by Leah Stewart
When we got inside the house Madame Gray went up the stairs, Sonia followed, and I brought up the rear. To my relief, at the top of the stairs Madame Gray went one way, Sonia the other. I followed Sonia, jumping when Madame Gray shut her door with a bang. I turned in the direction of the sound and saw that every door in the hall was closed. I couldn’t tell which room Madame Gray was in. “Don’t worry,” Sonia said. “She won’t come out again for hours. Sometimes she spends the whole day in there, with the lights out and the curtains drawn.”
She pushed open one of the doors. “This is my room,” she said. She walked in first, and then turned as if to see my reaction.
It was a room for a little girl. The furniture was white, painted with sprays of pink roses. The carpet was pink. There was a four-poster bed hung with lacy curtains. On the walls were paintings of ballerinas, none of the posters of actors or rock stars I favored. “It’s crazy girly, isn’t it?” Sonia said. “My father had it decorated for me when I was seven. I’m afraid it would hurt his feelings if I changed it.”
“It’s really . . . clean,” I said.
She gave me a rueful smile, and then bent to lift the bottom of the pink-and-white bedspread. I crouched to look underneath the bed and saw a crazed jumble of clothing, books, candy wrappers, crumpled paper, and, pushed way back against the wall, a few old Barbie dolls.
“Wow,” I said. We straightened up. “Your mother doesn’t check under here?”
Sonia shook her head. “It’s the same under her bed,” she said. “The whole house is like this. You don’t want to look in the kitchen cabinets.” She sat on the edge of her bed and fixed me with a hard stare. “Can you keep a secret?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said.
“No, I mean, really. Can you really keep a secret? Can you swear to never, ever tell?”
“Yes,” I said, growing annoyed.
“Even under pressure? Even if someone asks you questions?”
“I can lie,” I said. “I’m a good liar.”
“That’s true,” she said. “I noticed that yesterday.” She looked away, moving her fingers in the air like she was playing invisible piano keys. I’d learn to recognize this gesture as a sign of anxious thought. At that moment it just seemed as strange as everything else about her—her crazy mother, her childish room, the unnerving intensity in her manner. Even with all that, I didn’t feel any urge to retreat from the friendship we were beginning. She fascinated me, and whatever she was thinking of telling me, I wanted to know what it was.
“So, yes, I can keep a secret,” I said.
“Good,” she said, her tone suddenly brisk and decisive. “I’ve decided to tell you everything.” She pointed at the digital clock on her bedside table. “What does that look like to you?”
“A clock.”
“No, but what does it say?”
“It says three-fifty-three.”
She shook her head. “Not to me, it doesn’t. To me it says, ‘Hello, I am a bunch of little sticks.’ ”
“I don’t get it,” I said.
“Numbers,” she said. “Sometimes I can’t read them. They reverse or turn themselves upside down. They come loose and float around in space. Sixes look like nines. Fives look like threes. And sometimes they all just fall apart into a bunch of little sticks.”
I squinted at the green display on the clock until the numbers blurred, but I couldn’t make them do any tricks. “Why?” I asked.
“I’m dyscalculate,” she said. “It’s a rare condition that usually occurs only in the brain-damaged. No one knows why I have it.”
“What does it mean?”
“It means I’m stupid,” she said. “I can’t do math. Sometimes I think I’m doing math, and then I realize I’ve just written a bunch of little lines. Who would do that besides a stupid person?”
“You don’t seem stupid,” I said.
“I’m good at hiding it.” Her voice was almost angry now, and she was watching me with a narrow-eyed intensity, as if she expected that at any moment I’d denounce her, slap her across the face like her mother had. “I have good days, when I can read numbers. On bad days, if I’m in class and I can’t find the right page number in the book, I let it fall off my desk. The person who picks it up automatically turns to the right page before they give it back. If the teacher asks me to read numbers on the board, I squint and say I forgot my glasses. If I’m supposed to call someone and I can’t dial their phone number, I’ll tell them I got a busy signal or that my parents were on the phone all night. Some numbers I can dial because I’ve memorized the pattern on the phone.” She punched a number on an imaginary phone in the air. “If I have to pay for something, I just hand someone the bills and hope they’ll give me the right change, and if they say, ‘This is only a five,’ I laugh and say, ‘What’s wrong with me today?’ and hand them another bill. I know it’s George Washington on the one, but sometimes I still get confused.”
“No one knows about this?”
She shook her head. “My parents. The people who tested me in Albuquerque when I was little. You.”
“Why don’t you just tell people?”
She looked at me like I’d suggested she run naked down the hall. “Would you tell people if you were brain-damaged?”
“But you’re not.”
“No,” she said, but she didn’t sound convinced. “I’m lazy. I should work harder.”
“That’s what your mother says,” I said. “Isn’t it?”
She sighed. “I bet you don’t realize,” she said. “Numbers are everywhere.”
I sat beside her on the bed. She didn’t look at me, but stared at her hands, which she twisted in her lap. Her hair fell forward across her face. The bed was so tall her feet dangled off the edge. She looked like the child she’d been when her father decorated this room. I touched her hair, tucking a strand behind her ear. It was sleek as seal fur and soft—almost unbearably soft. “I think you have to be really smart to hide it so well,” I said. “It’s impressive.”
She glanced at me shyly. “Really?”
“Show no weakness,” I said. “That’s my motto.”
“I like that.” She looked away and then back again. “Show no weakness,” she said.
Later, Sonia would say that I was her negative and she mine, and by that she meant that our qualities were reversed, that she seemed less guarded than she was, and I seemed more. She used to say I did a fine job of seeming to care about nothing in order to hide the fact that I cared about everything. I used to say her best defense was a good offense; she used to say mine was a wall. She said I was hiding a big, bleeding heart, an assertion I always disputed, though she meant it as a compliment—she admired my ability to hide it.
I think I knew, even when we were fourteen, what a relief it was to Sonia that I had witnessed that scene in the gym, that she never had a chance to put up her guard with me. Because my own strangeness was physical, there was little I could do to conceal it, though I tried—avoiding heels, slouching, wearing baggy shirts to hide my substantial breasts. The best I could do was to pretend invulnerability, roll my eyes at my father’s jokes about my height, at the guy at my old school who referred to me as Melons. I understood the impulse to disguise, and I understood, too, the longing for one person to know the truth, the weakness of spies and superheroes everywhere.
“Can I ask you something?” I said.
“Okay.”
“Why did your mother look so surprised when you said you wanted to bring me home?”
“Because you’re the first friend I’ve had over since fifth grade.”
“But you’re so popular,” I said. “You’re a cheerleader, for God’s sake.”
She shrugged. “I want those people to think my life is normal, that I’m normal,” she said. “I want you to know what I’m really like.” The darkness in her mood suddenly lifted. She smiled, looking pleased with herself. I couldn’t tell if she was pleased by the thought that finally she’d have someone who kne
w her or by the thought of how successful she’d been at making sure no one else did. She said, in a stage whisper, “My eyes aren’t really blue.”
“Really?”
She nodded. “I wear tinted contacts.”
“What color are your eyes?”
“They’re brown,” she said. She raised a hand, her fingers hovering near my face. “Same as yours.”
7
One morning, about a month before Oliver died, I woke at seven, as usual, and went to the kitchen only to find it empty. There was no sign of Oliver, no coffee in the pot. In the three years I’d been living with Oliver, I hadn’t once reached the kitchen first. I put my hand against the coffeepot and when I felt its cold glass surface I was certain Oliver was dead. I ran to his suite, the word no beating time in my head with my steps.
I saw his figure in the bed and came to an abrupt stop. I don’t know what I would have done if he hadn’t at that moment raised his head. I pressed my hand to my heart. “Jesus,” I said. I took a deep breath, struggling to disguise my relief. “What are you doing still in bed?”
“Jesus, yourself,” he said. “If I sleep in, is that a national emergency?”
“Are you sick?”
“No.” He spoke to the ceiling. “I’ve decided that I’m going to spend the day in bed.”
“You should get up.” I put my hands on my hips.
He regarded me. “Why?”
“Because.” I couldn’t think of a single reason. He snorted and put his head down. “Fine,” I said. I went back to the kitchen, where I made coffee and put two full mugs, each with three dollops of heavy cream, on a tray. When I returned, Oliver had propped himself up on pillows and turned on the television. A morning news show anchor was interviewing an attractive young actor about his new movie. Oliver kept his eyes on the screen as I went around to the other side of the bed and set the tray carefully in the middle. I climbed in on the other side.
“What are you doing?” Oliver asked.
“Joining you,” I said. “This is what we’re doing today.”
Oliver lifted his mug and then, with a movement so startling I sloshed hot coffee onto my thigh, he threw it at the television. It was a weak throw. The mug made it just past the end of the bed and dropped to the floor with a thunk. On television, the anchor and the actor laughed like they were immensely pleased with themselves.
“What’s wrong with your own life?” Oliver said. In his fury he looked like the bird of prey he always claimed to resemble. “What do you want with mine?”
In the week after Oliver’s funeral, I woke up at seven every day. For lunch I made two bologna sandwiches and ate both of them. At night I watched The Philadelphia Story—one of Oliver’s favorites—so many times I could have acted out all the parts. During the day, when Oliver would have been reading or, more likely, nodding off over a book, I went to the attic and searched for old photos I’d never seen before, trying to guess who the subjects were—all those serious and smiling mouths, uplifted chins, hair bows and bow ties, striped bathing suits and carriages, hats and furs, cigarettes, lost lives. I didn’t cry. I avoided Oliver’s suite, and so a feeling persisted that Oliver was not dead, just perpetually in the next room. No one else came to the house that week, and I never left it.
On the seventh day, I was standing in the kitchen, eating a bologna sandwich, when I heard the front door swing open. I froze. After a moment I finished chewing, and swallowed, but I stayed where I was, like an animal convinced that if it keeps very still no one will see it.
“Cameron?” It was Ruth’s voice. “Cameron? Where are you?”
“Here,” I said, but my voice, unused in days, came out small.
Ruth appeared in the doorway. She wore paint-splattered jeans and a T-shirt, a huge cardboard box under her arm. She had a red bandanna over her white hair. “There you are.” She made a face. “What are you eating?”
“Bologna. Are we going to paint?”
She set the box on the table. It was empty. “No.” She rolled her shoulders and one of them cracked. “We’re going to clean. We’re going to sort. We’re going to give stuff away.”
“Right now? Why?”
She gave me a disgusted look. Then she pointed at the sandwich in my hand. “Isn’t it obvious?” she said. “Don’t tell me you like bologna. Now, come on.” She picked up her box and marched from the kitchen, heading in the direction of Oliver’s suite.
This was a dilemma—not only did I not want to sort and clean Oliver’s suite, I didn’t even want to go in there, but I couldn’t bear the thought of Ruth making all the decisions alone. What did Ruth know of the value of the ballpoint pen on Oliver’s bedside table, his favorite pen, without which he wouldn’t write a check or even sign his name? To her, that pen would look ordinary, would look like trash. The longer I stood in paralyzed indecision, the more likely Ruth was to be ripping through Oliver’s bedroom like a natural disaster, turning all his treasures into debris.
I expected to find Ruth flinging the closets and dresser drawers open, grabbing clothes and books by the armload. But she was standing stock-still in the center of Oliver’s bedroom, the cardboard box on her hip. When she turned to me there were tears in her eyes. “The sheets are still rumpled,” she said.
I made a quick survey of the room, letting my eyes skip over the bed. There were three dressers topped with bookcases. There were two closets, an armoire, two wooden chests, and two bedside tables, each with a drawer. That was just the bedroom. There was also the bathroom, with its shelves, cabinet, and medicine chest, and then there was all the built-in storage in the den. “Okay,” I said briskly. I clapped my hands at Ruth like a coach. “Let’s do the big job first.” I pointed at the wall of dressers.
Ruth stared at me. “I changed my mind. I can’t do it.”
“Yes, you can. Come on, let’s go.”
She set down her box, and we turned toward the dressers. We each opened a drawer, and sighed in unison at the chaos revealed.
It’s astonishing what a single life accumulates. The belts, lightbulbs, AAA batteries, bud vases, safety pins, expired medications, eyeglasses, rubber bands, picture frames, birth announcements, buttons from old coats, boxes that once held jewelry—all the things we think we just might need someday. These things we endow with a certain life—the possibility that we might use them, the memory we attach to them—and then, when we die, they become just things again. Again and again Ruth and I turned to each other, holding up a broken travel alarm or a never-used date planner from 1979, and said, “What on earth was he saving this for?” More than once one of us held up an unidentifiable object—a black plastic rectangle, a twisted piece of metal—and said, “What the hell is this?”
After three hours we had emptied the dresser drawers. Ruth shut the last one with an air of weary victory, and then reconsidered. She reopened each one and ran her hand all the way to the back.
“I think we got it all,” I said, but she kept looking. As each drawer came up empty, she seemed to grow more certain that there was something still to find. In the last drawer she checked, she found a small gray jewelry box, printed with the name of the jeweler in gold.
“Another one?” I said. “He really loved those empty jewelry boxes.”
Ruth shook it. “There’s something inside.” She made an excited face—a pirate about to open the treasure chest—and then she took off the lid. In a tone of wonder, she said, “I thought these were lost.” She showed me two slender gold bands—her parents’ wedding rings.
After that, Ruth didn’t want to clean anymore. She sat on the floor and turned the rings over and over in her hands, reading the inscriptions inside. I was glad she had found something that meant so much to her, but I couldn’t conquer the envy I felt at the emotion in her voice. I wanted to find something, too. On my own I lost the focus that had gotten us through the first task. I wandered from closet to dresser and back again, opening and closing drawers.
At Oliver’s bedside table, I
picked up his favorite pen. “Can I keep this?”
“What?” Ruth looked puzzled. “Of course.”
I slipped the pen into my pocket. Then I bent to open the drawer, and found my reward. There it was—the exact thing I had been hoping to find, without quite knowing it—an envelope with my name on it atop a package wrapped in thick brown paper. I lifted it out with reverence, and felt immediately possessive, like Gollum with his ring. I didn’t want Ruth to see. I sat on the floor beside the table, hoping the bed would hide me from her view.
The package was rectangular in shape, big enough to hold a hardback book, but too light for that to be its contents. Oliver had cut up a brown-paper bag to wrap it, and had not done a terribly good job of either the cutting or the wrapping. The paper puffed out in some places, stuck out in jagged triangles in others, and I could see where he’d struggled with the tape, jammed it on in sticky little bunches and started again with new pieces. He’d tied a piece of red yarn around the package, a loose knot where perhaps he’d wanted a bow. I turned the package around in my hands, imagining what, out of all his things, he might have chosen especially for me—a necklace that matched his aunt’s opal ring, one of the chickens from the collection on the kitchen windowsill? Maybe he’d secretly tape-recorded his memoirs and was leaving them for me to edit—a plan for my future he’d finished making after all. I knew exactly which picture of Oliver I’d choose for the cover—a studio shot of him as a young man, his thick hair combed back, his eyes bright, his sly smile suggesting a wealth of clever thoughts. He looked in that picture like a man on the verge of an adventurous life.
My excitement made me hesitant, hoping that whatever was inside the package would equal my joy at discovering it. I opened the letter first, tearing the envelope as carefully as I could.
