Love Anthony (15 page)

It’s the same feeling she had when she met Jimmy. It was a late night at the Chicken Box, Nantucket’s legendary dive bar. She couldn’t stop looking at him. It wasn’t because he was attractive, although he was. Plenty of attractive single guys were all over Nantucket that summer, everywhere she looked. And it wasn’t because she was drunk on beer and Jell-O shots, although she was. That night, there was only Jimmy. The whole bar was static, and Jimmy was a clear channel. She felt almost spellbound by him, as if he were a magnet pulling her to him.

Now this book on the shelf feels the same way. She stares at
it, mesmerized by its nonmesmerizing, simple cover, and wonders what it’s about. With considerable willpower, she shakes off its spell and returns to her blank page.

Blank. Blank. Blankety-blank.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

She looks up at the book, now feeling as if the girl on the cover were staring at her.

Oh, for God’s sakes.

She walks over to the bookcase and brings the book back to her seat.
The Siege
by Clara Claiborne Park. She reads the front and back covers. It’s a true story, written by a mother about her autistic daughter. Beth enjoyed
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,
but autism isn’t a subject she would normally read about on her own. But she’s obviously not going to begin writing the great American novel today. And she’s
not
going back and cleaning the house. She caps her pen, opens the book, and begins to read.

HOURS LATER, SOMEONE
taps her on the shoulder, startling her. She looks up. It’s Mary Crawford, the librarian.

“Sorry, Beth, I didn’t mean to startle you, but we’re closing in five minutes.”

Beth looks up at the clock. It says four fifty-five. She looks out the window. The light coming in is softer, more diffuse, suggesting longer shadows and evening. She looks at her watch. Four fifty-five. How did that happen?

She looks down at her notebook.

Blank.

“I’m sorry, I got completely caught up in this book.”

“Would you like to borrow it?”

“Yes, please.”

Beth didn’t write anything, and she didn’t clean anything, but at least she found a good book to read.

BACK AT HOME,
she still has plenty of time left in her free day before the girls come home. She could clean something or eat something. She chooses the second. She’s famished. She hasn’t had a thing to eat today since breakfast.

She fixes herself a ham-and-cheese sandwich and, in celebration of her free day, decides to make herself a real drink. She pours vodka, lime juice, cranberry juice, and a splash of ginger beer into Gracie’s lunch thermos because she doesn’t have a martini shaker. She adds ice, shakes, then pours some into a wineglass. She takes a sip and smiles. It’s good. See? She doesn’t need Jimmy. She can make her own passion.

The air in the house is hot and stale. No one was home today to turn on the air conditioners or open the windows. Beth takes her meal and drink and her library book out onto the deck, and she sits in one of the mildewed chairs.

The moldiest chair of them all, Jimmy’s cigar-smoking chair, is pushed off to the side, facing the corner of the deck, as if it’d been sent there for misbehaving. Beth asked Jimmy to get it out of here, once and for all, weeks ago. It was bad enough before, but she’s certainly not going to keep his cigar chair here while he shacks up with another woman. She angles her own chair so that his disappears from view. She eats her dinner and reads.

She’s still absorbed in reading and on her third Passion à la Beth cocktail, which she feels she’s now perfected (less lime, more vodka), when she hears the front door open and shut.

“Hello?” she yells.

Sophie and Jessica appear on the deck.

“Where’s Gracie?” asks Beth.

“In the kitchen, working on a project for camp,” says Jessica.

“Oh, what project?” asks Beth.

“I dunno,” says Jessica.

“What did you have for dinner?”

“Hot dog,” says Jessica.

“Hamburger,” says Sophie.

It frustrates Beth that they live on an island and none of her children will eat fish. She loves seafood but can’t cook it in the house without the girls pinching their noses and complaining about the smell.

“Where’s your dad?”

“He left,” says Sophie.

“Oh,” says Beth, strangely disappointed that he didn’t come in. Must be the vodka talking.

“How was camp today?”

“Lame,” says Sophie.

“Can you please change your attitude and not wreck it for your sisters? You loved it when you were their age.”

“Fine. It was
delightful
!” says Sophie, delivering the word
delightful
in a high-pitched squeal, her face stretched and dimpled in a too-sugary-to-be-real, Shirley Temple smile.

“Okay, okay. How was dinner?”

Sophie says nothing and looks to Jessica.

“It was
delightful
!” says Jessica in the same tone and manner as her older sister.

“It totally sucked,” says Sophie.

“Hey! Language,” says Beth.

“
She
was there,” says Sophie.

“Oh,” says Beth.

“I don’t like her,” says Sophie.

“Me either,” says Jessica.

Beth tries to summon some kind of maternal wisdom or politically correct advice or at least something positive for her girls, but the Passion à la Beths are working against her, and so she goes with something honest. “I don’t like her either.”

“Yeah, but you don’t have to spend time with her like we do. I wish we didn’t have to see her,” says Sophie.

“I wish Dad would come home,” says Jessica.

Beth’s heart breaks.

“He’s not going to, is he?” asks Sophie.

“No, I don’t think so,” says Beth.

Tears pool in Jessica’s eyes, fury in Sophie’s.

“I’m sorry, sweeties. I’m so sorry. This does totally suck.”

“I miss him, Mom,” says Jessica.

“I miss him, too,” says Beth.

“I thought you hated him,” says Sophie. “I thought that’s why you ripped up the pictures.”

“That wasn’t why, and sometimes I do hate him. I miss and hate him at the same time. It’s complicated.”

“Do you hate him more or miss him more?” asks Jessica with big, wet, hopeful eyes. Beth wipes Jessica’s face with her hand and kisses her cheek.

“Miss,” says Beth, having compassion for her sensitive middle child.

“Well, I hate him,” says Sophie.

“Soph,” says Beth in the tone that typically begins one of her lectures.

“Why do you get to hate him and I don’t?”

It’s a good question, but Beth doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t say because even if he’s no longer her husband, he’ll always be Sophie’s father. She doesn’t say because it’s not good to hate anyone. But is it okay for Sophie to hate her father if that’s how she feels? It can’t be healthy to stuff those honest feelings down. Beth should probably make appointments with the school’s guidance counselor for all three girls to talk about all this stuff.

“Because I’m the mother,” she says finally, waving that irritatingly vague, all-powerful parental wand over the whole discussion, ending it. “It’s getting late. Go get ready for bed.”

Sophie rolls her eyes and walks back into the house. Her younger sister follows. Before Beth goes into the house to see how Gracie’s doing and to direct the process of going to bed, she reads just a few more pages.

SHORTLY AFTER THE
girls go to sleep, Beth brings her book with her to bed, more tired than she has any reason to be after such a luxuriously free day. She hopes to finish the next chapter, maybe even the whole book, but her eyes close before she turns a single page.

As she falls into a deep sleep, unprocessed thoughts about the autistic girl in the book she’s reading search out similar elements learned some months ago about the main character in
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
. Detached from people. Bewildered by emotions. Enthralled by repetition. An uncelebrated intelligence. A primal need for order. A row of blocks. A series of numbers. A sensitivity to sound and touch. Persistent. Silent. Honest. Brave. Misunderstood.

These elements combine while she sleeps, blending into something new, something that can no longer be distinguished as belonging to either the girl in
The Siege
or the boy in
The Curious Incident
. It is a prethought, a shadow of an idea forming.

The shadow travels through her mind, gathering energy, weaving through the short story she once wrote about a peculiar boy’s imaginary world, merging with the image of a spinning pinwheel and the sound of a scream, absorbing the memory of a small boy and the joy in his eyes as he lined up rocks on the beach. And now, having collected the elements and the power they needed, through a neurological alchemy not yet described in any book, these many images and sounds within the shadow in her mind assemble, first into a chorus, and then, finally, into a single voice. The shadow is no longer a shadow. It has become inspiration.

That night, a brown-haired, brown-eyed boy inhabits her dreams, a boy who sees and hears and feels the world in a unique and almost unimaginable way. She doesn’t know him, yet her mind does. She sees him clearly. He is vivid and real. She understands him. She’s still dreaming about this boy when she is awakened in the morning by her alarm clock.

At nine, she drops the girls off at the community center and tells them to have a great day, and Sophie slams the car door. Beth then drives directly to the library.

She goes upstairs and looks up at the clock. It’s nine fifteen. Sitting in the same seat she sat in yesterday, she opens her notebook, uncaps her pen, takes a deep breath, and begins to write in the voice of the boy in her dream.

CHAPTER 12

I am lying on the deck in the backyard, looking up at the sky. Looking up at the sky is one of my favorite things to do, especially on a no-cloud day. On a no-cloud day, I stare at the blue sky, and I love it. I stare at the blue sky for so long, and I love it so much, that I leave my skin and scatter out into it, the way rain puddles return to the sky on a hot day.

I leave the boy lying on the deck, and I become the blue sky. I am blue sky, and I am high above the earth and the boy lying on the deck, and I am floating and free. I am blue sky, and I am air, gliding on waves of wind, swirling and blowing, weightless and warm under the sun, above the earth and the boy on the deck.

I am blue sky, and I am air. I am everywhere.

I am blue sky and air blowing into lungs. I am breath. I am air moving in and out of squirrels and birds and my mother and father and the green leaves on the trees. I am air turning into energy inside bodies, becoming pieces of what is living inside. I am hearts and bones and thoughts, unspoken words inside the head of the boy lying on the
deck, my father’s muscles, my mother’s sorrow. I am blue sky and air and breath and energy, a part of every living thing around me.

I look up into the no-cloud sky, and I am everywhere, connected to all living things. I look down at the boy lying on the deck. He is happy.

CHAPTER 13

D
avid follows Olivia into the kitchen, hanging back and looking around as he walks, probably inspecting the condition of the floors and the window casings, assessing the current value of the place. He can’t help it. She pours him a glass of wine and hands it to him.

“The cottage looks good.”

“Thanks. You hungry? I made a salad,” she says.

“No, I had a lobster roll on the way over. Wine is good. Here, I brought you this.” He hands her a small, white paper bag.

“Aunt Leah’s,” she says, smiling, shaking the bag, knowing even before she opens it and sees the hunk of chocolate fudge.

“You look good,” he says.

“You, too.”

He does. He’s wearing a plaid, cotton, button-down shirt, unbuttoned and untucked over a gray T-shirt, jeans, and black, Italian leather shoes. His hair, black but graying at his temples and in his sideburns, is much longer than he used to wear it. Thick and straight when it’s short, this new length, uncombed and tousled, reveals its natural waves and cowlicks. She likes it.