After Eli

by Rebecca Rupp

  What I usually talked about with Peter Reilly and Mickey Roberts and Ryan Baker and all the rest was stuff like the Yankees and the Red Sox and the kind of motorcycle Peter was going to buy someday, when he had enough money to buy a motorcycle, and what really happened at the end of the Sopranos and who was dating who from school.

  But with Walter and Isabelle and me, it was different. We talked about things that meant something. And we all listened to each other too, which, if you think about it, is rare. In most conversations, people don’t really listen. They just wait for you to be done talking and shut up so that they can say something of their own. Or they shut you up before you even begin, like my dad does.

  All the time we were talking, the twins were running around in the grass chasing fireflies, which were blinking on and off all over the place like crazy things. Fireflies were new to them, due to there not being any in apartments in New York City.

  “They’re magic,” Isabelle said. “They’re like little bits of stars.”

  Then Walter, who sometimes can’t help himself, said that firefly light was really the result of an enzymatic reaction and that fireflies weren’t flies anyway, but beetles. I was worried that Isabelle would get upset with that, because even though Walter is a genius, his explanations can be real downers sometimes, but instead she just started to laugh.

  “I’m not listening, darling,” Isabelle said, and she put her fingers in her ears.

  It was right then on Isabelle’s porch, with the citronella candles with their fake-lemon smell and the creaking sound of rocking chairs, that I knew something was happening. That my life was beginning to change.

  I knew that if at the lunch table at school, I told Peter and Mickey and Ryan and everybody that Walter was a really cool guy and we should have him come over and sit with us, they’d hoot and boo and laugh until milk came out of their noses and ask what I’d been smoking or if I’d been popping pills. They wouldn’t care that Walter knew all about parallel universes and philosophy and art and literature and beetles and all, because they wouldn’t see anything but that stupid haircut and that thing he does with his eyes.

  I also knew if I took my tray over to sit with Walter, I might as well kiss my social life good-bye. Like my dad said, people judge you by your friends.

  But something was changing all the same.

  “Do you know how you can tell what a person’s truly like?” Isabelle said.

  I said no and Walter said the Myers-Briggs Personality Test.

  “No, darlings, it’s by their auras,” Isabelle said. “I learned to read them last year from this very spiritual woman, a holistic theologist, who teaches courses online. Your aura is the manifestation of your true nature. It’s why you see halos on angels and saints. Halos are really just very intense auras. On ordinary people, they’re smaller and paler.”

  I could tell from Walter’s conflicted expression that he didn’t believe a word of this but didn’t want to contradict Isabelle.

  “Come in the house for a minute and I’ll read yours,” Isabelle said. “You have to stand up against a plain white wall.”

  The old Sowers house was really grand. The front hall had a marble floor laid out in squares, like a black-and-white checkerboard, and a huge curving staircase like something out of Gone With the Wind that went up to a landing with a big gold-framed mirror and then split into two staircases, one going right and the other left. Some of the spindles were broken out of the banister, and the red carpet was shabby, but you could still imagine what it must have been like at the old Sowers parties, with men in fancy suits with striped pants and women all glittering in diamonds and satin gowns.

  Off to one side there was a little parlor, where Isabelle’s parents were sitting on a couch with the stuffing coming out, drinking something out of teacups and watching a news program on this very small television set. She introduced us and we all said hi. Isabelle’s father was more athletic looking than I would have expected from a professor, and Isabelle’s mother looked a little bit like Isabelle, but tireder, which was probably due to living with the twins.

  Then Isabelle showed us the room where her father was writing his monograph, which had a big mahogany desk with a computer on it and piles of books and papers, and the room where her mother did her interpretive paintings. The paintings were propped up around the walls and were all in shades of purple and orange and looked like no cows that I’d ever seen.

  “It’s a series. She’s calling it Atomic Moo,” Isabelle said. “She’s going to have a show next winter in New York.”

  Which, though I did not say so to Isabelle, is the only place you could show cube-shaped orange cows without everybody laughing themselves sick. People in New York don’t know beans about cows.

  Then she took us out to the kitchen, which had an old iron coal stove the size of a steam locomotive, with a new microwave perched on top of it, and then through to the butler’s pantry, which was mostly empty except for a couple of soup tureens big enough for baby baths.

  “This is the only room in the house that has a plain white wall,” Isabelle said. “Stand over there. This will take a minute.”

  So Walter and I stood against the plain white wall, and Isabelle took a few steps back, took a deep breath, and squinted at us.

  She looked so beautiful standing there, and I thought that if Isabelle had an aura, it would probably be all silver and glowing like moonbeams and new snow.

  She stared and stared until I started to fidget. Then she said, “There!”

  “What?” I said.

  “Yours is royal blue, Walter,” Isabelle said. “That means you have a strong balanced existence and you’re transmitting a lot of good energy.”

  Walter said “Umf” in a noncommittal sort of way that managed to sound pleased and skeptical at the same time.

  My aura wasn’t blue. It was yellowish brown.

  “What does that mean?” I said.

  “It means that your life is in difficulty,” Isabelle said. “Your psyche is suffused with pain and anger.”

  Great, I thought. I felt like I’d flunked another math test. I could feel that aura hanging around me, full of bad energy and looking like old mustard.

  Then the twins came busting in, yelling that we had to come out and see the moon, and so we all went back outside again.

  And it was one fantastic full moon.

  It was so bright that it made shadows on the grass. Everything looked all glazed with moonlight like sugar frosting, the trees and the bushes and the grass and the porch steps and the stone pillars at the end of the drive. And it was huge, like something out of a science-fiction movie. Like the moon the kid rode past on his bicycle in E.T. when the alien made everybody fly. It was so fantastic that I almost forgot I had an aura the color of baby poop.

  “I think I’m turning into a werewolf,” Jasper said. “I feel itchy all over. I think I’m growing fur.”

  “I think you’re not,” Isabelle said.

  “And my eyes feel hot,” Jasper said. “My eyes feel really hot. Do my eyes look glowing and yellow? Like the eyes of a fierce wild animal?”

  “No,” I said.

  “I feel an urge to howl,” Jasper said.

  “I feel an urge to howl too,” Journey said.

  “I feel a need for silver bullets,” Isabelle said.

  The twins started running around and howling, “AaaOOOOOO! AaaOOOOOO!” They sounded like wolf cubs who had maybe had their tails slammed in a door.

  Isabelle said, “When I was little, I thought there were Moon Elves. I thought they’d fly down to earth on nights when the moon was full and perch on my windowsill. They had silver wings and silver hair and pearl-colored eyes, and they made little cheeping sounds like baby birds. I used to leave them things I thought they’d like to eat. Moon food. Necco wafers and dragées — you know, those little silver balls they use to decorate wedding cakes.”

  We all looked at the moon.

  I said, “When I was little, my mom sh
owed me how to find the face of a man in the moon, but then Eli showed me how to find a rabbit, and after that all I could see was that rabbit.”

  Walter said that there wasn’t any man or rabbit.

  Walter has a very limited moon. All he sees are the Mare Imbrium, the Mare Tranquillitatis, the Oceanus Procellarum, and the Tycho ray crater.

  Isabelle said, “Later I used to worry about the Moon Elves, that they’d gone away because I’d grown up. Like Wendy did in Peter Pan. I always thought that part was so sad, when Peter comes back for her, years later, and she’s too old to go back with him to Neverland.”

  For a moment she looked sad, and then an instant later she was laughing again, and she threw up her arms and shouted, “Moon Elves! It’s me, Isabelle! Come back! Come back! I’m still here!”

  And suddenly I remembered Eli. You know how memory sometimes comes in flashes, like a little video clip in your brain? Just a little piece of something, and you can’t remember what happened before or after, but the middle bit is really clear? I remembered sitting on the back porch steps with Eli and looking at the stars.

  Clear nights where we are, it looks like there’s a million stars, though Walter, who has probably counted them and done a statistical analysis, says only six thousand are visible to the naked eye. But it sure seems like a lot more. There are so many, and they’re so far away, that it’s hard to look up at them without realizing that you’re really pretty incredibly small. Like Walter says, mathematically we’re nothing.

  So Eli and I are sitting there, and there are peepers peeping — squee-squee-squee — like tiny little accordions, and fireflies blinking greeny yellow, and the Big Dipper dangling down over the barn, and I’m feeling small. Maybe Eli was too, because all of a sudden he jumped up and started to yell.

  “Hey, universe! It’s me, Eli! I’m here!”

  And he grabbed me and yanked me up.

  “Come on, Danny! Make first contact!” he said.

  So then we’re both yelling up at the sky, “I’m here! I’m here!”

  Like the tiny little people in that Dr. Seuss book, Horton Hears a Who!

  Suddenly I missed Eli so much that my stomach twisted up. I thought how I’d do anything to have him back again, even just for five minutes. Even for two.

  “Danny?” Walter said. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”

  “Let’s dance!” Isabelle said.

  She ran out into the grass and started spinning around and around on her bare feet in the moonlight, with her arms held out and her silky hair flying and her Indian skirt flaring around her knees, so that she looked like a twirling silvery flower.

  So the twins stopped howling and started spinning too, and then so did I, and even geeky Walter, looking like a gawky human windmill, and then we were all spinning around and around together under that huge silver moon. To look at us, you’d think the moonlight had made us all crazy.

  Walter says that in ancient times, people believed that moonlight did make you insane, which is why words like lunacy and lunatic come from luna, which is Latin for “moon.” You even got a lighter sentence for a crime if you committed it while there was a full moon. Which frankly gave me some ideas involving Mr. Engelmann, who teaches Algebra I.

  In this case, though, it wasn’t just the moonlight. It was Isabelle.

  Finally we got so dizzy with all the spinning that we just fell over in the grass, everybody laughing like zanies, and lay there, getting sopped by the dew and staring up at the spinning stars. I could hear the twins, who had fallen over on top of each other next to me, bickering about what stars would taste like if you could eat them, and Journey thought they’d be fizzy like ginger ale and Jasper thought they’d be tangy like lime sherbet, and then Journey said she thought she was going to throw up, but luckily she didn’t.

  Isabelle reached out and touched my hand.

  “Let’s always be like this,” Isabelle said. “Let’s be wild and free and young. Let’s believe in magic and wishing wells and fairy godmothers and love at first sight and doors in closets that take you into Narnia.”

  “If Journey was in Narnia, she would be the White Witch,” Jasper said.

  Isabelle wrapped her fingers around my hand and squeezed.

  “Let’s promise that we’ll come back here to this very spot fifty years from now and we’ll dance in the moonlight again, all of us, because even when we’re old, we won’t have changed. Promise that we’ll never change.”

  “Never,” I said. I would have promised her anything.

  “Let’s always remember this night,” Isabelle said. “Let’s memorize everything about it so that we’ll never ever forget it and all the rest of our lives we’ll be able to close our eyes and it will come back to us just the way it was.”

  So we lay there memorizing, which must have worked, because I can still remember how that night smelled of wet grass and roses and maybe a little whiff of pig manure, with the twins giggling and poking at each other, and Isabelle lying there, gleaming, with one arm behind her head, and Walter with his big bony knees bent up and his glasses white with moonlight.

  The full moon always makes me think of Isabelle.

  But at the same time I think about Li Po from my Book of the Dead. Li Po was an ancient Chinese poet who wrote more than a thousand poems, many of which involved heavy drinking. He was known as one of the Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup. One night, after a whole lot of wine cups, he drowned when he jumped into the Yangtze River, trying to embrace the reflection of the moon.

  Thinking back, I guess that was what I was like with Isabelle, except without the cups of wine.

  The truth is that everything always changes.

  And some things you just can’t have.

  Walter’s least favorite period of history is the Dark Ages, due to bubonic plague, lack of computers, general ignorance, and the divine right of kings.

  Isabelle’s least favorite is the Victorian era, due to whalebone corsets, turgid novels, and the unavailability of birth control.

  This last was why Queen Victoria and Prince Albert had nine kids. Queen Victoria lived to be eighty-one, but Prince Albert died of typhoid at the age of forty-two. The queen never got over his death. She wore nothing but black for the rest of her life. She even pretended that Albert was still around.

  She ordered the maids to lay out fresh clothes for him every morning and to bring hot shaving water to his room. Visitors to the palace still had to sign Albert’s guest book as well as the queen’s, so he could see who had come to call. Everything was kept as if he was still alive and had maybe just gone out for a stroll around the garden before lunch. It was like the death version of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” I mean, everybody knew Albert was dead as a doornail, but they pretended right along with the queen.

  That’s what my mom did too, with Eli. Everything in his room was just the way he left it. All his clothes were still in his bureau drawers or on hangers in his closet, and his posters were still on the wall, along with the big tacked-up piece of brown paper that he used for writing down messages and phone numbers and important thoughts. His brown paper said things like “Jar Jar Binks Must Die!”

  His clock radio was still set for his favorite station, though it never came on anymore, and all his books were still in his bookcase. Even the couple of books he’d had on his bedside table when he went off to war were still right where he’d left them, with the bookmarks stuck in them.

  I didn’t go in there anymore, though, because once when I did, rummaging around for a pencil, my mom totally freaked. She came running down the hall with her bathrobe undone and her hair snarled up and witchy and her eyes all wild.

  “What are you doing in here?” she said. Then she said it again, louder. “What are you doing in here?”

  And then when she saw the open desk drawer, she yelled, “Don’t touch his things!”

  “It’s just a pencil,” I said. “Eli wouldn’t care.”

  “Leav
e it alone!” she said. “Get away from there, Danny! Don’t come in here!”

  And her face got all red and splotchy, and she shoved me out of the room and slammed the door.

  I used to wish that Eli would come back as a ghost. I figured I’d be the only one who could see him, because kids are sensitive to ghosts, like that kid in the movie Sixth Sense who could see dead people. I imagined him sitting at the end of my bed, maybe looking a little transparent and soap bubbly, the way ghosts do, and thought how we’d still be able to talk to each other, even though nobody would be able to hear him but me. Like Ghost Eli would be my secret invisible friend.

  Then I realized how it would suck to be a ghost. I mean, what do ghosts do all day? It’s not like they can have friends or a career. Or do anything. Eli would hate it, being ectoplasm.

  Which is why I hated Winnie Carver, the Psychic Medium.

  Winnie Carver had a late-night call-in radio show called The Other Side. It began with this spooky Twilight Zone music, and then a whispery voice said: “The spirits of the dead are all around us. They wait beyond the veil, watching, yearning to speak to the loved ones they have left behind. Join us tonight with psychic medium Winnie Carver and listen to the voices calling out to you, calling from . . . the Other Side.” Then a brisk nonspooky nonwhispery voice gave the radio-show call-in phone number and explained how Winnie Carver was also available for personal appointments.

  In her normal mind, my mom would never have fallen for somebody like Winnie Carver, but after Eli died, my mom was pretty much cracked. Walter says this isn’t surprising. For example, after the Civil War, due to the bereaved being mentally unbalanced by loss and grief, lots of people turned to spiritualism, trying to get in touch with their dead husbands and sons.

  My mom would go off and see Winnie Carver and then she’d come home and shut herself up in Eli’s room and then she and my dad would fight.