Goblin Fruit

by S. E. Burr

  He said a brief goodbye to Maria, reminding her that Anna's and his cell phone numbers were on speed dial should there be an emergency. There was a sound of a car pulling up to the curb outside. “See you,” said Frank, putting on his coat. He opened the door and carried his suitcases out onto the porch. Turning, he locked the door, and then pulled on the handle to make sure it was secure. Picking up his suitcases, he shivered in the chill predawn quiet and turned toward the waiting cab, its driver standing beside it, ready to load his bags into the trunk. Frank watched the center through the cab’s back window as he was driven away.

  #

  Later that morning, but still very early, Nick dressed in the sumptuous elegance of his and Anna’s bedroom, the dim light of the morning illuminating the four post bed and matching antique bureau. Anna woke and groaned, pushing the gold coverlet away from her face. “Come back to bed.”

  Nick shook his head. “Can’t. Gotta go to work.” He looked at her. “You should too. Your patients will be up soon, and you know Maria's still struggling to handle it all. It's a pity you lost Jen.”

  Anna sat up, looking at him groggily. “Maria's learning quickly, and Jen wanted to stay home with her baby. I can understand that.”

  Nick bent down and kissed her. “You were always a sucker for babies.”

  Anna’s face fell, and Nick frowned. “Still? I was disappointed about losing the baby too, but it was for the best. We’re too career minded for a child. We wouldn’t have known what to do with one if we’d had it.” Nick put his watch on and moved toward the door.

  Anna shook her head and forced a smile. “At least I have Clarity.”

  Nick paused in the doorway, looking back at her. “How is Clarity?”

  “Fine.”

  “She’s not seeing goblins?”

  Anna’s eyes widened. “No, of course not.”

  “She’s not your child, Anna, and she might turn out crazy like her mother.”

  Anna stared at him, not responding.

  Nick shook his head. “Remember, I’ll be working late tonight. I’m meeting with some distributors.”

  “Okay,” said Anna.

  #

  Still later, after helping her mother with breakfast, Clarity dressed and left for school. The plan had been for Maria to stay a bit late so that Anna could drive her, but then Marcos pulled up in Nick's fancy, black car and she went with him instead.

  Anna smiled as she watched them pull away. Nick must have sent Marcos because he was feeling bad about his brusqueness that morning. He knew she was a little uncomfortable making Maria stay late. The new nurse had said it was okay but at the end of her shift she always seemed so anxious to leave. Anna figured it was because she was anxious to check on her father, who was in poor health.

  10

  I was excited to get a ride with Marcos. I’d never been in Nick’s car before, and since Marcos never talked, I planned to use the blissful silence to luxuriate on the plush seating and fiddle with the car’s many do-dads. It was not to be.

  No sooner had we pulled away from the curb than Marcos turned to me and said, “Clarity, what were you doing last night messing around in that playground?”

  I stared at him, amazed that he’d asked me something. “Nothing, you know, just messing around. Audrey seemed sort of uncomfortable at the center, and we went for a walk.”

  “Audrey,” Marcos repeated and then lapsed into silence. This was more normal.

  I started fiddling with the seat controls. They were amazing with built-in massagers, heat, and air.

  “How well do you know that girl?” he asked.

  I looked up from the controls. My mouth hung open. Wow, was he talkative. “Not well,” I said. “But she's nice. She's my friend.”

  “Anna said you got in a fight at school yesterday,” he said. “Perhaps you should choose your friends more carefully.”

  “Anna was talking about me?” I asked.

  “She mentioned it to Nick on the way to the play...Don't you have enough friends already? What about Jamie and the red headed girl and the short one?”

  I blinked at him. I hadn't realized that Marcos had paid attention to who my friends were. I supposed he would have seen them around enough through the years, but still... “They're boy obsessed and mean. I do choose my friends carefully, and I've chosen Audrey.”

  He grunted. “Strong willed, like your mother.”

  My breath caught. I’d never been able to get Marcos to talk about my mother, never known him to talk about much of anything. This morning he was uncharacteristically chatty. “How was she strong willed?” I asked.

  He shook his head and didn't answer.

  “Did you disapprove of her friends?” I asked.

  Again he made no response, and we rode in silence the rest of the way to school.

  #

  That day Audrey, Todd, and I stayed in Mrs. Nelson’s classroom when the lunch bell rang. She got out three old books from a locked cabinet behind her desk. “I don’t let everyone see these because they’re very old,” she said, “and they mean a lot to me. My grandfather was an English Professor, and these books were passed down through our family. He received them as a young man, and you can see his notes in the margins on some of the pages. Please be very careful with them. “

  We sat at a table and looked through the books. Audrey sat as far away from Todd as she could, without actually being at another table. I was a little surprised about just how angry she was at him, but Todd’s mother was Maria, and aside from being our nurse, she was also Audrey’s mom’s friend, so, I realized, Audrey and Todd could have a whole history I didn’t know about. And then it occurred to me. Oh, crap. I hoped they didn’t have some secret romance. I really didn’t want to be in the plot to Grease. I didn’t even like it as a movie.

  The artwork with the poems was breathtakingly beautiful, the books carefully made. For a while I sat engrossed in the images, looking at picture after picture.

  Finally, I looked up. “Guys, come look at this,” I said, and they did—slowly, avoiding each other's gaze the whole time. The colors in the picture were remarkably beautiful and vibrant. It was an image from Canterbury Tales, and the pilgrims were detailed and varied if not always proportioned like real people. But, there was something about it that drew me in, that made me feel like I was a part of it.

  “I wish I could paint like that,” I said.

  Todd snorted.

  “You can,” said Audrey. “Your artwork's amazing.”

  Todd made a small disbelieving sound in his throat, and Audrey glared at him.

  “Show him your sketchbook, Clarity,” she said.

  I hesitated. My artwork was hanging up in my dad's office, but I didn't show my sketchbook around a lot. It was more personal, like a journal in a way. And besides, Audrey was wrong; it didn't compare with the work in Mrs. Nelson's books.

  Todd looked at me skeptically. “Come on Clarity, if I’m going to help on this project, I need some idea of what I have to work with. I don't want to plan some complicated thing and have us embarrass ourselves.”

  I glared at him, grabbed my sketchbook out of my bag, and handed it to him.

  Laughing, he opened it. And then his laughter stopped. His eyes widened as he slowly turned through the pages. I could tell he was impressed. I didn't compare with the masters yet, but I was still good. My pictures were more than life-like, brighter, with colors that made your teeth tingle. There were pictures of a few animals, things you saw on the edges of town, a regal roadrunner, a creeping coyote, a road kill rabbit being picked apart by crows, but mostly they were of people. There were a lot of my dad, looking characteristically rumpled but kind. There were pictures of my mom with her empty expression, and there was one of her when she young, beautiful, and fully alive, though sleeping. Todd gasped when he saw that one. There was a picture of Mrs. Nelson, in front of the class looking commanding. When he saw a picture of Nick and Marcos, Todd asked how I knew them.

  “I've
known them my whole life,” I said. “They're friends of the family.” I looked at my drawing and shook my head. It wasn't one of my favorites. “I can never draw him right,” I said, running a finger across Nick's expression. “He always comes out looking sinister, but he's great in real life.”

  Todd looked impressed. “My dad works at Brinkley Laboratories. Everybody thinks Nick's great there, some kind of scientific genius or something.”

  I nodded.

  He continued flipping pages. He stopped at one of himself and his friends, and his jaw tightened. I stifled a laugh. It wasn't a caricature or anything. I hadn't drawn it to be mean, but I could tell he didn't like the way he looked in it. He looked cold, shallow, which wasn't exactly a mistake the way it was with Nick's picture. That's the way I saw him.

  Todd turned some more pages. The last drawing was of Audrey and me, a piece of bright red fruit, with the shininess of an apple and the red juiciness of a tomato, between us. The wind was blowing in the image and strands of our hair had become intertwined. Todd kept looking back and forth between the drawing and Audrey like he was making sure it was her. Which was weird, because it looked just like her. I'd done a really good job capturing her full lips and big brown eyes.

  “I drew that last night,” I said, looking at Audrey. “I'm working on my assignment about 'Goblin Market,' and I wanted to draw the sisters..." I was kind of nervous. "I draw people I've seen the best. I'm not great at making them up, and I don't have a sister.”

  Audrey smiled at me, and I felt relieved. “Do you think ‘Goblin Market’ would be in one of these books?” she asked.

  “Maybe,” I said. “It’s old enough.” I turned to the index. “Yeah, here it is,” I said, turning to the page.

  I read the whole poem out loud to them. It was fairly long, and took up most of the lunch period, but I barely noticed. I was captivated by the words, as always.

  When I was finished, Todd laughed. “Are you a lesbian, or what?”

  I scowled at him. “That’s none of your business. You’re an idiot.”

  “Clarity,” Mrs. Nelson said warningly, from across the room.

  “Sorry,” I said, turning to face the teacher.

  When I looked back, Audrey was staring at me in a questioning kind of way, and I laughed. “No. Okay. I’m not a lesbian. It’s not actually about sex, not really. It’s about love and sacrifice and fruit.”

  “You mean, like fruit fruit?” said Todd. “The drug? But the poem’s really old.”

  “I know," I said, "but, okay, Rossetti’s father was from Italy, and they found a plant there that produces the chemical naturally, so I thought…well, it’s just a theory, but maybe he knew about it and told his daughter…”

  “I heard about that plant,” said Todd. “Wow.”

  The bell rang.

  “So you guys want to do the mural about ‘Goblin Market1’?” asked Todd, which sort of surprised me.

  “Sure,” I said, and Audrey agreed.

  We gave the books back to Mrs. Nelson and headed to our classes. “Oh, Clarity,” said Audrey in the hallway. “My mom wanted to know if you could come to dinner at our place tonight, kind of a thank you for yesterday. You could come over right after school.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Okay, I’ll let Anna know.”

  11

  The rest of the school day went by quickly, and I got out of my last class, Chemistry, early after there was a fire at another lab station. I called Anna, and she was fine with me going to Audrey's for dinner, so after school I waited in the parking lot by her car, and we drove off together.

  Audrey lived in a pretty dilapidated looking apartment house. It was a two story peach colored stucco building, with some painted squares that didn’t quite match the original color—places where someone had painted over graffiti. All the apartment doors were exterior. Audrey took out a key and opened the number 14 apartment door. It was on the first floor, which was good since her mom would probably have a hard time with the steep stairs up to the second story balcony. “Mom, I’m here, and I brought Clarity with me!” she called.

  Audrey's mom came into the room, supported by her crutches. “That's wonderful,” she said. “Welcome. I'll start dinner. Make yourself comfortable.”

  I smiled. “Thank you, Mrs. Ortiz.”

  “Call me Natalie.”

  Audrey's room was small with dingy flowered wallpaper, and boxes stacked in one corner.

  “It's not much,” she said, “but it's home...sort of.”

  I forced a laugh. This was depressing. “Hey, a guitar,” I said, seeing the case propped in a corner. “May I?”

  “That's Andrew's,” said Audrey.

  “Oh.”

  She blushed. “No, I mean, it's okay. I haven't opened it since he went catatonic, you know, his hands.” She looked at her own hands, opening and closing them.

  “Oh, no,” I said. “Don't worry about that. The goblin fruit secretions from people's skin degrade pretty quickly. I’m sure the guitar's fine.”

  She nodded and watched as I laid the case on the floor and opened it. There was a picture of the band on top of the guitar, their arms draped around each other’s shoulders—Andrew, Audrey, Mark, and Jacob. I knew their names, though I’d only seen Mark and Jacob in internet videos, and you couldn’t really say that I’d met Andrew. I’d never heard of the band, Benjamy, until we got Andrew as a patient, but what had started as a bored Google search a couple of weeks back, had turned into watching five hours of YouTube videos, and downloading all their songs. I wasn’t going to make a big deal of it or anything with Audrey. It would just stir things up, but yeah, they would have been huge. They were awesome.

  I handed her the picture, and she smiled looking at it. “This was a great night. We'd hit ten thousand downloads of our single, and we went out to celebrate.” She looked at me. “This was just a few days before, you know...” She started to cry, and I jumped to my feet and hugged her, rubbing her back in a circle with my fist. “It's gonna be okay,” I said—not that it necessarily would be, but that’s what you say—an expression of faith more than fact.

  After a while, Audrey pulled away, wiping her eyes. “Sorry,” she said, “It's just sometimes...” She looked away. “Do you play?” she asked gesturing to the guitar.

  I smiled and pulled it from the case, strummed it, and sang the chorus to “Leaving on a Jet Plane.” I knew I was terrible, but that wasn’t the point.

  Audrey sang along and laughed (that was the point.)

  “Well, that's it,” I said. “That's all I can play.”

  Slowly, Audrey took the guitar from me. She played a couple of songs, old stuff, and we sang together.

  “You lied,” I told her. “You said you weren't any good, but you're great. You could have played lead guitar.”

  She shook her head and set the guitar back in its case. “I just play around with simple chords and stuff. Andrew is amazing. He could almost play anything by ear, and the stuff he wrote was...glorious.”

  I nodded. I agreed with her, but it didn’t seem like there was anything to say. Andrew was gone. My mother was gone. Even though I hoped every day for a cure, even though I’d heard my dad say countless times that they’d find one, that it was just a matter of time, I wasn’t sure. I didn’t know if Andrew, or my mom, or any of them were ever coming back.

  Mrs. Ortiz called us to dinner. We sat around a table in the small kitchen, and I bowed my head and closed my eyes as she said grace. It was really long, and I was surprised by all the things Audrey’s mom thanked God for, especially since her life pretty much sucked. Her husband was dead, her son was catatonic, and she was disabled, but she thanked God that they had a place to live, food to eat, that Audrey had found a new friend (me), that I was there to share their meal, that they’d found good care for Andrew, that they were living again near their old friend Maria, and on and on. Then she asked for blessings on the food and on lots of people, including me. She ended with, “And God, please even bless J
erry Williams.” And that was the first time I heard her sound at all bitter. “Give him the things he needs in his life. Soften his heart and help him to be a good father to Todd.” She took a deep breath. “And please bless Todd to find his way and to reunite with his family. Amen.”

  “Amen.”

  We ate plates of stuffed pork chops, potatoes, green beans, and salad, with apple pie for dessert. I was spoiled with my dad’s cooking, but Natalie could give him a run for his money. It was delicious, and I felt comfortable and happy eating with Audrey and her mother. We talked a little about the mural we were going to do, and Natalie asked about how Todd was behaving, and Audrey said, “Fine, so far.”

  After dinner, Audrey and I hung out in her room a while longer, and I helped her unpack some of her stuff. Mostly it was clothes, a few stuffed animals, and some pictures. One was of Audrey and Todd when they were much younger standing with Natalie, Maria, and two men, who must have been their dads. One was tall, athletic, and Hispanic. The other was short, handsome in a sleaze-ball kind of way, and white.

  “What was that about Todd and his dad?” I asked. “You know, in the prayer.”

  Audrey shrugged and sat down on the end of the bed. “Todd was my best friend when we were little, but then when I was eight my dad got a job in Texas, and we moved away, and, well, he’s changed a lot.”

  “Yeah, I can tell,” I said.

  She nodded. “Yesterday we gave him and Maria a ride because their car wouldn’t start. I couldn’t believe how he acted at his grandparents’ house. He sat out on the porch and wouldn’t even go inside. Just because it’s not fancy or anything like the place he’s living. He’s like some massive snob now.”

  “Oh,” I said. “And what about his dad…Jerry?”

  “Yeah, Jerry,” said Audrey. “Jerry’s a jerk. He’s Todd’s dad, he’s rich, and he’s changed a lot too. He used to be really good friends with my dad. It’s a really cool story how he and Maria got together. I used to think it was romantic, you know, until they got divorced.”