Coming of Age at the End of Days

by Alice LaPlante

  Ms. Thadeous is watching them. “You two,” she says. Her voice comes out thick. Her hands tighten around her empty glass. “What on earth have I taken on?”

  29

  MS. THADEOUS DRIVES ANNA HOME. Jim Fulson walks her to the door. He opens it for her, then hesitates before letting go so that it slams shut. “Damn it,” he says, and gathers her into a hug. Anna feels awkward, doesn’t know what to do with her elbows, but allows herself to be held for a moment. It doesn’t feel like Ms. Thadeous’s hug earlier; it does not feel safe. Jim Fulson releases her, and then returns to the car without saying anything else. Anna watches him get in. Ms. Thadeous says something that makes him throw his head back in laughter, and then his arm goes around her as she steers the car away from the curb.

  Anna’s Aunt Ginny is waiting. “I’ve put fresh pajamas on your bed,” she says, and then, half fearfully, “Where were you? We didn’t know whether to call the police. But someone saw you leave with that boy across the street. They say he’s okay.”

  “Very okay,” Anna says.

  Aunt Ginny looks worried. “Your mother never mentioned a boyfriend,” she says. “I’m not sure she would have let you go off with him like that. You’re only seventeen. You’re a minor. They said he was older, out of college. He could get into trouble for . . . anything . . . that might happen.”

  The slight buzz from the wine is wearing off and Anna realizes how tired she is. She hasn’t looked at her watch since setting off on her run with Jim Fulson. She checks: it’s been forty-five hours. Terror ignites in her chest. She brushes past Aunt Ginny to go upstairs. Aunt Ginny follows. At the landing Anna turns left into her parents’ room, where she had slept the last two nights.

  “No,” Aunt Ginny says, and she grabs Anna’s arm, an offense so heinous that Anna is speechless. “Your uncle and I decided. You’ll be sleeping in your own room, your own bed. It’s not right, you spending time in there.”

  Anna stops in the threshold of in there, her parents’ room. The bed has been stripped. All the drawers are open. Empty. Photographs and lotion bottles and quarters and dimes and other miscellaneous items have been cleared from the tops of the dresser. Nothing more than a hotel room, ready for the maids. And the odor, the reek of air freshener and furniture polish, not the same, not the same at all.

  “The smell,” Anna says.

  “Yes, there was that funny odor.”

  Her father’s mineral and dirt samples. He’d forget and leave them in his pockets, empty them on the dressing table. Anna’s mother hated it, used to make him leave his clothes outside the room and shower before he got into bed, but still the smell lingered.

  Anna sits down on the bare mattress. That rich heady scent of earth and metal mixed with Lysol, her mother’s attempt to cover it up. Gone. Replaced by the smell of artificial violets.

  “You had no right,” she says. Something that was hers, something precious, has been taken.

  “We felt it was necessary,” her aunt says. “You were getting morbid.”

  “We’ll go to bed and discuss this in the morning,” Anna says. She knows she sounds like her mother, down to the irritated inflection that clearly communicates to her aunt how tiresome she is being. Anna’s mother told her she’d never gotten along with her little sister, bullied her, and her sister took it until she married a bigger bully. Once the younger sister, always the younger sister.

  “Go to your room,” Anna’s aunt says, trying to sound firm. “You’ll sleep there tonight.”

  “I’ll sleep where I’ll damn well please,” Anna says. “In my new bed.”

  “That would be in Columbus,” a male voice says. It is Uncle Bob. He has entered the room and stands behind Aunt Ginny. Anna doesn’t know them well. She rarely visited her mother’s childhood city. Anna’s mother had loathed it, so Anna learned to hate the north side of Columbus where Uncle Bob and Aunt Ginny live, around the corner from where Anna’s mother grew up and from where she fled immediately after high school. Anna had been ten the last time they’d visited, for her cousin Kenny’s high school graduation. Their red brick house was in disrepair, a drainpipe hanging off the corner, stones missing from the façade above the front door. The backyard had been paved over with cement to create a basketball court for Kenny, and it being late May, dirty snow still lay in patches on the ground. A gray city, landlocked, stale air, stale food, even the songs on the radio were last year’s hits.

  Aunt Ginny’s resemblance to Anna’s mother is extraordinary, the same thick wavy hair, small but strong physique. “Peasant stock,” Anna’s mother would say. “Never sick. We drop the babies in the field and keep working. Our type lives forever.”

  Aunt Ginny looks frightened. “Bob, we were just discussing that,” she says. “No need for you to get involved.” She gestures vaguely around the room, at the still-full walk-in closet, at Anna. “We’re going to start sorting through the rest first thing in the morning, aren’t we, Anna? In the meantime, Anna needs to sleep. She needs her rest.”

  “I’m staying here,” Anna says, not moving. She finds that her fists are clenched. “And you’re not touching anything else. Don’t you dare go into that closet.”

  “Oh dear.” The words escape Aunt Ginny’s lips involuntarily. Strange to see someone who looks so much like her mother so terrified. Whatever she was feeling inside, Anna’s mother projected fearlessness. Just recently Anna had begun to understand how fragile that façade was, how easily she could permeate it with a mere look. Had she only known. Had she only tried harder.

  “Out!” Anna shouts suddenly. Then again, “Out!” Her aunt Ginny appears near fainting with alarm. Anna’s head is clearing; she is gathering the strength that her aunt is losing.

  Uncle Bob takes a step in her direction. He smiles. He is anticipating conflict. He is enjoying this. Anna picks up the lamp from the top of her mother’s dressing table, pulls the cord so the plug comes out of the wall socket.

  “Anna!” says Aunt Ginny, and her voice is thin; she is beseeching now, she sounds positively desperate. “You don’t know what you’re doing. What could happen.”

  “Fuck that,” Anna says.

  Her aunt winces and steps back, nearly colliding into Uncle Bob, who has taken another step toward Anna. Aunt Ginny looks at his face and what she sees there almost unhinges her.

  “Oh my God,” says Aunt Ginny, and retreats all the way to the doorway. Her hands go up in the air, wave excitably.

  She is so much like Anna’s mother, Anna experiences a sharp hiccup of pain, and involuntarily glances at her watch. Still forty-five hours. Only minutes have passed. Cold permeates her stomach, rises to her chest, too much time is gone now, and the brutal unreasonableness of it bubbles into her head and turns into rage. She is standing close to a window. She is holding the lamp in her hands, and then she isn’t. What. Have. I. Done. After the initial shocking crash through the windowpane, they hear a muffled thump as the lamp lands on the lawn below.

  “I would have thought you’d have enough of broken glass.” Uncle Bob doesn’t speak much, but when he does, it wounds. He holds everything inside until it hurts him, and then lets it out in a way that hurts others, Anna’s mother told her once, after a long and weepy call from her aunt. A sullen mountain of a man. Anna’s parents had despised him.

  “Get out of this room,” Anna says to him. She shivers in the wind blowing through the window. “You. Now.”

  Anna’s uncle has a disconcerting habit of taking his time. Just swinging his large head around to get her in view takes him a good three seconds. Aunt Ginny retreats farther, into the hallway, her hands still waving, but silent.

  “What’s that you said?” asks Uncle Bob.

  “You heard,” Anna says.

  “I don’t think you quite understand the situation,” says Uncle Bob. Anna wonders if there’s something physiologically wrong with him, the way he moves his head to addre
ss her, then looks at the broken window, then back to her.

  “Honey, go easy,” Aunt Ginny calls from the hallway. “She’s just a kid.”

  “Maybe,” his head swings to the right, toward his wife. “Maybe,” he repeats. “But I’ve had enough.” He moves into position to get Anna in view again. “You. Hey. I’m talking to you.”

  The room is now quite chilly. Uncle Bob is slowly advancing and Anna is backing up, stepping away from him and closer to the window, and for a lunatic moment even wonders if he intends to push her out.

  Words come to her. “You are cursed,” she says. This stops him from coming any closer, he appears astonished that she would speak, that she would still have the power of words. The arrogance of bullies. But Anna has seen her share in school. She knows how easily spooked they can be. “For by strength shall no man prevail,” she says. “But the wicked shall be put to silence in darkness.”

  “Whatever that’s supposed to mean,” says Uncle Bob; Anna has his full attention, his bull-like head bowed as if about to charge. “Sticks and stones. Don’t forget, I’m your guardian. Doesn’t that wacko religion of yours say anything about honoring your parents? Well, I’m your parent now. And don’t look at your aunt. This is not about her, this is between you and me. As far as authority goes, I’m it, baby.”

  “Is that a fact,” Anna says. Her uncle is several feet closer, but approaching her more slowly, like she is a rabid dog. Anna picks up the top book from her father’s bedside stack, weighs it in her hands. Her uncle takes another step. With both hands she lifts the book above her head and heaves it with all her strength through the second window. Another loud crash, another thump. Both of them are sprayed with flying shards of glass. Anna’s uncle involuntarily backs out the door, covering his eyes. Aunt Ginny screams. Anna seizes her chance. Before either of them recovers, she’s across the room, slamming the bedroom door.

  “When you’re reasonable we can talk,” Anna says, and turns the lock.

  Pounding, and obscene threats from the other side of the door.

  “Quiet,” Anna says, to roars of outrage. She sinks onto the bare mattress, hugging herself to keep warm.

  The pounding on the door continues, gets louder. Anna ignores it. Taking armfuls of clothing from the closet, she makes the bed as well as she can, using her father’s shirts to cover the mattress, and her mother’s dresses and long skirts as blankets. She improvises a pillow out of one of her father’s sweaters that she finds in the laundry hamper, and lies down. Minutes pass. Perhaps hours. She can’t sleep. The wind whispers through the broken windows. A harvest moon has risen, implausibly large and orange, and has fixed itself in the sky just above Jim Fulson’s house. His red truck is in the same position on the street as it was earlier. His rec room is dark. Whatever is happening between him and Ms. Thadeous is happening elsewhere.

  Still cold, Anna rummages through the closet again and puts on her father’s robe as a sort of jacket. Through the pocket she feels something that makes a noise when she moves: her father’s lucky coins. He always had change in his pockets, felt naked without it, he’d say. Even in his bathrobe, he didn’t feel secure without a few dozen pennies or nickels or quarters. He liked the dull clang as they hit each other, the feel of cold metal at his fingertips. Anna has seen him steal from the Take-a-penny-leave-a-penny bowls at cash registers if he felt what he was carrying in his pocket didn’t have enough weight or make a sufficient jingle. Anna is suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of what she has lost. She reaches into the pocket and brings out a quarter. A talisman. Although a superstitious act and therefore against His will, she kisses the coin and is finally able to sleep.

  30

  ANNA DOESN’T HAVE TO GO to Ohio right away after all. She—or rather Martha—wins a reprieve. She can stay until the end of the semester, until Christmas. As it turns out, Anna has enough credits to graduate a semester early. Then she goes to Columbus, where she will be under the care of her aunt and uncle until her eighteenth birthday in May. Until the end of the fall term, however, she’ll stay with the Goldschmidts.

  Weeks after the memorial reception, the pans of lasagna, plates of cookies, tossed salads with the notes please return the bowl when done are still coming, left on the Goldschmidts’ front steps with discreet knocks. Anna can’t force anything down; she is losing weight, vanishing. A wraith. She misses more school than she attends. The notices from the school district pile up at the Goldschmidts’, but they are as uninterested in opening them as Anna is.

  Without Anna, Lars is making better inroads at school. He’s managed to gather together a growing cadre of outcasts. Now in the cafeteria Lars is surrounded by a table of admirers, spends time with them at church, even down in the Goldschmidts’ rec room. His own ministry. His own disciples. Anna was merely a test case, the opening act for the soon-to-go-platinum Lars show. Anna doesn’t care. She is quickly fading from the world.

  A For Sale sign is staked into the lawn of her former home. Mail is still being delivered. Martha swings by several times a week to pick it up, to sort through anything important related to the estate. Anna says nothing to her. She has plans. She’ll be eighteen in May. She’ll have money from the house and her parents’ retirement accounts. But she tells Martha none of this. She has decided to keep her own counsel. She is corresponding with Fred Wilson weekly now.

  Dear Anna,

  Yes I am looking forward to you joining us as an intern next summer when you’re of age. I hope you are continuing with your Bible reading and studying, for there is much to make sense of in these times. You strike me as a particularly sensible girl, however, and your devotion to our cause warms my heart. Let’s continue corresponding about this opportunity. We have some months before your birthday in May.

  Affectionately,

  Fred

  Anna ramps up her workouts, is running three, four times a day. She runs faster and faster, punishes the earth by striking a blow with each step. She spits the bile out of her mouth onto the sidewalk and still it comes, a font of poison. Streetlights flicker when she passes, trees wither, children wince, dogs whimper. She realizes she is not mourning, she is murderous. She squashes a fly flat with her palm on her thigh, so fast are her reflexes, so hot is she for blood.

  In the safe-deposit box Martha had found a gold and opal rosary with Anna’s grandmother’s initials engraved on it. Anna finds it a useful device. For each of the pink translucent stones she repeats one word ten times as her feet pound the ground. Any word. A way of acknowledging the permanence, the intractability of her despair. For again she is descending. She is trying to protect herself, trying to stay afloat, only allowing herself to realize how much she has lost: a little every day, a little is all she can bear. Compartmentalize. That’s what Dr. Cummings used to say; for once, useful advice. Anna separates memory fragments. Her father bent over one of his geological maps, colored pencil in hand. Her mother listening to her beloved Hindemith. But there is pain even in such small moments. Why didn’t He give her some hint, some sign of what was coming?

  Anna holds the rosary in her hand as she runs, counts off the beads as she sees things in His world that she knows are worth praising, even though nothing now is either useful or beautiful. This morning: fence fence fence fence, ten times. Then, in succession, window window window window and rock rock rock rock rock. And because the harvest moon has not yet disappeared despite the fact that the sun is almost overhead, moon moon moon moon, a sort of brain aesthetic that relieves her of the need to think. She forces herself to seek meaning, resonance in the words themselves. As she nears the Goldschmidts’ house, she cycles back to the first word: fence fence fence fence fence. A resting place for blue jays, a support structure for bougainvillea. It keeps such things that must be contained, contained. It has its place in the world, and therefore it must be good. She must have faith. She must continue to have faith, as difficult as it is. Praise the Lord.

  Sh
e goes straight to the spare room in the Goldschmidts’ house. Her bed is a pile of sheets and blankets on a thin foam mattress, but the fabric is too soft for her rough skin, she throws all the bedding into the corner and lays down to sleep on the bare cold hardwood floor, but it still isn’t enough to cool her body. A malignant growth of flesh surrounding a handful of bones. Adam’s rib. Evolve or die. She isn’t sure which will happen to her.

  31

  MOST PEOPLE SPILL INANITIES. KIDS at school she barely knows approach her, say how sorry they are, some even have tears in their eyes. Anna believes that most are sincere, most are sincerely trying. But most start their sentences with I: I am so sorry. I can’t believe what you must be going through. I wish there was something I could do. I. I. I. I. Putting themselves in her place, guiltily relishing that they don’t have to stay there for too long, feeling virtuous that they tried. Anna doesn’t listen, but not out of rudeness. It’s that she can’t stand the proximity; the kids stand too close, some even touch her.

  She’s been spending more time with Ms. Thadeous, a surprising source of comfort. A surprising source of wisdom.

  They’re in the chemistry lab, between classes.

  Anna had always loved this room. Sometime in the years before Anna took her class, Ms. Thadeous had papered the walls with posters, newspaper headlines, scientific articles cut out of magazines, colorful diagrams, and charts. She’d printed out pieces from online archives that delved into the history of scientific discoveries Anna had never heard of. Anna could read about the launch of Sputnik and the invention of the birth control pill as if they were happening now, feel the excitement and skepticism of the era. Anna first learned about Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring from Ms. Thadeous’s wall, about the first ­cancer-causing gene being discovered in a chicken retrovirus. She could dive into that wall for months and not reach bottom. It is a window into the teacher Ms. Thadeous was when Jim Fulson first knew her.