After Eli (16 page)

But for whatever reason, that fight pretty much ended life as I’d known it.

I wasn’t in anymore. I was jelly-bean bait.

H
ere’s my question: Is there free will? Do we decide things for ourselves? Or is everything all preprogrammed and we just toddle along down the track, sometimes falling into stuff by mistake like those cartoon characters falling down manholes?

I guess what started me thinking about this was when Walter told me about the Butterfly of Doom. The Butterfly of Doom is why you can’t go back in time and fix your life and make everything come out better.

The butterfly comes from this quote that says a butterfly flapping its wings in New Hampshire can set off a typhoon in the China Sea. The butterfly flap makes some tiny little change that causes another tiny little change that causes another and another, and it all keeps multiplying until finally you’ve got palm trees snapping all over Indonesia and you’re in the middle of a typhoon. But if you went back in time to try to stop the typhoon, you couldn’t, because you’d never find the butterfly.

The butterfly thing really creeps me out, to tell you the truth. It’s like you don’t eat your Cheerios one morning and just because of that, forty years later a grand piano falls on your head. Somewhere maybe there was some tiny little thing Eli did that set him on the way to his roadside bomb. That’s chaos theory, Walter says.

Which only confirms my belief that the worst thing that ever happened to the human race is math.

Isabelle was leaving on the last day of August.

I had it marked on the calendar on the back of my bedroom door. The calendar came from Ernie’s Bait and Tackle, and every month had a picture of a fish. The August fish was this really mournful-looking largemouth bass. Every day I’d cross off a day, and it would be that much closer to Isabelle going away, and that fish would just look at me like it knew how I felt. That bass was one sad fish.

I still had all these plans for how I’d persuade Isabelle not to leave, how I’d get her to stay, and I’d play them over and over like little movies in my mind. I’d tell her I loved her, and suddenly she’d see me like for the very first time, and then we’d fall into each other’s arms and the music would come up and there’d be this really gorgeous sunset.

We’d pledge ourselves to each other, like she and Simon Dewitt Paxton did, only this time it would be forever and for real. Even if she had to go back to New York for a while, because of her father’s job, we’d write to each other every day, because Isabelle thinks letters are more romantic than e-mails, and I could see myself at our dented-up mailbox, getting her letters in the mail, all in her swoopy red handwriting. “Darling Danny,” they’d begin, and they’d end, “Love always, Isabelle.”

Then, maybe after we graduated from high school, she’d come back and I’d build a little house for us over at the blue-potato farm. I’d plant a garden for her with roses and daisies, and we’d have a little porch where we could watch the full moon and the fireflies.

“They’re magic,” Isabelle would say, looking at the fireflies. And I’d reach out and take her hand and say, “No, that’s you.”

That’s the kind of stuff I thought about. I’d lie awake at night making plans, each one dumber than the last.

The days on the calendar kept filling up with
X
’s. It was five days, then three days, then two days. Then it was hours.

And it wasn’t anything like I’d planned.

On that last night, we were all there, me and Isabelle and Walter and the twins, on the old Sowers porch. It was still summer, but you could tell summer was over really, done with us, on its way out. You can always tell. The light changes and there’s this feel to the air.

The twins were all droopy and subdued, sitting close to each other on the porch steps and speaking only when spoken to, which was weird, since getting them to shut up would ordinarily take a sledgehammer or one of those drugs that the wildlife guys use to down rogue elephants. Jasper was wearing a T-shirt that said hope is for sissies. Journey’s shirt said i hate people.

Walter looked like the fish on my calendar, and I probably looked worse. But Isabelle was all lit up and kept talking faster and faster about all the marvelous things there were to do back home and all the marvelous places she’d take us when we came to visit.

Suddenly
marvelous
was one of Isabelle’s words.

“You’ll love it, darlings,” she said over and over. About the Guggenheim, the Met, the Cloisters, the Russian Tea Room, Times Square. The lions, Patience and Fortitude, in front of the New York Public Library.

I thought Patience and Fortitude were lousy names for lions. Lions should have more active names, like Simba and Leo.

“Did you know the Harry Potter books are over?” Journey said mournfully. “This summer was the very last Harry Potter book.”

“Journey was sad when Voldemort died,” Jasper said. “If Journey was a Harry Potter character, she would be Voldemort.”

“Nobody liked Voldemort,” I said.

“I did,” Journey said.

“Do you think you’ll be back again next summer?” Walter said.

Say yes,
I thought.

But Isabelle just shrugged and shook out her silky hair.

“Who knows where we’ll be next summer?” Isabelle said. “Anything could happen. Maybe we’ll meet next in some foreign city, where there are temple bells and palm trees and the air smells of cinnamon.”

“If Jasper was a city,” Journey said, “he would be Detroit.”

And I knew right then that it was over. We’d never go to visit, and we’d never meet in a foreign city full of temple bells, and Isabelle wasn’t coming back. She was trying to patch it over with all the
marvelous
talk, but I knew she was done forever with Fairfield and with Walter and with me. She was leaving us behind, going back to the symphony and the art museum and her fancy private school. Her father the professor had finished his monograph, and her mother was done with painting boxy orange cows. It was over, and I was too old to go back to Neverland.

Everything I’d imagined about Isabelle and me was just dumb.

“
We’re
coming back,” Journey said. “Jasper and I buried a time capsule behind the carriage house, and we’re coming back to dig it up. We’re coming back in twelve years, when we’re twenty-one. Will you still be here when we’re twenty-one?”

Probably,
I thought.

“It’s romantic, really, being forcibly torn asunder like this in our youth,” Isabelle said. “We should send a token each year to show that in spite of everything, we’ll always be true. A single red rose, like in
The Prisoner of Zenda.
”

“You could just post on your Facebook page,” Jasper said.

Then we sat there not saying anything much, because there really wasn’t anything left to say, just watching the fireflies blink off and on in the tall grass. I had a pain in my chest that felt like my heart was going to explode.
This is what a broken heart feels like,
I thought.
My heart is blowing up like a Japanese octopus trap and I’m going to die and the
last thing I’ll see will be Isabelle with the stars behind her, looking like fireflies in her
hair.

I knew I’d never tell Isabelle how I felt about her now. It was too late, and it had always been too late or too early, or anyway just wrong. Somewhere in my past I’d picked a dandelion or something, and that was the Butterfly of Doom. Something had set me on the path to being the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time, to losing Isabelle, to Isabelle going away.

Then Isabelle’s mother came to the door, looking tired, and said how lovely it had been for Isabelle and the twins to be friends with us this summer, but now it was really time for them all to come inside because they had an early start in the morning and they still had packing to do. Journey started to cry.

“I don’t want to go home,” Journey said. “I want to live here.”

“Don’t be silly,” Isabelle said.

Then she kissed Walter and she kissed me, and she hugged me hard.

“I’ll be in touch, darlings,” she said. “It’s been wonderful.”

And then she went inside and closed the door. Walter and I just stood there for a minute. Then we went down the Sowers porch steps and headed down the driveway toward the empty Sowers pedestals and the road.

“You all right, Danny?” Walter said.

“Sure,” I said.

Though I wasn’t.

“Look, Dan,” Walter said, “you knew she was never going to stay. She was only sort of playing with us, really. It wasn’t going to last.”

“Sure, I knew that,” I said.

But I hadn’t, I really hadn’t. I was that dumb.

I should have remembered that story from Greek mythology about what happens to boys with wings.

I should have remembered Miss Walker’s poem.
Nothing gold can stay.

When I got home, my mom was up in her bedroom, lying down with the lights off, and my dad was in the living room, watching TV, a rerun of some cop show with lots of tire noise and gunfire. I went up to my room.

Back when I was little, Eli and I watched this old movie
The Wizard of Oz.
It starts out all in black and white on this little farm in the middle of nowhere in Kansas, and then a cyclone whirls in and takes Dorothy and her dog and her whole house to Oz. When she gets to Oz, it’s a magical kingdom where everything is suddenly in Technicolor, and there are witches and flying monkeys and the Emerald City. But all Dorothy wants is to get back to black-and-white Kansas again.

I thought that was nuts, and so did Eli. He said nobody who got out of Kansas ever voluntarily went back.

That’s how I felt, walking up the stairs that night to my room. Like for a whole summer I’d lived in this magical rainbow country, and now it was over. Now I was back home.
There’s no place like home,
I thought. Where Peter Reilly was going to make the rest of my life a living hell. Where Eli was gone and my mom was gone and my dad had always been gone and anyway thought I was dumb as a stump.

I hated them all. I even hated Jim and Emma, because they were happy and I wasn’t, and Walter, because he was going to have a successful brilliant life, and the twins, because they were too young to have any problems and didn’t have the sense to see how lucky they were. I stopped in the hall in front of Eli’s bedroom door. It was shut, like it always was, and the light was off inside. Downstairs a commercial came on, and I could hear my dad walking out to the kitchen to get a beer. No one was around to stop me, so I opened the door to Eli’s room and turned on the overhead light and went inside. Then I locked the door behind me. And then I started to take Eli’s stuff down.

I tore his posters and his brown paper down off the wall and crumpled them up and stuffed them in the wastebasket, and I tore all the sheets and blankets off the bed and threw them in the middle of the floor in a big pile. I dragged all his clothes out of the closet and yanked them off the hangers — shirts and pants and jackets and the gray suit he’d worn in his scholarship picture — and I dumped out all his bureau drawers. Then I started throwing stuff out of his desk. Papers he’d written and notebooks and pencils and pens. A bottle of ink smashed, and I threw a whole drawer after it. I threw his clock radio, and the plastic cover cracked across. I kicked at his bedside lamp, and it fell and smashed and little pieces of lightbulb skittered all over the floor.

I was crying and breathing in big sick gasps.

“Why did you have to do it?” I shouted at Eli’s empty room. “Why did you
leave
?
Why does everybody leave?
”

And I shoved at Eli’s bookcase, and the whole thing teetered and fell and books spilled out.

By then my parents were outside, pounding on Eli’s door, and my dad was shouting, “What the hell is going on in there? Daniel! Open this damn door!”

Eli’s room looked like a cyclone had hit it. My hand was bleeding where I’d cut it on something. I stood there a minute, catching my breath. Then I climbed across the mess of stuff and opened Eli’s door.

“What have you done?” my mom said, and her voice went all shaky and ragged.
“What have you done?”

“I think you ought to see a doctor,” I said to my mom. “I think how you’re acting is crazy. I think you should see a psychiatrist.”

I was trying not to cry.

“Eli’s not here,” I said. “Eli’s not here anymore. But I am.
I am!
”

“Danny,” my dad said.

“You leave me alone,” I said. “Don’t talk to me anymore. Don’t talk to me ever again. Just leave me the hell alone.”

And I went into my own room and slammed the door. Outside I could hear my mom crying, but I didn’t care. I sat on my bed and thought about the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés in my Book of the Dead. There’s a story that when Cortés first landed in Mexico, he burned all his ships so that he and his men would have no way to retreat.

I’d always thought that was a pretty shortsighted thing to do. Like Eli always said, it’s important to have a backup plan. But then I thought,
No, Cortés was right.