A Sense of the Infinite
Page 20
When he reached for my food journal, his arm knocked into a stack of basketballs, which promptly collapsed into bouncing, rolling chaos in the tiny office. I leaped up from my chair and Bob leaped up from his. When we had stuffed the basketballs out of the way, we were both disgruntled and Bob was covered in a film of sweat.
“Sorry about that,” he said. “They keep saying they’ll move those.”
“Do you want to get out of here?” I said.
“Where do you want to go?”
“I believe you owe me some pizza,” I said.
131
THE YEAR WAS ROLLING TO AN end. Teachers started opening the windows in classrooms again. Outside the funeral parlor, purple and yellow crocuses were pushing up from the ground. Win and I performed our play at the One-Act Play Festival.
“We dedicate this performance to the memory of Steven McNeil’s finger,” we announced when we came onstage.
Dominic and Kris filmed it, to send him. The play was surrealist. We wore mustaches, and dug for butterflies that were burrowed underground.
132
IN MAY, JEANETTE FIELDING CALLED TO see if I could pick up a few shifts at the ice-cream shop before coming on full-time in the summer. I had nothing better to do on the weekends, so I said okay.
On my second shift, I was leaning against the counter chatting with Phinnea so I hardly noticed when a family drifted in from the Gardens.
“I’ll get this,” I said, and I turned to the ice-cream case to take their order.
“Hi there,” I said in my usual way. “What can I get for you?”
There were six of them: a mom, a dad, two grandparents, a little girl with pink beads in her hair, and—
Loren Wilder.
Loren Wilder.
Loren Wilder was in the ice-cream shop.
The others were hovering around the ice-cream case, peering down at the flavors. Loren was the tallest, hanging back to let the others see. He saw me too. Our eyes locked, and his face dawned with a smile of surprise.
“Annabeth?” he said.
Phinnea had come up to take the others’ orders.
“Hi, Loren,” I said.
My body reacted before my brain had a chance to get a word in. I smiled at him, the way water falls, the way rainbows form in the mist. Happiness. It lit inside me, simple as a bird taking off.
“How are you?” he said.
“How are YOU? How was the rock-climbing trip?”
We babbled at each other over the ice-cream case, our words less like words than the spouting of fountains, the happy clanging of trams.
“What kind of ice cream do you want?”
“Um,” he said. “Um.”
It was as if our smiles had temporarily stunned our brains. Loren widened his eyes and blinked and looked down at the ice cream, but his eyes bubbled back up to me.
“What’s good?” he said.
“Pralines and cream,” I blurted.
I don’t know where it came from. But as soon as I said it, I knew it was true. Pralines and cream was delicious. Pralines and cream was the most exquisite flavor of ice cream in the world. Suddenly, I was filled with the knowledge of sweetness.
“Okay,” said Loren. “I’ll have that.”
We were quiet while I scooped it, although I could tell we were both eager to speak. His grandfather was paying. Phinnea was at the cash register. I handed Loren his cone.
“Do you get off work soon?” said Loren.
“Three o’clock.”
“Do you want to—I mean, I could come back,” Loren said.
“We can go to the gorge!” I said.
“Yes!” said Loren. “Yes!”
“Loren,” shouted his little sister from the door. “We’re GOING.”
“See you,” he said. “I’ll come back in—I’ll come back.”
He hurried out the door after his sister, almost dropping his cone.
I hummed. I buzzed. I felt like a fountain turning on again after a winter spent cradling dry leaves. I bent over the ice-cream case with the scoop.
“Annabeth Schultz,” said Phinnea. “Are you making yourself a cone?”
I couldn’t speak. I had just taken the first bite.
Portrait of the artist as a person in bliss.
133
THE WEEKEND OF MY GRADUATION, Pauline drove down from Maple Bay. I came home from my last day of school to find her and Mom at the kitchen table with a pot of tea. When I walked in, they looked at me strangely. I said hello, and Pauline gave me a hug.
“How are you, sweetie?” she said.
While she asked me about school, Mom got up from the table and went into the kitchen to refill the teapot. As she walked out, I caught a glimpse of her face. It was filled with an emotion I couldn’t name. Something huge. My chest tightened.
Mom stayed in the kitchen for much longer than it takes to fill a kettle with water.
As I chatted with Pauline, I strained my ears for any sound. I couldn’t hear the tap, or the whistle that means boiling. I wondered what Mom was doing. If she was just standing there in the kitchen. If she was frozen by the sink as I’d caught her sometimes, when I was younger, wringing a dishrag as if she was trying to strangle it. Minutes passed and still the kitchen was silent.
Then from the backyard came the sound of chopping wood.
I looked Pauline in the eye. “What happened?”
“Scott called.”
“What?”
“He wanted to apologize. And ask if he could give her some money. Make some gesture. That sort of thing.”
My face went hot. Suddenly, my visit to Baxterville didn’t seem so heroic after all. The angry letter he had almost certainly read. I had imagined him begging for forgiveness, but now I wasn’t so sure that was a good idea. An apology didn’t seem worth the completely intrusive horror of having to hear the sound of his voice on the phone.
“Is she okay?” I said, but before Pauline could answer I was already running outside.
134
MOM WAS BY THE WOODPILE, HER flannel shirt hot with sweat. When I came outside, she threw down the ax and gathered me so fiercely into her arms it seemed that both our bodies would have to break before either of us would let go.
135
ON THE DAY I GRADUATED FROM E. O. James, the scabby black peach trees were covered in a pink snow of blossoms. The puddles at the bottom of our driveway were warm as soup. Mom and Pauline sat in the kitchen talking while I brushed my hair and brushed my teeth and wriggled my feet into the dress shoes that Nan had taken me to buy at the mall the day before.
Graduation was a joke. Mr. Beek gave a funny speech that mentioned each graduate by name, even the ones he had never actually talked to in the four years we were here. They flashed our freshman-year photos on a projector screen. Mine showed a wide-eyed girl in glasses. Noe’s showed a baby-faced kid in a Winnie the Pooh sweater. Over the past few months, our friendship had become a mystery to me, but when I looked at those pictures, I remembered who I had been when I needed Noe the most, and who she had been when she needed me. Maybe none of us can tell what we’re becoming until we become it, like seedlings instinctively groping for certain nutrients without knowing why.
After the graduation ceremony, everyone spilled outside, where next year’s Senior Leaders had set up refreshment tables with cake and coffee and sparkling apple juice. From the place where I was standing with Mom and Pauline and Ava and my uncle Dylan, I saw Noe turning a cartwheel on the grass, keys falling out of her pockets as her legs arced through the sky.
Something in my heart broke, then. I put down my cake plate and ran to her. We didn’t talk, but turned cartwheels on the soccer field, mortarboards falling off, hands staining green from the grass.
When I thought of the girl in my freshman-year picture, I couldn’t imagine her leaving Noe to do it alone.
136
MOM ASKED ME WHAT I WANTED for a graduation present. “It can’t be too extravagant,” she added, as if I
would ever dream of asking for something like a new car or a new computer or a trip to Mexico.
“I want you to take me canoeing,” I said.
137
WE DROVE UP TOGETHER THE WEEK before the fall semester started. We packed matches and knives, string and sunscreen, oats and coffee. Uncle Dylan dug Mom’s old canoe out from the back of his garage and we spent a weekend rubbing the paddles with linseed oil and patching a small leak in the stern. On the drive up, the tip of the canoe poked out over the front of the truck, pointing like an arrow toward the north. Trees rippled on either side of the road, lush and green in their summer fullness.
When we put into the water at Maple Bay, the canoe leaped forward with a speed and power that astounded me. Soon the docks melted away behind us, and the families paddling around the bay in their bright yellow rental canoes, and we entered a silence unlike any I’d experienced before. In the silence was a whirring warbling dripping of paddles, musical greens and blues. I was almost afraid to look behind me in case Mom had vanished, in case the woods had reabsorbed her, greedily embraced her in their twigs and mosses.
I wondered if I would always feel her that way, as a strength propelling me, a guiding silence in my canoe. I saw them, then, the ghosts quietly slipping out from under us. I could feel mine leave me, a weightlessness. I cut my paddle into the water and felt the wilderness rush toward me, and the wilderness inside me tremble and flower, rushing, rushing toward it.
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epicreads.com
About the Author
Photo by Gabriel Jacobs
HILARY T. SMITH lives in Portland, Oregon, where she studies North Indian classical music and works on native plant restoration. She is also the author of Wild Awake. Find out more at www.hilarytsmith.com.
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Books by Hilary T. Smith
Wild Awake
A Sense of the Infinite
Credits
COVER PHOTOGRAPH © CLAYTON BASTIANI / TREVILLION IMAGES
COVER DESIGN BY KATIE FITCH
Copyright
Katherine Tegen Books is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
A SENSE OF THE INFINITE. Copyright © 2015 by Hilary T. Smith. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2014952736
ISBN 978-0-06-218471-9
EPub Edition © April 2015 ISBN 9780062184733
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