The Infinite Onion

by Alice Archer

  “Thanks for your help, Freddie. See you tomorrow.” I ended the call and headed to the DeVille, which pulsed with magnetic force. I power walked past the garage, sprinted along the trail to the holly gate.

  Splayed over the back seat in the afternoon warmth, I allowed myself a last look at the page with the orange circles and tried to justify keeping it. The steady drone of a bee too fat to slip in through the cracked window made my eyelids close for longer than a blink.

  “Are you certain he’s asleep? It won’t do for him to hear this.”

  I startled and widened my eyes. It had been days since I’d felt the memory stalk me. It crept up most often in the house, when I tried to sleep. I’d lie awake on the couch in the great room as the house filled with ghosts.

  I was ten when Granddad found the orange couch in Tacoma. He’d brought it home and filled half the great room with it, then persuaded me to park on it for hours while he worked on a new quilt. I’d lounged and sketched, lounged and read, lounged and eaten, tried to ignore him as he draped fabric over me and the couch, muttered about geometry and math, flashed his compass and scissors, conducted an opus at his sewing machine. Granddad had named that quilt How the New Couch Complements You, Especially When You Glare at Me and Your Face Turns Red.

  Granddad always named his quilts starting with How. On my first day of third grade he gave me a quilt named How You Spent Your Summer Painting Green Portraits That Made Everyone Look Sick.

  After Granddad died, Dad and I loaned the quilt with the longest title to the Museum of Contemporary Art and Craft in San Francisco under a twenty-year agreement. It was Granddad’s most intricate and famous creation, a quilt he made for me when I was twelve. The sign holder on the wall at the museum had to be specially made to fit the title: How You and I Went Camping and It Rained the Whole Time and We Didn’t Go Home, Even Though the Playing Cards Got Wet and We Ran out of Blueberry White Chocolate Muffins and You Made up a Story You Told Me for an Entire Day While That One Asshole Bird Chirped in the Background.

  I grew up ferrying scraps of fabric and bits of thread on the bottoms of my socks and inside the legs of my pants and pajamas. Knowing they were there, the flotsam of home, helped me fall asleep. I missed them.

  My heavy hands pinned Grant’s drawing with the orange circles to my chest in the DeVille. Granddad’s sewing machine stitched at the edge of sound, piecing together a new quilt. How the Ghosts Finally Found You.

  I don’t want to fall asleep.

  The bee buzzed above my head in a constant hiss of tires on rain.

  “Are you certain he’s asleep? It won’t do for him to hear this.”

  “He’s asleep,” Dolphin King says in a very quiet voice. “And you’re cruel.”

  Fox Mother Queen takes a big breath. “Me not taking this job would be like you giving up art. I’m not asking you to do that. I would never ask you to do that.”

  When she stops talking, Dad doesn’t say anything.

  “Lucca,” she says, “We can really be together. You would love Geneva. I know you would. Please move with me.” My mother sounds sad when she says that part. Sad gray edged with opalescent gold, like she’s sad that being in love with her work means we have to move, but also happy because in Geneva she can be with her Fox Son every single day instead of only on Saturdays and Sundays. I keep my smile to myself and don’t snuggle into Dad with happiness.

  “You already know my answer,” Dad says.

  “Won’t you please compromise? Please. I don’t want to hurt him.”

  “Then don’t go. It’s your choice.”

  “Lucca, I’m begging you.” I hear a rustle and open my eyes just for a quick second. My mother’s emerald green dress sounds like a gust of dried leaves when she moves off her seat to kneel in front of my dad. “You career is more mobile than mine. I love you both so much, but if I don’t take this job I’ll… I’ll waste away. It’s a great honor to be asked to take this position, a great opportunity. I’ll help so many people. Please let’s do this together, for all our sakes. We’ll bring Matteo. You’ll take Europe by storm. We have more than enough resources to do it however we want to. Isn’t there any way at all you’d be willing? If not for me or for us, then for… him. Imagine him growing up immersed in the art and history there. He would love that.”

  “How the hell would you know?”

  “His favorite book is Hart’s History of Italian Renaissance Art.” Fox Mother Queen sounds calm and sure. I know Dad will say yes.

  Moving to Europe is the hardest thing to keep still about. My favorite painting, by Mr. John William Waterhouse, lives in the United Kingdom. It’s the one of Ophelia in a bright blue dress. If she wore a crown, she would look exactly like Fox Mother Queen, even including her sad face. Granddad showed me the United Kingdom in our atlas. He tells me stories with his fingers in the atlas, like about when he was a boy in Florence, Italy. When we live in Europe we can all go on a trip to visit the United Kingdom and Florence. On a train!

  I have to put a bubble around living together in Europe to freeze my wiggle so I can be still and listen and record all the words they say. I make it a pretty bubble with tiny rainbows, like the ones Granddad knows how to paint. After we get to the ferry dock and I tell my Fox Mother Queen goodbye-for-now until Friday night when she comes home again, and after Granddad tucks me in tonight, I’ll pop my pretty bubble and listen.

  Dad clears his throat and bounces his leg. “If you do this… Madeleine, if you leave, I’ll get a legal document. To keep you from… To keep…” Dad’s hand on my hair stops petting. “To keep… him. Do you understand?”

  My Fox Mother Queen takes a fast breath, like she stepped her paw on a steel trap under the trickster grass.

  I shut off my hearing more, to make more space between their words and my ears so I can be still.

  “I will fight for sole custody.” That voice isn’t Dolphin King. It’s only Dad, my Dad who really means it this time.

  The next silence inside the car is longest. At first, to stay awake, I add black specks to my bubble that holds Europe and living together all in one place all the time. Granddad showed me how shiny bubbles reflect, but I can’t get it right. I don’t know how to paint a bubble trapped in black.

  My dad doesn’t breathe for the whole long silence. I try to breathe for us both while we wait for Fox Mother Queen to say what I know she will say, that if her king and her Fox Son won’t go to Europe, she will stay with us. Of course she will. Breathing for two people makes me much sleepier. It makes me sleepy to death, as Granddad says. I want to hear Fox Mother Queen say she’ll stay, but I can’t wait. Sleep takes me with grabby hands. I soften in the claws and dream. I dream what happens next.

  “He’ll never understand.” Dad starts to cry—that’s how I know I’m dreaming. “You don’t see him after you leave on Monday mornings, Madeleine. He cries for hours. All day Tuesday he mopes. On Wednesday, he tells me how many hours until you get home Friday evening.” Dad cries harder. His leg moves away from my foot.

  Since it’s only a dream, I don’t have to worry about anything. A dream is a story about something that didn’t really happen. In real life, I’m only taking a nap on my bed. Across the room, The Eagle talks to his sewing machine. Dad is out in the courtyard telling stories to our friends to make them fold onto the picnic table with laughter.

  My life, the one with Dad laughing, is my real life.

  I hear the rustle again. I feel my mother’s hand on my chest and her breath on my face and hear her quiet voice above my head. “Tell him it’s my fault. If you think it will make it easier for him, tell him everything painful is my fault.”

  Fox Mother Queen bends closer. I smell her Monday morning perfume for going back to work in the city. She whispers to me in my ear. “I will always, always love you, my Coyote-Fox. Always and forever.” One kiss on my cheek, soft and exactly right.


  One final kiss before she stops being my Fox Mother Queen.

  After that day, she is only Fox, a lady Fox in the stories Dad and Granddad tell me, a glittering red fox who sneaks around our property on many secret adventures.

  I sometimes catch tiny sudden pieces of her. A flash of copper fluff at the tip of a tail behind a tree. A sigh of paws over dried leaves. One red hair in a spot I’ve never been. Maybe.

  Dad and Granddad’s stories of Fox make me laugh. I ask to hear them again.

  Their stories are perfect.

  They keep my mother from being Fox Mother Queen who didn’t choose me.

  Their stories are perfect.

  They keep my dad from being the king who stole his son for himself.

  Chapter 80

  Grant

  “You did well, Grant.” Mitch slowed the BMW so we could look for Clementine’s Volvo among the vehicles lined up along Fauntleroy Way. Friday afternoon commuters and island weekenders crowded the road and the boarding lanes at the West Seattle ferry dock.

  “I did do splendidly, didn’t I?” I bragged.

  Kai snickered from the back seat.

  Mitch’s praise made me feel less like a sad ex-relative and more like an equal. He’d even trusted me with a spare key to his house.

  “There.” Kai raised his skinny arm to point over my shoulder. Clementine must have left work early. She’d almost reached the dock.

  Mitch stopped beside the Volvo and put on the BMW’s flashers. “See you Monday?”

  “Yep. I’ll ride with Clementine to the ferry dock on Vashon, then catch the water taxi to downtown.” Monday was shaping up to be a big downer. “Maybe I’ll go to a park on my way to your house.” The life seemed to have gone out my voice. I got out and opened the back door to tell Kai goodbye.

  “You’d like the botanical park,” Kai said. “It has trees and trails and islands. It’s big.”

  “That sounds super.” I didn’t have the heart to tell him it wouldn’t be big enough.

  Kai almost tore my neck off with a fierce hug. “See you soon,” he said.

  All the way back to Vashon on the ferry, and then to Clementine’s cottage in her car, I chanted to myself. Kai, income, botanical park, Mitch—a litany of city gratitude to distract me from Vashon, deep woods, Oliver, Clover, Abelino, Penelope, Jill, Clementine.

  Clementine and I shared a dinner of sandwiches at her kitchen table until we’d talked long enough to make a bike ride to the treehouse unwise in the twilight.

  “I really did not mean to do that,” I told her.

  “Sleep on the couch,” Clementine said. “Consider it a bon voyage gift.”

  We made up the couch with sheets and a blanket, took turns in the bathroom, and told each other goodnight.

  I slept hard and woke uncertain.

  Over brunch at Clementine’s kitchen table, I felt like I could barely lift the fork. “I guess I should go,” I said, but I didn’t want to. Saturday, the day Oliver would try to leave his property to meet Freddie at the dock, and I dawdled over the crumbs on my plate, reluctant to reclaim my role as the asshole who invaded Oliver’s space to check on him.

  I biked to the treehouse in the mist and trudged up the stairs. Maybe Mitch would let me and Kai build a treehouse in their backyard.

  My first thought when I opened the door was that I’d slipped through a time warp, back to the first time I’d opened the door, before I’d put anything up on the treehouse wall.

  But the nails were still there. My backpack slouched in the corner. My sleeping bag lay on the bed with the sweater I used as a pillow. Clean clothes on a shelf.

  Empty shelf where my journals had been.

  So this is what invasion feels like.

  It felt terrible, like an emergency surgical procedure.

  I don’t have permission to be here, I reminded myself. I was lucky Oliver hadn’t taken all my stuff. What shocked me most was the realization that the things Oliver took were my most valued possessions.

  I memorized how it felt to discover that a space I’d thought was safe and mine wasn’t. I’d done that to Oliver—bypassed his red flag at the mailbox, stomped into his house with hostility, presumed to overhaul his workshop—toolshed. I’d even ignored Oliver’s names for his own things.

  What a pair of jackasses.

  I pulled my journal from my back pocket, snagged the ballpoint from the shelf, and drew an infinite onion across a two-page spread. Something… I clicked the pen and stared. Something about our invasions nagged at me.

  Layers accumulated over time, stories of buried pain and hoarded joy, a mystery at the center. One glimpse of the mystery in each other and our curiosity bound us with a twist and a compulsion to expose, a need to know, the endless intrigue of a connection with the promise of depth.

  Oliver and I had looped around each other for weeks. I’d goaded him with my attitude—a dagger aimed at an internal organ. I’d gouged into his inner layers, wounded him so I could see more, drawn false conclusions, poked again. He’d done the same with me.

  But we’d gotten it wrong.

  I slid the pen along the loops, slowed and softened as I thought of Oliver’s sweetness in the brambles when he sagged in my arms and I held his warm body close, then when he leaned against my leg at the DeVille and told me about Aza.

  I’d learned the most about Oliver when I’d been quiet, patient, and present.

  Connection isn’t a cold poke to the center with a dagger, but a gentle peel with a warm hand over time.

  I didn’t have time.

  I dropped the pen and put my head in my hands to talk myself out of invading Oliver’s space again.

  One last time. To retrieve my art and journals. To apologize for the ways I’d invaded his life. To assure him I wouldn’t do it again. To wish him and Freddie a happy life together. To apologize for anything Oliver wanted me to apologize for. And I would mean it. I would apologize for all of it.

  Infinite apology. Sorry for the sting. Safe travels.

  Goodbye and good luck.

  Chapter 81

  Grant

  According to my calculations, Oliver had to leave his house by 3:25 p.m. to catch the 4:00 p.m. ferry. That meant I had an hour to find him and help him leave. Or to sweep up the pieces when he fell apart in the attempt. Neither option felt like a win.

  A jog from the treehouse through a drizzle of rain delivered me to Oliver’s yard. No suitcase in the van under the carport. Oliver didn’t answer when I knocked on the front door. Sheer curtains over the porch windows allowed me to peer inside. I noted pillows arranged in symmetrical rows, a towel over the computer. An excess of unusual tidiness. I didn’t see my journals or drawings, but I couldn’t see the entire room.

  On the side porch, I pressed my face against a pane in one of the French doors and saw papers on the dining table that might be mine, and kitchen counters cleared to barren.

  At the windowless back door, I stared for a while at the door handle. When I finally tried it, with a heavy sigh, I found it to be locked. Ditto the other doors when I went back around to try them. The whole place had been battened down tight.

  I considered the implications of Oliver’s closed bedroom door, and the closed bedroom drapes I’d noted on my way around the house, and the hairs on my arms stood up. But I wasn’t willing to break into the house. Not yet.

  Like a determined thief, I tried the toolshed door, found it to be locked, and circled to the back windows to case the joint. The table I’d set inside the door for Oliver’s carving tools had been tucked under a workbench. I pressed my cheek to the glass to try to see into the near corner. Oliver’s carving tools hung on the pegboard in their white-outlined spaces.

  It was all too definite, as though Oliver planned to be gone longer than a weekend. None of it was my business—I knew that—but I couldn’t s
hake my unease. The longer I didn’t find him, the more my conclusions stuttered on a sentence that began, Oliver put his world in order and then… My mind refused to complete it.

  Oliver wasn’t ready to leave. I felt sure of it.

  Aza hadn’t been ready to leave either.

  I tried calling Oliver’s phone. A robotic voice invited me to leave a message. Maybe he’d finished his carving project, hung up the tools, and gone back to try out the throne, but forgotten to keep track of the time. If Oliver wasn’t at the stump, I’d check the DeVille.

  I sprinted down the path. When I arrived at the stump, I lifted my hand to trace the images with my fingers—sparrows in flight, rabbits tucked under blossoms, bursting life in a forest of leaves—all brought into being by Oliver’s unfathomable talent.

  He wasn’t curled onto the seat as I’d hoped. I leaned in for a quick look at how Oliver had finished the blank area, and came face to face with a carved person, eyes so full of expression I reeled back and banged my head on the roof of the enclosure.

  What. The. Hell.

  I leaned in again. The crown and the infinity symbol hovered over a king whose arms extended to encircle whoever sat on the seat.

  I recognized the king’s face. I’d seen it in the mirror.

  My thoughts fractured. I hadn’t checked the DeVille, but I also hadn’t been able to see into Oliver’s bedroom.

  My body took over. I ran flat-out back to the house to try the windows. In the courtyard, I found a louvered window that had been closed but not locked. I pulled it open as far as it would go then contorted myself to squeeze behind the rose trellis and into the house. It was awkward as hell, but I managed to land in Oliver’s nooky room with my muddy boots in the air and shimmy over the pillows and out the door before I put my feet down.

  The archive room was locked, of course. I banged on it anyway, called Oliver’s name, in case he’d hidden himself away with all the other artwork. Empty library. I carried on to the great room. Nothing but ice crystals in the freezer. In the fridge, a bottle of HP Sauce and a tub of miso huddled in the otherwise empty space.