Althea and Oliver

by Cristina Moracho

  This gives him pause. “Is that what that is?”

  “Could be.” She smirks into the mouth of her wineglass.

  “Was I an accident?”

  Nicky almost drops the glass. “Are you serious?”

  “You were what, like, twenty-one when you had me?”

  “I was twenty-two, and no, Ol, you were not an accident. You were—you were a very pleasant surprise.” She smiles.

  “Do you ever wonder—”

  “No. I never wonder. About anything. Except why I can’t cook. Sometimes I wonder why I can’t make my son a decent meal. But that’s it.”

  “Why didn’t you have me in New York?” he asks.

  “Why are you suddenly so interested?”

  “I just am.”

  Nicky stares out at the lawn, watching the intermittent spark of fireflies. “We could have stayed in New York. I’ve heard a lot of stories about couples in small apartments turning dresser drawers into makeshift bassinets and stuff like that. All our friends were there. Sarah was there. Jimmy, too—he was already on the scene then. He really didn’t want us to go. But we didn’t want to stay and be the novelty act, the super-young married couple with the baby still living on Avenue B and trying to be cool. Our life was parties and shows and friends, going out all night and then watching the sunrise from our fire escape. We knew if we tried to shoehorn a baby into that, we’d be setting ourselves up for a lot of disappointment. I wanted to focus on you and Mack, and not be thinking about all the things we couldn’t do anymore. So we left. We got to be pioneers. We struck out for new territory.” She waves away a mosquito.

  “Why Wilmington?” Borrowing her orange Bic, he lights the citronella candle on the table.

  “When you live in New York City, you think every other place is the same, this big, generic landmass of Not-New-York. We’d been here once, just for a weekend, to visit some friend of his at UNC, and we liked it here. It seemed as good a place as any.”

  “Did everyone think you were crazy?”

  “They thought we were totally fucking insane. I would have, too, if Sarah had told me they were moving down south to have a baby. Mack came home one night after drinking with Jimmy, and he had all these little notes scribbled on a cocktail napkin, and he was like, ‘Okay, check it out. I did the math. We have this kid now, and by the time he’s eighteen and out of the house, we’ll barely be forty. We’ll still be cool. And we’ll have gotten the kid thing out of the way. It’s really more practical, when you think about it.’ It was the Californian in him, so laid-back about shit. You definitely get that from him. In some ways he was totally right. We got our shit together way before any of our friends, had a kid and bought a house and did all those grown-up things when everyone else was still sleeping around and spending their rent money on records and acid and tequila. And we had a good time doing it, you know, until he died. We were lucky for years, and then we weren’t.”

  It had been a clever plan, and most of it had come to pass. Nicky was still cool and not even forty. Child-raising and home ownership had been checked off her list of life goals, and those years Mack had promised they would find on the other side now stretched out before her. There was just one thing missing.

  Oliver squeezes another lemon slice over his kale, trying to cover the flavor of burnt wok.

  “You don’t have to bother. I know it’s inedible,” she says.

  Relieved, he sets down his fork. He wishes he had another red velvet cupcake.

  Nicky hands him a stack of mail. College brochures. “These came for you over the summer.”

  Oliver flips through the catalogs, replete with images of glorious foliage and students in repose on vast, meticulously manicured lawns. “Where are the ones from UNC?”

  “Come on, Oliver, you can do better than a state school.”

  “We can’t afford any of these.”

  “Let me worry about that. We can figure something out.”

  He looks with longing at the pictures of MIT and RPI, the well-appointed laboratories, formulas written on dusty green chalkboards. Mack’s parents have been pushing for Caltech, hoping to get him out on their coast so they can finally spend some serious time together, but he’s transfixed by the idea of New England, crisp autumn breezes and snowy afternoons in the library. He sighs and pushes the pile back across the table toward his mother.

  “It’s not happening,” he says.

  “You can’t give up, Ol—”

  “How am I supposed to go away to college like this? We spend all that money and then, what, just hope I don’t sleep through the semester? If I go to school at all, it’ll be here. I’ll have to live at home and go to Wilmington. Go Seahawks.”

  “Wilmington doesn’t even have an astronomy program.”

  He shrugs.

  “How would you like to go to New York?” Nicky asks.

  “What for?”

  “I got a call this week from a doctor there.”

  “I don’t want to go back to the doctor. It never does any good.”

  “This is different. He says he knows what you have.”

  The front door is open; they can hear the Zombies album on Nicky’s stereo. Across the street, Mrs. Parker’s television flickers like blue candlelight behind her tightly closed curtains. “What does he say I have?” he asks.

  “Kleine-Levin Syndrome.”

  He wants Valerie to silk-screen those words onto a shirt that he can wear every day, or engrave them onto a pair of dog tags, or print them on a button he can pin to his backpack. He wants an artifact, something tangible, something he can point to the next time his temperature rises and his joints start aching and that sinister fatigue becomes the focal point of his entire being. And then he can say, I’m not making this up. I’m not on drugs, I’m not crazy, I’m not pretending. This is real. I’m just along for the ride on the Non-Stop Sleeping Wagon, and the only rule is I can’t say no.

  “Do you think he’s right?” Oliver asks. “Do you think that’s what it is?”

  “I’ll show you,” Nicky says, and ushers him inside to the living room, where she pops a tape into the VCR. “There was a piece on CNN a few years ago. They sent me a copy of it.”

  She puts her arms around him, kissing the top of his head. Then she points the remote at the television and hits play.

  A teenage boy wrestles with his dog in a backyard while the reporter’s voice-over sets the scene with the usual cheesy intro—just an ordinary kid, everything was fine, until one day, it all changed forever.

  “I just got so tired,” the boy says, describing how his first episode began with an urgent nap on the linoleum beneath his locker at school.

  “His teachers thought he was on drugs,” says his tearful mother, seated next to the sympathetic father. “But we knew that wasn’t our son, he wouldn’t do that. We knew it had to be something else.”

  “She’s lying,” Nicky says, lighting a cigarette. “Of course they thought it was drugs.”

  “Should I get you some popcorn?” Oliver asks.

  “Can you believe they let her wear those jeans on television?”

  “Shush.”

  The parents elaborate on the strange behavior that occurred during their son’s ten days of near-constant unconsciousness, the eating and confusion and childlike regression. Oliver feels a sharp stab of recognition, like the excitement of discovering another person who loves your same obscure favorite band. This is him, without a doubt, this is what he has, and he’s not the only one after all.

  The family gives a litany of the misdiagnoses and describes the despair of watching the episodes return every few weeks.

  “Every few weeks?” Oliver shouts.

  They had filmed their son while he slept, hoping it would help the doctors better understand. There’s a lot of time-lapse footage of the boy in bed, occasionally rollin
g over in his sleep. During one of those strange waking hours he wouldn’t recall later, they filmed him sitting on the floor of their living room, rocking back and forth and babbling a series of incoherent syllables, blank eyes unseeing while his parents ask him a series of innocuous questions—Where do you go to school? What’s the dog’s name?—that he obviously has no hope of answering. Later, when he’s back in bed, his mother tries to wake him up to eat some dinner and he slaps her across the face. Oliver, who had been mortified by the Waffle House debacle, where only a dozen other patrons witnessed his tantrum, is enraged on behalf of his fellow sufferer, whose fat mouse has been broadcast on national television. Still, he can’t stop watching. So this is what he’s like.

  “This is him,” Nicky says as the video cuts to a young Latino doctor with curly, exhaustively gelled black hair and a warm smile. “That’s the guy in New York.”

  “No wonder you want to go up there and meet him.”

  “Give me a break.”

  The doctor, identified on-screen as Dr. Crespo, describes what is known about Kleine-Levin Syndrome, which, it turns out, is almost nothing. It affects mostly teenagers, and among those, mostly boys. He reiterates the symptoms, addresses the debate of whether it’s a sleep disorder or a neurological condition, and then casually mentions that while there is no cure, most patients “either outgrow the episodes or experience a marked reduction in their occurrence once they’ve reached adulthood.”

  “Wait a second,” Oliver says, pausing the tape. “He can’t stop it?”

  “Don’t you want to watch the rest?”

  “Your boyfriend Dr. Curls just gave away the ending. There’s no cure? Nothing he can do?”

  “He says he’s putting together a study in the fall with other kids that have the same thing. At a hospital in the city, St. Victor’s. He thinks you’d be a good candidate. He can’t stop it altogether, but they might be able to find a treatment, something that would shorten the episodes, lengthen the amount of time between them. I’d have to talk to the insurance company and fill out some paperwork, but I think I can get you in.”

  “How long would I be there?”

  “A couple of months, maybe.”

  “Two months in the hospital?” he asks. “No way.”

  “If we can’t get you some help, before this time next year you’ll lose another two months anyway. Dr. Curls there”—she points to the TV—“is your best shot.”

  “I don’t care.” Oliver shakes his head.

  “You say you don’t care, until it happens again.”

  “Maybe it won’t happen again.”

  “You believe that?”

  “I have to. Otherwise I’m just waiting for the next time.”

  Nicky stands abruptly, storming back out to the porch to collect their dishes. She scrapes his uneaten food onto her plate. What’s left is enough for a full meal. He hates when she gets like this, her patience suddenly evaporating without warning.

  “What?” he says, following her into the kitchen.

  She dumps the dishes in the sink. “I’m glad you can be such a little Zen master about this. I’m glad you can still worry about things like Althea’s hair color and who she might be sleeping with. I myself am a bit preoccupied these days. I am wired to think about nothing other than what’s wrong with you. I am incapable of doing anything besides waiting for the next time you go off the air and I have to sit here for weeks, incapable of doing anything besides waiting for it to be over. So I don’t care, Oliver, if you want to see more doctors or not. You’ll see all the fucking doctors I want you to and yes, you’ll go to a hospital in New York so that eventually we can both have the luxury of thinking about other things.”

  “Yeah, I know, I’m supposed to be out of the way by next year so you can get on with your life. I apologize for the inconvenience. I don’t want to mess up the schedule,” he says.

  “Don’t be spiteful,” she says.

  “We have to make sure you get your chance to have all that fun you missed. I hope Sarah still knows where to get acid.”

  All of Nicky’s facial muscles freeze, but when she speaks, her voice is trembling. “I thought this was good news. I thought you’d be excited.”

  “Because a doctor I’ve never met says I have a disease he can’t cure? What’s so exciting about that? How do you even know he’s a doctor? He looks like a starting forward for Real Madrid,” Oliver shouts on his way out the door. “All he did was give it a name.”

  • • •

  Althea doesn’t look surprised to see Oliver knocking on the basement window. She gestures for him to come in and he gestures for her to come out.

  Bring your car keys, he mouths, overenunciating so she’ll understand.

  She doesn’t argue, doesn’t ask why, just meets him in the driveway five minutes later and hands him a sweatshirt.

  “What’s this for?”

  “In case you get cold. Where are we going?”

  “We’re running away.”

  “Cool.”

  If Oliver had to pick one spot as something approximating his proper place in the world, it would be the shotgun seat of Althea’s car. As she threads their way out of the neighborhood and onto the highway, he feels he is right where he belongs. He hates driving, but he loves being a passenger, the whisking sound of the road beneath the tires and the blurry, intangible scenery that fades before it can even register. Like the rest of the world, the Camry is subject to the whims of their imaginations—it can be a pirate ship or a roller coaster or a subway train hurtling toward Coney Island—but tonight Althea makes it exactly what he needs it to be: a white noise machine. She says nothing as she drives, and there’s nothing charged about her silence, nothing that implies she is waiting for him to start doing the talking. At night, with no traffic, her impatience behind the wheel vanishes, and it seems to him that she could drive like this forever as long as he were sitting to her right.

  Althea pulls over at a rest stop, a stout brick building filled with restrooms and vending machines, with a few picnic tables on the side of the road. It’s deserted except for them.

  “How’s this?” she says, as if it had been their destination all along.

  “Perfect.”

  He expects her just to turn the car around and go back, but instead she kills the engine and gets out, gesturing for him to follow. They lie on their backs on one of the tables. The sky has clouded over and there’s nothing to see in the way of stars, but the air is fresh against his face and even the wooden planks of the table feel good, like they’re straightening out a kink in his spine. They can’t be more than thirty miles from home, but he can’t remember the last time he’s even been that far. It’s still out here, the world beyond Wilmington. It hasn’t vanished due to lack of interest on their part. He reaches across the table and takes her hand.

  “Why did you dye your hair?” he asks.

  “So people would finally be able to tell us apart.”

  He laughs until she joins in. It’s the exact right answer. They both know he isn’t ready for a real one.

  chapter five.

  ALTHEA HAS AN IDEA.

  “Hey, Ol, do you have more of those pills?” she asks.

  “Which ones?”

  “The round ones. Sort of linen-colored.”

  Valerie and Minty Fresh prick up their ears like terriers.

  “Pills? Yes, please.” Coby looks at Oliver expectantly.

  Oliver shrugs and digs dutifully through his backpack to retrieve the small orange bottle. Their inability to provide Oliver with a proper treatment for KLS has not stopped the good doctors of North Carolina from prescribing him a plethora of amphetamines and stimulants. In high school, pills are a currency better than money, and Oliver generously shares his bounty, holding out a handful like candy, watching the others eagerly devour them as such. Althea washes hers down
with the Southern Comfort Coby is toting around in an iced tea bottle.

  Down at Lucky’s, Minty Fresh and Valerie have put together a Halloween punk show to raise money for Bread and Roses. The flyer Althea designed has been taped to every telephone pole in Wilmington. Althea and Oliver have decided on post-assassination Jackie O and JFK, figuring there will be plenty of Goth kids who love wearing makeup dressed as Jack and Sally. At Goodwill, they picked out a pink suit for Althea and the perfect tie for Ol, promptly dousing both in fake blood. Her hair is tucked under a brown flip wig, and there is a bullet hole painted on his forehead. Val and Minty are dressed as the farmers from American Gothic, although his Mohawk is razor-thin, six inches high, and formidable. The parking lot is filled with kids masquerading as the obvious—zombies, skeletons—and yes, as suspected, the cast of The Nightmare Before Christmas is out in force. For a lot of the girls, it is the first year they’ve realized that Halloween costumes are a clever excuse to show up to a party half-naked. There are lots of Wonder Women in metallic tube tops and Betty Boops tottering around the parking lot in red minidresses and stiletto heels.

  “Look at that shit,” Althea says, as a French maid in Doc Martens bends over to tie her shoelace, giving everyone a good look at her underwear. “She’s flashing her fancy stuff all over the place. My father would have a heart attack.”

  “You look positively upstanding in comparison,” says Valerie.

  “I don’t know about that,” Althea says, smoothing her blood-soaked skirt. “But at least my business is covered.”

  It’s another clear, warm night; stars are coming out in the navy blue sky, and a breeze blows through the parking lot. Bands are loading in their gear, and kids are handing out homemade stickers and flyers for upcoming shows; plans for after-parties out by Seagate and Silver Lake are passed between groups of friends along with flasks and packs of cigarettes. Leaning against Althea’s car, they take turns drinking from Coby’s bottle until it’s empty, and he tosses it into the woods.

  “What do y’all feel like doing after the show?” Minty asks.