by Laura Tucker
After my appointment, Apollo took me down to the fifth floor, where Alex’s room was. “I’ll be in the lounge,” he said, gesturing with his newspaper at an open area at the far end of the floor, and I felt a flutter of panic as he ambled away down the hall.
I stood in the doorway of Alex’s room, screwing up the courage to go in. He looked tiny in the bed. Straps and poles came down from a web of shiny struts above his bed, and his left leg hung from one of them, encased in a thick ugly cast. He lay there, stock-still, looking out the window on the other side of his bed.
I turned away, sick at the sight and sure I was going to cry. It was too awful. Alex, the boy who never stopped moving, was lying there immobile, trapped in some bizarre contraption. Who even knew if he’d ever be able to climb or jump again?
I couldn’t do it. I just wanted to find Apollo and get out of there. But right as I turned to flee, Alex swiveled his head toward the door.
“Ollie?” he called out, and I had no choice but to go back.
“Hey,” he said, grabbing at the steel triangle dangling down in front of him and swinging himself up to sit.
“Wow,” I said, because I couldn’t think of one single other thing to say.
“I know! Isn’t it cool?” The ropes in his forearms stood out as he lifted his body again, showing off for me, his injured leg sawing back and forth like he was living inside his own personal jungle gym.
“You see my muscles?” His skinny arms looked the same to me, even when he showed me how he could do dips on the bed’s steel frame. He cycled through all the tricks he’d learned, hauling himself up by the triangle. He could, it turned out, pull himself almost to a standing position on the bed by manipulating the complicated bars and straps into different configurations.
I never imagined I’d be so happy to see him doing some dumb trick.
“You look like Wile E. Coyote,” I said, cracking up a little when he narrowed his eyes at me. The Road Runner is one of Alex’s heroes.
Then, without warning, he let go of the pole he’d been hanging from with a loud clatter and lay back quickly with an innocent expression.
I turned around. Behind me was an enormous woman, her nurse pajamas covered with approximately twelve thousand teddy bears.
“I thought we weren’t going to touch those straps, mister,” she said to Alex, checking something on the chart hanging at the bottom of his bed.
“I was just showing my friend,” he said weakly, but his cheeks, flushed with effort, betrayed him.
She looked at him, expressionless, until he squirmed. “Sorry.”
“Mary,” she said, introducing herself to me with a wink while she was plumping the pillows behind him. Then she came around front and stuck her finger right into the center of his chest, pushing him back into the pillows she’d fluffed.
“Now that your friend has seen what you can do, you stay put. Your ribs can’t heal if you’re climbing around like a drunken monkey.”
To get out of her way, I sat down on the slick plastic chair next to the bed. Alex rubbed his chest, aggrieved, like she’d mortally injured him with her finger. “You better not forget that you promised me an extra pudding with lunch,” he called after her broad back. “Remember? Mary?” She didn’t bother turning around.
There was writing all over his cast. Apollo had signed it. So had Manny Weber and Javadi Awad. Richard had drawn a little monster, like the rubber puppets you put on top of a pencil. It wasn’t bad, actually.
“Want to draw something on it?” Alex handed me a Sharpie from the tray by his bed. I hadn’t held a fat pen yet, and my hands stretched uncomfortably to accommodate it.
“How are they?” he asked me, looking at my hands.
“Okay, I guess.” I showed him the splint I had to wear to stretch the scar tissue. “The doctor said I’ll probably get full range of motion back if I do my exercises. She said I could draw now.”
Could I? I looked, unsure, at the cast. Whatever I chose to do would have to be pretty easy. The plaster was super bumpy, and Sharpies weren’t great to draw with in the best of circumstances.
I thought about Saint Fall napping on my legs the night before, remembering the heavy, solid warmth of her and the comfort I’d taken from having her there, licking her chops and grumbling softly in her sleep. There was a big blank spot on the cast around the fattest part of Alex’s calf, and I thought maybe I could sketch a cat, as if she’d fallen asleep on him.
Honestly, it was a little bit of a cheat. I’d drawn a thousand cats in my life. Even if the conditions weren’t ideal, I could draw one with my eyes closed.
Alex picked up a candy bar from the pile by his other leg. “Apollo brought me these yesterday,” he said, ripping it open and offering me a bite.
I chewed slowly. Apollo’s name hung out there in the air between us.
“It was my mom,” I said. “His True Lost Love.”
Alex nodded, not surprised.
“When did you know?” I asked, uncapping the Sharpie.
Alex opened his mouth to lie, then changed his mind. “I ended up asking Linda after all.” I concentrated on the sleeping cat taking shape over his plaster shin, careful not to show any expression on my face. “She wouldn’t tell me, but I overheard her when we were on the Island, telling Merle.”
“What did she say?” I asked, even though Alex hated talking about this stuff.
“That Clothilde had been a blessing in disguise.” My hand was sore and tired already, but I kept my head down, grateful to have the drawing as an excuse. “That your mom and Apollo would never have had a chance if your dad was still in the picture, so it was good that he’d met someone.”
I filed that away for later and let him off the hook.
“Linda must be really upset about all this,” I said, nodding at the contraption above us.
He exhaled sharply. “Yeah, it’s pretty bad right now. But at least there’s food in here. Maggie says that Linda is on the Beverly Hills Diet now.” He answered the blank look on my face. “Fruit is okay, but that’s it. Maggie said she ate five pounds of grapes in one day.”
I winced. “Gross.” My stomach hurt thinking about it.
“Yeah.” Alex was playing with the straps suspending his legs again. “Anyway. I don’t think my dad’s going to be living there, either, when I get home.”
He must have seen a look on my face because he spoke quickly. “It’s not because of this. Maggie heard Linda say she’d made up her mind by the time we’d left the Island.” He brightened a little then. “She says she’s going to spend the whole summer out there with us this year.”
“Yeah?” I was surprised he seemed so happy; one of the things Alex liked about the Island was the lightened Linda load. As if he could read my mind, he said, “She’s different out there.”
I had one more question. “How did you know my mom was still in there, that night?” The night of the fire.
“I don’t know,” Alex said, looking genuinely perplexed. “I just did. I guess I thought Apollo would let her stay. He’d help, but he’d let her get up herself, if she could.”
I nodded. That was right.
“You saved her life,” I said to Alex.
He scowled at me. “Apollo was already up there.”
“But the firemen didn’t know about either one of them.” I watched as understanding broke over his face; I couldn’t believe he hadn’t known. “Remember? They were just standing around; they thought the building was empty,” I told him. “You’re a hero.”
Alex turned away from me, pretending to need a sip of water from the pink plastic cup on his bedside table, but not before I’d seen the twist of pleasure and pride on his face.
The silence between us might have gotten awkward if Richard hadn’t turned the corner, pushing a bald man I’d never seen before in a wheelchair.
“
Ollie!” Richard looked incredibly happy to see me, and I knew that if Alex hadn’t been there, he would have given me a hug.
“Olympia did most of the drawings in the Taxonomy,” he told the man. To me, he said, “Ollie, this is Stuckey. Mary the nurse introduced us. Stuckey’s a stuntman.”
Stuckey raised one hand, then dropped it again to continue drumming on the arm of his wheelchair.
“We have the same physical therapist,” Alex explained. “Stuckey has broken twenty-seven bones over the course of his career.”
“Twenty-eight, as of this morning,” Stuckey said. “They missed one of my metatarsals when they admitted me.”
“Stuckey knows Ray Harryhausen,” Richard said. “He played Triton in Jason and the Argonauts, even though he was only there to do stunts.”
“They needed someone with long arms,” Stuckey explained modestly, holding one of them up for me to see. I didn’t know what he was talking about, and anyway, his arm looked regular to me.
Alex narrowed his eyes. “Hey. Stuckey. How’d they do that thing where the skeletons attack Jason?”
“Well, it was animated, but that didn’t make coordinating seven skeletons any less complex. . . .” Stuckey leaned forward in his wheelchair and started walking Alex through the scene, using his hands to explain.
Richard tore himself away to ask me how I was doing.
“I’m okay. I can draw again, anyway. Sort of. But I won’t be able to help you with the Taxonomy this summer. They’re sending me to France, to see my dad.”
“My mom told me,” he said. “She’s been calling Apollo to check on you. She can’t forgive herself; she knew something was wrong that night you had dinner at our house.”
That felt like a slap. It hadn’t occurred to me that Dr. C would feel bad.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and meant it.
Richard leaned against the wall and plucked at the seam on his jeans. It took him a long time to ask.
“How come you didn’t want to tell anybody?”
“I thought I could fix it,” I said. Richard wrinkled his forehead. I wanted to be the kind of person who could.
“Next time, I’ll send up a flare, okay?” I waved my arms like I was hailing a helicopter. “Mayday!”
Alex and Stuckey stopped talking to look over at me flailing, but Richard didn’t laugh. “You say it three times,” he said quietly. “Mayday. Mayday. Mayday. So it can’t be confused with another call.”
I was thinking about it for the first time. “It’s a weird thing to say, right? I mean, why Mayday?”
“It’s French,” Richard said. “M’aidez.” He sounded like his Brooklyn grandma, Violine.
I changed the subject back. “Anyway, I’m sorry to leave you with the Taxonomy. We were just getting started on Transformations.”
He looked down, shy suddenly. “I’ve been doing some stuff on my own. After Khepri, I made a couple more maquettes; Mrs. Ejiofor helped. And Stuckey’s going to be in a monster movie next year. He can’t tell me anything about it now, but he said he’d take me with him to the company that makes the prosthetics, when they cast his face for the mask.”
“That’s great,” I said. “I can’t wait to see your maquettes.”
His face got serious again. “Are you okay? About going to France?”
“Yeah. I really want to see my dad.” There was a lift in my chest at the thought, and I realized it was true. “I kind of wish I spoke French, though.”
Richard smiled dangerously. “Yeah, be careful what you point at. They eat snails there, for real. And horses.” I shuddered. I thought French food was supposed to be good, but maybe it was the kind of good that kids don’t like.
Apollo’s bulk filled the doorway. He tossed a bag of chips at Alex in the bed, then bent over to shake hands with Stuckey.
I got up to go, then turned back to Richard. “Are you going to tell me what ‘Mayday’ means?” I tried to pronounce it the way he had, but it came out more Pepé Le Pew than Violine.
Richard didn’t say anything for a little while, and I wondered if it would always take him so long to do things, or if that would have to change when we grew up.
“M’aidez,” he said again, the Haitian-flavored French rolling out of him. “It means ‘help me.’” He left it there, his brown eyes meeting mine.
I ducked my head. And I didn’t mind at all when he reached out to give me a hug goodbye, even though Alex made gagging noises behind us.
TWO GIFTS
“Your tail is back up,” Lady Day said.
She was perched on the wide windowsill in my room at Joyce’s house, her long skinny legs in a spiky pile, while I used the bed to fold and pack the clothes Joyce had bought me for the trip.
Joyce had told me she’d waited thirty years to buy clothes for a girl, so I felt a little bad that the only things I’d wanted were jeans and T-shirts and shorts. She did buy me a dark blue dress, though, in case things got fancy in France.
Lady Day meant that I was feeling more like myself. Cats don’t vocalize at other cats, unless they’re warning them off; meowing is strictly cat-to-human. Instead, they communicate with one another (and with us) with their tails. A lowered tail means a cat is scared or aggressive; a bristling one means she’s alarmed; thrashing means she’s mad. But a straight-up tail means a cat is relaxed and content and happy to see you.
Lady Day was right: I did feel better. My hands were healing, and I could draw a little, even though it made me tired and my hands cramped after a while. I’d kept playing with Apollo’s watercolors, too, layering a forgiving wash of color on top when my pencil sketches looked rough. The night before, I’d finally talked to my dad, who was so happy I was coming to France that I thought he might have been crying on the other end of the line.
And my mom had gotten out of the hospital. She was staying with a friend of Apollo’s in Brooklyn. He was going to take me to see her on our way to the airport.
“You’re so lucky to be going,” Lady Day said. “I’m dying to know what it’s like.” Lady Day is going to be a world traveler when she grows up, but the only place she’s gone so far is Puerto Rico, where her grandparents are. “Are you going to open this before you go?”
There was a package on the desk addressed to me, wrapped in brown paper and covered with stamps from France. It had been there for a couple of days.
“You can, if you want.”
Lady Day checked my face, then nodded and leaned over to pick at the thick tape holding the brown wrapping closed.
Inside was a big art book: photographs of Paris. The note on the inside cover was short: “Dear Olympia: I look forward to meeting you,” it said, in handwriting that looked a little like Apollo’s. “Your friend, Clothilde.”
I was going to have to get out of the habit of calling her Vouley Voo.
Lady Day flipped through the pages. The photos had been taken a long time ago, but the introduction said that Paris hadn’t changed much. “It doesn’t look all that different from New York,” she said.
That was what I thought, too. There were pictures of parks, and restaurants with tables outside. There were impressive buildings with columns and marble stairs, and rough-looking industrial parts, too. There were cobblestones. There was even a picture of the photographer’s studio in there, a familiar mess.
Looking at it, Lady Day asked me, “Will Apollo keep the studio? Are you going to move back into the loft?” I shook my head; I didn’t know. Nobody knew what was going to happen next, even though they all wanted to tell me they were sure it was going to be okay.
Lady Day had stopped at a photograph of a not-very-clean little boy in a cap and boots, waiting outside a doorway. Her right hand was moving, a gesture so small I’m not sure I would have noticed if I didn’t do exactly the same thing: She was air-sketching, translating what her brain was seeing into something her hand
could understand. She stopped when she caught me looking, but I smiled and she smiled back, and I felt a little sad that the first time we’d ever hung out outside of school was the day before I was leaving for France.
“Can we go to the Met together some Saturday, when I get back?”
Lady Day shrugged like she didn’t care, but I could tell she was pleased. “Sure. We could bring sketchpads even, if your hands are better.” And I imagined being there, drawing, with a friend who was a girl, who knew about art.
“Hey,” Lady Day said, looking out the window onto Broome Street. “There’s a guy putting up a poster down there.”
I joined her at the window. The Wake Up Artist was across the street, wearing the same brown suit and wide-brimmed hat. She was applying a poster to the wide, empty brick wall of the one-story mechanic’s garage that sat catty-corner across from Joyce’s house.
“She’s not a guy,” I said absentmindedly to Lady Day, trying to see. “What’s on the poster, can you tell?”
She shifted a little, but the angle was wrong. “Not without falling out. Let’s go down.”
“We’ll be right back,” I called out to Joyce, the big metal door of the loft banging behind us as Lady Day and I flew down the industrial stairs—me a little more slowly because of my sore foot and shorter legs—before bursting out onto the street below.
It was beautiful out. There was none of the restless feeling of the last few weeks in the air: Spring was officially here, and pretty soon summer would be, too. I inhaled deeply. Even in SoHo, it smelled green.
Lady Day checked fast both ways for cars and headed toward the poster. The Wake Up Artist had disappeared. The poster was there, though, vivid colors standing out against the faded red and brown brick.
The image was a painted woman, two fingers pressed to her forehead in a waggish salute that matched the mischievous smile she wore. I caught my breath, my eyes widening in surprise and delight.
It was the Head.
The Wake Up Artist had captured the sweetness I hadn’t been able to nail in the hundreds of drawings I’d done. But in the Wake Up Artist’s version, the sadness was gone, replaced by a naughty, winking, do-you-think-we’re-going-to-get-away-with-it? look that had me smiling on the street.
