A Sense of the Infinite

by Hilary T. Smith

  I was hungry, and a little crampy, and woozy from the sedative drugs. On the drive home, Ava stopped at a coffee shop to get us blueberry scones. When we got back to the dorm, Ava’s roommates had pooled together to buy me flowers. They were sitting in a vase on Ava’s desk, dahlias like fireworks, yellow bursting out of pink. Get Well Soon, said the card, with a picture of a cartoon frog. Love, your friends at Mackenzie House.

  “What do you feel like doing now?” said Ava. “Want me to stay with you, or would you rather be alone?”

  “I think I want to be alone for a while.”

  “You can use my computer if you want. Or take a nap or a shower. Eat whatever you want in the kitchen. You know where the tea is, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  She smiled at me, her blue hair bright against the white wall.

  Funny, the people you end up being close to in the end.

  61

  WHEN AVA LEFT, I WENT THE kitchen to make tea. The dorm was quiet. While the water boiled, I took my time choosing from a dozen jars of flaky stuff with names like Peppermint Passion and Ginger Fairy. When my tea was ready, I carried the mug up to Ava’s room and started to read one of her theater books.

  Outside Ava’s window, people were trickling across the quad like colored dots, hurrying to their classes. A few intrepid squirrels were venturing out to inspect post-lunchtime contributions to the garbage cans. I imagined that this was my life. Curling up in a dorm room, reading a smart book, waiting for my friends to get back from their classes so we could cook something delicious and figure out what we were doing that night. On the weekends, I’d go rock climbing or hiking, or lie in the grassy quad watching leaves fall. I wondered if I’d think about this day—if I’d remember myself at seventeen, throwing up on the Greyhound, sliding down Half Moon Mountain, going to the clinic with Ava, sitting on her bed and looking out the window after it was all done.

  You’re doing okay, I thought to myself, and it was like there was a future Annabeth saying those words inside my head.

  It was nice to think there was a future Annabeth who liked me and thought I was okay. It was almost like making a friend.

  You’re okay, too, I said back, and I put my head on Ava’s pillow and fell asleep.

  62

  WHEN I WOKE UP FROM MY nap, it was almost time to walk to Pauline’s house for dinner. I lay on Ava’s bed for a while longer, not wanting to get out from under her fuzzy blanket. I was still a little crampy and very tired, and all I wanted was to sleep some more. For a second, I thought about calling Pauline and telling her I couldn’t come. But then Pauline would tell Mom I was sick, and Mom would be both curious as to the nature of the illness and disappointed I hadn’t seen Pauline.

  I got out of bed and took a few of the pills the nurse had given me. Just go to Pauline’s and get it over with, I thought. At least tomorrow, I wouldn’t have to do anything except ride a bus and sleep.

  Ava must have come into the room and left again. There was a piece of leftover birthday cake on her desk, with a note that said, Call me if you need anything!

  I wrapped up the cake and put it in my backpack for the bus ride tomorrow. Who knew? Maybe I would meet someone who needed a magic spirit friend, and I would give it to them.

  Pauline lived only a mile from campus, but somehow the walk drained the life out of me. It felt like the day had already lasted a hundred years. I wanted to talk to myself some more; to attend to those quiet inner stirrings that didn’t happen every day. I wasn’t ready to turn outward, to engage.

  It’s just dinner, I told myself. Do it for Mom.

  I rustled up a smile and rang the doorbell.

  63

  “ANNABETH!” EXCLAIMED PAULINE, SWINGING open her front door that was festooned with a wreath and a clutch of jingling bells. “Come on in.”

  Pauline was shorter than me by a few inches. She was fond of long skirts and linen shirts with wooden beads for buttons. Mom had told me that Pauline had been in Earth First! in college and chained herself to a tree. Now she was a lawyer for an environmental nonprofit and fought for the trees in a courtroom instead. When I was little, I thought Pauline was weird because she brought her own food when she came to visit us, sacks of bulgur wheat and lentils and seaweed, as if she was going on a camping trip and not visiting someone’s house. What was wrong with frozen pizza from No Frills?

  Pauline and Mom went to high school together, but Pauline hadn’t lived in our town since before I was born. When she came to visit, it always used to surprise me that she knew where everything was; that it was her town, too, from a previous lifetime. It bothered me that people could have repertoires of towns; I found it slightly offensive. In my childish way, I told myself Mom and I were superior. Sometimes after Pauline’s visits, Mom would talk about finishing her paramedic training and “traveling around a little” after I went away to college. This always freaked me out. Not the going-away-to-college part, which was still a distant abstraction, but that Mom might pack up our little house and go away too. I need you here, I would say, and stamp my foot. As if Mom going anywhere would unhinge east from west, and I wouldn’t be able to find myself anymore.

  Pauline’s house was small and warm and wood-paneled. I recognized a few of Mom’s paintings on the walls. There was a Christmas tree in the corner and a big, drooling dog dozing on the couch. Pauline’s husband, Lev, was in the kitchen chopping parsley.

  “Leslie told me you’re vegetarian,” Pauline said. “I hope falafel’s okay. Can I get you something to drink? Water, tea, juice?”

  “Just water, please.”

  She disappeared into the kitchen, and I sat on the couch with the dog. There was a box of records on the floor. I fingered their narrow spines. Bob Dylan, Peter, Paul and Mary, Ani DiFranco. Pauline’s couch was big and comfortable, with a thick blanket folded up on one end. I wondered whether Mom would have a house like this if she hadn’t had me. If Mom would have a life like this.

  “So, tell me about your visit to Northern,” said Pauline, coming back with two glasses of water and a little bowl of snack mix on a tray. “Did Ava take you to Half Moon Mountain?”

  I sipped my water and did my best to chat with her. Pauline still had a long braid that went down to her waist, a braid I loved to play with when I was little. When she used to visit us, we would play Climbing Trees and Building Forts and, if it was winter, Dragging the Injured Hiker on a Sled. Things were more fun when Pauline was around. When it was Pauline’s turn to be the Injured Hiker, Mom would get a wild look in her eye and we would pull the sled as fast as we could, giggling like crazy until somebody fell down or the sled tipped over.

  “Do you know what you want to study?” Pauline was saying.

  “Maybe forestry,” I said.

  It felt like only 1 percent of me was actually talking to Pauline, and the other 99 percent was doing anything it could to acquire sleep. The pattern on the blanket was swimming before my eyes. “Take it easy for a day or two,” the nurse had said. “No sledding.” I wanted to be back in Ava’s room, curled up in her bed. It was stupid to come here, stupid stupid stupid.

  Pauline was waiting for me to say something.

  “Can I use your bathroom?” I said.

  “Sure.”

  Pauline showed me the way. I locked myself in and washed my face, trying to wake myself up with the cold water. I remembered the time in tenth grade when I’d found Noe and this girl Dulcie Simmonds from choir in the downstairs girls’ bathroom, the tiled room echoing with Dulcie’s sobs. I joined them at the sink.

  “What’s wrong?” I’d said.

  Noe had her arm around Dulcie’s back.

  “Dulcie’s pregnant,” Noe informed me.

  “What?!”

  Dulcie’s face in the mirror was splotchy and pink. The paper towel dispenser was all the way dispensed. After school that day, I went with them to the drugstore and then to Dulcie’s house and sat on her enormous frilly bed while Noe herded her into the bathroom, listening t
o their voices through the half-open bathroom door. Laughter, too. As if this were a game, another girlish adventure. And maybe it was.

  “Pee on it,” Noe was saying. “Aim, girl.” They’d exploded into giggles.

  “I can’t aim when you’re—”

  Giggles, giggles. I’d looked around Dulcie’s room. She had very few books, just a closet and a wardrobe and a desk covered with framed family photographs and ballerina figurines, all sorts of shoes lined up against her bedroom wall: red satin high heels, knee-high boots in black leather, blue plastic sandals, black pumps with feathery stuff on the toes. They looked like the props in a magician’s bag, the hoops and wands and handkerchiefs necessary to a life based on illusion. Mom and I had one pair of shoes each, three if you counted hiking boots and sandals for summer.

  Jubilant shrieks. “Oh, thank God!”

  And Noe, drily, “Congratulations. Your oven has been certified bunless.”

  I smiled, imagining Noe saying that to me: Congratulations. Your oven has been certified bunless. And smiled again, remembering how Noe had informed me, later, that Dulcie Simmonds had never even had all-the-way sex, could not possibly have been pregnant, and was making the whole thing up for drama: Unless there is something really weird going on with Mark DiNadio’s tongue, in which case all bets are off.

  I sat on the edge of the tub for a few minutes to rest. The smell of the dinner Lev was cooking crept in under the door. I could hear them talking in the kitchen. Just act normal, I thought. You can sleep soon.

  When I came out of the bathroom, Pauline poked her head out of the kitchen. “Dinner’s on the table,” she said brightly.

  I followed them into the dining room and we all sat down to eat. We chatted about the Wilda McClure house and the theater lecture Ava had taken me to, and I managed to eat most of my falafel and tabbouleh, but by the time Lev went into the kitchen for the blueberry pie, I was spent.

  “Pauline?” I said. “I need to lie down.”

  Scraping of chairs, worried murmurs, the blueberry pie hustled back into the kitchen. I thought I would die of embarrassment.

  “I thought you looked a little sick,” said Pauline.

  We went out to the living room and I lay down on the couch beside the drooling dog. Pauline draped the patterned blanket over my shoulders. I wanted to sleep for ten thousand years. I hadn’t realized how worried I’d been until the appointment was over. Now that the burden had been removed, I felt its full weight for the first time.

  I must have looked awful.

  “Do you want to call your mom?” Pauline said.

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She reached for the phone. I grabbed her hand to stop her.

  “Please don’t call her,” I said.

  Sharp silence. Something changed in the air. I took my hand off Pauline’s, but it was too late. She sank to a crouch beside me and patted the dog’s head.

  “Annabeth,” said Pauline. “I think you’d better tell me what’s going on.”

  64

  I KEPT THE STORY SIMPLE. HOMECOMING dance, boy, accident. I tried to make it sound as adult and reasonable as possible.

  “I didn’t want to miss campus visits, so I decided to get it done while I was up here.”

  Pauline wasn’t buying it.

  “Why didn’t you tell Leslie?” she said, flat out, when I had finished my summary.

  I skirted my eyes away from Pauline’s and started to ramble. Mom and I had been fighting, Mom didn’t like my friends, Mom would freak out if she discovered that I’d spent homecoming drinking Jack Daniel’s and Gatorade with a boy I hardly knew, let alone the sex part.

  “I’d already sort of denied that I’d been with a boy,” I said. “And then this happened and I didn’t want—I couldn’t stand—for her to look at me like that.”

  “Look at you like what?” Pauline said.

  “Like a disappointment,” I said. “Like a skank.”

  “Is that how you see yourself?”

  “No.”

  “Then why would Leslie?”

  I mumbled something about Operation Condom Drop. The truth is, skank wasn’t the thing I was worried about. It was something else. It was the cold glove that clenched at my stomach when I tried to finish my sandwiches. The way I sometimes saw myself in the mirror and wondered if Mom saw him when she looked at me. The way that revulsion would sometimes overcome me when I was in the shower or getting dressed for school, the tightness that lived in the corner of my heart, as if something there could hardly stand to be alive.

  “I don’t want to give her any more reasons to hate me,” I said.

  Pauline’s gray-blue eyes gazed deeply into mine. “Why would she hate you?”

  “Why do you think?”

  The clock on the mantelpiece ticked. The dog snored. Pauline drew in a short breath. “Leslie once told me she would rather crawl barefoot through snow than see you suffering. She loves you more than anyone else in the world. It’s a spit in her face to say she wouldn’t want to be with you for every minute that you were going through this. A spit in the face.”

  I wasn’t expecting Pauline to be angry. I lay there, stunned, while she got up and disappeared into the kitchen.

  I pulled the blanket up to my chin. I wasn’t sure which was worse: the grief I imagined in my mother’s voice when she said this, or the love. I didn’t want to be responsible for either. I just wanted to disappear.

  “I’d like you to sleep here tonight,” Pauline said when she came back. “Can you call your cousin to let her know?”

  Knowing better than to argue with her, I pulled out my phone.

  65

  BEFORE SAYING GOOD NIGHT, PAULINE gave me an ultimatum.

  “I want you to tell her,” she said. “It’s not the kind of decision you’re supposed to make for another person, and you can call me a blackmailing bitch, but there is no way I’m putting you on a bus tomorrow in your condition. We’ll call her in the morning and you can explain.”

  Pauline looked tired. She stood in the doorway of the den with her arms folded.

  “You can hate me if you need to,” Pauline said. “If I was your age I’d hate me too. Leslie would never forgive me if I let you keep this a secret from her. I guess that’s more important to me than being the cool auntie, even though I wish there was a way I could be both.”

  She smiled sadly. I dropped onto the foldout couch and felt my world sink like a flooded canoe. Pauline came over and gave me a half hug.

  “She loves you,” Pauline said. “I love you too.”

  The pattern in the floor danced and flashed. I thought forlornly of the flowers on Ava’s desk. I nodded, and Pauline went away.

  66

  EVEN THOUGH I WAS ALMOST DELIRIOUS from exhaustion, there was no way I could sleep with the phone call hanging over my head. I woke up Pauline’s computer and browsed distractedly. I started looking at old photos of Noe and me, the ones I used to upload religiously: Noe and Annabeth drinking lemonade on Noe’s patio, Noe and Annabeth making scared faces on a roller coaster, Noe and Annabeth wearing matching Trivia Wars T-shirts in tenth grade. I was so deep in my memories that when Noe chatted me I almost jumped out of my chair.

  hey doll. how’s it going?

  good, I typed. well—

  yeah. good.

  what’s up?

  I hesitated, my hands hovering over the keyboard.

  remember how you said the pill still worked if you took half? I typed.

  well

  it doesn’t.

  It took a few seconds for Noe to reply, and when she did it was first just a stream of exclamation points.

  !!!

  !!!!!!!

  !!!!!!!!!!

  ohmigod!!!!!

  i know, I typed.

  what are you going to do?!?!??

  i already did it

  this morning

  are you ok?!?!?

  yeah

  are you sure???

 
; oh bethy. i want to give you the biggest hug right now

  this year has been so crazy

  i know, I typed.

  i want to wrap you up in a warm blanket

  and rub your ears

  and tell you everything is going to be okay

  it is ok

  i had my cousin

  and all her friends were really nice

  i’m so relieved it’s over

  you should have told me

  we could have talked about it

  how far along were you?

  nine weeks

  ohmigod

  so you were pregnant on halloween

  and thanksgiving

  and nobody knew it

  crazy, right?

  i need to go

  can we talk in the morning?

  might be hard

  but i’ll try

  are you sure you’re ok?

  i just can’t—

  god. wow.

  i am sitting here in shock.

  see you soon

  yes! soon. i can’t believe we have school on monday.

  i can’t believe it either

  oh bethy. oh dear.

  talk to you tomorrow, k?

  ok

  After talking to Noe, I still couldn’t sleep. I got up from the computer and started rummaging through Pauline’s books. The den seemed like more of a storage room; Pauline had moved cardboard boxes of books aside to fold out the bed. I pulled down one book and then another one, making a little stack to take to the couch with me. The cardboard boxes were mostly photography books; I dug through them and pulled out one about the boreal forest and one about polar bears. I was at the bottom of the photography box when my eye fell on a spine that wasn’t like the others. It was a scruffy journal held together by sagging elastic. I slid it out from between its neighbors and flipped it over.

  Nature Notes, said the cardboard cover. I slid off the elastic and opened it.

  Property of Pauline Delacruz, said the inside page, with a date from a summer eighteen years ago. When I turned the page, a dried maple leaf fell out.