A Sense of the Infinite (15 page)

FALLING ROCKS, SAID THE SIGNS, AND
I wanted to be one, tumbling angry forever.

YOU ARE IN BEAR COUNTRY
, said the signs, and I wanted to lumber down riverbeds in pajamas of meat and fur.

ICE ON ROADS
, said the signs, and I wanted to be that deadly, to kill without warning, out of nowhere, invisibly.

The city said
ENTER
, the bridge said
MAX WEIGHT 1.5 TONS
, and I felt myself heavy, breaking the spans.

I flinched when we passed a sign that said the name of his town.

I could feel him in the car with us, sucking up all the air.

I wanted to push him out the door, but I didn’t know how.

WHEN IT GOT DARK, WE STOPPED
at a diner in a town I didn’t recognize. We ordered tomato soup. Neither of us was very hungry. It came with hard white bread rolls and frozen packets of butter on a plate.

“Are you mad at me?” I said.

“I don’t know yet.”

We ate our soup in silence. The waiter came by with more coffee for Mom. I listened to it splashing into her mug. Behind us, a pair of truckers was watching a football game on TV. I thought about the regional park. It seemed like there was always a sports game going on in the background when Mom and I were having a bad time. I snuck a peek at her face. The emotions there were too complicated for me to read. Strain.
Exhaustion. Exasperation. Hurt. I looked back at my soup and felt the minutes drag.

“I guess it’s my fault for embarrassing you with the condoms,” Mom blurted at last. “How were you supposed to tell me after that?”

I blushed. I couldn’t stand to see her feeling guilty for something I’d done.

“How long did you know?” said Mom.

It was a relief to be talking again. Better than that long, strained silence in which God-knows-what thoughts could be lurking. “Only since the day before I left for Maple Bay.”

Mom shook her head. “Jesus,” she said. “Well, at least you were somewhat responsible. Ava’s not the worst person you could have asked to help you. And Pauline says you didn’t even try to lie to her. I’m just sorry you didn’t feel like you could tell me.”

“I’m sorry too.”

Our eyes met over the empty soup bowls and then we both looked away, as if the pain of connection was too piercing to sustain. My mother and I loved each other with eyes averted, like birds circling a pile of grain but never coming close enough to peck. As if love was a mirage that could shimmer and vanish if you looked at it too closely, or a tree with sorrow nesting in every branch: shake it too hard and your heart would break.

We walked to the cold car and got back on the road.

It was too dark to see the trees now, and soon we were home.

I TOLD NOE IT WAS TOO
late to come over, but she insisted.

“Mom?” I said sheepishly, hovering in her bedroom door. “Noe’s coming by for a few minutes. I think we’re going to go for a walk.”

Mom grumbled her acquiescence, and I went downstairs to wait by the window until I saw Noe appear at the end of the block. I slipped out the door and ran to meet her. Our bodies collided, and I thought of the loons who wheeled through our town on their annual migration until one year, for no reason anyone could discern, they didn’t come back.

“Bethy,” she gasped.

“Noe,” I wailed.

The street at night was empty and quiet, the moon a sliver.

I wondered what it would be like not to know her anymore.

THE WEEK AFTER CAMPUS VISITS, OUR
school was buzzing with stories of what everyone had gotten up to. Michael Lavelle had gotten drunk with a college basketball team and woke up with a string bikini drawn over his nipples in permanent marker. Eleanor Watchless had attended a 400-level physics seminar and astounded the professor by turning in the solution to every problem she had written on the board. Mallory Davis had cheated on Tim Xiu with her campus tour guide.

Steven had taken the train south to NYU to check out their drama department. In Art, he chattered about it nonstop. “It’s like an entire school full of pee sisters,” he confessed gleefully. “Perhaps an entire city.” He’d stayed with his rich uncle
in Manhattan, and the uncle had taken him to see
The Lion King, Avenue Q
, and a ballet called
Petrushka
. He brandished a pink slipper the lead dancer had signed for him after the show. After Art, we went to the bathroom together to wash the paint off our hands, an endeavor that proved to be surprisingly labor-intensive.

“What about you, Annabeth?” Steven said. “You’re being awfully quiet about Northern.”

“It was—very interesting,” I said.

“Interesting how?”

“A lot of ways. Every way.”

I pumped more soap into my hands and scrubbed at my fingernails, which were caked with tenacious blue paint. I thought we’d reverted to friendly silence, but after a moment Steven said, “Are you going to tell me about it, or is the privilege reserved for first-degree friends?”

“Steven—” I groaned.

“I’m right, aren’t I? Whatever it is, you probably told Noe the minute you saw her, but I’m just the person you kill time with in Art.”

I froze, hot water blasting over my hands. “We
are
friends,” I said. “We talk all the time.”

“
I
talk all the time,” said Steven. “You demur.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I guess I’m a private person.”

“A picket fence is private. You’re the freaking Berlin Wall.”

I blushed hard. I remembered the way Noe’s gym friends
had badgered me at the restaurant, the night of the homecoming dance:
Why are you so quiet? Why don’t you ever talk?
I hadn’t managed to make a connection with them, and apparently I’d been kidding myself about making a connection with Steven.

“Don’t you think I’d talk if I could?” I said.

“Why can’t you?”

The bathroom tiles were flecked with shiny bits of copper. I’d never noticed that before. My hands were red and throbbing from being under the hot water for too long. I was thinking about Scott’s face in the camping trip photograph. Maybe I’d never be normal. Maybe I’d never have a real friend. Steven was right. Friendship was more than laughing at someone’s jokes. It was more like skinny-dipping: if you cheated and kept a piece of clothing on, you’d never experience the wonder of the water against your bare skin, or be a full participant in the trust that binds naked swimmers to one another.

“I’m not like you and Noe,” I said. “Sometimes I feel like everyone else has this
thing
that I’m missing.”

On
thing
, my hand moved to the place on my rib cage where my heart used to live. I drew it away quickly.

“Do you really believe that?” said Steven.

“If someone amputated your leg, would you
believe
that you still had it?” I said.

The bathroom door creaked open, and Kaylee and
Rhiannon walked in with a few other girls. I busied myself with the paper towel dispenser.

“Hey, Kaylee, hey, Rhiannon,” I said.

“Hey, Anna—gross, what’s
he
doing in here?”

I glanced at Steven. “Pee Sisters Convention,” I sighed. “We were just leaving.”

On the way down the hall, Steven gave me a high five. “That was great,” he said.

“What was great?”

“We had a fight. You said things.”

He seemed to consider this a victory, but my shoulders slumped.

“I still haven’t told you about Northern,” I burst out. “And I’ve never made it . . .
okay
. . . for you to be anything other than a funny person in Art. You could be going through hell right now and I wouldn’t even know, because I’ve made it so clear that
funny person in Art
is the only part you’re allowed to play.”

We paused outside the cafeteria. The bulletin boards were cluttered with announcements for the winter talent show and the holiday concert and sign-ups for the annual ski trip.

“I
suck
,” I said. “It’s like I’m not even human. You’ve been trying so hard to be friends with me, and I haven’t been a friend to you.”

Steven could tell he’d triggered something bigger
than he’d intended. He reached out and gently touched my sleeve. “The thing that’s actually wrong with you is probably tiny to nonexistent compared to the things you’ve made yourself believe are wrong with you. At least, that’s what Ricardo says.”

“What if the thing is big?” I said. “And it’s not in your imagination?”

The bell began to ring for fourth period. We turned from the cafeteria without going in and walked back down the hall. For once, the space between us was heavy and quiet instead of being filled with witty banter.

It felt strange, the heaviness and quiet. It scared me.

Some kinds of scary are better than others, I guess. When I sank into my desk for Media Studies, I felt like a swimmer come in from the sea.

DECEMBER WAS COLD AND WHITE AND
blinding. The trees bent and creaked under the weight of the snow. I tried to get excited about exams and Secret Santas and all that stuff, but it was hard.

In Art, Mr. Lim called me up to his desk. “Ms. Schultz, you have a redo outstanding on your self-portrait.” At lunch, I filled a jar with rocks and left it in his office with a title card that said,
RAW MATERIALS II: Portrait of the Artist as a Jar Full of Stones
. It would make a nice diptych, I thought.

I got an email from Loren Wilder, my tour guide from Northern.
Thought you might be interested in this poem by Wilda McClure.
He signed the message with a smiley and his
initials. I wondered how he had gotten my email address, then remembered it was on the form Mom had filled out to book the tour.

The poem was about wolves in a castle of wind. I tried to read it, but zoned out after a line or two.

I guess I wasn’t in the mood for poetry just then.

Noe was always busy studying with friends from her classes. In Art, Steven showed me the Christmas present he was making for her: a leotard with purple and silver feathers, which he was calling the Noe Suit. I told him about Ava and Pauline, and let him smell the bottle of lavender oil Ava had given me before the abortion. He wanted some on his wrists. I dabbed it on carefully.

“Who smells like perfume?” Noe said later as we walked down the hall.

I was feeling bad about putting off Bob for so long, so I stopped by his office with a list of vegetarian food requests for the cafeteria. He was in the sagging swivel chair studying for a nutritionist exam and listening to a program on NPR.

“What happened to
Kingdom of Stones
?” I said.

“I finished it. Do you want to borrow the CDs?”

I was going to say no, but changed my mind. “Sure.”

He rummaged around in the desk and handed me a five-disc box. “Don’t start listening before you’ve finished exams. The story is very addictive.”

“Okay,” I said.

On the last day of exams, Noe, Steven, and I went downtown to use up my pizza coupons. It turned out the pizzeria in question was a dingy joint beside the Anaconda Nite Club. The hairy-browed guy at the cash register looked at my coupons, flicked them back across the counter, and said, “Nice-a try, kids. These-a been expired for three years.”

“Trust a fake nutritionist,” Noe said as we trudged out.

“I thought it was weird that he had so many,” I said.

I told myself I was doing okay. I went skating at the rink and Christmas shopping at the mall and even to a party at Lindsay Harris’s house. I pulled the craft supply box out of the closet and made Noe a jeweled box for the talcum powder she put on her hands for uneven bars, and Steven a sparkly headband that said
PEE SISTERS
in purple sequins.

One day when I was cleaning my room, I found the postcards I’d bought at the Wilda McClure house. I took them downstairs and gave them to Mom.

“These are for you,” I said.

“Oh,” she said. She stuck them to the fridge with magnets. A forest, a lake, a beaver dam, a pair of snowshoes. They looked small and dumb on the fridge, doing nothing to conjure the wilderness I’d glimpsed from the bus window.

We had been careful with each other since Maple Bay. Overly polite. She took me to see a doctor to “check things
out,” and on the way home we hardly spoke. I wanted to tell her about the journal I had found, but I knew it would only make her sad. Instead, I carried around the image of Scott’s face like a stone lodged in my throat.

I looked up his address on the internet. It wasn’t very hard, since I had his full name and the town.

It was strange to think of him having a house and a car and a whole normal life. It made me angry. It creeped me out.

I fantasized that I was on the canoe trip with Mom and Pauline and I came to Mom’s rescue. In some versions, I whacked him over the head with a paddle. In other versions I came running with a can of bear spray.

Sometimes in my dreams, I killed him over and over again, but he kept on getting up like a zombie and there was no way to make him die.

THAT CHRISTMAS, THE WATERFALL FROZE
for the first time in two hundred years. The whole town came out to peer at it: a palace of ice, intricate and spired and still, so terribly still, where we had only ever seen it tumble and churn. I went with Mom and Nan and Aunt Monique to huddle by the iron railing and take turns saying how we’d never, ever, ever, seen a thing like that before.

At Nan’s house, presents. We ate the gingerbread my cousin Max had baked, and Uncle Dylan plunked out “We Three Kings” on the old piano. Ava had stayed in Maple Bay to volunteer at a women’s shelter over Christmas. She called, and Uncle
Dylan passed the phone around, but it was hard to talk with everybody there. Then Aunt Monique’s parents came over, Max and Ava’s other grandparents, the ones who were horrified that Mom didn’t give me up for adoption, and still acted stiff and uncomfortable around me, although they tried to be nice. They said hello and asked me about school, but I could tell I made them nervous, and we all excused ourselves from the conversation as fast as we could.

I wondered what Scott was doing, and what my other grandparents were doing, the ones I’d never met. I sat on the edge of Nan’s plaid couch and fussed with the fireplace, adding logs and blowing on the coals and moving things around.

“Annabeth,” called Mom. “It’s your turn for charades.”

The card I pulled was
Star Wars
. Star: a finger pointing at the sky. Wars: an imaginary gun firing willy-nilly.

“Sky shooter!” everyone shouted. “Battle sky!”

I was glad when the whole thing was over.