by Rebecca Rupp
Then for a minute I thought I could hear something deep, deep down in the ground, like a huge old string bass with strings as big around as your arm. Thrum.
“Hey!” I said. “I think I hear it.”
Walter says the earth really does hum but that nobody can possibly hear it because it’s a sound way too low for human ears. It’s somehow caused by changes in planetary air pressure. We’re lucky we can’t hear it, Walter says, because it’s a really boring hum. It’s the cosmic hum equivalent of “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall.”
Isabelle reached over and put a hand on my arm and squeezed.
Thrum. Thrum. Thrum.
Of course it could just have been the blood beating in my ears, because what with Isabelle right next to me, and now with her hand on my arm, my heart was going about a million miles a minute.
Journey said, “I don’t hear any hum.”
“You have to be quiet,” Isabelle said. “You have to feel the earth around you and be one with the grass and the ground and the rocks.”
The twins were quiet for maybe six seconds.
“This is boring,” Journey said.
“If Journey was a hum,” Jasper said, “she would be a high whiny hum like a malaria mosquito.”
Isabelle took her hand off my arm and sat up.
“You don’t deserve to live on this planet,” she said. “Neither of you.”
“I am from a more interesting planet than this,” Jasper said. “On my planet there is purple light and very little gravity.”
“Great,” Isabelle said. “Scram. Go out behind the barn and watch for the mother ship.”
The twins took off in a flash of purple, giving us more poison-apple looks.
Isabelle pulled her skirt up above her knees and stretched out her legs in the sun. She had great legs, and I kept trying not to stare at them. It was hard with Isabelle to find a place not to stare at.
“My mother took fertility drugs trying to get pregnant with them — can you imagine?” Isabelle said. “And then she had to stay in bed for six months with her feet up. And look what came of it.”
I thought that sounded nice, actually, that Isabelle’s mother had gone to so much trouble to have a baby. My uncle Al once let slip after a couple of gin and tonics at a family-reunion picnic that I’m only here because of a disastrous failure in a contraceptive device.
“When they were babies, every time I went near them, they’d scream,” Isabelle said. “I think they did it on purpose. They were diabolical. I was always getting blamed for abusing them.”
“My brother said the first thing I did when I came home from the hospital was puke on his Pittsburgh Penguins T-shirt,” I said. “He always said it was the start of a beautiful relationship. It was years before I figured out he was being sarcastic.”
“I heard your brother died in the war,” Isabelle said.
Immediately I had a whole lot of shameful thoughts. First I thought that maybe Isabelle would feel sorry for me, knowing I was bereaved, since girls are often softhearted that way, and that maybe she would want to comfort me in my bereavement and we could go for long walks on Scrubgrass Creek Road where the little bridge is and we could talk and hold hands. I thought that maybe it made me interesting, being bereaved, and I started trying to look bereaved while sneakily staring at Isabelle’s legs at the same time. Then I thought what a disgusting creep I was to think thoughts like that.
What I said (brilliant, Danny) was, “Yeah.”
“It must be glorious, in a way,” Isabelle said. “To be brave enough to sacrifice your life for what you believe in. Like Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities, going to the guillotine in place of his friend Charles, who was married to the woman Sydney was in love with. He gave up his life for her happiness. His last words were, ‘It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done.’ Don’t you think that’s romantic?”
Romantic was always one of Isabelle’s words.
I remembered when Eli was reading A Tale of Two Cities for an English-lit class he took in college. He said it sucked except for the creepy old lady who sat there knitting and watching the chopped-off heads fall into baskets.
Then I thought how if Sydney Carton had had the sense God gave a chicken, he would have let Charles go to the guillotine, like he was supposed to, in which case Sydney could have lived happily ever after and gotten the girl. That’s what I would have done if I’d been Sydney. But I couldn’t say that to Isabelle.
“I don’t know that he thought it was glorious,” I said. “He was all upset about Nine Eleven. He was angry that anybody would kill innocent people like that.”
“Nine Eleven was so terrible,” Isabelle said. “A girl in my class, her dad got killed in one of the towers. And I used to have nightmares about those people jumping with their hair on fire. For a long time I wrote only very dark poems.”
We were quiet while Isabelle thought about dark poems.
“Let’s not talk about it,” she said. “Let’s talk about something else. Tell me about you.”
So I started telling her about where I went to school and what teams I was on, but she stopped me somewhere in the middle of junior-varsity soccer.
“No, darling, that’s what you do,” she said. “That’s not who you are. Tell me who you are. What do you love? What do you hate? Whom do you admire? If you could be a month of the year, what month would you be?”
That pretty much stopped me cold, so Isabelle talked instead.
If Isabelle could be a month, she’d be July, because of fireworks and lightning and thunderstorms.
Things she loves are peppermint ice cream, silver earrings, Johann Sebastian Bach, full moons, tigers, amethysts, merry-go-rounds, and Emily Dickinson; and things she hates are fast food, Barney the purple dinosaur, shopping malls, tattoos, hair spray, paper plates, Britney Spears, and the oil-based economy.
People she admires are Buddha, Jesus, Amelia Earhart, and Langston Hughes, who quit Columbia University and got a job on a boat to Europe and threw all his textbooks into the sea because he wanted to write poems.
I didn’t get the textbook thing.
“You know those books cost two hundred bucks a pop?” I said.
“It was a grand romantic gesture,” Isabelle said.
“Well, sure,” I said hastily, though to tell the truth I didn’t get it. Eli always said you could get good money for those books from the textbook exchange. I thought how that would maybe have bought Langston Hughes a lot of sandwiches and ballpoint pens.
“I’m going to write someday,” Isabelle said. “I already am writing, actually. But not on a computer. That always seems soulless, don’t you think? To share all your feelings with a machine?”
“Uh,” I said.
“If I could, I’d write in gold ink with a swan’s quill,” Isabelle said. “Virginia Woolf always wrote in purple. And Pablo Neruda wrote in green.”
“Green is nice,” I said. Dumb. I never could keep up with Isabelle.
But the thing was, when she told you things like that, you felt special, like she was sharing something private just with you. Listening to Isabelle made me feel like I was standing in a sort of golden spotlight all the time.
My mom missed Eli so much that I used to feel like I was invisible. After Eli died, it was as if she couldn’t see real people anymore. She could only see ghosts. She’d stop all the time in the middle of doing something and just stand there staring at nothing, and then she’d go up to her room and shut the door. Sometimes at night I’d hear her walking around downstairs, just walking back and forth for hours, going from room to room in the dark.
For a while I used to go around writing my name on things. DANNY, I’d write, over and over. On my arm, on my sneakers, on the wall in my bedroom, inside my desk at school. DANNY, in permanent black ink. I think it was my way of reminding myself that I was still there.
With Isabelle, I felt real. Everything sparkled with Isabelle. With Isabelle, I didn’t want to be Pete
r Reilly. I wanted to be me.
I guess that was why I was in love with her.
I guess that’s why in a way I still am.
In the entire three days of the Battle of Gettysburg, only one civilian got killed. Her name was Jennie Wade, and she was in the kitchen kneading bread dough when a bullet came through the door and went right into her heart. She dropped dead on the kitchen floor, becoming what the U.S. Army calls collateral damage.
Collateral damage is someone you kill by mistake when you’re really trying to kill somebody else. Though as it turns out there are lots of ways of killing people that don’t involve actual death. Like how Eli’s death did in my mom and dad.
My parents never got over Eli dying. My dad, who was never an easy person to live with, became pure hell. And my mom just sort of curled in on herself and shriveled up. She used to be bright and funny, and she had a lot of friends and a job teaching kindergarten at the elementary school in Fairfield. But she quit that after Eli died. After Eli died, she just stayed home.
The first year after Eli died, I used to do stuff all the time to try to make her feel better. Sometimes I’d bring her presents, like the napkin holder with her name on it that I made in the 3-D project part of Visual Arts class. Or I’d come home after school and make her a cup of Lipton tea and arrange Fig Newtons in circles on a plate, like in fancy restaurants, and I’d take them up to the bedroom where she spent a lot of time lying on the bed with the shades pulled down.
She’d say, “Just put it there on the table, Danny,” and I could tell by the way she said it that she wasn’t going to eat those cookies.
Much later, when I told Isabelle about it, she said that maybe the Fig Newtons were a mistake, because everyone knows that real comfort food has chocolate in it. But I think that for my mom there wasn’t any comfort food.
Her heart was broken. For a long time I thought that she was going to die too.
Walter says it really is possible to die of a broken heart. Though it’s not really a break, Walter says, but more of a pop after part of your heart blows up like a balloon. Great emotional stress, like after someone dies, messes up the heart muscles until they go all weak and start to bulge, and if they bulge too much, you die. Officially this is a condition called takotsubo cardiomyopathy, which nobody on earth can pronounce except Japanese fishermen, medical doctors, and Walter. The takotsubo part is the Japanese word for “octopus trap.” Japanese octopus traps are these big roundish pots, the same shape that a broken heart takes on before it blows.
At which point Walter got sidetracked onto octopuses and how nobody has any business trapping them because they’re as smart as dogs, so eating an octopus is like chowing down on Man’s Best Friend. Walter’s favorite animal is the octopus.
Dogs can die of broken hearts. When old Mr. Pilcher, Jim Pilcher’s granddad, died, his dog, Bernie, just lay down and died too. When they all got back from the funeral, Jim said, there was Bernie, all cold and stiff on the floor, with his head on old Mr. Pilcher’s needlepoint carpet slippers, the ones he used to chew.
When we got the news about Eli, that was one thing I thought of — that I was glad he didn’t have a dog. Or, I guess, an octopus, though back then I didn’t know how smart they were.
Isabelle thought it would be romantic to die of a broken heart, like Romeo and Juliet, though Walter says that in their case death was helped along by poison, stupidity, and a failure to communicate.
“If Simon died, I would simply waste away,” Isabelle said.
We were all sitting under one of the big old trees on the Sowers lawn because it was shady and there was a little breeze. Isabelle was wearing a denim skirt and a shirt with little puffed sleeves, embroidered all over with flowers and birds. She leaned back against the tree trunk and got a sort of dreamy, faraway look.
“I would lie on a brocade sofa wearing a long white nightgown with little pearl buttons, and a white lace shawl over my knees, and I would grow thinner and frailer and paler, and finally, when the last leaf fell, my spirit would go with it.”
Simon, aka Simon Dewitt Paxton, was now pigging out on chocolate éclairs in France. Isabelle wore a gold chain around her neck with a little gold pendant in the shape of half a heart, and Simon had a matching gold chain with the other heart half, which showed that they were pledged to each other.
The only good thing I knew about Simon was that the twins called him Dewittless.
“When the last leaf falls, can I have your iPod?” Journey said. “And your turquoise bracelet?”
“If Journey died, I wouldn’t waste away,” Jasper said. “I would get to sleep in the top bunk whenever we visit Uncle Paul. And I would get a companion dog.”
“If Jasper died, I would get two companion dogs,” Journey said.
I must have looked kind of funny then, because Isabelle stopped looking dreamy and told them to shut up, and for a while after that, we didn’t talk about broken hearts or dying anymore.
How the army deals with dying is with acronyms.
The worst job in the army must be CNO, which stands for Casualty Notification Officer. The CNO is the person who goes around telling people that somebody in their family has just become a KIA, which means Killed in Action. Our CNO was named Captain Eula Bates, and her teammate was a sergeant twice her size with practically no hair.
Everybody gets told about their KIA the same way. There’s a standard speech.
“The secretary of defense has asked me to express his deep regret that your son Eli was killed in action in Iraq when his vehicle encountered a roadside bomb. The secretary extends his deepest sympathy to you and your family in your tragic loss.”
“Oh, Jesus,” my father said. “Oh, Jesus.” Sort of gasping for air, as if somebody had punched him in the stomach.
My mother said, “Oh, God, no,” and just sat down on the chair in the hall as if her legs had lost their bones. Her arms were clutched tight across her middle, and her face had gone so white and pinched up that you could see what she’d look like when she was really old.
“A Casualty Assistance Officer will be in touch to help you with further details,” Captain Bates said.
Spelling it out for us, because the army just says CAO.
Then she and the sergeant drove away in their van, leaving us to begin our LWE. Life Without Eli.
The thing about death is that it takes a while before you realize that it’s never going to go away. That sounds stupid, but it’s true. For months after we knew Eli was dead, I’d find myself thinking about the things we’d do when he came home or hearing a joke he’d like, or there’d be something I’d want to tell him. Then I’d remember all over again.
I’d think how now on every Thanksgiving, Eli’s chair would be empty and he wouldn’t be there to say grace. Eli always said these awful graces.
He’d say, “Dear God, in your infinite wisdom, please protect your humble servants from the unspeakable turkey tetrazzini we were forced to eat last year in a misguided attempt by my mother, thy handmaiden, to use up thy leftovers,” or “Dear Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I cannot accept, and the cleverness to make that asshole Timmy Sperdle eat dirt, since he is one of thy worst mistakes.”
Then my mom would threaten to bean him with the gravy ladle.
I’d think how now there’d be nothing for him under the Christmas tree and how he wouldn’t be here cheering for me when I graduated from high school, like he’d promised, or be around to take me out to Rudy’s Beverage Bar & Barbecue Grill for my first legal beer. We’d already had one Christmas without Eli, but that wasn’t so bad, because we figured next year he’d be back home. We sent him a package with these gingerbread men that my mom and I decorated to look like little soldiers, and on Christmas morning Eli called us — on the computer, so that we could see him — though he couldn’t talk for very long.
Afterward my mom cried.
“He looked so tired and thin,” she said. �
��Didn’t you think he looked tired and thin?”
“For God’s sake, Ellen,” my dad said. “Of course he’s tired and thin. They’re all tired and thin.”
I knew what she meant, though. He looked different. Older.
I had a calendar that Eli got me before he left. I’d cross off every day with an X, waiting for the big circled day at the end, which was when his tour of duty was up and he’d be coming home. That was the best part of that last Christmas. X-ing off another day until Eli came home.
When I was a little kid, Eli’s being older used to really piss me off. I remember throwing a tantrum when I was maybe five or six. I can’t remember what set me off — I wanted to stay up past seven thirty or see some movie that wasn’t G-rated with animated singing mice or something — but I was mad enough to pop a gasket.
“Why do you always have to be older than me?” I yelled. Stamping around in my choo-choo train pajamas because Eli got to do everything and he could stay up late and drive a car and stay home by himself without a babysitter, and I never got to do anything I wanted to do, ever. I was steamed.
Eli grabbed me by my choo-choo collar and said I’d grow up eventually unless I kept screeching, which would probably permanently freeze my vocal cords, so that I’d always talk like a girl, and I might as well face it that his being older was just the way it was.
“Live with it, kid. When you’re eighty, I’ll be ninety-two,” he said. “I’ll be old and irascible, and if you give me any of your pitiful underage eighty-year-old lip, I’ll whack your butt with my cane.”
Then he tickled me until I got the hiccups, and then we watched The Lion King.
We never thought then that when I was eighty, Eli would still be twenty-two.
Most of the guys I hung around with had jobs that summer. Peter Reilly was using all his Bowflex biceps to haul cement blocks and boards for his dad and his brother Tony, who ran the family construction business. Mickey Roberts was doing dishes at the pizza parlor, which included getting a twelve-inch pepperoni-and-mushroom pizza every night for free, which Mickey didn’t need, having inherited the Roberts family tendency for flab, and Ryan Baker was pumping gas and changing tires at his uncle Bug’s garage.
