Goldengrove

by Francine Prose

  By now, I could hardly not notice how much I thought about Aaron, how often I talked to him in my head and remembered things to tell him. And there was that trick he did with time, making it speed up when we were together and drag till I saw him again. The memory of him was like medicine: two drops in the dead of the night when I woke up missing Margaret. Then I’d remember that Aaron and I were going to watch Trouble in Paradise, and for a moment I’d feel better.

  I’d had crushes on boys in my class. One day, a boy would be just like any other boy, and then some overnight change made my attention fly toward him like filings to a magnet. After that I always knew where he was, even in a crowd at recess. He alone stayed sharp and clear while everyone blurred around him. Suddenly, I couldn’t speak when he was anywhere near. I imagined holding his hand. I pressed my lips to my wrist. Then, just as mysteriously, the crush would disappear, and I couldn’t understand why I’d been foolish enough to think that one boy, that boy, was different from the rest.

  It wasn’t like that with Aaron. I could talk, I could think, I could be myself, or at least the version of myself that most resembled Margaret. But if it wasn’t a crush, what was it? Maybe it was love. Not boy-girl love, not waiting-for-him-to-call love, not wondering-if-it-was-too-early-to-let-him-kiss-you love. It was something purer and deeper. No one could know how it felt to be us, to have lost and found what we had. Aaron was going away in the fall. We would only have this one summer.

  On the weekends we had plenty of time. I’d pretend to be at Elaine ’s. Weekdays were more rushed. I couldn’t just vanish for hours without telling my mother where I was going. But gradually, the weekday visits lengthened. Dad was in the bookstore, and Mom was leaving on her drug holidays earlier in the day.

  I knew the reason Aaron liked being with me was that I reminded him of my sister. I’d catch him squinting at me, searching for traces of her. I knew it, and I didn’t. Some part of me believed that Aaron liked the part of me that was Nico, whoever that was. I felt as if Margaret were a plant inside me that, nurtured by Aaron, had begun to blossom. Mostly, it was fine with me, but sometimes—usually when I was tired or lonely—it scared me. I felt as if I, and not Margaret, was the one who had disappeared, or as if I’d become a petri dish in which my sister was growing. There were days when I wanted to say, “I’m the living sister.” But when I ran out of vanilla oil, I asked Aaron to get me more. He always nodded and didn’t talk. Those were always good moments.

  One night, after my parents had gone to bed, I put on Flying Deuces and fast-forwarded to the end. The plane Laurel and Hardy have hijacked crashes, and as Stan crawls out of the wreckage, Ollie’s ghost flutters up toward the sky.

  In the final scene, Stan is walking down a country road with a little hobo pack. He looks calm and happy, his simple-minded old self. Has he gotten over Ollie? A voice calls him—it’s Ollie’s!— and he turns to see an irritated-looking horse with a bowler and a Hitler mustache. Ollie the horse is as foul-tempered and peevish as Ollie the person. He snarls, “Look at the mess you’ve gotten me into.” But Stan is so thrilled to see him that he grins and throws his arms around the horse’s neck. Stan hadn’t gotten over his friend’s death. Ollie was lost, and now he was found.

  The film ended. I wasn’t crying or crumpled up in pain on the sofa. I got up and went to bed and closed my eyes and slept.

  MY MOTHER NEVER GOT A HARPSICHORD. Maybe she forgot, or maybe the trouble she’d had trying to pronounce it had dampened her desire. Now, at meals, she played with her food, extracting one shred of cabbage from the tangle of coleslaw, one curl of pasta from the mac and cheese. Then she’d lose interest and grow abstract, listening, as if a voice, inaudible to my father and me, was calling from another room. A dim gleam, a sort of fish-tank glow, would flicker in her eyes, and, waving her fork like a baton, she’d say something like, “I’ve just figured out the whole thing about Mozart.”

  We’d pause from our pretend-eating and wait, but the light in her eyes would sputter, and after a while she would ask, with rising anger, why we were looking at her.

  “Because you’re so beautiful,” my father would say, at which point she would stand unsteadily and drift out of the room.

  At those moments, I hated how grown-up I needed to be in order to keep reminding myself that they were doing their best. But their best wasn’t good enough. It was in our interests to let the others hide, lest, in the flood of confession, our own secrets might spill out. It was terrible, how Margaret’s death had put everything in perspective and trumped everything that might seem huge to a normal person. Margaret’s death said, None of that counts. Every problem can be solved as long as the people involved are alive.

  July and August mocked us from the calendar on the kitchen tackboard. Every square used to be filled with Margaret’s spidery writing, notes about a party or school event, music lesson or rehearsal. It was eerie that some of the boxes were already filled. But we couldn’t take the calendar down, no more than we could dismantle Margaret’s room. Someone must have canceled my sister’s dentist appointment.

  One calendar box was marked with a new red X. I would have remembered without it. That was my appointment with the heart specialist in Albany. Every time I thought about it, I saw a gloomy, faceless person in a white lab coat telling me that I had only weeks to live.

  Biking to meet Aaron, I’d think, I could die like Margaret and wind up in a ditch. If I didn’t show up, how long would it take Aaron to work up the nerve to call my parents? How long would it take them to find me? The grief I felt on their behalf was so overwhelming that I had to remind myself it hadn’t actually happened. Did I need to warn Aaron that my heart could stop even when we were just quietly watching a movie? In fact, when I was with him, the pain disappeared. I would have thought I was cured, if I’d been thinking about it.

  Mom offered to drive me to the doctor’s, but a few days before, Dad announced we were all going in the Jeep. He shot my mother a nonnegotiable look filled with information—no accusations, just facts—about her ongoing romance with prescription medication.

  How could Mom have driven? It was all she could do to hold on to the directions to the hospital. Who would have imagined that there were so many ways to misplace a sheet of paper? Each time she lost it, she went insane, scrabbling under the seat, and my father’s shoulders would stiffen. But I didn’t think she’d taken any pills that day. She used to get nervous before. We’d forgotten what we used to be like, forgotten what was normal.

  The hospital was outside the city, a short distance from the highway. I didn’t get a chance to look at the shops and the traffic or to enjoy the twisted fun of my parents getting lost and fighting. But maybe I wouldn’t have liked it without Margaret there to enjoy it with me.

  We were all so relieved to find the hospital that we were practically ecstatic until, one by one, we remembered why we were there. As we drove through the gate, Mom said, “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”

  Dad muttered, “That’s not funny.”

  The cement road had a bumpy stretch where a group of workers with earth-moving equipment were enlarging the parking lot.

  “Good thing we brought the Jeep,” said Dad.

  “Brilliant,” said Mom. “We need to find the Newton Pavilion. Pavilion? Whatever that is.”

  “I know that, Daisy,” said Dad.

  I thought of Dr. Viscott, and of the electric train chugging its reassuring circuit around his waiting room.

  “Watch out,” Mom called to me, as we crossed the oddly deserted parking lot.

  Dad said, “Watch out for what?”

  “Watch out on general principles,” said Mom.

  A cop with an orange mustache scrutinized Mom and Dad’s driver’s licenses as if we might be terrorists plotting to blow up the ICU.

  “Picture ID?” he asked me.

  Mom said, “She doesn’t drive. She doesn’t have a passport. Should we have brought her birth certificate? Would that have been enough?”r />
  The guard held up his hand. Enough. He gave each of us a long, hard look. Then he waved us through.

  “Thank you,” my father said meekly. Mom and I glared at Dad for that, but he pretended not to notice.

  “You’re welcome, sir,” said the cop.

  As we threaded the maze of white halls to the doctor’s office, all the evidence—wheelchairs, stretchers, oxygen tanks—testified to the range of disasters that strike unsuspecting people daily. Three times, my mother asked directions to Suite 14H. We could have found it ourselves.

  Several doctors had their offices there, but the waiting room was empty except for a tiny boy and his mom. The boy had translucent bat-wing ears, and his skin was skim-milk blue. I didn’t know if I should say hello. I pretended to read a golf magazine. If the doctor gave us bad news, I’d be spending a lot of time sitting across from Skim Milk Boy and other kids like him. Like me.

  Dr. Nevins was tall and thin, with a beaky nose, dark hair in a knot, round tortoiseshell glasses. She came out to the waiting room and briskly shook our hands. She managed to make intense eye contact without seeing us, exactly. She appeared distracted, even alarmed, but not, I hoped, about me. I did sense that she was scared of me in some puzzling way. She got flustered when all three of us crowded into her office.

  Mom and Dad took the chairs, and I jammed myself into the window ledge. There would have been more room for us if not for the hundreds, maybe thousands, of knickknack owls that covered the doctor’s desk and filled their own glass case.

  My father said, “I guess you like owls.”

  The doctor’s twitch of a smile was pure effort, but somewhere in mid-smile she finally saw my dad, and I watched my father’s handsome face work its magic even on her. She said, “Thanks. I’ve been collecting them since I was a little girl.”

  What sadistic relative first gave her one of those birds? To an owlish girl, it must have felt like being ripped by claws. I guessed she ’d gotten over it and embraced her inner owl. If we ’d been smart enough to consult her, and she ’d saved Margaret’s life, I would have found her every owl on the planet. But we hadn’t bothered, we hadn’t known enough, we hadn’t taken the trouble.

  The doctor skimmed the papers my dad had filled out. She said, “I’m a little unclear . . .” Her glance kept tracking between me and my parents, lingering on me. I grinned like mad in what I hoped was a heart-healthy way.

  My father said, “Our daughter had—”

  “Our other daughter,” said Mom.

  I’d never before seen my father shoot my mother a look like a strip of duct tape he wanted to paste across her mouth.

  “Our older daughter had—” My father smoothly pronounced the name of Margaret’s condition.

  “I see,” said Dr. Nevins. And then, all science, “How is that being managed?”

  “Was being managed,” said my mother.

  “It wasn’t,” said my father.

  “She went swimming. She drowned.”

  “She died,” my mother said.

  Mom, I thought. That’s what drowned means.

  “I’m so sorry,” said the doctor.

  “He told us there was nothing to worry about,” my mother said. “Nothing to worry about!” Amazing, how fast her tone of voice changed the tone of the conversation.

  “Daisy, please,” said my father.

  Dr. Nevins said, “I understand your concern. These things do run in families, but the incidence of that is rarer than the chance of it happening at all. Which in your daughter’s case, I know, was a hundred percent. But I’m sure Nicole’s fine.”

  “Nico,” I said. “How can you be sure?” Mom said.

  Dr. Nevins turned to me. “Have you been having any problems?”

  The question was ludicrous, or would have been from anyone else.

  I said, “My chest hurts. Every so often.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since my sister died.”

  “O-kay,” said the doctor. “Let’s take a listen. And then just to set everyone’s mind at ease, we’ll do an echocardiogram. Painless, noninvasive. We can look at her heart on a monitor and see what’s going on with—”

  “Nico,” I said. “Nico,” repeated the doctor.

  “We know what an echocardiogram is,” my mother said. “Now we do.”

  “—what, if anything, is going on with Nico,” said the doctor. “Would you like to step next door, Nico?” Now that she finally knew my name, she couldn’t say it often enough.

  Mom and Dad jumped up. The doctor looked as if she wanted to push them back in their chairs.

  “Why don’t you relax in the waiting room—”

  “Relax,” said Mom. “That’s what we’ll do. Relax.”

  “And we’ll come get you as soon as it’s over. It’s just a closet with a machine and enough room for me and Nico and the technician. I promise I won’t hurt her, and I’ll return her to you in one piece.”

  Everyone chuckled. A doctor hurting someone? What a hilarious joke. In fact, my parents seemed relieved. They’d wanted to be there for me. But they didn’t really want to watch my heart, healthy or not, on TV.

  I followed the doctor next door. The examining room was chilly and bare but for a table, computer, shelves, plastic gloves, gowns, a tangle of rubber tubing. A wastepaper basket with a red cross. The only light was the monitor’s lunar glow.

  The technician had gray dreadlocks and a calming smile. She told me to take everything off on top and gave me a short white gown flecked with pink. She smeared a blue, bubble-gum-smelling gel over my chest and ribs.

  “Sorry, baby,” she said. “Sorry it’s so cold. We keep it like the machines want it.”

  In a few moments the doctor returned and asked how I was feeling.

  “Fine!” I sang out, terrified and angry at myself for the wimpy hypochondria that had brought me to the point of lying half naked on a table in this icy spaceship capsule. Was it too late to call it off? I’d rather live in happy ignorance and die in the middle of life, like my sister.

  The doctor listened to my heart with a metal stethoscope. The stethoscope was a formality. Her machine would tell us what we needed to know.

  “This won’t hurt,” the doctor promised.

  I jumped when she pressed the cold mouse to my chest.

  “Hold still, dear,” she said. She massaged it in tickly circles, concentrating on the screen. I studied her face for the wrinkle that would mean I was doomed, and when she returned to the same place twice, I knew my doom was certain. She asked me to lie on my side and ran the mouse over my ribs. I told myself to relax and enjoy my last few minutes of health.

  This part lasted so long that I started shaking. I closed my eyes and asked Margaret to help me. She’d let me down about the haircut, but that hadn’t counted, not compared to this.

  After an eternity, the doctor said, “Looks shipshape to me.” Shipshape? Was that a scientific term? It was her smile that convinced me. A weight seemed to have been lifted from her, and I understood that she had been frightened of having to give me bad news. I liked her when I realized that my danger had been hers, too. Suddenly she looked almost pretty to me, still owlish, but a pretty owl.

  Thank you, I thought.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “I can’t take credit,” she said.

  “It’s a relief, is all.” It was the first true thing I’d said since I got to the office.

  “Were you worried?” the doctor said. “The odds were on your side.”

  “I knew that.” I was lying again. “I wasn’t worried. Not really. You know what? Science is my best subject. I’ve been thinking I might want to be a scientist some day. I love knowing why things happen and the scientific names and—” The staircase spirit said, Maybe your heart’s shipshape, but now she’s going to make you see a shrink.

  “Oh, do you?” Dr. Nevins had started tidying up.

  “Can I look?” I asked. She nodded. I got up on my elbow so I could watch th
e monitor as she pulled the mouse over my heart. A dark blob pulsed in a sea of black, contracting and expanding in shuddery sea-creature ripples. I thought about Margaret’s heart. I wondered if it had slowed down or stopped suddenly, all at once. Thump thump. Thump thump. Nothing.

  “That’s the left ventricle,” the doctor said. “And see that, that’s the aorta.”

  “And that?”

  “A vein,” she said. “The vena cava, to be exact.”

  Already it seemed less like my heart than like somebody’s science project. It was oddly pleasant, lying in the cool, dark room with the doctor giving each part of my heart a purpose and name.

  I said, “Could you have saved my sister?”

  “Maybe,” she said. “Who knows?” I could tell she thought she could have, though maybe I was wrong. She pretended not to notice that I’d started to cry. She said, “I’m sorry about your sister.”

  “Thank you,” I tried to say. I sat up. The doctor put down the mouse, the screen went blank. All black sea, no island. After a while she said, “If you really like science, Nico, don’t let anybody stop you. If that’s what you want to do—” Like the bookstore customers, she was talking about herself.

  “Actually,” I said, “I was thinking that if I didn’t become a scientist, I might want to be a jazz singer.”

  “A jazz singer?” she murmured. “Interesting.” She was stripping off her gloves. Each finger came off with a pop. With one glove still dangling from her hand, she paused and said, “If you want to talk to someone, I can give your parents a referral.”

  “About?” For a minute, I thought she meant my future in science.