The Museum of Us

by Tara Wilson Redd

  If Lucy were lying here, she’d be dying. She’d be a shark bite victim or maybe have been wounded pulling a stranger out of a burning car about to explode. Something cool. She wouldn’t have a broken leg.

  For better or worse, I am just Sadie. I think a name says a lot about you. Your name is kind of like your destiny—people make all kinds of guesses about you because of your name. Doesn’t that seem too much like fate?

  Anyway, I don’t really listen to the Beatles anymore. The Tape, the one I loved so much, was falling apart, and the sound had deteriorated, but it was still my favorite until I lost it: it got eaten by Old Charlotte the summer before ninth grade. It survived a car crash, but it couldn’t escape its fate. That pretty much ended the Beatles for me. My parents listen to NPR now. I don’t know about at work, but they don’t listen to rock and roll at home. I miss that tape sometimes. Every single song was magic. I listened to it so many times that it felt like my own thoughts.

  Lucie coughs loudly, and I remember where I am. The room pulls into focus and my thoughts recede. Mrs. Vaughn is looking at me, very concerned.

  “I’ll call as soon as I have a phone,” I say, and Lucie starts texting Henry. This is so awkward. “Thanks for visiting,” I tell Mrs. Vaughn. She nods, but that uniquely annoying look of parental concern does not leave her face.

  “I’m going to go chat with your parents. It’s good to see you, Sadie. Lucie, come find me when you’re ready.”

  She leaves us and Lucie laughs, snapping her fingers in front of my eyes to wake me up.

  “God, sometimes I think you’re secretly a stoner, you’re so moony,” she says. She jumps up and starts rummaging through my stuff. Lucie and I never hang out in my room because she cannot help but rummage everywhere she goes. My room is a disaster of dreams, and she finds clues too easily.

  Lucie’s room is military-spotless exactly once a week when her mom checks it, and then it’s like a bomb made of sports bras and video games and Quidditch and bass guitar exploded right on her bed. She’s been the bass player for Henry’s band, Brother Raja, since the very beginning, and so we usually hang out at her place before they practice, or after we go running. I find her stories all over her room. She loves to tell those stories, one for every clue I find. I know I have too many secrets to let her find mine.

  “So,” she starts, “like…you know this is a psych ward, right?”

  “Yeah,” I say. But she doesn’t look embarrassed. She’s super-excited.

  “So cool. So, so cool.”

  “It’s really not. I mean, it’s just a mandatory hold. It’s not like I’m supposed to be here or anything.”

  “Oh, I get it. But still. It’s so cool. It’s like we’re behind the scenes in a scary movie. What do you do here?”

  “Uh…color. Watch TV. Read. Talk. That kind of thing.”

  “So basically what you do at home.”

  Lucie is always talking, always moving. She’s always working on a project or running from practice to practice. I can see that being trapped like I am would drive her crazy.

  I like to hang out with her between all her missions because there’s always something to help with: a poster that needs painting, or a guitar that needs stringing, or some drama with her other friends she wants to vent about. Sometimes I listen to her try out songs, and it makes me happy that she cares what I think. She makes me feel useful. I’m a good sidekick.

  “What are you working on?” She points to my notebook.

  “Oh. I’m supposed to be writing a story. There’s a lot of kindergarten tasks here.”

  “What kind of story?”

  “I don’t know. A ‘true’ story, whatever that means.”

  I really don’t know what that means. It’s one of the tasks Roberts has extracted from me in order to secure my release. She asked me to write “one true story.”

  “What if I can’t tell the truth?” I asked her.

  “You’ll find a way. There are a lot of ways to tell the truth.”

  I probably rolled my eyes.

  “You love going to museums, right? You like art?” I shrugged. I like museums: walking around and stepping through frames to other worlds. Art is somewhat incidental to my liking of it.

  My indifference took some of the “cool doctor” wind out of her sails, but she plowed ahead anyway. She pulled out her phone and swiped through some pictures. Then she showed one to me. It was Van Gogh’s last self-portrait: the swirly one. I think his eyes are so beautiful and sad. Supposedly his final words were “The sadness will last forever.”

  “So what do you think? Is this true?” Roberts asked. I shrugged, and she took back her phone.

  “You might say it’s not realistic, but it’s true,” she said. “How about this?”

  She flashed what I could only assume was a big Pantone swatch of Rothko at me.

  “I dunno. I guess if you like that kind of thing.”

  “Rothko was trying to tell a big truth, in his way. He was obsessed with truth. The point is, you can tell the truth in a lot of ways. I want you to tell the truth however you see fit.”

  This, to me, seems like a lot of ridiculous art therapy bullshit on the level of teaching angry girls to ride horses, but I nodded because I wanted her to go away.

  “I won’t read it if you don’t want to show it to me,” Roberts said sweetly. “But I think seeing it yourself would be good. So try to find it. The truth.”

  I really, really dislike this project.

  Lucie is staring at my notebook because I zoned out again and I happen to be staring at it too. This time, she looks a little annoyed.

  “Where are you?” she asks me.

  “Huh? Oh. Sorry. You know, I am basically a stoner right now,” I say. “Pain drugs. So high.”

  She laughs at that, and for the moment, at least, my mask is firmly in place.

  And I know she wants to read my notebook, but she won’t ask. People hold back all kinds of things you know they would ask you if they could.

  “Oh man. Well, I’ll write some new fan fiction in solidarity,” she says finally. “Can you get online?”

  “No. I don’t even have a phone.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah. I’ll be home in a few days, though.”

  “Cool. But I guess you’re not going to be running anytime soon.”

  I look pointedly at my leg.

  “Sucks. Senior year and everything. Who will be my cocaptain?”

  “Vice captain,” I correct her.

  “Co,” she insists. Technically, I was voted vice captain. But Lucie wasn’t having it.

  “Well, it’s not like I was any good at it.”

  “None of us are any good at it,” Lucie says. “But the team misses you. Everyone wanted to know if they could come see you, but I said no. I thought you wouldn’t like that.” I doubt anyone but Lucie even cared about seeing me. They probably just felt obligated.

  “Well, it was cool of you to come,” I say. “I appreciate it.”

  “I appreciate it,” she mimics. “God, you’re like a middle-aged businessman sometimes. You sound like my dad.”

  “Well, I do,” I say quietly, and she gives me a gigantic Lucie hug, which is like no other hug ever because it is too tight, and very lopsided. It’s the perfect hug. “I really do.”

  * * *

  I pick up my new iPod, but I don’t want to hear the sounds of Henry. I hide it in a drawer, out of sight.

  I open up a Harry Potter book and start half-reading. I know that story so well, my eyes just dance across the pages, the words conjuring the places I’ve been a thousand times before.

  I visit all my old haunts: the Hogwarts library, the Three Broomsticks, Flourish and Blotts. I try to fill in the space all around me with that other world. I try to pave the linoleum with cobblesto
nes and brick myself in with magic. I want to feel George’s hand taking mine, the way he does when he sneaks up on me and suddenly we’re off on an adventure. But it isn’t to be.

  I read but the words stay on the page, and I am in a hospital room and my hands are holding a book and I am alone.

  You want the truth? The truth is that I’m all alone.

  It is on this self-pitying observation that I notice the pixie standing in my doorway. I know who she is immediately. She has foreshadowed herself, written her hints into my story.

  Maybe “pixie” is not the best way to describe her. She is a Titan: she dominates every breath I take from the instant I see her.

  She is wearing a shark costume, and her arms are crossed and wrapped with pink bandages, her hospital bracelet nestled among a few long strands of technicolor pony beads. Her crazy hair is dyed all sorts of colors, but it has grown way out so that it looks like she has a white-blond crown on top.

  “Hi,” she says. “My name is Eleanor.”

  Mr. and Mrs. Black began their morning in precisely the same manner each and every day. It could be tracked in doors closing, in kettles whistling, in the elevator jazz intro to Morning Edition on NPR. At thirteen, Sadie knew this soundtrack so well she could watch the movie of their morning from under her covers in bed. She no longer hovered at the kitchen table observing the clockwork staging of coffee, breakfast, and morning news. She pretended to sleep late—a privilege of having just graduated eighth grade—and the machinery of the household turned without her.

  When the Foley track above went silent, Sadie peered out from under the covers. It was perpetually night in the windowless basement, and her phone-turned-flashlight glowed over the disarray of her bedroom until it passed over a pair of black shoes with one toe impatiently tapping away.

  George sprang to life, flipping on the lights and tossing her a pair of cutoffs and her Ravenclaw T-shirt, which was almost too small. She recoiled from the fluorescent assault, covering her eyes. “Welcome to summer. Eighth grade—done! No school, no cross-country practice today, nothing but you and me!” he shouted.

  “Good morning to you too,” she said, blinking. George rifled through her closet as she got dressed, tossing out maps, disguises, wands, potions, keys, and books. He had to dig quite far to find what he was looking for: her spy notebook and fedora. He held them up expectantly.

  “Breakfast, George.”

  He let out an elaborate sigh.

  “Come on, then.”

  They raced up the stairs from the basement into the empty house, their feet beating the carpeted steps as one.

  “What do you want to do today?” Sadie asked. She glanced at the itinerary her parents had left her stuck under her lunch box: the plan she’d agreed to the night before. Everything she was going to do was already written down: breakfast, library, clean her room, dinner at seven. She wasn’t really free with her day scheduled down to the minute. She texted her parents that she was awake and having breakfast. Then she crossed “eat breakfast” off the list.

  She was always being told she needed “structure.” The only place she was ever free was in her head.

  George handed her a giant bag of store-brand Froot Loops to distract her. It was mostly empty and disintegrating. She poured a rainbow of rings and fairy dust into her bowl, doused it with too much milk, and carried it as cautiously as a circus performer to the living room.

  “We could go to Moscow.”

  “We’re going to the library.” It was on the itinerary.

  “I know why you want to go there,” George teased. Sadie’s cereal balancing act tottered, but she recovered.

  “We’ll also go to Moscow. It’s a long walk.”

  “Good.”

  Sadie sat carefully down on the couch, where she was Forbidden to Eat Anything on Pain of Death or, Worse, Confiscated Phone, as established in the bylaws set out by her mom. George vaulted the back of the couch and landed with a thump next to her, causing a tidal wave of milk to spill over her bowl. Sadie shot him a glare. He grinned sheepishly and turned on the TV. The tail end of Casablanca was playing, and Humphrey Bogart was putting Ingrid Bergman on the plane.

  “ ‘If that plane leaves the ground and you’re not with him, you’ll regret it. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life,’ ” George recited along with the TV.

  Sadie tried to reply, but her mouth was full of cereal. George laughed and then she laughed and then cereal was everywhere.

  It was the best way to start a summer day all alone.

  * * *

  Every summer day she could, Sadie walked to the library. She walked along precisely the same route, listening to exactly the same music. She knew every house and every tree, every crack in every sidewalk. By noon it would be too hot, so her routine began just after the morning movie on TV.

  The weather and her long fantasies during these walks were the only elements that varied. Sometimes the movie she’d watched would creep into her mind, and she and George would be off swashbuckling, solving murders, or performing elaborate tap numbers. Sometimes she imagined her life as it might have been: running away with George, hopping a train to L.A. to become an actress, or conning her way onto a plane to become an Australian citizen, living free in the outback. She had been working on her accent since elementary school. When she arrived at the library, whatever she had dreamed up needed details, research. She pulled real paper encyclopedias out of the dusty land of exile in the back of the building. She dug up atlases and pored over travel books. And by midafternoon, she’d be settled in at a huge table with a novel in her lap and half the world laid out before her.

  George didn’t sit with her in the library. Why would he, when there were pages and pages to explore? She followed him down into the depths of the catacombs of Paris, and to the top of the world’s highest mountains. She sat alone, though she was never truly alone. After all, she wasn’t really there.

  So it came as a great surprise when, last summer, an intruder sat down across from her with a book, tethering her solidly in the library and distracting her with reality, much to George’s displeasure.

  He was a little older than she was, with dark hair and brown eyes. He wore T-shirts of bands Sadie had never heard of. (Surreptitiously, she Googled them on her phone.) He read manga and Lord of the Rings and sometimes a music theory textbook feathered with sticky notes. He sat on a diagonal from her, with his legs stretched under the table to rest his dirty Converse high-tops on the chair next to hers. His legs barely made it. He had to slouch low, nearly sliding off the chair. It was as though he wanted her to see his shoes. Even when she looked down, he was in her peripheral vision.

  All this Sadie observed with the precision of a spy. It drove George crazy. She couldn’t quite get away with the dark-haired boy around.

  She knew that she had read too much into his choice of seats. It was a big table, after all. Maybe he was only sitting with her because he felt bad for her, all alone. Maybe he didn’t even realize he was sitting with her at all, so much as near her.

  She’d seen him around town, but she’d ducked away. He wasn’t at her school, that was for sure. She didn’t know his name. Today, she wondered what he would read this summer, when she dared to imagine that he’d be there.

  George coughed next to her. He was jealous of her treacherous thoughts. He’d been shut out, fading away.

  “Are you going to be like this all summer?” he asked as she locked the front door. She shifted her backpack on her shoulder. George’s attaché case had all the important things, of course: ransom money, their guns, the keys to the Aston Martin. But the necessities of reality were heavy in her backpack. She had books to return, water to carry, a lunch box her mom had left her, house keys, phone. George never seemed burdened.

  Once he had her attention, he bolted ahead, around the house
to the backyard, to Old Charlotte. She chased him, sprinting, her heart pounding. As soon as she started running, her problems faded away. They always did. Laughing, she hopped into Old Charlotte and reached under the seat for The Tape. Even touching it sent relief coursing through her veins.

  Most of the time, worries caroled across her mind, chanting and singing like a choir, their voices amplified as though in a perfect cathedral. She couldn’t escape the music in her mind, but she could replace it. When the Fab Four, as her mom called them, took their places on the stage in her head, there was no room for other voices. They silenced the real world and drew her into another one.

  George readied himself as she closed the truck door. She slipped in her earbuds and her feet started their automatic march toward the library. The Beatles began to sing, and Sadie and George were back in the thick of a mission they’d paused, out of breath and on the run. The sun began to rise on Tverskaya Street in Moscow, footsteps echoed behind her, and the suburbs were gone.

  When they reached the library, it was as though no time had passed since they’d left home. Daydreams were like that. Lifetimes passed in no time. But a bolt of disappointment shot through her and blew George away as she resurfaced: a lanky teenage boy stood staring at a white sign on the library door. Sadie could see that it said CLOSED in giant red Sharpie letters.

  She turned away, trying not to cry from disappointment. There was always tomorrow. But she fell down a spiral of disorientation: she’d been so excited for the library, and now she’d have to go home, and—

  “Hey!” shouted the boy behind her. She turned, red-eyed.

  It was him. He had grown half a foot since she’d seen him last. He wore his hair longer and his face was mottled with acne, but his eyes were the same. Big brown doe eyes, perfect and kind.

  “It’s closed?” Sadie asked, staring at the handwritten sign.

  “The air-conditioning broke down.” They stood in silence shoulder to shoulder in the narrow entry. “I’m Henry,” he offered.