Veronica took off her shoes, not knowing where to go. Sylvie wasn’t a very good hostess. She took her backpack, wandered into the living room, and plopped down on a long beige couch amid the craziest assortment of pillows. She loved all the patterns, stripes, and tribal designs mixed with paisleys and so many colors. Some living rooms looked like rooms people were supposed to get out of before getting comfortable in, but not this one. She nestled into the pillows and pulled a paisley cashmere throw that hung over the back of the couch around her. She wished her house could be like this, filled with nice things, but not cluttered. Marion Morgan collected everything.
Sylvie made a lot of clanging noises. She must be in the kitchen. Veronica missed Mary desperately and wanted her Oreos. At lunch, she hadn’t had much of an appetite and now she was sitting in a stranger’s living room with a stomach roaring like a lion. She covered her tummy with a striped pillow.
There was a table to her right with a few photographs of Sylvie and her parents. They weren’t recent. It was the same in Veronica’s house. Parents seemed to lose interest in documenting their lives as their children got older. Like the novelty of having a family just wore off or something. Sylvie’s mother was much younger than Veronica’s mother. She was also very pretty.
Sylvie called. Veronica followed her voice into a breakfast nook off the kitchen. It had a window that faced an airshaft. From Sylvie’s window, you could see into the apartments on the other two sides of the airshaft. It was like having rows of television sets that played the stories of real people’s lives.
At the moment, most of the rooms Veronica could see were dark and empty. But a few had life in them. A housekeeper vacuumed in one. An old man read the newspaper in another. Veronica was wondering about the other people and their lives when Sylvie set a platter of scrambled eggs and toast down on the table.
“Are you hungry?” Sylvie asked. She handed Veronica a fork and a napkin.
“Sort of,” Veronica said, praying the growling of her stomach wouldn’t betray her. She wanted to eat slowly, but honestly, scrambled eggs had never tasted so good. And the toast, for some strange reason, was the most satisfying food she had ever eaten. She should remember to tell Mary that this would be a good snack from now on. When they were finished eating, Veronica followed Sylvie and watched her put their dishes in the dishwasher.
“I guess we should start our project,” Sylvie said after everything was cleaned up. She opened a cabinet and took out a pile of neatly folded newspapers. She spread them out on one of the counters.
“What kind of chemicals do you want to put in?” Sylvie asked. She turned over one of the pots and dumped out a plant, separating the soil from the roots.
“I don’t know, ammonia and bleach?” Veronica said, immediately regretting it. Dr. Snope would call that kind of comment “provocative.”
Sylvie rummaged around the kitchen displaying no sign of provocation whatsoever. “I was thinking we could put in cleaning things that wouldn’t, like, gas us out of the house,” she said.
“Okay, I guess that’s the more sensible approach,” Veronica said. Sylvie examined rows upon rows of products: Ajax, Windex, silver polish, and Fantastik.
“Should we just use them all?” Sylvie asked.
“Sure,” Veronica said by default.
Sylvie piled everything on the counter and Veronica followed her lead, pouring and spraying and sprinkling the pile of soil. It reminded Veronica of potion making, an activity mothers detested because it was so messy, but there was no one at Sylvie’s house to object. After Veronica poured a pile of borax over the mixture, Sylvie squirted silver polish into the middle. The container made a noise like a fart. She did it again. Was she trying to be funny? Veronica didn’t want to laugh, just in case Sylvie had done it by accident. Instead she dumped a pile of Ajax in the middle and stirred it around with a wooden spoon. She threw all caution to the wind and unscrewed the spray nozzle from the Fantastik and poured a big stream into their soil. It was more fun than she had had in weeks. She and Sylvie were up to their elbows in soil. When it was thoroughly blended Sylvie showed Veronica how to put a few rocks at the bottom of the new pots for drainage and how to repot the plants. One plant got fresh and clean potting soil. The other one got the contaminated mixture.
Sylvie put the contaminated plant in the linen closet and turned off the light. Veronica suggested they put the other plant by a window. She hoped the window Sylvie chose would be in some other part of the apartment she hadn’t seen yet. But Sylvie thought it best to put it in the living room.
“This is the sunniest spot in the house,” she said. They went back to the kitchen and scrubbed their hands with a nailbrush. It took half a bottle of soap to get clean.
Mrs. Morgan picked up Veronica at six o’clock.
“Bye, Veronica. This was fun,” Sylvie said.
“It was,” Veronica said. “See you tomorrow.”
Recovery
What do you give a woman waking up from hip surgery? A whoopee cushion? A pile of rubber vomit? A Mylar balloon? The gift shop in the hospital where Mary’s hip had been replaced was filled with inappropriate gifts. Veronica would have liked to get Mary a stuffed animal but the selection seemed more appropriate for four-year-old girls than sturdy Mary. Plus she couldn’t look at anything that resembled a puppy. Mr. and Mrs. Morgan were patient while Veronica selected a gossip magazine, a book of crossword puzzles, and a box of chocolates. She brought them to the register, assigning each member of the family a gift, but her parents were nice and said all the presents could be from her.
The Morgans waited in the solarium until Mary woke up from her anesthesia. They took turns feeding dollar bills into the vending machines and devouring Doritos, Snickers, and stale granola bars.
“Is it taking too long?” Veronica asked. She was on her second bag of Doritos.
“Don’t worry, darling. Mary will be fine,” Mrs. Morgan said.
“She’d better be,” Mr. Morgan said, “or we will never eat a proper meal again.”
Veronica knew that was supposed to be funny, but her father’s jokes had never been easy to laugh at. That in itself used to make her laugh. Now it just made her sad. Since losing Cadbury nothing was particularly funny.
When Mary woke up, Veronica was so happy she had to stop herself from crawling into her bed. The hospital had washed Mary with some kind of antiseptic and she smelled different. But Veronica kissed her a dozen times because she was alive.
“I made it,” Mary said, still groggy from the anesthesia. She had tears in her eyes.
Veronica squeezed Mary’s hand and said, “See, Mary, you are tougher than you think.”
“So are you, my baby. So are you.” Mary smiled and told Mrs. Morgan to open the drawer of her nightstand. Inside was a menu from Grand Szechuan.
“It is supposed to be excellent. And I am hungry.”
“Hungry is good!” Mr. Morgan exclaimed. Veronica, who was sick to death of Chinese food, was so happy she thought she would burst. This was as good an end to a day as possible. Thank God for her family.
Silence Is Golden
Mary was recovering well and Veronica’s project with Sylvie was progressing. The changes in the plants were becoming visible. It had been Sylvie’s idea to rob one plant of light by putting it in a closet and rob it of nourishment by feeding it poison, but it had been Veronica’s idea to rob the plant emotionally. Every day while Sylvie cooked, Veronica opened the closet and sneered at her plant. She gave it dirty looks and said mean things to it. She told it it was weird. She told it it didn’t fit in. She told it she didn’t like it. She wished she was talking to some of her classmates. They made her feel bad just because she cared that her dog died. Well, the worst thing that had probably ever happened to any of them was having a stupid cashmere sweater cut in half.
Every day after they ate, Sylvie loaded the dishwasher while Veronica sponged up. Then they brought the closet plant out and put it next to the window plant. Veronica dre
w pictures of the plants, charting any changes in their appearance. And Sylvie made notations of the changes on a graph. Veronica was comfortable at Sylvie’s. When she used to go to Cricket’s house she talked all the time, about anything. She remembered once being so desperate for a topic she actually went on and on about fingernails because she was certain that if Cricket got bored, Cricket wouldn’t invite her over again. Veronica enjoyed that talking wasn’t required when she was with Sylvie.
Sylvie’s parents obviously worked a lot, because they were never home. Veronica hadn’t met either of them. It was strange how the absence of authority inspired such good habits. She and Sylvie could have goofed off all afternoon. But they never did. Mary always made Veronica sit up straight at her desk to do her homework but Sylvie insisted on working at the coffee table sitting on the floor. Veronica liked being on the floor too. The drawing part of science was fun. She had just invented a way of layering similar colors to create a kind of 3-D effect. Coloring used to frustrate Veronica because the colors that were in her pencil sets were so limited and nature never was. Yes, the leaves of plants were green and the bark of trees was brown but leaves were about twenty different greens and bark was so many colors. But as a reward for her hard work on the Carver family apologies, her parents had given her a new set of colored pencils with over one hundred colors.
When the doorman buzzed up saying that Mrs. Morgan was in the lobby, Veronica was startled. She had no idea it had gotten so late.
* * *
Fifth Avenue was noisy with the sounds of rush hour surging around them. Buses, cars, and bicycles seemed to be veering in and out of every empty space. It was always such a shock to reenter the world after Sylvie’s.
On the way home, Mrs. Morgan asked, “What do you do there? I’m dying to know if you’re beginning to get a sense of her.”
“She makes good snacks,” Veronica said.
“That’s interesting. Such as?” her mother asked, and smoothed Veronica’s hat down over her ears in a way Veronica hated.
“Today we had grilled cheese sandwiches and a salad with pears and walnuts.”
“That does sound good,” Mrs. Morgan said.
Veronica shifted her backpack and put her hand inside her mother’s. Sometimes holding hands made her mother stop asking so many questions. Veronica didn’t feel like talking.
Halfway
The closet plant was no longer just wilting and turning yellow. It was all but dead.
“You are so pretty,” Veronica said to the thriving plant. “No one likes you,” she said to the dying plant.
Sylvie set the table and Veronica wondered if she always made food like this for herself or if she was trying to make a good impression. If she was, it was working.
“Are you, like, really into food or something?” Veronica asked.
“I love cooking,” Sylvie said. “It’s like arts and crafts you can eat.”
Veronica didn’t know any other eleven-year-old who made food like Sylvie did. Today Sylvie had prepared pumpkin ravioli with brown butter. Veronica wondered if her mother liked pumpkin ravioli. It seemed like something her mother would like. But she would want to get it in the fall and from the farmers’ market. Her mother loved things that were seasonal and not available all the time. Sylvie said the sauce was just butter, but browned.
“Doesn’t your mother cook?” Veronica asked.
“No,” Sylvie said. “She’s dead. She died when I was three.”
“Oh. I’m sorry,” Veronica said, stunned. “I don’t know what to say,” was all she could manage.
“Sometimes,” Sylvie said, “and I don’t mean this in a mean way, Veronica, but sometimes there is nothing to say. That’s why I don’t talk much.”
Veronica believed Sylvie didn’t mean it in a mean way, but she still felt like she’d been told off. Talking too much ran in her family.
She wanted to hug Sylvie, to compliment her, to say something. But she didn’t know how to express anything that would be worth expressing, so she took Sylvie’s advice and didn’t say anything. She rinsed the silverware instead.
At home she couldn’t take her eyes off her parents. Her parents who she took for granted and complained about all the time. They both drove her crazy. But that was her life: two kinds of craziness and knowing that she was loved. Poor Sylvie.
“Mary called your mother and me today,” Mr. Morgan said. “She’s doing wonderfully and apparently giving the nurses a run for their money.”
“She asked about you, honey. She misses you,” Mrs. Morgan said. “Do you think you can make it at Sylvie’s for one more week?”
“I guess so,” Veronica said.
“Has it been awful?” her father asked.
“No,” Veronica answered. It hadn’t been awful at all, but she didn’t care to elaborate. She couldn’t stop thinking about Sylvie. Sylvie who cooked for herself and who cooked so well for Veronica, Sylvie who didn’t talk much. Sylvie who didn’t have a mother.
The Light at the End of the Hall
Veronica and Sylvie decided to arrange their data like a graphic novel. Veronica’s sketches would go in the panels and Sylvie would add all the data in a manner that was both scientific and narrative. Veronica couldn’t help but feel the plants were telling a bigger story.
She was very conscientiously outlining each frame, and the care she put into making them reminded her of the way she used to put dashes between each letter in each word she spelled when she was in kindergarten. Her mother had tried to make her see that instead of adding clarity, she was making her writing illegible. But Veronica never saw it that way.
She had one more frame to make when the lead of her pencil broke. She dug into her pencil case and came up empty. “Oh, no,” Veronica said, “I broke my lead.”
“There’s a sharpener in my room,” Sylvie said without looking up.
Veronica left the living room wondering what strange things lurked in the uncharted areas of the Samuelses’ apartment. Maybe showing people around your apartment was the behavior of grown-ups. Her mother always took people on tours of their apartment and got so excited to go on tours of other people’s. Kids generally didn’t do that. But still, it was strange to have spent every day here and not know anything about what was beyond the living room. She’d never actually been anywhere except the living room, a powder room, and the kitchen.
Veronica made her way down the hall. Toward the end was a light, like someone had left a TV on, which struck her as odd. But this light was many colors. It throbbed and bounced off the wall, which made the source impossible to identify. What was it: a lava lamp? An interactive artwork? She was mildly disappointed to discover the source of all these colors was just an ordinary laptop.
On the desk in Sylvie’s room an open laptop played a slide show. Each image held for a second or two before morphing into the next. Sylvie’s life was exposed for Veronica to examine.
Some babies look like old men when they are born. Sylvie was adorable. And the way her mother gazed upon her was startling. There was so much love in her eyes, so much joy in her face. None of the pictures of Veronica and her mother had that kind of mother-daughter-precious-moment-captured-forever-on-film quality because Mr. Morgan took the pictures and it always took him so long to operate the camera that by the time he finally pressed the button, whatever spontaneity had prompted the picture in the first place was long gone.
The pictures on Sylvie’s laptop told a beautiful story, but it was too short. The oldest Sylvie looked in the pictures was two or three. The last picture of them together was taken at a beach. They were standing in the surf holding hands. And even though the picture was taken from behind, Veronica was certain they were smiling.
Veronica understood now that Sylvie Samuels wasn’t weird or cold or creepy. Sylvie had a hole in her heart where her love used to be. Sylvie Samuels was sad, just like Veronica.
The Right Moment
That night Veronica hid her flashlight and all her colored pen
cils in bed. After her parents turned off the lights she set up shop. She copied Esme’s Rainbow Bridge story for Sylvie. She made each line a different color and it took a long time.
The next day after school, they met up as usual. Veronica wondered when the right moment would present itself. She had an idea that there would be a perfect time for giving the story to Sylvie. She considered handing it to her when they were waiting for the light on the corner of Ninety-Sixth and Third. But there was so much traffic and it was so loud she thought better of it.
When they got to Sylvie’s building and Sylvie was busy in the lobby opening the mailbox with her little key, Veronica fished the story out of her backpack. And while they stood next to each other in the elevator, watching the numbers light up as it climbed, Veronica worked up the courage to hand it to Sylvie.
The minute the story was out of Veronica’s hand she knew it was the dumbest thing she’d ever done in her whole life. How could she have compared a dead animal to a dead mother? How could she have used so many bright colors and glitter? What was wrong with her? No wonder she had no friends.
Veronica watched Sylvie read the story, wondering if their short friendship was over. But when Sylvie was finished reading, she hugged Veronica.
“Oh God, I thought you were going to hate it. It feels corny now—like a greeting card.”
“Yeah, but I’m corny.”
“Oh God,” Veronica said again. She couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“There has to be somewhere they go,” Sylvie said. “It can’t be the end of my mom. I don’t believe in heaven exactly, but there has to be somewhere they go. I think they are waiting for us.”
“I hope so,” Veronica said. She hadn’t thought she would see Cadbury again, but that was the point of the Rainbow Bridge, after all. “Maybe they’re together.”
“Maybe my mom is playing with your dog,” Sylvie said. The elevator reached the ninth floor and the doors opened.
The Good, the Bad & the Beagle Page 16
