Goldengrove (13 page)

He took me to a part of the forest where someone had piled a mound of stones. He said it was a druid grave, from centuries before Columbus. It was something Margaret would have said. Probably it wasn’t true, but I didn’t correct him. I didn’t want him to think that he and Margaret had been the only poets.

He would never have done something corny, like whipping out a drawing pad and sketching. But every so often, he’d look at a mountain or a tree as if he was framing it in his mind, and I’d wonder if he was figuring out how it might work as a painting.

One Sunday afternoon, we were parked at Miller’s Point, watching two high-flying hawks perform their suicide-courtship air ballet.

Aaron said, “You know, this is the first time I’ve thought about making art since . . .” That was our code-speak for Margaret’s death: the silence that came after
since
.

I was so happy that being with me might have made Aaron start thinking about painting. He’d promised we’d help each other, but I’d never believed I could help him. I remembered the Senior Show, how he’d crossed in front of the screen and, for a second, Mirror Lake had rippled over his handsome face.

The van smelled of vanilla. Aaron liked me to wear the aroma-therapy oil. We never had to discuss it.

At first, I’d been careful to scrub it off the minute I got home. But after I forgot a few times, and my parents didn’t ask, I started wearing it constantly, dabbing it on to help me sleep and then help me get up in the morning. I was surprised, then annoyed, that my parents didn’t notice. What if the smell was alcohol? They would have registered that. For all the fuss they made about their only Remaining Child, I’d begun to feel dangerously cut loose and out there, on my own.

Putting on the oil became an addictive secret rite. Dabbing it on in the steamy bathroom, I thought, This is how cutters begin. Girls who do painful things to themselves because they can’t resist. The little blue vial
could
have contained LSD or Rohypnol. Why wasn’t vanilla extract included in Oficer Prozak’s DARE teacher-training guide?

Often, as we rode around, Aaron and I listened to music. The sweet, slow phrases flowed over us like the breeze streaming in the windows. Sometimes Aaron would replay a track and point out some smoky Lester Young lick, or how Elvis Costello communicated more than he could make himself say. Once, when Aaron played Robert Johnson, I said, “He makes the blues sound like something spilling out of him instead of anything he’s doing.”

Of course, we were quoting Margaret. We didn’t need to say that, either. It was sad, the way the music was sad, but not so sad that we couldn’t stand it.

My parents must have thought I was spending a lot of time at Elaine ’s. Or they would have thought that, if they thought about anything much beyond putting one foot in front of the other.

One night, at dinner, my mother announced that she and Sally had paid another visit to Dr. Viscott.

“Please don’t say you’re looking for closure,” my father said. “It’d be like channeling Sally.”

My mother said, “He gave me another prescription.”

Dad said, “He’s a pediatrician.”

Mom said, “He listens to me. He wants to help. He says it’s the least he can do.”

She stood up from the table and lurched toward the bathroom. She didn’t bother closing the door.

I said, “Sounds like Mom’s throwing up.”

“So I hear,” said Dad. “I don’t think it was something I cooked, do you, Nico? You’re feeling okay, right?”

Neither of us moved. Finally, Dad said, “I guess Mom had better start watching that extra glass of wine before dinner.”

I said, “You guys didn’t have any wine.”

After a while he said, “Listen, Nico. We just have to get through this. All we have to do is survive and make it to the end of the summer.”

“And then?” I said.

He thought a moment. “Then we have to get through the fall.”

M
Y FATHER WAS WORKING HARD ON HIS BOOK
. That was all he did now, at the store. He’d started going in earlier, when Elaine was still there. The more time he spent around Elaine, the more I worried she’d say something to make him suspect I wasn’t at her house as much as I pretended.

In fact I often dropped by Elaine’s so she wouldn’t be totally lying. We drank iced coffee and talked about movies, about Tycho, about Tycho’s dad’s photographic recall for every mistake Elaine ever made and his chronic forgetfulness about child support. It was like having a friend again, except that we never discussed the things
I
needed to talk about—Margaret, my parents, Aaron.

Ever since I’d started hanging out with Elaine, I’d begun ordering iced coffee at the Nibble Corner. The first time, my father stared at my coffee glass as if it were a clue to some mysterious grown-up life I was leading without him in it. Then he said, “You know, I think I’ll have one of those, too.” I stirred three spoonfuls of sugar in mine, and my father did the same.

It became another ritual. We ordered coffee every day and fed our addiction to the caffeine and the sugar and the slow stirring in circles. All that sugar should have made me stop losing weight. But I kept on getting thinner and looking more like Margaret. Sometimes, passing a store window, I’d catch a glimpse of her, and my knees would go weak—and then she’d turn back into me.

One afternoon, my father and I were finishing our coffee when he told me that he was almost sure he’d found out exactly where the Millerites had gone to be raptured. Apparently, our tiny local public library had a cache of crumbling documents from the year when the cult gathered on the hillside.

“For a long time afterward,” my father said, “it was known as Disappointment Hill, though I don’t think they call it that now.”

“Not great for real estate,” I said. “Where is it?”

The map Dad sketched on a napkin passed dangerously near Miller’s Point, then turned off in another direction. I was so relieved I said, “Great!”

My father reached across the table and squeezed my arm.

“That’s my Nico,” he said. “Let’s do it. Let’s take a ride tomorrow morning. Let’s find the field where they waited.”

I was supposed to meet Aaron tomorrow morning.

“What’s
that
going to tell us?” I said. “It’s probably someone’s front yard.”

“So what?” my father said. “It can’t hurt to check it out. Let’s see how it feels to be there.”

“How
what
feels?”

“Who knows?” said Dad. “Some leftover remnant of all that hope and disappointment. Some aura that attached itself to the place and is still hovering in the air.”

“Aura?” I said. “Really, Dad, why not just get out the ouija board?”

My father stared at me, confused. Perhaps my saying
ouija board
had reminded him of Margaret, or maybe my thinking about Margaret had made him think of Margaret. All the excitement leached out of his face and left him staring at the milky tracks on his coffee glass as if they were tea leaves he was trying to read.

I said, “Actually, that sounds like fun. It’s a fantastic idea.”

Ten

H
ERE WAS AN OBVIOUS QUESTION
I’
D NEVER ASKED MYSELF
before: How could you do the same thing with two different people, and it could be heaven with one person, and hell when you did it with the other? I loved driving around with Aaron. Our rides never lasted long enough. But as my father and I set out on our Great Disappointment road trip, every mile took forever. The houses were shabby, the barns half collapsed, the countryside depressed me.

Dad said, “Did I ever tell you that Miller got most of his information from the book of Daniel? It’s an eschatologist’s gold mine. A grab bag of prophetic dreams and exploding galaxies, tornadoes, hungry monsters rising out of a sea—”

“You told me,” I said. Every time he said “Miller,” I thought, Miller’s Point. I felt guilty for not mentioning it in case, with all his poking around in the library, he’d missed some crucial connection between Aaron’s panorama spot and his doomsday landing strip. But if I told him, I might have to explain how I knew.

I couldn’t believe that I, a scientifically minded person, was accompanying my father on a mission to channel the ghosts of dead fanatics. Margaret and I had made fun of Dad, but the truth was, we’d both liked the part of him that would drive to the middle of nowhere on the chance of finding some leftover ectoplasm. Once, en route to visit Gran Bradley—his mom, our only surviving grandparent, who lived with a caretaker in her rambling house in Maine—Dad detoured an hour out of our way because a Goldengrove customer had told him about a convenience-store owner who would show you her treasure, the world’s smallest cathedral. The store was shut. Dad knocked on the door. We never saw the tiny cathedral. The romance of Dad’s disappointment was a major part of the drama.

But now his eccentric enthusiasm charmed me less than it used to. Now it just seemed silly and sad. Spacey old hippie theater. I told myself to enjoy it, or at least remember every detail so I could tell Aaron.

Dad said, “October. It had to be cold. Those poor suckers were out here for days, long before Gore-Tex parkas were invented.”

“How do you know about Gore-Tex, Dad?”

My father didn’t answer as he nosed into the traffic. Then he said, “Nico, don’t patronize me, okay?”

He went back to telling me more things he’d told me before. I zoned out and tried to visualize Disappointment Hill. I pictured a ranch house with vinyl siding nestled under a buzzing web of cancer-causing power lines. Or a shack to which hermit rapists lured girls with bogus garage sales. I saw a door riddled with bullet holes, and two slobbering rottweilers whipping out to greet us.

Dad said, “Nico, look around you. Some of this scenery’s lovely.”

“Lovely,” I said. A gas station, trees, more trees. One nice house, a cluster of trailers.

Dad said, “Before his death, Williams Miller wrote, ‘Were I to live my life over again, with the same evidence that I then had, to be honest with God and man, I should have to do as I have done. I confess my error and acknowledge my disappointment.’ ”

I said, “Wouldn’t it be better if you opened your eyes and looked where we were going?” I’d been worried about Mom’s driving. Now I decided that neither of them should get behind the wheel. They had all been excellent drivers before: my father, my mother, Margaret.

“Sorry,” he said. “I was trying to get the quotation right.”

“I understand. But you’re
driving
,” I said.

“I apologized,” he said.

“Anyway, I don’t get it. Was the guy saying he’d do it all over again the same way, or was he saying that he wouldn’t do it again no matter what?”

“I don’t know,” said my father. “I thought I understood it, but now that you ask, I’m not sure.”

Dad kept consulting his hand-drawn map. He claimed that if you drew a line between the river and the Davenport Revolutionary War Monument and extended it into a triangle, Disappointment Hill was at the apex.

“Right,” I said.
Wrong
, said the staircase spirit.

As we approached the X on the map, Dad turned onto a smaller road that heaved up into the mountains, then turned into one of those two-lane head-on collisions waiting to happen, a corridor lined with overgrown junkyards and filling stations begging to get robbed or about to start leaking and poisoning the aquifer.

“Are you sure this is right?”

“A lot happens in a hundred and fifty years,” Dad said.

“I think the apocalypse blew through here, and we missed it,” I said. “Too bad,” said Dad.

“Certain longitudes and latitudes have a certain hard-luck karma.”

“I wish you wouldn’t talk like that,” I said.

“Like what?” he asked.

“Like
karma
.”

“Here it is, I think,” said Dad.

I said, “I think not, Dad.”

We’d dead-ended in a dying strip mall, five dusty storefronts lined up like an Old West town: a convenience store, a dry cleaner, a video rental place. Two empty retail spaces with white swirls on the windows. A handwritten sign propped against one boarded-over door said, “Used tires,” and listed two phone numbers.

“Lovely,” I said. The three battered cars in the parking lot must have belonged to the desperate losers who worked there. Who would have picked this spot to watch for a divine visitation? People whose angel didn’t come. I thought of Miller’s Point, and it made me feel protective of my dad, who seemed suddenly older and sadder and smaller.

He said, “I guess everybody was raptured some time in the early eighties.”

I said, “This place scares me. Can’t we just leave?”

“Come on, Nico. As long as we’re here . . .”

We shuffled around the parking lot. The smelly black asphalt stuck to our feet. Blinding sunlight ping-ponged off the grimy windows. Anyone could have been hiding inside. I hoped no one was watching. We must have looked pretty strange, separating and wandering around and getting back together like two guests at a party at which no one else had shown up.

Aaron had warned me about looking in the wrong direction. But how did you know which direction was wrong? I looked at the sky, as the Millerites must have done as they’d waited for a distant speck to appear and grow larger. My father was looking up, too.

I said, “I’m getting back in the car.”

Dad said, “Roll down the windows. I’ll be there in a minute.”

I kept the windows all the way up. It was broiling, broiling. I thought I might pass out. I tipped my head back against the seat. I tried not to breathe. I let the heat bake my brain until I saw the Millerites shivering in their white wedding gowns. I saw their pale lips and chapped hands. I watched them shifting from foot to foot, pretending they were dancing. To flutes, my father had said, but I heard bagpipes playing “Amazing Grace.” I was lost, but now I’m found. The Millerites had stayed lost. They’d stayed here, and no one found them.

How could my father have gotten into the car without my noticing?

“Nico!” he was shouting. “Are you insane? This is how dogs die—”

I said, “Can we go home now, Dad?”

My father said, “I don’t know what I was thinking, to want to come here.”

“It wasn’t such a bad idea. I mean it, Dad. It wasn’t.”

My father said, “I guess they didn’t call it the Great Disappointment for nothing.”

As we pulled away, my father said, “In another hundred and fifty years, this is going to be a real mall.”

I said, “That’s the best-case scenario. Wal-Mart’s the best we can hope for.”

“Meaning?”

“No ozone. No water. Poisoned soil. No air. No humans.”

“That’s pretty bleak,” said my father.

“I didn’t know you felt that way.”

I hadn’t either, exactly. What scared me wasn’t the prospect of planetary extinction but the fact that it no longer scared me. Which scared me a lot.

I said, “I don’t know. You tell
me
, Dad. You’re the end-of-the-world guy.”

After a beat he said, “The fact that I’m writing about it doesn’t mean I think it will happen. If I thought the world was ending, why would I write a book? Why would I have kids?”

He put his sunglasses on.

I said, “Dad, please, can we just drive for a while?”

We were silent for miles. How strange that my father was writing the book about the end of the world, when I was the one who believed that it was going to happen. I thought about the cult members waiting to be zoomed up into the sky. They should have been more patient. Because now they
were
there, or somewhere. But not all together. Maybe they’d joined the robed angels in the Sienese orchard paradise. Maybe they’d been sent to hell for trying to get a free pass so they could spend eternity with all their loved ones, instead of losing them, one by one. I wondered how they’d really felt on the night they went home. Maybe some of them liked their lives and didn’t want to leave them.

The road reminded me of the route Aaron took to the grove of foxgloves. At one point I was almost sure we were passing the turnoff. I wondered if the flowers were still in bloom. I wished we could have stopped to see. I twisted around and stared.

“What are you looking at?” Dad said.

“Nothing,” I said. “How come you’re going this way? It’s taking forever.”

“Shortcut. It’s marked on the county map.”

“Goldengrove,” I said. “What?” said Dad.

“Goldengrove,” I repeated.

“Fucking Goldengrove fucking unleaving.”

We passed the feed store, then the nursery.

“I used to love that poem,” Dad said. “Fleeting youth, mortality, time, age, innocence, death—the whole metaphysical enchilada. What did I think life was going to be, some kind of . . . English paper? What did
any
of that have to do with . . . this? How could we have named her that? What the hell were we thinking?”

I said, “It doesn’t matter. What happens is going to happen.” It was strange to hear my father saying what I used to believe. I felt as if Aaron was helping me to stop thinking that way, helping me turn back into a rational human being.

I checked my watch. I still had time to call Aaron. I could bike to our field and get back to town in time for lunch.

My father dropped me off at home. I called Aaron, he answered. I changed clothes. I’d gotten sweaty shuffling around the parking lot. I splashed on the aromatherapy oil. The bottle was almost empty. I would have to ask for more.

Aaron was waiting at our spot. He said, “You look like a train wreck. What happened?”

Maybe I should have been insulted that he would say that, first thing. But the truth was, I felt happy that Aaron knew me well enough to tell the daily train wreck from the spectacular smashup.

I said, “My father made me go to this hideous place.”

“Hideous,” Aaron said. “What a girl word. I love it.” I made a mental note to say
hideous
as often as I could.

Aaron drove up a narrow dirt lane and parked, and we leaned against the van. The forest was still misted with dew, even though it was almost noon. We didn’t talk and didn’t talk, and then Aaron said, “What happened?”

I wanted the story to come out right. I didn’t want to make Dad sound idiotic. In the end, it spilled out so fast, how could Aaron have put it together? Trolling a strip-mall parking lot for leftover doomsday vibrations? Aaron nodded when I mentioned Dad’s book. Once again I wondered what Margaret had said about us. I thought, I must trust Aaron to be telling him this.

Aaron said, “Your poor mom and dad. This has got to be hard.”

“I know,” I said. “I forget that sometimes.”

“They’re in hell,” Aaron said.

“They are,” I said. “I forget.”

“Maybe your dad wants to know what it feels like to believe in something.”

“You think he wants the angel to come and take
him
away?”

Aaron said, “More likely he wants the angel to give him a reason to stay here.”

I said, “That’s what
I
want.”

Aaron said, “That’s what we all want.”

I said, “How do we find it?”

After a while he said, “You know that Sienese art book? Show it to your dad. That painting of the angel appearing to the shepherds and the sailors. Heaven and hell. The Last Judgment. Isn’t that what he’s writing about? It could be a cover for his book, if it ever comes out. Show him the painting you like. The one with the flying saint and the ship on the ocean.”

I said, “That’s a great idea. I’d better go. My dad’s waiting.”

Aaron said, “He’s probably worried the angel raptured you without him.”

Dad did seem a little anxious when I showed up ten minutes late at our booth in the Nibble Corner.

He said, “That was a waste of gasoline. I apologize, Nico.”

I said, “I liked it, Dad. Honestly. It had its own wacky charm.”

We ate our sandwiches. We didn’t talk.

As soon as we got to the store that day, I showed the art book to Dad. I paged through for my favorites, though not Saint Nicholas and the shipwreck. That one was mine, only mine. I turned to the painting of the blessed souls in the lemon-tree paradise.

I said, “Wouldn’t this make a beautiful cover for your book?”

I wished I’d thought of it, I wished I deserved the gratitude on Dad’s face as he looked at the citrus-grove heaven. It was as if I’d offered to
publish
his book. I was glad I could cheer him up after our sad morning. I felt like I had when Aaron said he’d started thinking about painting again. Maybe that’s what I had become, a messenger of recovery, helped by Margaret to help Aaron, who was helping me help Dad. It made me feel closer to Aaron, as if he and I were siblings conspiring to comfort our grief-stricken parents.