Orchard (9780062974761)

by Hopen, David

  “Congratulations,” I said, after the ceremony concluded. I stood with Amir in the corner of the ballroom, near a table bearing salads, challah rolls, cold cuts.

  Amir had the award tucked under his right arm. “Where the fuck have you been, Ari?”

  “Nowhere,” I said. “I’ve been nowhere.”

  “You just don’t answer calls?”

  “I answer some, don’t I?”

  “Barely.”

  “I know, I’m sorry, it’s just . . . the truth is, I almost feel like we shouldn’t be speaking,” I said. “And I know this is fucked, I do, really, but it’s—maybe we’re not supposed to fall back into anything resembling normalcy? Maybe we’re not entitled to anything that even somewhat looks like . . . regular life? I don’t know. Does that—do you know what I mean at all?”

  “No, I don’t know what you—” Amir paused as Donny walked by to fix his plate. He nodded, warily, in our direction. We nodded back. We were used to this. Everyone avoided us. “You and I, we’re the last ones standing. Speaking is necessary, you understand me? It doesn’t mean we’re forgetting . . . what happened. It just means—it means we need each other, because who the hell else is there?”

  I touched my eyes. “Where’s Oliver?”

  “Not in great shape,” Amir said. “I talked to his mom for a while yesterday. She said he’s still with all these specialists who can’t figure out why he’s so unresponsive to different therapies. I think they’re really starting to worry that it’s, you know, that it’s permanent.”

  I saw my parents lingering near the exit, anxious to leave. Rabbi Bloom had already disappeared, eager as he was to avoid Amir and me. Sophia, on the other side of the room, stood with her back my way, accepting congratulations from a crowd of parents. “And—Evan?”

  “I mean, I’ve tried,” Amir said. “Haven’t seen him or heard from him at all.”

  “Not since the funeral, you mean?”

  “What? No, he had the audacity to skip the funeral, remember? And you’d know how I feel about that if you maybe ever answered the fucking phone.”

  “Wait, but,” I said, “I—I saw him there, just for a second. When I was speaking.”

  Amir frowned. “What are you talking about?”

  “Yeah, I—he darted out as soon as we made eye contact.”

  “No,” Amir said, “I really don’t think he was there. He’s been totally incommunicado—”

  “Amir.” Suddenly I was hot around the neck. “I’m telling you I saw him.”

  “Right.” Amir clenched his clean-shaven jaw, looked at me strangely. He was rather dignified beardless, I thought. A new person. “Right, okay, then. It’s just—well, Ev’s been hiding, you know, since Bloom axed him.”

  “What?”

  “I thought you knew. Again, I only left you, what, three voicemails about it?”

  “I didn’t—”

  “Evan’s expelled, Ari.”

  I didn’t care why Evan was out while we were permitted to graduate. Maybe Evan had told Rabbi Bloom the truth. It didn’t matter. “He’s the one who deserves the worst,” I found myself saying, my voice rising. “He’s the . . . Evan’s the cause of all our—”

  Amir nodded behind me. I turned: Sophia was waiting, still wearing her cap and gown. A scarlet tassel, signifying her status as valedictorian, hung below her eye, just where Evan’s face featured a scar.

  “Hi,” she said, after Amir left. She wore no makeup. She raised a plastic cup to her lips. I noticed it was empty.

  “Sophia.”

  “You’re a hard person to get on the phone.”

  “You’re the same way,” I said.

  “I think we’ve been evading each other,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said, “maybe that’s true.”

  “Well, I want to tell you that you spoke beautifully. At the—at his funeral, I mean.”

  What had it been like wearing a face nobody remembered? What had it been like not thinking about the moral fissure dividing who we were from who we envisioned we’d grow up to be? “Oh.”

  “I think he’d—” Sophia pursed her lips, remembered how to smile. “I know he’d be immensely proud, Hamlet.”

  Outside, floodlights punctured the darkness of the soccer fields. Human beings, I decided, need crowns of mourning, not veils of ignorance. Why pretend we don’t know our station? Why pretend we don’t know living demands grief, and grief requires submission, and it is only submission that ensures humanness? I kept staring out through the window. Whatever drifted outside, in those fields, had found its way inside.

  She said: “We should probably, finally, talk.”

  “Okay,” I said, “let’s talk.”

  “Sophia?” Mr. Winter approached; I received a cautious glance. “We should head out if we’re . . . going to make that dinner reservation.”

  She nodded, he stalked off. “I get the sense he’s heard about me,” I said, once we were alone again.

  “Yes, well, everyone has, Hamlet.”

  What I wanted to say was: I wish I were erased. What I said instead was: “Yes, I know.”

  * * *

  REBECCA CAME TO SEE ME that night. “I want to give you one more chance to come clean,” she said. She refused to come inside, so we went for a walk down the very street she traversed every Friday night with Noah, the very street on which they shared their first kiss, the very street she figured her children would roam in a not unimaginably distant future. “Everyone tells me to sever ties, you know. But it doesn’t feel right. I don’t think that’s what—I don’t think Noah would’ve appreciated that. And for my own sake, Ari? For my own sake, I need the truth. Please, I just—it’s time to finally hear truth.”

  I told her as much as I could explain logically. This proved fruitless. Despite my swearing, she didn’t believe that we didn’t willingly take acid, that we had no credible memory of the night, that we woke to find him dead. “What are you hiding?” Her hands were in her face, she was yelling. “I don’t understand what you could all possibly be hiding from me?” How was I to explain what I’d seen? How could I make her understand what I didn’t?

  She stopped abruptly in her tracks, turned toward me. “I don’t care what Sophia or Bloom or Eddie or Cynthia thinks.” She stopped crying. She was close to my face. “I don’t care what anyone thinks.”

  I stepped backward, away from her. “I don’t—what does that mean, Rebs?”

  “It means I don’t trust you anymore. It means I—somehow, I misjudged you. We all did, I think. Because you weren’t who you were supposed to be, Ari. You turned out to be—” She pulled at the ends of her hair. “Everything changed once you came into our lives.”

  Rebecca left me, disappearing down Milton Drive. I missed Noah terribly. I stood under a streetlight, resigning myself to new and everlasting loneliness.

  * * *

  SOPHIA CALLED A FEW DAYS later, as I knew she would. She asked, at first, how I was holding up. Not well. Was Kayla around? No, and she knew it. Breathless silence. In time: did I have anyone? My parents? Amir? Yes, I lied. Yes, of course. But how was she? “Trying to keep life from disintegrating, I guess you can say.”

  “Probably we’re a bit late for that,” I said. “All of us.”

  “People are worried about you, Ari. Amir calls a lot. Asks if I’ve heard from you, asks me to check in.”

  I took my cellphone off speaker, held it to my ear. “Know something, Soph? All I wanted, ever since it happened, all I wanted is to just—I don’t know, to mourn. To fucking—” Rage was impermanent, time was impermanent, injustice was impermanent, my body, above all, was impermanent. “And I only wanted to mourn with you. But why? Why do I feel like you’re the only person in the world who understands?”

  “Ari.”

  “Why am I always—why am I so fucking desperate to wrest just one last second of happiness with you?” I paused, bit my lip. “Why didn’t you come when I needed you?”

  “I’m not sure how—�
�� I listened to her breathing, phone blazing against my cheek. “Why’d you do this, Ari? Why did you romanticize me like this? So—so unsustainably. You’ve insisted, from the very beginning, on building me into some kind of . . . I don’t know, some idealized entity just because you decided you wanted me. Just because the person you choose has to be special, doesn’t she? Has to be world-changing, has to be—”

  Months earlier, in a session with Rabbi Bloom, we discussed Avicenna’s Floating Man. Imprisoned in an Iranian castle, Avicenna pictures a human ushered accidentally into existence. This poor creation, forever suspended in air, never experiences material reality, and yet he is capable, through no power outside his own reflection, of knowing himself. Hearing Sophia’s voice only faintly, random assortments of disembodied sound, I fell and I fell and I fell like this Floating Man, a bundle of impulse and perception fluttering irrelevantly over the abyss of matter, removed always from the human world.

  I realized, eventually, that the line was quiet again. “Sophia?”

  Somewhere on the other end she cleared her throat. “I said I’m leaving for New York next week.”

  I frowned. “Already you’re leaving?”

  “Well, I need to go up and get settled and—”

  “Right.”

  “And I need to get away from here.” Isn’t everyone supposed to love home? “I don’t want to come back anymore.”

  “I don’t blame you,” I said. “So you’re really calling to say goodbye, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I am.”

  “I just—” No longer could I tell whether we were whispering or screaming.

  A hesitant lull. “Yes, Ari?”

  “I just need you to know—” Her ice-gray voice. Those opalescent eyes I made out before dawn, amid the unfamiliar shapes of my room. Her infinite loneliness, dignified and seductive, a loneliness worse than mine, never to be breached. “Please, I—I’m telling the truth, Soph. About what happened with Noah, I mean.”

  “I do believe you,” she said, without hesitating. “At least, I think I do. And every day, since you’ve come back, I’ve been trying to convince myself of one thing.”

  “Which is?”

  “That you’re different than he is.”

  My eyes were attempting to cry, but it appeared my body had forgotten exactly how to do so, which I found strange, considering it hadn’t been long since I last cried, so far as I could remember. “I—I’m nothing like Evan.”

  After the longest time: “I love you, Ari.”

  “I love you, too.”

  “Goodbye, Hamlet,” she said and hung up.

  * * *

  MY PARENTS MADE ARRANGEMENTS. They found a buyer for the house, an apartment in Brooklyn. They were ready to go back, even my mother. I asked how soon. Within the next few weeks, they said, after I’d left for college. I told them an apartment would be too small for all three of us. They said they’d be alone going forward.

  * * *

  LATER THAT WEEK I RECEIVED a call from Amir. “Ari,” he said urgently, after I ignored the first several rounds of ringing, “where are you?”

  Early evening. I was home, drifting into one of my pill-induced fogs. Augustine’s Confessions was open on my lap, though I didn’t remember removing it from my shelf. “Why?”

  “I need your help.”

  The desperation in his voice threw me. “You okay?”

  “Yes, I—it’s Evan.”

  “Evan?”

  “They withdrew their offer.”

  “Stanford?”

  “Yeah.”

  Grief eats away its heart. I closed Augustine. “Good,” I said. “He can go to hell.”

  “Ari, listen to me. He’s in a rage, he’s—it’s frightening.” That dark space again: inhale, exhale, focus on the panicky voice on the other end of the line. “We need to do something.”

  “Not our problem.” I despised how I sounded, despised the way my room was, at that moment, performing a delicate pirouette into the fading light. “Not anymore.”

  “Ari!” Was Amir shouting? “He’s—I really think he’s going to hurt himself.”

  It wants to be like you, from whom nothing can be taken away. I shut my eyes, resting the phone against my face, stretching my arms into the air. “How do you know?”

  “He totaled his car. Do I need to remind you what he’s capable of in this kind of state?”

  “Well, I—why are you calling me?”

  “Who the hell else is there besides us?”

  I thought this over. “Bloom?”

  “Bloom’s the one who called Stanford, Ari. There’s Sophia—”

  “—I didn’t say Sophia—”

  “—but she hasn’t answered.”

  I was silent again.

  “Are you home or not?”

  But my sin was this: that I looked for pleasure, beauty, and truth not in him but in myself and his other creatures. I pitched Confessions against my wall. “Yes,” I said, fighting against the spinning in my head, willing the world to come back to me.

  “I’m coming for you,” Amir said. “We need to find him.”

  The search led me instead to pain, confusion, and error.

  I sprang from bed, threw on clothing. I waited in my driveway, streetlight trickling over me. The weather had been oppressive since Noah died: sweltering days and nights, starless skies, heavy winds, unusually rainless stretches that left our lawns brown and desiccated. The heavens were in mourning, protesting what had befallen South Florida. Amir was there within minutes, soaked in sweat, hands unsteady on the wheel. I had the urge to run across the street and grab Noah.

  “He called about a half hour ago,” Amir explained, driving frantically, swerving to avoid a mailbox, craning his neck for any sign of Evan. “To tell me about Stanford.”

  “Where did he say he’s going?”

  “Well, he didn’t, obviously. He was going on about Bloom and what happened in the mountains and about—” An involuntary pause as he swallowed at the thought of what he was saying. “He said he thinks he might know what we need to do to atone.”

  “Atone?”

  “Yeah, I mean, he was literally raving. I tried calming him down and convincing him to let me come see him, but he said he was heading out and wouldn’t tell me where.”

  He wasn’t home. He wasn’t walking the streets. He wasn’t in the library. He wasn’t at the lake. He wasn’t in Three Amigos. We called Oliver (his mother answered, only to immediately hang up), Donny, Rebecca, Remi, Gabriel, everyone. Amir called Sophia again. It went straight to voicemail.

  “I think we should give up,” I said, still replaying the sound of Sophia’s voicemail message in my mind.

  Amir braked fast at a red light. “Can you stop fucking saying that? We can’t, okay? We can’t just forget about it.”

  I didn’t face him. “He’s not our responsibility anymore. He’s not my friend anymore.”

  The light turned green. Amir, fists shaking, floored the gas. “I’m trying the Academy.”

  “Do whatever you want,” I said, “but take me home first.”

  A pause. “You’re not actually going to make me do this alone?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “but we—I don’t think you should be doing this at all, Amir.”

  “You think we have some kind of choice here, Ari? You think you can use what happened to Noah as an excuse to abandon everybody? To give up on living, like you’re the only one who’s affected? You think that’s what Noah would’ve wanted from you, of all people?” He stopped, voice threatening to break. “You think, after all else, he’d want to see you become this . . . this fucking shattered and selfish, in the end?”

  Debilitating guilt infested every inch of my body. “Fine,” I said, breaking my gaze from the rearview mirror. “The Academy.”

  We drove in silence. It was fully dark now, and the Academy at nighttime had an eerie feel. The guard gate, surprisingly, was open. Flickering, silver lights bathed the si
des of the building. A few cars were parked in the lot, as well as a small bulldozer and a dumpster. Garbage and desks were piled high outside the entrance. Classroom lights were on. A solitary figure limped through the model temple.

  “Evan!” Amir called out through his open window. We parked diagonally, claiming two spots, and, cautiously, approached, hovering at the border of the miniature city. Wind sobbed in my eardrums. I grabbed my yarmulke to stop it from soaring into the night. “We’ve been searching everywhere.”

  Evan looked up, his eyes narrowed into blue slits. “Why are you here?”

  I knew, of course, he was addressing me. “I don’t know,” I said.

  He was shivering visibly in the wind. “He—Amir put you up to this.”

  Amir took a step toward Evan, entering the Outer Courtyard. “Enough of this, Ev,” he said gently. “We’re here to help.”

  A fragile laugh. “With what?”

  Several more steps forward. Amir crossed now into the Inner Courtyard. “Help you.”

  Evan released a strange burst of laughter. “I’m afraid I’m nearly beyond help,” Evan said. “Actually, we all are.”

  “No, actually, we’re not,” Amir said, pleading. “Because I know this is—well, this is fucked up. But even if it doesn’t seem like it right now, we can heal, Ev, all of us will figure out a way to heal. You’re going to need some time, but this won’t define us, you understand me? We’re each going to rebuild. You can reapply, if you wanted, you can do something to prove that you’ve—”

  “You really think I—” Evan blinked feverishly, placed his hands over his head. “Amir, you actually think I give a fuck about where I go to school?”

  Amir glanced my way for help, but I remained motionless. “Yeah, Evan. I do. Because you always have, rightfully so. I don’t like to say this, you probably won’t ever hear me vocalize this again, but you’re brilliant and you deserve it, and I know you have a certain . . . emotional connection with the school and—”