This Must Be the Place: A Novel (54 page)

This was a kid’s floor.

Eugene was just a kid. Just a kid, like her—just a kid, like her mother. And like Mona.

Oneida’s feet moved faster. Room 420 was the second from the end, the doorway as dark and anonymous as every other she’d passed. She stepped inside Eugene’s room and immediately pressed her back against the wall and closed her eyes, because she didn’t know what she was going to do, hadn’t really thought this far ahead. She sniffed. She smelled the harsh clean smells of the hospital and on top of that, something almost identifiable, something familiar. She opened her eyes and saw a boy she didn’t know lying in a bed.

Oneida blinked. It wasn’t a trick of the light or her imagination. She really didn’t know this boy. He couldn’t have been any older than nine or ten, with short light hair and a tiny snub nose, made snubber by a tube that ran beneath it and over his ears on either side. He was awake.

“Hi,” he whispered.

“Hi,” Oneida said. Her voice was high, embarrassed. She was frightened of the boy, frightened for him.

“Are you Ohn Ida?”

Oneida stared. She nodded.

“He talks about you in his sleep,” the boy said. “It’s really annoying. Listen.” He faced the curtain on the right side of his bed; Oneida could see in the dark that it was striped like a circus tent.
What kind of sick bastards design children’s hospital wings?
she thought, suddenly infuriated by the world. She was insulted on the little boy’s behalf, insulted by the implication that a few cheerful stripes, a few rainbows, a few balloons, would camouflage the reality of whatever his situation was, would trick him into thinking everything was just fine. Life isn’t a circus, she thought. Life is short and cruel and beautiful, and kids know it. It’s the grown-ups who forget, and it’s the grown-ups who need to lie to themselves, and to each other. The kids are quite aware of what they’re going through.

Hell, she thought, her throat hitching. She looked at the little boy in the bed, at his round eyes, and she had the urge to tell him something: something true. Something honest. Something she’d learned.

“Growing up,” she said, and her voice faltered as she wondered what the odds were, for this kid, on such a proposition. She swallowed. “Growing up . . .” What
had
she learned? Quick—she had to think—

“Listen. There he goes,” the little boy said again, and this time Oneida heard Eugene, on the other side of the curtain, say
Oneida, please don’t tell. It’s a secret, Oneida. It’s the truth.

He was sitting on the couch in Astor’s study. He’d been sitting on the couch in Astor’s study for a long time, he thought; his butt hurt in a vague, dreamy way, not enough to make him want to move but enough to make his butt cheeks feel numb, like flat pancakes of meat strapped to his tailbone. Ha ha ha. He laughed on Astor’s couch, and then he realized he wasn’t alone; there was a funny little man sitting on the other end. His hands were clasped over his knees. He was wearing a three-piece plaid suit and a bow tie and glasses, and he was mostly bald with little white tufts over his ears.

There were other people too—sitting on his left was Oneida’s mother and on his right was Arthur Rook, and they were acting like he wasn’t there between them. They were both staring straight ahead at the white open wall of Astor’s study, where Astor had projected the movie about slicin’ up eyeballs.

It was a different movie today. Wendy didn’t know what it was or where it came from—it looked pretty old, but it was in color. There wasn’t any sound, and there were scratchy lines all through it that jumped like lightning. A blue creature, a cross between the Loch Ness and the Cookie Monster—it was furry and scaly both, and had a huge spike fin down its back—rose, flailing, from an old-fashioned bathtub without water.

Oneida’s mother laughed. “She said she’d do the water in post. Guess she never did.”

Arthur didn’t react at all. He pressed two fingers against his nose, and squinted like it hurt, and said, “Hey—hey, Max. Stay on eighty-one. I know a better way to get there.”

Then Oneida’s mother and Arthur turned to face each other, staring straight through the space where Eugene’s head should be, which frightened him for a moment because he didn’t know if he would be crushed or absorbed or what if they got any closer, so he closed his eyes and when he opened them, they were gone. The little man in the suit was sitting closer.

“Hi,” Wendy said. “I’m Wendy. You can call me Eugene. Or Wendell. I think I’m going to go by Wendell from now on. I like the way it sounds.”

“My name is Joseph Cornell,” the little man said.

“Oh, hey.” Wendy’s voice squeaked. “Hey, I know you! I know all about you!”

“That’s nice,” the little man said.

“Is it true you died a virgin?”

The little man sat up straighter, pulled down on his vest.

“I’m sorry, that was rude. But seriously, is it true? It’s so awful.”

“I screwed Dolley Madison.” The little man tilted his head as though trying to remember the particulars of that occasion.
“It was hollow and meaningless. I would have rather died a virgin, honestly.”

“She was kind of hot,” Eugene said.

“She was no Mary Todd Lincoln. Or Eleanor Roosevelt.”

“Eleanor Roosevelt?”

Joseph Cornell sat up straight again. “One word,” he said. “Mrowwr.”

“Wow.” Eugene began to feel slightly dizzy. “I have a confession to make.”

“I know that you made a forgery for your father to pass off as mine. That’s OK.”

“Really?” Dizzy and ill. He was slipping down into the couch, lower, between the cushions, butt first. He couldn’t say for sure whether he had a butt anymore or not. “I feel terrible about it. I think about it all the time. It seems so dishonest to me suddenly.”

“It isn’t,” Joseph Cornell said. He handed Eugene a green glass bottle with a rolled piece of midnight-blue velvet inside. “Every artist steals from other artists. Do you honestly think you can say things that nobody has ever said before?”

“My father’s going to go to jail, isn’t he?” For some reason he couldn’t hold on to the bottle, his hands didn’t work, wouldn’t grasp. His fingers melted, flopping like fettuccini. The bottle rolled away across the floor.

Eugene’s knees were up around his ears as the couch sucked him in deeper. “It’s my fault, isn’t it?”

“We repeat ourselves,” Joseph Cornell said. “We repeat ourselves because it reminds us of who we are. It reminds us where we came from.”

Only Eugene’s head was left above the couch cushions. He couldn’t feel the rest of his body at all. He was very tired. He was very confused. He was very frightened.

Joseph Cornell stood up and knelt down in front of Eugene’s head. He patted him affectionately, running his gnarled old artist’s fingers through Eugene’s full dark hair.

“Would you like me to tell your fortune?” Joseph Cornell asked.

Eugene nodded. The cushions on either side of his face battened his ears.

“You will grow up and die.”

“That’s a shitty fortune,” Eugene tried to say, but the ravenous couch muffled him.

“On the contrary,” Joseph Cornell said, leaning in closer. “It’s the single greatest thing that will ever happen to you.” And he kissed Eugene with soft full lips that didn’t seem at all like the lips a dead introverted artist ought to have, that reminded him of other lips, familiar lips, lips that kept secrets from him. And for him.

He opened his eyes.

Oneida Jones was leaning over him in the dark of his hospital room, her glasses catching a sliver of light from the moon outside. She looked different: newer and older than he remembered. He didn’t know her all that well.

But he wanted to. There was still time.

“I want to tell you something,” she said.

“OK.” He blinked. His eyelids felt funny, like he hadn’t used them in a while. He didn’t remember when he’d last been awake. “Tell me anything,” he said.

She smiled wide. Her teeth were white in the dark. “There’s so much to tell,” she said. “Where to start?” And she actually climbed into his tiny little hospital bed with him: rolled him on his side and curled her body around his back, until they were a pair of nesting question marks. She draped her arm over his side and pressed her nose against the back of his neck, and Eugene Wendell had never felt so safe in all his life.

“You were right from the start,” she whispered. “I’m named after a spoon.”

“You want to tell me why you’re doing that?” Max asked.

No.

Arthur rubbed a white daisy petal, fondant dried but still sweet on his tongue, between his thumb and the crook of his index finger. Then
he tossed it out the window, into the black beside the highway, as he’d been doing every fifteen minutes since they left Ruby Falls.

“Where did you even get those?”

“Mona.”

“Like a snack?”

Arthur handed him a petal. “They’re edible. But don’t bite down. You’ll lose a tooth.”

“Road trip! Woo!” Max said, voice garbled around the petal in his mouth. He smiled to show Arthur that he was still
so
fucking happy to see him; but he was kidding himself if he thought Arthur couldn’t see straight through to the worry, to the anxiety he really felt.

Arthur had barely spoken since they pulled out of Mona’s driveway. He’d spent the first hour on the one-lane highway to Syracuse staring at the two objects in his hands, his awakening brain stretching, yawning, percolating like a coffeepot. In one hand, he held the small parcel with Amy’s ashes; in the other was the GPS device Max had rented with the car. Together with the bag of leftover fondant petals he found in the pouch of his sweatshirt, that he’d felt Mona slip inside when they said good-bye, they told him what to do next.

He smiled at Max, to show him everything was happening as it should. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I know exactly where we’re going. And now the GPS agrees.”

“Are you sure that thing even gets service out here? Wherever . . . we are?” Max craned his neck over the steering wheel, but there was nothing to see but highway and taillights and mile markers.

“We’re taking the next exit, merging onto the Pennsylvania Turnpike.”

“The—the what?” Max blinked. “Are we going into Pennsylvania? How does that get us to Massachusetts?”

“In all the time we drove around the city and county of Los Angeles, did I ever get lost?” Arthur’s heart beat faster. “Trust me, Max.”

To his credit—and Arthur’s discredit, he thought; it was shameless to manipulate Max, who had come for him so quickly, without question, like this—Max didn’t ask Arthur what the hell he thought he was doing until they drove into Philadelphia.

“I don’t care if you don’t want to go home, Arthur.” Max had turned into the first gas station on the other side of the city. “I get that. But tell me. Don’t trick me. Tell me where we’re going.”

Arthur looked down at the parcel that was Amy, cradled between his hands.

“We’re going to release the Kraken,” he said.

Harryhausen’s Kraken, he told Max, was Amy’s favorite monster. Its master and keeper Poseidon released it on Zeus’s command—to destroy cities, to receive virgin sacrifices, and scare the shit out of Athenians—and when its work was done, it dove back to its home in the depths. Even when it was killed, when the head of Medusa turned its mighty bulk to stone, it crumbled to pieces and sank to the bottom of the sea, to rest in pieces, undisturbed.

He didn’t mention that Amy, when she needed to hide, ran to the precise strip of sea they were approaching, or that Amy had spent the time between the first and second ages of her too-short life by that sea with the same woman who had so recently helped Arthur live through a similar half-life. None of that seemed important to tell Max, who was only too happy to head toward the ocean of Arthur’s choosing once Arthur told him half of why. They drove across northeastern Pennsylvania into New Jersey, the land flat and grassy, low and watery, as they approached the shore.

They entered the town limits of Ocean City at one in the morning.

The streets, off-season, were dark and deserted. Max drove in the general direction of the water, following signs for overflow parking lots, weaving down the narrower roads behind the boardwalk, looking for an empty curb. He parked illegally thirty feet from a boardwalk ramp. Ray Harryhausen, out of his carrier in the backseat, lifted his head at the sound of the cut engine, sighed deeply, curled himself into the world’s largest cinnamon roll, and fell back asleep.

Arthur had been to plenty of New England beaches, but Jersey beaches were different, which he knew as soon as he opened his door. They
smelled
different: saltier, warmer, even for October. Wind ruffled his hair and he started walking, clutching the parcel of Amy to his tender chest, and then he began to run up the wide wooden ramp, old
boards creaking beneath his pounding feet, and it was there, it was all there at the top: to the right and to the left, as far as he could see in the darkness, were the pizza stands and the junk shops, boarded for the night or the season, he couldn’t tell, that Mona had brought to life for him. This was the place where Amy and Mona had been children, where they had discovered choice and possibility, had tasted freedom and the rest of their lives. There were streetlamps the length of the boardwalk but they were weak fireflies compared to the moon, enormous, full but for one flattened edge, closer than Arthur had ever seen it, so large and bright it momentarily cowed him. He was pinned by its light, stunned and immobilized by the enormity of time, of everything that had come before his tiny speck of a life and everything that would come after. And then he heard it—the ocean—turning over, moving, breathing, and he freed himself from the moon’s thrall and remembered why he had come.