by Lev AC Rosen
“Thanks,” he said.
“It’s the music I listened to when my dad was in rehab,” she says, putting her phone away. It’s not, like, super sad or anything. It’s like power music. Music that makes you want to punch things. It’s stupid, I know, but I just thought maybe you could use it.”
“It’s not stupid,” Nick says. He forces his best smile for her. He puts his phone away and looks back up at her and opens his mouth to tell Nat about the crack in the wall, but then stops. He doesn’t want to share it. “I’ll know more after I talk to Jess on Friday,” he says instead. “She can tell me if it’s Ms. Knight or not.”
Nat smiles, but her eyes flicker down for a moment, like she’s disappointed. “What are you going to ask her?”
“What her character looks like. That seems like something Jess would know, even if she only sees Ms. Knight playing.”
“Cool,” Nat says. She looks down at the remnants of her food and the plastic table. “You okay? You seem kinda weird today.”
Nick looks up at her and studies the blue streaks in her hair. They’re growing out and start a few inches down, just showing up out of the black like the aurora borealis. “I had a fight with my dad this morning. It’s not important.”
Nat starts packing up the remnants of her lunch, piling the trash like a hill on her tray. “My folks made me go to a shrink when my dad went into rehab,” she says, taking Nick’s crumpled brown lunch bag. “I hated it. Didn’t help, except for one thing: the shrink said it was good to say things aloud. Makes you confront them. I spent hours in my room saying ‘My dad is an alcoholic. My dad is sick.’ Sounds creepy, but it helped.”
“Like when you listed all that stuff yesterday?” Nick asks, thinking of her chanting her father’s drinking habits.
“Yeah.” Nat nods. She gets up and takes the tray over to a trash bin. Nick watches her sweep all the trash away and put the tray on top of the others. She comes back over, and Nick stands and they walk out together. “Sometimes it just helps to say a thing,” Nat says. “When you’re ready.”
“Thanks,” Nick says. But he doesn’t say anything else. He doesn’t say My mother lit the stove on fire.
Nat shrugs and then reaches out and squeezes his shoulder. “See you in history,” she says.
The rest of the day and the next go quickly. School is driving relentlessly forward, and as his teachers are fond of saying, this is junior high now, things are tougher. Nick can’t even go near the game for the rest of the week; he has math quizzes and papers, and what Dad said about his not studying sort of stung. He’d always been a good student. A-minuses, mostly, not those pure, diamond A’s, but good. Mom had always praised him for that, helped him study. It’s harder on his own. He locks himself in his room, where the air seems thick and hot and salted with some sort of sleeping gas. He tells himself that Severkin studied—Severkin knows all the ancient languages, the ancient cultures. If Nick wants to be anything like that, he needs to study, too. He listens to Nat’s playlist, and he likes it, though it’s usually not what he listens to. It’s loud and angry and feels like a lightning storm over the ocean. After a few songs, though, it calms down. It’s just rain.
Dad isn’t exactly pretending that they didn’t fight, but he’s not talking about it, either. Nick doesn’t say anything to him, and Dad doesn’t say anything to Nick besides “What do you want on the pizza?” and “I’ll pick you up after school tomorrow so we can go see Mom.” Otherwise, they’re strangers haunting the same empty house.
• • •
Nick gets in the car Friday after school after waving goodbye to Nat. He thinks he did okay on the math quiz, and his paper on East Berlin is going well. But today is more important than school. Today he has to find out more about Reunne—from Jess, and from his mother. If Reunne is trying to tell him something, he needs a clue from outside the game.
“I’m going to talk to your mom today,” Dad says when they’ve been driving for a few minutes. “About telling you more about why she’s in the home. Okay?”
“Sure,” Nick says after a moment. He doesn’t know what else to say. He thinks he should be happy—Dad is finally listening to him—but instead it’s like his stomach is so heavy, it’s pulling the rest of his body down. He slouches back into the chair, scooting down so the seat belt pushes into his chin. It doesn’t help.
“I don’t know if she’ll be okay with it, though. It’s really her story. It’s not even much of a story. But she has her reasons. She loves you and wants to protect you.”
“How can she protect me?” Nick asks. “And from what? Alzheimer’s? If she’s sick, I’m going to get sick. If she’s not sick, I’m not. All she has to do is admit she’s not sick.” The heaviness in his stomach starts to roil, and he remembers being Severkin on the ship at the beginning of the game: the shuddering underfoot, the huge rolling wave that pushed him away.
“She’s sick,” Dad says, voice like a hammer. “You have to accept that, Nick.” He looks over at Nick, then his eyes dart back to the road. “But it doesn’t mean you’ll get sick. We don’t know that for sure. There’s just a chance.”
“Yeah, a big chance,” Nick says, folding his arms. Dad is silent.
They pull into the white gravel parking lot without either of them saying anything else. The crackling of the gravel under the car sounds like crumbling rock.
Nick opens the door before the car is even parked and walks quickly toward the porch so Dad can’t catch up. A nurse swipes him through with a nod and he runs upstairs to Mom’s room, but she’s not there. He walks back downstairs to the desk, where his father is standing.
“She’s painting out back,” he says. They walk outside and around the back, the old people staring at them, one asking his father to get them more iced tea. Nick and Dad ignore them. Out back, in the grass, Mom has an easel set up. The grass is almost as high as her knees and seems to fade into her. Or she into it. She doesn’t see them at first and instead focuses on her easel and the palette of paints in her hand. Her back is straight and her hair is loose, occasionally flying out in the breeze. She wears a white skirt and sweater. She looks like she’s painting the back of the home, but as Nick gets closer he can see her easel, and the painting on it is of him. At least, he thinks it’s him. The eyebrows are too thick, and the skin isn’t brown but gray. The whole painting is gray, except for his eyes, which are brown. That part she got right.
“Hi, Mom,” Nick says when they’re close enough for her to hear them.
She turns and smiles. “Nicky,” she says. “I’m trying to paint you. It’s hard from memory….Come here and stand over there so I can fix it.” Nick walks around to stand in the grass in front of his mother. She’s blocked by the canvas except for her legs and one elbow. Dad goes and stands behind her, watching her paint. “No need to look so worried, Nicky,” Mom says, poking her head out around the side of the easel. “Relax.” Nick tries to relax but is suddenly very aware of his arms and how they hang wrong, and his posture, which has never been good. “Don’t think about it,” she says. “Why don’t you tell me about school. How is your paper on me coming?”
“It’s not really on you,” Nick says, trying putting his hands in his pockets. That feels weird, though, so he folds them over his chest. “It’s about the fall of the Berlin Wall. I’ve been doing lots of research. I know how it was sort of a mistake that they opened it, but then everyone gathered at the gate and it came down.”
“Arms down,” Mom says. “Yes, I remember that. So many people.”
“You were there?” Nick asks.
“Oh yes,” she says, her face obscured by the canvas and her voice like a strong breeze, or a heavy sigh. “It wasn’t intentional. I was out walking.” She sounds as if she’s going to say more but then pauses for a long time. Her arm stops moving. “Can you turn a little to your left, Nicky?” Nick turns obediently. “Good, thank you. But yes, I saw the crowds. I’d been walking for hours, so I hadn’t heard anything on the radio. I had
to ask someone what was happening. I stopped a young man on the street and asked him, and he said, ‘They’re opening the wall, sister.’ I remember that. I wasn’t a revolutionary before, but that night anyone young, anyone who had been raised under the shadow of the wall, we were brothers and sisters. It was almost a new word, not the old brother, sister, comrade. It was something else. So I followed the crowd and I watched from a distance—I didn’t want to be arrested, they would have taken away my chance at a good job, and after all the work I’d done getting so far in school, I couldn’t risk it. So I watched. And then, suddenly, the wall was open. I wish I could say it was like light flooded in or something romantic, but it was like…like when your ears pop on a plane. Noises become louder and clearer, but they’re still the same noises. That’s what it was like that night. Of course, over the next few weeks and months it all started to change. But that night, it was like having your ears pop.” She leans out from behind the canvas and looks him in the eye, then makes a popping noise with her lips. Nick smiles.
“Finally, a smile,” Mom says. “Now hold it so I can paint it.”
Nick tries to hold the smile but it becomes strained, then painful. “I can’t hold it anymore,” he says.
“That’s all right, I got it, I think. Come see.” Nick walks around to look at the painting. Not much has changed—it’s still grayscale except for his eyes. But it looks more like him now, he thinks. Except maybe the expression. The expression is too hard. Even with the smile, he looks like a wall. He turns away and looks at Mom instead.
“It’s nice, Mom. But tell me more about the wall. Where were you?”
“Oh, I don’t remember exactly,” she says, looking up at the sky. “I was a long way from home, I remember that. But I wasn’t so close to the wall that I could hear the crowds.” She shakes her head. “Sorry. I just followed the others. I don’t remember where I was.”
“Where were you going?”
“I was just out walking, Nicky.” Her voice lowers slightly. “I don’t want to talk about that. That night was very good for a lot of people, including me. But it wasn’t all good. Now tell me what you really think of the painting.”
Nick looks back at the painting. “I think I look angry,” he says. “But otherwise it’s really good.”
“You don’t look angry,” Dad says. “You look worried. Paint him so he looks more relaxed, Sophie.”
“No, I like it this way. I think he looks like he cares. That is the face I want to see on my wall—my son, caring.”
“I do care, Mom,” Nick says, taking Mom’s hand.
“Why don’t we take the painting up to your room,” Dad says. “We can hang it there. Then I need to talk to your mom alone for a little while, okay?”
“Yeah,” Nick says. “But the paint is still wet.”
“Oh, right,” Dad says. Nick wonders if he should make a checklist for Dad. Check off box 8—“Decreased or poor judgment.” “Well, maybe you can go find a nurse to let them know it’s done? While I talk to your mother?”
“Sure,” Nick says. He’ll find Jess. He needs to talk to her anyway, and alone is better. His parents walk over to the bench they were sitting on the other day, and Nick walks away, trying not to look too purposeful. He checks the media room first, but Jess isn’t there, so he asks at the desk and they direct him to a room down the hall.
The door is open, and Nick walks in slowly. Jess is sitting by a patient’s bedside, checking a tube that goes into the patient’s nose. This room is one of the more hospital-like ones, with floors that glare under bright lights.
“Your hair is so pretty,” the old woman in bed says to Jess. “You people have the best hair.” She reaches out and strokes one of Jess’s braids as Jess reaches over her.
“Thank you,” Jess says in a tone Nick has heard before. Has used before. “Looks like you’re all set here. Want me to turn on the TV?”
“Oh yes,” the woman says. Jess turns it on and walks out of the room, nodding at Nick as she does so. Nick follows her.
“Did you want to talk to me?” Jess asks.
“Do you get questions about your hair a lot?” Nick asks. They’re walking to the media room.
“Old white people. Yeah. Sometimes I try telling them it’s not okay, but they forget, or pretend to. Part of the life.”
“Yeah,” Nick says.
Jess stops in the media room and starts collecting stray DVDs and matching them to their cases. “Did you want to ask me about my hair, too?”
“Oh, no,” Nick says rubbing his hand over his own buzzed hair. “I wanted to ask if you knew what character Ms. Knight plays—in Wellhall.”
Jess looks up at him, an eyebrow raised. “Why do you want to know that?”
“Is there a reason I shouldn’t know?” Nick asks, suddenly wondering if Nat was right. His heart speeds up a little.
“I get that she’s a cool, young teacher and all, but she’s still your teacher. You can’t hang out with her in the game to get better grades.” Jess stands, no longer focused on cleaning up, just focused on Nick. “She likes you—don’t worry about being a suck-up. That’ll freak her out.”
“No, no…,” Nick says, putting up his hand. “The opposite. We know she’d be uncomfortable, so we just want to make sure if we see her in-game, we can stay away. It’d be weird if she found out she was playing with her students.”
Jess nods. “Okay. That’s really mature of you. But I don’t know how helpful I can be. I mean, I watch her play, but usually I’m in bed, and it’s just sort of happening. I don’t pay much attention.”
“Do you know what her character looks like? Or what weapon she uses?”
“Yeah…” Jess looks down at the DVDs in her hand. “I think she uses a spear—or a staff. Something like that.” Nick swallows.
Maybe Nat was right. “Anything else?”
“It’s a female character. Red hair, like hers. I think she wears a red-and-white dress or robe—but that changes, right?”
“Yeah,” Nick says, exhaling. Reunne does not have red hair. Ms. Knight isn’t Reunne. Nat was wrong. Nick cracks a grin. He knew she was wrong. She should have believed him from the start. He knows his own mother. He feels a laugh start to bubble up inside him but pushes it back down.
“And I think she’s a priest, or a warrior priest or something. Is that specific enough?”
“Yeah,” Nick says. “Is that the only character she plays?”
“Oh yeah. She loves that character. Besides, she only has time for one.” Jess puts all the DVDs back on the shelves and walks out of the media room, and Nick follows.
“Thanks,” Nick says. He uses all his energy to keep his body still, not jump up in the air and holler so loud Nat can hear it that he was right. His mom is playing the game. His mom is trying to tell him something. She’s trying to tell him something and he has no idea what.
“No problem,” Jess says. “How’s your mom?”
“She’s really good,” Nick says. “I’m thinking of springing her out of here.”
Jess laughs, but seeing Nick’s face, the laugh fades. She stops in the hall and looks at him. “You’re not serious, right?”
Nick shrugs. “I just don’t think she’s as sick as everyone says.”
Jess puts a hand on Nick’s shoulder and leaves it there. “They haven’t really told you anything, have they?”
Nick shakes his head. But he knows enough. He knows his mom is Reunne, and that means something. He just has to figure out what.
“That’s not fair,” she says. “Not fair to anyone.” She kneels slightly so she’s at eye level with Nick. “Your mom is great. She’s one of my favorites. She’s funny, doesn’t do any of that little micro-aggressive racist crap—sometimes even calls other patients out on it—and she loves you so much. You’re all she talks about. Have you seen what she’s painting?” Nick nods. “And she’s in here so much, watching people play Wellhall, painting it afterwards. Sometimes she talks to them as they play, too.�
� Jess pauses, looks away for a moment, then looks back at Nick. “She calls them Nicky.”
“And she plays, too,” Nick says. Jess keeps staring at him, saying nothing. “She plays, too,” Nick repeats, louder.
Jess stands up. “I don’t know. I’m not in there all the time. Maybe.” She turns and starts walking again.
“Thanks,” Nick says, pushing a polite smile onto his face. He knows his mom plays. And she doesn’t know how sick his mom is. She’s not even a doctor.
“If you ever want someone to talk to,” Jess says, stopping and turning to face him again, “I’m always around.” She smiles, but it’s a smile that’s trying to hide PityFace, and Nick has to work hard not to roll his eyes. It’s not her fault. She doesn’t know, after all. No one knows but him. But if Reunne isn’t Ms. Knight, then it has to be Mom. He feels himself evaporating, all the weight that he possessed gone, like he has used one of the potions in-game that let you carry a heavy load without affecting movement. No, not like that, he realizes, because the load is gone. Now if he can only figure out what Mom is trying to tell him in the game—what the sharp-eyed, smart part of her wants to say. It has to be some way to get her out, some symptom the doctors haven’t noticed that points to something besides Alzheimer’s. Maybe just the fact that she’s playing online with him would be enough for the doctors—she found him online, right? All he has to do is prove it’s her.
He still has to do that, he realizes, walking back outside to his parents. The actual proving. She won’t admit she’s Reunne. He might know it, and she might know it, and Nat might know it, but until Dad and the doctors know it, it doesn’t count. Or he can get her to admit it. Get Mom to realize that playing the game is enough to show how well she is.
