I have asked him to shut up but I know he can’t, and he says thickly, half-choking, “Are we still friends? I don’t blame you if you don’t want to be friends any more.”
But I’m holding myself too, my numb hands fastened onto opposite sides of my jacket, looking up at the last of the sunset: bruise-purple, blood-black, stars coming out. My stomach hurts. Dr. G, upon hearing about the blood in my vomit, told me that I likely had some internal bleeding, but for that, there was nothing she could do. It would have to heal or not on its own.
The magpie gives up on us and hops off, not even deigning to fly. I don’t even know, really, why I went looking for Henryk. Part of me wanted to beat him up. Part of me just wanted to know what happened: Had he been hurt? Had he been sick? No. Just a coward.
Cowardice: I can leave that behind. I can give that up.
He’s the one always saying that it’s too late to start over; and I agree now, I see what he means. He means the world, but it applies to everything. It’s always too late. It’s never in time. But there’s always time to start afresh, point a different way, do something else, make something new. The end of the world makes a clean slate to build a new one.
I get up slowly from the steps and walk home, and I don’t look back to see if he’s following me.
14.
Mom doesn’t come home until the next evening, when I have quietly made as many inquiries as I think I can make without letting people know how crazed I am with worry, just short of getting her name up on the board. Even Larsen looks at me blankly, and says, very casually, that she’ll poke around.
She does not congratulate me on the boar hunt. As I leave, I find myself wobbly-legged with relief that she has not.
Our place seems too big and too quiet. Never used to solitude, never used to not hearing another voice on the far side of the wall, feeling the air move with someone’s breath. This, this aching void, this is what I would leave her with. This is what she fears. Well, you get used to it, I suppose. When people die, when people sicken . . . but to have someone leave you, to hand this void to you and expect you to take it. That is what hurts her. I get it now.
When Mom returns, I have finished brushing my teeth and am getting ready for bed, trying to get the knots out of my hair. Easier than yesterday, when it took me forever to wash out the clotted blood and dirt. We stare at each other for too long in the fading light. In a minute, one of us will get up and light a lamp. Not the one in the green jam jar, I hope, which makes us look a bit underwatery and ill. Instead, the room darkens.
She moves forward slowly, formally, and takes the comb out of my hand, tilting my chin up in her cold fingers. “Hmm. Not as bad as people said.”
“People were . . . saying . . . things?”
“They said your face was completely ruined,” she says. “It’s just the one big cut here, and that’ll heal clean. And some scratches.”
She sits on the bed, and I turn on my chair and look at her; our faces are almost on the same level when we sit like this. My heart pounds so that I think I might be sick. “I did it for you. Giving you my share. So that when I go . . .”
“That’s what Henryk said.” Her voice is flat, noncommittal; it tells me nothing. It takes me several moments to realize just how incandescently angry she is.
“It’s a lot. Look.” I give her Koda’s note, but she doesn’t bother unfolding it, only sits very still, back straight, with the paper shaking in her hands. Thunderheads cluster in the room. I wait for them to break.
“Reid, you’re not ready for this. Ready to go to university. Or live on your own. This just cements it: this is proof, everyone I’ve talked to agrees with me.”
“Who were you t—”
“Don’t interrupt me. This was the decision of a child — trying to buy your way into something, as if throwing away your life to hunt a dangerous animal would prove that you were ready to travel thousands of miles by yourself for something that might not even exist. And you’re sick, you know that, and you still went. And look what happened. Gabriel Bramswell is dead.”
“Mom, I didn’t have anything to do with that. I don’t know what people were telling you, or who . . . who did you talk to? Who told you what happened down there? Don’t say Henryk.”
“Why would Henryk know wh— . . . oh Reid, for God’s sake. For fuck’s sake.”
I have never heard her swear before; it is like being slapped. Tears rise to my eyes, first one, then the other, and begin to burn down my cheeks like molten tar.
“Did you take him along with you on that — on that suicide mission? Did you drag him along?”
“No! He volunteered to go! He wanted to go!”
“How can you look at me and lie like that? How? When you were a little girl — no, look at me — when you were a little girl, remember, we sat down and had that talk, about how you wouldn’t lie to me, and I wouldn’t lie to you, because it was just the two of us —”
I’m weeping now. How dare she. The two of us: an open wound. Just the two of us now. I don’t remember that, only that it was winter, and we had birch candy after, a tiny bite, just for the children (the sign said) but I had saved some of mine for her and even a little for Daddy, because she could not convince me he was not coming back. “I’m still going. I’m sorry I went on the hunt, because yeah, it was stupid, people got hurt, but I’m sorry, I’m still going.”
“Is this the part where you tell me that I have to let you live your life?” At last she raises her voice, so that I can hear her over my sobs. Thoughtful of her. “Hmm? Is that what you’re going to say?”
“No. Yes! Yes! I am saying that!”
“Because what do you think you’re living now? What do you think this is? Not good enough for you? It’s more real than anything in that letter could possibly be. You know — Reid, stop it this minute. You know Mrs. Cross doesn’t do anything with those applications. She just wants you to write essays. I could go down to her office right now —”
“No!”
“— and find the stacks and stacks of them in the drawers, because she won’t give them up to be recycled —”
“That’s not true! She did send it away! They talked about my essay in the letter! They said that was why they were accepting me!”
“Reid, stop acting like a child. We can put this all behind us if you’ll just calm down and be reasonable. I want to put it behind us. That’s all I want.”
“You want to put everything behind us! That’s what you want! You don’t want me to have a chance at something different and new, you’re terrified of it, or your — your fucking disease is terrified of it, and one of you is saying this shit, and I can’t tell the difference anymore! I can’t tell the difference! I don’t even know who I’m leaving!”
“You can just leave the Cad out of this,” she hisses, standing, and I stand too, and I realize that I am taller than she is, which shouldn’t be possible. “It doesn’t factor into this at all. It’s just an infection. It doesn’t —”
“It does and you know it!” My tears dry and pull on my skin; I feel lit-up from inside, possessor of great and terrible secrets, iron-hard, that I could pound into a spearpoint. “You think I’m grateful for the so-called benefits of this thing, you think that’s it, don’t you? That it keeps us out of trouble, keeps us safe. Well, fuck the benefits, and fuck Cad, fucking parasite!”
“You watch your language!”
“I didn’t consent to having this thing in me!” I scream at last, even though the disease itself, as if to prove my point, flares, hurtful, in fingers and toes; it must be swirling angrily across my face like a dust devil. Mom is staring at my cheeks rather than my eyes, stunned.
“You don’t consent to your genes either! That’s an extremely childish argument, and you’re going to need to lower your voice.”
“It made Dad leave! That, that thing, inside you! That’s wh
at drove him off!”
Her eyes widen. Had I thought no more lines could be crossed? She strokes both hands through her hair and composes herself. “It had nothing to do with it. That was a decision he made on his own. How dare you suggest that —”
“It was the thing’s fault!”
“That thing is part of you! And at least he came to visit your grandmother in the hospital! You didn’t even see her — you didn’t see your own grandmother, my mother, while she was dying!”
“Dying of this! Grandma was screaming, she was screaming while she died and there was nothing they could do, and you wanted me to talk to her like that, a five-year-old, you wanted a five-year-old child to hear her grandmother in the worst pain of her entire life, and you’re a monster for that, you’re a monster, and you’re carrying a monster, and you made me a monster too, and I hate you for it! I hate you for all of it !”
Her face dissolves. Through a blue-tinted fog, I fling the comb at my desk, and then I am gone, hurling myself in bare feet down the slick concrete steps, something in me
(you know its name)
making me grasp the handrail to slow my headlong flight.
15.
Henryk’s door is shut, which causes me to goggle at it as if I’ve forgotten they could do that, which honestly I think I might have; it is so rare to see it done. But he opens it to my tap and lets me in, and I shut it again behind me because he seems to want it shut.
He is sleepy, damp, baffled, clearly about to turn in. I also get the impression that he somehow never expected to see me again. But I could not think of anywhere else to go, nowhere safe seemed safe enough, enough of a structure to protect me from my self-inflicted storm.
“Were you . . . crying?” he says cautiously.
“I had a fight with my mom.”
“Oh. Um —”
“Can I sleep over? Just for tonight.” I sniff, and rub a hand over my eyes.
“Of course.”
He insists I take the bed; I’m still shaking from the fight and feel like I’m going to throw up, and I’m not much use as he folds blankets and rags to sleep in next to it. When we are both settled in, night has fallen; a narrow bar of moonlight hits the windowsill and nothing else. I am on the very edge of his bed, stiff as a board, everything hurting: head, eyes, ankle, guts. Rustles and grunts as he tries to get comfortable.
“It must’ve been pretty bad.” His voice floats up, startling me with how close it sounds: he’s only a couple of feet away, at most. I could probably reach out and poke him in the face.
“Jesus. It was bad. I don’t want to leave like this, but . . . I don’t see how I can stay after . . . after all the things I said.”
“I don’t want to go either,” he says. “And I don’t want you to go. But what are we supposed to do? Sometimes you can’t . . . you can’t build something new while you’re standing in the spot where the old one is. You have to move. Build it from somewhere else.”
“I guess.” I’m stuffed up and can’t breathe except through my mouth; annoyed, I roll onto my back and look up at the darkened ceiling, where a tiny mobile hangs, white paper cranes. Something his dad made, I think. “God. I’m such a . . . I’m such a terrible fucking everything. Daughter. Hunter. Friend. Maybe I can be a semi-decent student, I don’t know. I hope they’re not expecting miracles from me when I show up.”
Silence. Murmurs from other walls. Finally Henryk says, “When Mom and Dad died? I thought I should die too. I didn’t understand how it was possible that I had gotten sick and then gotten better, and that they had died. I started thinking of how I could die too. How to do it. You were the one who got me through that. No one else even really talked to me after the funeral.”
“I remember that. Wait. You were going to kill yourself? You never said that.”
“I didn’t want you to talk me out of it.”
“You bastard son of a bitch. I would have, too. I would have tied you to a chair and put you on a twenty-four-hour watch.”
He laughs weakly. “I know. But you didn’t need to save my life that way. You saved it anyway. You’re not a bad friend. You’re the best. You’re good and smart and generous, and if you hadn’t given so much of yourself to me in those six months, there would be nothing inside me at all except the black hole from where they died.”
“ . . . Well I don’t think that’s true. There’s plenty inside you.”
“Including you.”
“I’m nothing much,” I tell him, trying not to raise my voice. “I just said that.”
“That’s not true. You know? It’s like clouds. They don’t look like much. They look weightless, but they weigh millions and millions of tons.”
“Bullshit. They’re fluff. Like steam.”
“No, they’re not. Water is heavy. You can’t tell from looking how much of a big deal something is.”
“But —”
“I read about it. I’m not lying. Can you trust me, Reid? Can you trust me on this?”
I’m crying again, silently, tears leaking onto the pillow. I dab at them with the blanket. “Come up on the bed. It must be freezing down there.”
He clambers awkwardly over me to the space between my back and the wall, all elbows and knees for a second; warmth blooms between as soon as we wrestle the blanket into place. We’ve never shared a bed before.
This is it, I guess; I said it, and he did it, and now I suppose we’ll have to carefully, because I’m hurt, very carefully curl into each other, confess secret things, learn how to kiss; I am already imagining how strange the first one will be, not that I want him to, or do I? I’m not sure. It feels inevitable somehow. That he will slide his arms around me, that we will in our grief and our long-repressed (was it?) mutual lust finally let ourselves go, make love, not worry about protection so that I can carry his baby to university (wait: no, the timing’s not right, maybe next week there would be a baby), no parents, no guilt, no shame. That this is the moment we both finally realize we’ve always been meant to be together: that anyone else didn’t mean anything real.
I wonder if he can feel how fast my heart is beating, conducted through the wood of the bed. And then I realize, almost laughing, that he’s simply pushed his face between my shoulderblades and gone to sleep.
Well, all right. Serves me right, too. Can you imagine. The embarrassment of it all.
Later, I wonder why I was waiting for him to make a move instead of making one myself, and then as I wonder this I realize I have woken up, and what’s woken me up is my bladder. I eel off the bed, and hesitate. Bathrooms are down the hall, the only closed doors to keep in the smell before everything gets collected in the morning. I don’t want to walk all the way down there in the dark. Chamber pot: where?
I fumble to his desk, where I remember seeing a lantern, and strike it into life, squeezing the shutter nearly closed, so that only a thin ray remains. Dozens of small oblongs on the floor — mousetraps. I’ll have to watch my toes. He didn’t have these last time I was in here, but now that I come to think of it, when am I ever in here? We’re always at mine. Being mothered. Oh, Hen.
There’s the chamberpot, on the floor next to the desk, and a stack of clean rags next to it in a basket. After I’m done, I realize that the “sweat” trickling down my face, in the chilly room, is blood; I press another rag to my eyebrow, and run my hand lightly over the top of the desk, looking for something that might serve as a mirror. He’s not vain enough to have one like mine, maybe, but you can always check your reflection in something. There: glass. I pick up the bottle and inspect my face in it: yes, a scab has pulled off and dangles by a thread. Gross. I pick it off, toss it in the chamberpot, and firmly fit the rag to my brow again, sitting on the edge of the desk.
It is not till I’m about to shut off the lantern and return to bed, shivering, that I realize what I picked up. I glance back at Henryk: asleep, or at lea
st unmoving, even though I threw the corner of the blanket over his face when I got up.
Then I heft the bottle again and hold it close to the lantern. It is not black as I had initially thought, but dark green. Ink. And the top drawer of the desk contains a few sheets of pink paper, speckled with black. I close it quietly, snuff the light, crawl back into bed. His breath falls hot and steady on my back.
I guess if you thought you had face to save you’d do it to save face. But if that’s the case then I cannot imagine why Henryk bothered, and I lie in the dark for a long time fighting sleep thinking about it, and trying not to itch my eyebrow. If he just ran away, he would not care that his name went up under Missing on the board. Not Henryk, not in a million years.
And yet. He understands more than anyone else — more than me, too — that the world will not get better on its own. That it was not fucked up on its own, and it cannot now heal on its own. Not the world around us (which does not care if we are in it) but the one in which we live, in which we participate. The one that has a pulse. He understands that.
And at last I do understand why he did it, and I find I am the shamed one. The timing of the “arrival” of that letter: not a coincidence. I still feel that I am leaving my mother for an airy-fairy dream, just as she said, just as she feared, just as I fear. Just as Hen fears, too, and will never tell me. But what if the only way out was just wide enough for you, and no one else? What if you promised to come back and knew it wasn’t a promise you could keep? To anyone, for all time. What if you left and discovered that you didn’t want to come back? What if the bone had to break? If love does not pin you down, if love is not heavy enough to keep you in place, what on earth could be? If love is not enough then guilt cannot be enough, duty cannot be enough. But what do they weigh? What is the heaviest, what could weigh you down?
The Annual Migration of Clouds Page 11
