After Eli

by Rebecca Rupp

  “Well, sure,” I said.

  And I stepped into the creek twice. Splash. Splash.

  “Nothing to it,” I said.

  “No, think about it,” Walter said.

  So instantly I knew that I should have known better. When Walter asks a question, Lost in Space music should start playing in your head. You know, that movie with the robot that goes “Danger, Will Robinson, danger!”

  Walter said, “The creek just keeps flowing along, so by the time you got your foot back in it, it was a whole different creek. The water you stepped in the first time is now somewhere down by the bridge. And everything about you is just a little bit changed too. You’ve got different air molecules in your lungs, and your blood is circulating, so now it’s all in different places, and you’ve gotten a little bit older.”

  If that robot had had to deal with Walter, its head would have spun around and it would have had a software meltdown.

  “Not older enough to count,” I said defensively. “Only like about two seconds.”

  “All right,” Walter said. “Are you the same person now that you were five years ago?”

  I thought about how different things were five years ago. How my mom was still teaching school and cooking and telling silly jokes, and I still had a big brother and my world had felt safe and steady.

  “No,” I said. “I guess not.”

  “Five years ago,” Isabelle said, “I wanted to be a wizard like in the Harry Potter books, and I was really upset that I was a Muggle. I collected heart-shaped stones and I wouldn’t eat anything orange and I had this favorite hat that I wore all the time. One of those knitted Peruvian hats. You know, with earflaps and the long braided things hanging down on either side.”

  I thought how cute Isabelle would look in a hat with earflaps and long braided things hanging down on either side.

  “I was definitely a whole different person then.”

  She kicked her feet in the water, and the sun caught the spray where it splashed up and turned into lots of little silver beads.

  “And that was the year the twins were four and they kept insisting they were robots and they ran around making meep-meep noises. They wanted a cookie. Meep-meep. They wanted juice. Meep-meep. And they couldn’t take baths because that would destroy their electronic insides. The only way my parents could get them to go to bed was by pretending to take their batteries out.”

  “I think the twins are still exactly the same people,” I said.

  Isabelle said, “The bar-code reader at the supermarket checkout in Fairfield goes meep-meep. The first time I heard it, I screeched. The sales clerk thought I was insane.”

  Then the twins came splashing up, yelling and pointing because most of their beaver dam was not being in the same place twice, due to having suddenly washed down the creek and gone under the bridge.

  What Walter thinks is that people are like rivers. We never stay in the same place but just keep flowing along, learning new stuff and picking up new experiences and changing all the time. So today’s you isn’t the same as yesterday’s you and won’t be the same as tomorrow’s you.

  But Walter also thinks that there’s a real perfect you that you’re always trying to get to, and the better you are at living your life, the closer you come to it.

  Walter is looking to the future in which he will have evolved into the Perfect Geek.

  But I have to say that since Eli died, I don’t have faith in the future the way I used to. I mean, how do you know you’ll have one? Which is one thing I like about Jim Pilcher. He knows how that feels.

  Jim says that men make plans and the mice in the ceiling laugh. That’s an old Japanese saying that means that people can plan all they want, but unexpected things have a way of smashing those plans to smithereens. Then the mice giggle themselves sick. When Jim says it, he’s thinking about how he went off to college with his life plan all thought out, and how Melissa Murray from Chagrin Falls, Ohio, and substance abuse shot it all to hell.

  Emma says that what she thinks about plans is all in this story she got from her auntie Dell.

  We were sitting on the back steps off Emma’s kitchen. Emma was wearing baggy denim shorts and one of Jim’s old T-shirts, and she had more freckles than ever from being out in the sun.

  “Auntie Dell wasn’t really our aunt,” Emma said. “We all just called her that. She used to live down the street, and we’d go visit and sometimes we’d stay there overnight when my mom had a new boyfriend and didn’t want us around. Anyway, one day she was all hung down and sick looking, and we said, what’s wrong? And she said her daughter’s boy, who was seventeen, had just got hit by a truck and killed. A real bright boy, she said, and a hard worker. He might of gone somewhere, she said.

  “Then she sat us down on her saggy couch and pointed a finger right at our noses and said, ‘So you girls listen good. If ever you think what you’re doing isn’t living, you get out of there fast. Because sooner or later there’s a truck comes down the road for every one of us.’”

  Emma picked up the glass I’d had my black-carrot smoothie in, the remains of which looked like something that might have oozed out of the ground at Chernobyl.

  “I don’t think she meant for me to drop out of school though.”

  But that’s what I mean about the future. You can’t count on it. Because you never know how much of one you’re going to have.

  In my Book of the Dead, there’s a Major General John Sedgwick, who fought on the side of the Union in the Civil War. At the Battle of Spotsylvania in Virginia, the Confederates were shooting at his troops and his men were all jumping back and ducking behind stuff and running for cover. General Sedgwick yelled that he was ashamed of them. He said they were in no danger. He said, “Why, they couldn’t hit an elephant at this dist—” Those were his last words. Right then he dropped dead with a bullet through the eye.

  Let’s say you die and you go to heaven, and it turns out that you get to pick the best day in your life to live over again. What day would you pick? A birthday, a Christmas, a graduation day?

  Walter wouldn’t tell me his pick, because he said all the relevant data were not available yet, which means that he is not as devoted to a life of the mind as he says he is, but still has hopes of someday meeting an attractive female person who is as smart and weird as he is. Jim said it was the day he harvested his first blue-potato crop. Emma said it was the day she found out she and Jim were going to have a baby.

  But I’ll tell you what mine would be. Mine would be the pretty much perfect day I had with Isabelle.

  Not that that’s fair to Isabelle, because it started with her having her heart broken by an e-mail from Simon Dewitt Paxton, the boyfriend who was spending the summer in France. By then it was the end of July, and I knew more than I really wanted to know about Simon Dewitt Paxton. From Isabelle I knew that he was six feet two inches tall and had elegant hands and that he played the oboe and was on the school fencing team. He came from a wealthy family on Long Island and was very distantly related to Theodore Roosevelt and Cornelius Vanderbilt, and he had an uncle who was a senator.

  From the twins I knew that Isabelle had a picture of him on her bedside table, along with one of those little bud vases with a rose.

  “She kisses it good night,” Jasper said. “Like this.”

  He made a kissing face. Journey pretended to throw up on his feet.

  “So what’s he like?” I said.

  “He’s very polite,” Journey said. “He goes to one of those schools where you have to wear a jacket and a tie.”

  “Isabelle’s friend Marnie thinks he might be gay,” Jasper said. “That means he might be homosexual. Do you know what homosexual is?”

  “Yes,” I said. I hoped Marnie was right.

  “But Isabelle says that’s crap,” Jasper said.

  “Once he locked us out in the hall,” Journey said. “When he was visiting. We were out there for a whole afternoon. We played eleven games of Candy Land.”


  “And Journey cheated,” Jasper said. “She cheated at the Lollipop Woods.”

  “If Jasper was a lollipop,” Journey said, “he would taste like soap.”

  Simon had been in France for one and a half months, and he had been to the Louvre and the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame. He had also gone boating on the Seine and ordered croissants in cafés, and fallen in love with Andrée, who was the daughter of the family he was living with and who had not only helped him greatly improve his speaking knowledge of French but was very cute in a Continental sort of way that involved little black dresses and high-heeled shoes. Though of course he wanted Isabelle always to be his friend.

  I knew the friend thing was a bad sign, from the Education Day in which Eli explained to me how to break up with a girl.

  Isabelle was sitting in the porch rocker wearing skinny jeans with a hole in one knee and a floppy white shirt, and she was crying in little sobs, like she’d been crying for a long time and was tired of it but couldn’t stop. Her nose was pink, but she still looked beautiful anyway.

  “What’s the matter?” I said.

  Isabelle held out Simon Dewitt Paxton’s e-mail, which was crumpled up and damp.

  “Read that,” she said. “I actually printed it out. I was thinking I would make this scrapbook of rejections. Boyfriends I’ve been dumped by, colleges that turn down my applications, scholarships I don’t get. Recitals I bomb in. Plays where I forget my lines. A collection of hideous failures.”

  She put her head down on her floppy sleeve and began to cry again, harder.

  I didn’t know what to do, so I read Simon Dewitt Paxton’s e-mail.

  TO: moonelves411

  FROM: sdp526

  Dear Izzy,

  It’s really hard to tell you this, but I know we promised always to be open and truthful to each other, and I know once you’ve finished reading this, you’ll really be happy for me. I’m in love. Her name is Andrée, and I know I’ve mentioned her before. Since I’m living with her family, we’ve seen a lot of each other, though at first we thought we were just good friends. But suddenly this last week we discovered that we were a lot more than that. All this time she’s been feeling about me just the way I’ve been feeling about her. Andrée said I should write right off and tell you so. So now I am.

  I know now that you and I should never have thought of tying ourselves down the way we did. I know there’s someone out there for you, just as perfect as Andrée is for me, and I’m glad that now you have a chance to find him.

  I hope you are having a very enjoyable summer and that we will always be friends.

  SDP

  “SDP?” I said. “SDP? This guy signs a breakup letter with his initials?”

  Which probably wasn’t a tactful thing to say, but come on.

  Anyway, it helped because it got Isabelle thinking of other people who went by their initials, like FDR and JFK and MLK, and she decided Simon had no business going by initials, since he wasn’t nearly as good as any of them.

  So then I said, why didn’t we walk over to Scrubgrass Creek, because it was a beautiful day and getting out might make her feel better.

  “All right,” Isabelle said. “If you don’t mind a tragic companion.”

  “A tragic companion is okay,” I said.

  The twins wanted to come too, but Isabelle said no, because she couldn’t stand any analogies just then.

  We went down the Sowers driveway and past the pedestals, and turned right on the Fairfield Road, that was all dry and dusty, with the ditches grown up with blue chicory and yellow dandelions. Then we crossed the road and went left onto Scrubgrass Creek Road, which isn’t as much a road as a track, with potholes and rocks and grass growing up in the middle. It was cooler on the creek road because it was shady, with all the trees, though there were sunny patches too, with wild daisies and red clover.

  Then Isabelle took my hand. She just reached over and wrapped her hand around mine, and I felt like my heart was going to explode. Her hand felt thin and cool and elegant, like the rest of her, and in contrast my hand felt like a ham, all sweaty and hot, but Isabelle didn’t seem to mind.

  When we got to the bridge, we stopped in the middle and leaned on the splintery rail and looked down into the water. The creek was running fast and clear, with the sunlight sparkling off it in little golden blobs. In the dark under the bridge, you could see flickering shapes of fish, darting all together, then stopping, then darting in another direction. I’ve always wondered how fish knew to do that.

  “Which do you think you’d be, if you were an element?” Isabelle said. “Water, fire, earth, or air?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. I didn’t have the foggiest.

  “You can tell by which one makes you feel transcendent,” Isabelle said. “You know. Whatever makes you feel dreamy and peaceful and magical. Is it watching ripples on a river or waves at the beach? Or is it gazing into a crackling fire or looking up at towering mountain peaks or running with the wind?”

  “Which are you?” I said.

  “Oh, definitely water,” Isabelle said. “If I could, I’d be a naiad, all bright and quick and glittering, with necklaces of mother-of-pearl and water lilies in my long green hair.”

  I thought how I felt with the wind in my face, riding my bike down Turkey Hill.

  “I guess I’d be air,” I said.

  “You’d have wings,” Isabelle said, and she turned her head and looked at me with those blue, blue eyes that felt like falling into the sky. “I could see you with wings, Danny.”

  And for a crazy minute I could see me with wings too, a flying boy. Zapping through the sky with Isabelle in my arms, like Superman with Lois Lane.

  Isabelle bent her head and reached behind her neck and fumbled with a catch. When she straightened up, she had a necklace in her hand, the one with the broken half of a little gold heart on a thin gold chain.

  “Simon has the other half,” she said. “Or anyway, he did. They’re supposed to fit together to make a whole. To remind us that when we were apart, we were only half a person without the other.”

  She paused, looking down on it.

  “His is probably in some trash bin at the Louvre,” she said.

  I tried not to look too glad that SDP was a moron.

  “I can’t imagine you ever being half a person,” I said.

  Isabelle climbed up on the lowest rung of the bridge railing and dangled the necklace out over the water. “I’m thinking of Rose, the girl in Titanic,” she said. “How the man she loved died when the ship went down, and it was so heartbreaking. But then afterward she escaped from her horrible fiancé and lived a long and happy life, and at the very end she threw his hateful gift of a fabulous blue diamond into the ocean.”

  “She should have pawned his hateful gift of a fabulous blue diamond and bought a yacht and a Ferrari,” I said. “And maybe saved the homeless and cured AIDS.”

  “It was a grand romantic gesture,” Isabelle said. “It was a repudiation of false love and all that it means.”

  She leaned farther over the water.

  “Now I too drown false love,” she said.

  And she threw the necklace hard. It spun through the air, a little streak of gold, and vanished into the creek with a tiny splash.

  “Some mermaid will find it,” Isabelle said. “I only hope it doesn’t bring her bad luck.”

  “She’ll be all right,” I said. “Unless she’s a French mermaid.”

  Isabelle looked glum.

  “I was thinking how I should have done things differently,” she said. “I should have gone to visit him. Then I thought, no, maybe it’s best to find out now that it wasn’t meant to be.”

  “Sometimes it doesn’t matter what you do,” I said. “Sometimes things are just beyond your control. Like that iceberg rearing up in front of the Titanic.”

  “Andrée was the iceberg that sank my ship,” Isabelle said tragically.

  “But you’re a survivor,” I said.
“Now you go on and live a long and happy life.”

  “My life sucks,” Isabelle said.

  But she sounded better.

  We found some wild strawberries and we picked them and ate them. Then I took off my sneakers and Isabelle kicked off her flip-flops and we went wading in the creek and collected all these shiny little pebbles that looked all polished and jewel-like where the water was running over them, that Isabelle wanted to take home. We picked flowers and Isabelle made a daisy chain and put it in her hair like a crown. Then she made one for me too, and I kept it on, even though one of the stems hung down and kept tickling my ear.

  “Let’s never go back,” Isabelle said. “Let’s stay here forever and eat strawberries and live in a hollow tree.”

  I couldn’t think of anything I’d rather do than stay on Scrubgrass Creek forever with Isabelle.

  “Maybe squirrels will bring us nuts,” I said. “Maybe the Moon Elves will visit.”

  “We can catch fish for breakfast and make dandelion wine,” said Isabelle. “In the winter, we’ll fly south with the birds.”

  “We’ll probably have to,” I said. “It gets pretty cold here in winter.”

  We lay on our backs in the grass at the edge of the water, and sometimes we talked and sometimes we didn’t say anything at all, and either way it felt fine.

  I thought how now this place was special to me and Isabelle, and how maybe we’d come back here again and again, year after year. Maybe we’d bring a picnic and a bottle of wine and celebrate our anniversaries, the way my mom and dad used to do at Bev’s Caf.

  By then the sun had dried all our pebbles out and they’d turned dull and drab, so we put them back in the creek again.

  On the way home, Isabelle suddenly stopped in the middle of Scrubgrass Creek Road and put a hand on either side of my face and pulled me toward her and kissed me on the mouth. I thought I would die right there. I could feel her hands, thin and cool on my face, which by then was way hot. She smelled like clean sheets and just-cut grass, and she tasted like strawberries and sun.