In Every Way (9 page)

Maria wonders at the bond between her mother and Karen, one she knows she has already missed her opportunity to replicate for herself
by opting to not have a roommate when she lived in the dorm at UNC, by opting to then give birth to a child, by deciding to then drop out of school altogether. The possibility of making a true friend, one who imprints for life like Karen, now seems even more remote than before. Maria will go back to school, this she knows, but she does not want it to be in Chapel Hill. In the last few weeks, overwhelmed by a desire to escape any town occupied by both Jack and Icy People, Maria has submitted a transfer application to Yale. It is a dream escape for when her mother leaves this world, a place she wants to attend so badly that she tries to keep herself from thinking about it too much, lest her hopes rise to a level from which they might never safely descend. Maria knows her chances of admission are slim at best and feels like she might not have even finished the application correctly. Her essay was about cancer, conception, and drawing self-portraits. She is afraid it is only crazy.

Maria steps out of the wheezing Volvo, her mother still asleep in the passenger seat. She waves to Karen before retrieving her backpack and pillow from the backseat. Karen crushes her cigarette into an ashtray, steps into the yard, and says, “Can I help?”

Maria raises her small load, as if to say I got it, and as she does, a swarm of white feathers appears around her legs. In the breeze they skid across Karen's lawn. Maria looks down. The pillow has sprung a leak. Maria grabs at it and a new burst of feathers shoots out in a small, slow explosion. This is the pillow Maria has slept on since fifth grade, that her mother insisted she travel to summer camp with. Her mother has slept beside her on this pillow. Jack has slept with his head on this pillow. Maria had this pillow in the hospital during labor. Bonacieux has even cried here, restless, while her first day shimmered
cold and bright around her. A corner is now torn. Its innards have found the light.

“Come here,” Karen says. “Come here.” Maria begins to cry.

It has been only two weeks since Jack told Maria about Icy People, who according to Facebook has recently released three singles on her MySpace page, which Maria has since examined closely. To Maria's dismay, one of the new songs, a theme song of sorts titled simply “Icy People,” is excellent. Its chorus—“Icy People got things and stuff”—will not cease playing within Maria's mind.

In Karen's arms, Maria feels a rush to tell her about Icy People, Jack, and Bonacieux. She does not know what her mother has already shared. But Maria knows it will all emerge in time. Karen eases information out of people by making them feel like nothing they say might shock. “I'm sorry,” is all Maria says for now. She feels that Karen already understands it all anyway.

Karen's house is furnished with marble-topped dressers, mirrors so large they make Maria nervous about their hanging devices, antique cabinets filled with porcelain plates, portraits of ancient bearded men staring out from fields of darkness, and glass coffee tables standing at attention in seemingly almost every room. Bookshelves hold large-format catalogs from the art museums of other continents, hardback Junior League cookbooks, and John Irvings and John Grishams and John Updikes. In the living room, a pair of red reading glasses rests in the spine of an open
Town & Country
. An iPad glimmers on the table beside it. Maria feels a longing to be in the very room she is now in. The physical act of being there in the moment is not good enough. She sinks into the white leather couch and wishes she were more than just a visitor.

It is part of Karen's design, this desire to belong. She cultivates guests, always convincing them to stay longer than they had planned. Maria's mother says this is to keep her from getting lonely. Karen's ex-husband, a trial lawyer, left years ago but moved only a few blocks away. His proximity is only an amplification of his removal. Maria feels like Karen needs to leave Beaufort to start her life anew but is afraid that if she does so, she and her mother will no longer have this waterfront escape. Nor will Karen need them as much. Selfishly, Maria hopes Karen will never leave. She does not want the balance of dependence to change.

A young man dressed as a skeleton enters the room, blowing listlessly through a Twizzler.

“Boo,” he says.

“Boo,” Maria says.

This is Christopherson, Karen's fifteen-year-old. Maria has known him since he was born. He is now, for the first time, obviously not a child. There it is again, Maria thinks, that cosmic clock that refuses to adhere to standard measure. It was so long ago that she was his age, so much longer than the four years that actually separate them. It was not long ago at all, though, that Maria was in high school with boys his age. She is embarrassed at the swell of nerves now conjured by his sudden adolescent presence. But Maria too has changed since they last met. Her stomach has still not returned to its original shape, but it almost has. She feels it's an improvement. The angles on her body, for so long too acute in her mind, have now been softened by the process of motherhood. She questions if her breasts might remain permanently larger. Her skin is a new wardrobe. She is mysterious within it. She watches Christopherson admire it.

“Wanna trick-or-treat?” Christopherson says.

“Is that a metaphor?” Maria says.

“What.”

“Never mind. Aren't we a little old?”

“Who cares. I want candy.”

Maria is not thinking about candy but says, “Me too,” and Christopherson blows through his Twizzler again, raising it like a trumpet into the living room airspace.

Maria does not know the address of the house in which her daughter lives, but she feels certain it is near. The whole neighborhood is little more than a dozen blocks square. Go ahead and walk these streets with Christopherson, she thinks, eat the candy of the generous neighbors and enjoy this warm October evening. She will celebrate a holiday in a town that she loves, that she has missed, and if, along the way, she finds the house in which her child lives, so be it.

She does not have a costume but that afternoon makes do. Karen retrieves an old white bedsheet from the attic, and with the removal of two small pieces, it happens: Maria becomes a ghost.

CHAPTER 7

T
HE SUN HAS
set. From behind the old sheet, in her own private cloud of mothballs and fabric softener, Maria can view the neighbors' yard where dry ice swirls around a ten-foot mechanized reaper whose scythe slowly slices back and forth through the counterfeit fog.

“Don't go into the graveyard,” Karen says. On the top step she is backlit by the porch light, Maria's mother beside her wearing a floppy witch hat at a rakish tilt. She looks radiant and ecstatic, and at this moment Maria feels the rightness of their journey to Beaufort. Already life has become magical and exotic. Her mother looks nothing if not alive. “Or anything else stupid,” Karen says.

Christopherson gestures to Maria. As if, he seems to say, with her?

The neighborhood teems with more costumed children than Maria has ever seen in one place at one time. It seems like every family from a hundred-mile radius has driven in for the night. Jarheads from Camp Lejeune lead sunburnt children from door to door. Black kids from the county giggle with nervous glee inside plastic costumes. Neighborhood children goof with each other, recognizing friends from across the street, even behind masks.

Christopherson leads Maria west, away from the crowds, in the direction of the drawbridge. Low-limbed live oaks shade the
streetlights, Spanish moss hanging from a few like hair that has just shaken loose. The streets smell vegetal and decaying, like the depths of a forest. Two lost princesses clutch empty Harris Teeter bags that rustle in the breeze. One Spider-Man trips on the sidewalk. An elephant cries until placed on his father's shoulders.

At each address, Maria looks for the double floor of columned porches, the magnolia, the stallion weather vane she has seen in Philip and Nina's photos. And each house is almost right. Does she want it to appear? She does not know exactly. She feels relief when they finish walking past a block of houses where she recognizes none as Philip and Nina's. But nevertheless, at the next block she begins again to look.

As Maria follows Christopherson in a whisper of footsteps, she turns her whole body from side to side to better see the passing homes through the holes in her sheet. The going is slow. They stop at one house where the owners hand out full-sized Snickers bars. At another a young couple dispenses apples, yet none of the children seem disappointed. Soon Christopherson starts skipping houses, even those clearly decorated to attract passing trick-or-treaters. They depart the tight bundle of columned homes and approach the edge of the Old Burying Ground, the very graveyard of which they were just warned. Like the proof to some theorem of adolescence, Christopherson has led her directly here.

The graveyard is shrouded in the limbs of craggy live oaks. It dates from the 1700s. A girl is buried in a rum barrel here. A British officer who was interred standing up. Someone with the cannon of his ship as part of his grave marker. There is no one who Maria has known whose bones rest in this sandy soil; still, it is one of her favorite places to visit. She has walked its poorly marked paths countless times, but
never after dark. A wrought-iron fence encloses the yard, cracks in its concrete base yielding sandy weeds. A thick chain casually loops the gate shut, but this closing is only symbolic. There is a gap wide enough for all to pass through and many already have. Shadows move along the graveyard's far edges.

“You like being scared?” Christopherson says.

“It usually makes me feel like I'm going to die,” Maria says, “and I don't want to die. So, no.”

“Then I'll just tell you. It's awesome. My friends all lie down on the graves here. And as you walk by they sit up.”

“And?” Maria says. She is both charmed and suspicious of Christopherson's teenage enthusiasm.

“And nothing. That's the thing. They just sit up and then lay back down. It's awesome.”

He ducks under the chain and steps through the gap in the fence. From within he then beckons, waving palmfuls of humid air urgently toward himself. Maria follows. What else is she going to do? She is not going to return to Karen and tell on him, nor is she going to reprimand him herself. She fears what might happen if caught, but who is going to catch them? And what are they even doing?

The gravestones that she passes are so old that the years lived by those memorialized are illegible. Several graves stand above ground, enclosed by a blanket of brick pebbled with seashells. As they walk by each grave along the sandy path, a teenager dressed as a skeleton sits upright, only to then lie back down once they pass.

“Cool, huh?” Christopherson says.

Maria cannot help but answer yes. As the teenagers of Beaufort rise and recline in silence at her transit, the sorrows of her time in Chapel
Hill ease. Even here, surrounded by reminders of death, the very specter that has haunted the last year and a half of her life, the cure of geography works. She cannot explain the magic of this stupid act, lest it be some halfhearted symbol of a resurrection in which she does not believe. “It is,” she says. “It is.”

“You've had a shitty year, right?” Christopherson says, as they pass through a grove of gravestones so old and sunken they seem merely stubs of stone peeking out of the earth, as if they might, at any moment, close their granite eyes and disappear forever. There is a measure of privacy in this ancient corner of the yard, the teenage ghouls more tightly populating the extravagant and grand markers elsewhere, and Maria appreciates both Christopherson's interest in her and his discretion in waiting till now to reveal it.

“I guess,” Maria says. She is glad he already knows. She prefers the knowledge to precede her.

“Well,” he says, choosing his words carefully. Maria understands he is forging new conversational ground here, that he has, in all likelihood, rarely before discussed an epoch of such consequence in anyone's life, let alone anyone even remotely near his age. “I'm glad that this isn't shitty.”

“Thank you,” Maria says, touched by his meager offering.

The graveyard adventure ends quickly. The last of the phantom teens behind them, they exit the yard in silence. Maria understands Christopherson had no true business in this graveyard, only that he wanted to impress Maria with the performance. And she was indeed impressed. More importantly, she feels she has been transported. Nothing about this evening resembles the days she has been living. Of this she is glad.

They move parallel to the water, stopping at more houses now, gathering more fruit and handmade candy. Still Maria watches for Philip and Nina's house, but with each that is not theirs, Maria begins to feel that perhaps she has guessed incorrectly. Maybe Philip and Nina live in a different town, one nearby, one she has no knowledge of. Perhaps Philip only walked his dog here. As she scans the street, Christopherson leads her toward a large blue house, one of the oldest on the block. Its shield reads W
HEELER
E
DWARDS
1714.

“This's my dad's house,” Christopherson says, defeated, shuffling up the walk. Maria can tell he's embarrassed to have to hew to parental authority in her presence. “I promised him I'd stop by.”