Althea and Oliver (11 page)

Oliver knows it's not normal that he's never had a girlfriend, that she's never had a boyfriend, that they never even talk about what it would be like. To talk about sex would have inevitably drawn attention to the possibility that they might someday have it with each other, or that they would someday belong to other people. The territory was just too dangerous. Still, Althea's answer fills him with enormous relief.

“I hate your hair,” he says.

“You need a shower.”

“I just want everything to go back to normal.”

“I know.”

• • •

Nicky cooks for him that night, or tries to, coating chicken breasts in flour and capers and lemon juice, singeing the kale around the edges and scraping burnt jasmine rice out of the bottom of the pot. Typically, when she ties on an apron, Althea is around to avert these minor disasters, readjusting the burners on the stove while Nicky is waist-deep in the fridge hunting for the chardonnay, or adding black pepper and paprika to whatever pan needs it when Nicky turns her back to put on another album by the Replacements, but Althea has bowed out of this meal, perhaps wisely. As Nicky moves around the kitchen she speaks wistfully of New York: her old stack of takeout menus, scallion pancakes and shrimp dumplings delivered in the middle of the night, floppy slices of pizza so cheap you could pay for them with the change in your pocket.

“People talk about how expensive New York is,” she says as they carry their plates to the front porch. “But you can still get two slices and a root beer for five bucks. It's about all you can get for five bucks, but, you know.”

This is when he normally inquires about her former life in the city, listens to her wax nostalgic about Alphabet City and the early days of rock and roll. She's told these stories many times, about dinner parties thrown in cramped walk-up apartments and stifling summers spent on the beach at Coney Island, and he can imagine it all perfectly—Nicky in some red gingham sundress with her hair pulled back in a bandanna serving red wine in plastic cups, or napping on a towel with a Corona in her hand and a copy of
Pride and Prejudice
open across her face. And always in the background of these stories his father hovers, a blue-eyed phantom sharing cigarettes with Nicky on the fire escape, drinking her lemonade on the beach. He imagines their laughter as a breathing, perpetual thing. Oliver looks down at his plate. His father must have done all the cooking.

“The soccer team started practices already,” Nicky says, “but I can call Coach if you want.”

Oliver shakes his head. “Don't bother.”

“Are you sure?”

“I'm in no shape for sports. No point in spending the fall on the bench.”

“Did you find Althea this afternoon?” Nicky asks, cutting her chicken into tinier and tinier pieces.

“She was at Coby's,” he says with distaste.

“Why didn't she come over for dinner?”

“She said she didn't want food poisoning.” He digs at his plate for a decent bite of rice.

“What did you think of her hair?”

“You've seen it?” Oliver moves on to the capers, trying to spear them with his fork.

“I see everything.”

“Have you seen her around much?” he asks.

“Here and there.” Nicky turns her attention from her food to her wine.

“Does she seem different to you?”

“I'm not sure the black hair suits her.”

“If you know something, could you please tell me? Because I've had this really bad feeling since I woke up today, and no one is giving me any straight answers, and Garth was acting funny when I went looking for her, and I just want to make sure that she's okay.”

Nicky doesn't answer right away. “Why are you so worried about her?”

Oliver thinks of the burns on her arms. And of Coby. “I didn't say I was worried.”

“Are you jealous?” she asks delicately.

This gives him pause. “Is that what that is?”

“Could be.” She smirks into the mouth of her wineglass.

“Was I an accident?”

Nicky almost drops the glass. “Are you serious?”

“You were what, like, twenty-one when you had me?”

“I was twenty-two, and no, Ol, you were not an accident. You were—you were a very pleasant surprise.” She smiles.

“Do you ever wonder—”

“No. I never wonder. About anything. Except why I can't cook. Sometimes I wonder why I can't make my son a decent meal. But that's it.”

“Why didn't you have me in New York?” he asks.

“Why are you suddenly so interested?”

“I just am.”

Nicky stares out at the lawn, watching the intermittent spark of fireflies. “We could have stayed in New York. I've heard a lot of stories about couples in small apartments turning dresser drawers into makeshift bassinets and stuff like that. All our friends were there. Sarah was there. Jimmy, too—he was already on the scene then. He really didn't want us to go. But we didn't want to stay and be the novelty act, the super-young married couple with the baby still living on Avenue B and trying to be cool. Our life was parties and shows and friends, going out all night and then watching the sunrise from our fire escape. We knew if we tried to shoehorn a baby into that, we'd be setting ourselves up for a lot of disappointment. I wanted to focus on you and Mack, and not be thinking about all the things we couldn't do anymore. So we left. We got to be pioneers. We struck out for new territory.” She waves away a mosquito.

“Why Wilmington?” Borrowing her orange Bic, he lights the citronella candle on the table.

“When you live in New York City, you think every other place is the same, this big, generic landmass of Not-New-York. We'd been here once, just for a weekend, to visit some friend of his at UNC, and we liked it here. It seemed as good a place as any.”

“Did everyone think you were crazy?”

“They thought we were totally fucking insane. I would have, too, if Sarah had told me they were moving down south to have a baby. Mack came home one night after drinking with Jimmy, and he had all these little notes scribbled on a cocktail napkin, and he was like, ‘Okay, check it out. I did the math. We have this kid now, and by the time he's eighteen and out of the house, we'll barely be forty. We'll still be cool. And we'll have gotten the kid thing out of the way. It's really more practical, when you think about it.' It was the Californian in him, so laid-back about shit. You definitely get that from him. In some ways he was totally right. We got our shit together way before any of our friends, had a kid and bought a house and did all those grown-up things when everyone else was still sleeping around and spending their rent money on records and acid and tequila. And we had a good time doing it, you know, until he died. We were lucky for years, and then we weren't.”

It had been a clever plan, and most of it had come to pass. Nicky was still cool and not even forty. Child-raising and home ownership had been checked off her list of life goals, and those years Mack had promised they would find on the other side now stretched out before her. There was just one thing missing.

Oliver squeezes another lemon slice over his kale, trying to cover the flavor of burnt wok.

“You don't have to bother. I know it's inedible,” she says.

Relieved, he sets down his fork. He wishes he had another red velvet cupcake.

Nicky hands him a stack of mail. College brochures. “These came for you over the summer.”

Oliver flips through the catalogs, replete with images of glorious foliage and students in repose on vast, meticulously manicured lawns. “Where are the ones from UNC?”

“Come on, Oliver, you can do better than a state school.”

“We can't afford any of these.”

“Let me worry about that. We can figure something out.”

He looks with longing at the pictures of MIT and RPI, the well-appointed laboratories, formulas written on dusty green chalkboards. Mack's parents have been pushing for Caltech, hoping to get him out on their coast so they can finally spend some serious time together, but he's transfixed by the idea of New England, crisp autumn breezes and snowy afternoons in the library. He sighs and pushes the pile back across the table toward his mother.

“It's not happening,” he says.

“You can't give up, Ol—”

“How am I supposed to go away to college like this? We spend all that money and then, what, just hope I don't sleep through the semester? If I go to school at all, it'll be here. I'll have to live at home and go to Wilmington. Go Seahawks.”

“Wilmington doesn't even have an astronomy program.”

He shrugs.

“How would you like to go to New York?” Nicky asks.

“What for?”

“I got a call this week from a doctor there.”

“I don't want to go back to the doctor. It never does any good.”

“This is different. He says he knows what you have.”

The front door is open; they can hear the Zombies album on Nicky's stereo. Across the street, Mrs. Parker's television flickers like blue candlelight behind her tightly closed curtains. “What does he say I have?” he asks.

“Kleine-Levin Syndrome.”

He wants Valerie to silk-screen those words onto a shirt that he can wear every day, or engrave them onto a pair of dog tags, or print them on a button he can pin to his backpack. He wants an artifact, something tangible, something he can point to the next time his temperature rises and his joints start aching and that sinister fatigue becomes the focal point of his entire being. And then he can say,
I'm not making this up. I'm not on drugs, I'm not crazy, I'm not pretending. This is real. I'm just along for the ride on the Non-Stop Sleeping Wagon, and the only rule is I can't say no.

“Do you think he's right?” Oliver asks. “Do you think that's what it is?”

“I'll show you,” Nicky says, and ushers him inside to the living room, where she pops a tape into the VCR. “There was a piece on CNN a few years ago. They sent me a copy of it.”

She puts her arms around him, kissing the top of his head. Then she points the remote at the television and hits play.

A teenage boy wrestles with his dog in a backyard while the reporter's voice-over sets the scene with the usual cheesy intro—just an ordinary kid, everything was fine, until one day, it all changed forever.

“I just got so tired,” the boy says, describing how his first episode began with an urgent nap on the linoleum beneath his locker at school.

“His teachers thought he was on drugs,” says his tearful mother, seated next to the sympathetic father. “But we knew that wasn't our son, he wouldn't do that. We knew it had to be something else.”

“She's lying,” Nicky says, lighting a cigarette. “Of course they thought it was drugs.”

“Should I get you some popcorn?” Oliver asks.

“Can you believe they let her wear those jeans on television?”

“Shush.”

The parents elaborate on the strange behavior that occurred during their son's ten days of near-constant unconsciousness, the eating and confusion and childlike regression. Oliver feels a sharp stab of recognition, like the excitement of discovering another person who loves your same obscure favorite band. This is him, without a doubt, this is what he has, and he's not the only one after all.

The family gives a litany of the misdiagnoses and describes the despair of watching the episodes return every few weeks.

“Every few weeks?”
Oliver shouts.

They had filmed their son while he slept, hoping it would help the doctors better understand. There's a lot of time-lapse footage of the boy in bed, occasionally rolling over in his sleep. During one of those strange waking hours he wouldn't recall later, they filmed him sitting on the floor of their living room, rocking back and forth and babbling a series of incoherent syllables, blank eyes unseeing while his parents ask him a series of innocuous questions—
Where do you go to school? What's the dog's name?
—that he obviously has no hope of answering. Later, when he's back in bed, his mother tries to wake him up to eat some dinner and he slaps her across the face. Oliver, who had been mortified by the Waffle House debacle, where only a dozen other patrons witnessed his tantrum, is enraged on behalf of his fellow sufferer, whose fat mouse has been broadcast on national television. Still, he can't stop watching. So this is what he's like.

“This is him,” Nicky says as the video cuts to a young Latino doctor with curly, exhaustively gelled black hair and a warm smile. “That's the guy in New York.”

“No wonder you want to go up there and meet him.”

“Give me a break.”

The doctor, identified on-screen as Dr. Crespo, describes what is known about Kleine-Levin Syndrome, which, it turns out, is almost nothing. It affects mostly teenagers, and among those, mostly boys. He reiterates the symptoms, addresses the debate of whether it's a sleep disorder or a neurological condition, and then casually mentions that while there is no cure, most patients “either outgrow the episodes or experience a marked reduction in their occurrence once they've reached adulthood.”

“Wait a second,” Oliver says, pausing the tape. “He can't stop it?”

“Don't you want to watch the rest?”

“Your boyfriend Dr. Curls just gave away the ending. There's no cure? Nothing he can do?”

“He says he's putting together a study in the fall with other kids that have the same thing. At a hospital in the city, St. Victor's. He thinks you'd be a good candidate. He can't stop it altogether, but they might be able to find a treatment, something that would shorten the episodes, lengthen the amount of time between them. I'd have to talk to the insurance company and fill out some paperwork, but I think I can get you in.”

“How long would I be there?”