk drawer, she yelled,
“Don’t touch his things!”

“It’s just a pencil,” I said. “Eli wouldn’t care.”

“Leave it
alone
!” she said. “Get away from there, Danny! Don’t come in here!”

And her face got all red and splotchy, and she shoved me out of the room and slammed the door.

I used to wish that Eli would come back as a ghost. I figured I’d be the only one who could see him, because kids are sensitive to ghosts, like that kid in the movie
Sixth Sense
who could see dead people. I imagined him sitting at the end of my bed, maybe looking a little transparent and soap bubbly, the way ghosts do, and thought how we’d still be able to talk to each other, even though nobody would be able to hear him but me. Like Ghost Eli would be my secret invisible friend.

Then I realized how it would suck to be a ghost. I mean, what do ghosts do all day? It’s not like they can have friends or a career. Or do anything. Eli would hate it, being ectoplasm.

Which is why I hated Winnie Carver, the Psychic Medium.

Winnie Carver had a late-night call-in radio show called
The Other Side.
It began with this spooky
Twilight Zone
music, and then a whispery voice said:
“The spirits of the dead are all around us. They wait beyond the veil, watching, yearning to speak to the loved ones they have left behind. Join us tonight with psychic medium Winnie Carver and listen to the voices calling out to you, calling from . . . the Other Side.”
Then a brisk nonspooky nonwhispery voice gave the radio-show call-in phone number and explained how Winnie Carver was also available for personal appointments.