Goldengrove (7 page)

Strangers knew all about me. They’d ask how I was doing, and I couldn’t just say fine. So I’d shrug, and after a silence they’d say something like, “I know. It’s hard.” And bang, they were off and running, telling me about grief and its life span, its half-life and its resilience, the ebb and flow, the sneak attacks, the unpredictable setbacks. They felt they had to let me know that grief lasted forever, and yet they wanted to promise me that I would outlive it. It was a kind of pep talk, I knew, but it went deeper than that. People wanted to believe that their suffering had a purpose, if only so that they could offer me the distilled wisdom of their experience.

Women told me how lovely I looked. Or they’d say I’d gotten thinner. The grief diet, they said, as if everyone knew that death was nature’s magic weight-loss plan. So many of them said the same things that I might have thought that there
was
common ground, if I hadn’t known that I was alone on an iceberg split off from a glacier.

I sensed that the customers were looking at me but seeing themselves —their former selves—right after a loved one died. They’d tell me their intimate stories in an urgent, confiding tone. When they wept, I cried, too, and for a moment I almost believed that my iceberg might have room for another person. For that moment, it was helpful to see that the bereaved were not only walking and talking but laughing and yelling at their kids.

People gave me useless advice. Was I getting enough exercise? Did I play tennis? Hike? Swim? They got as far as swimming, then remembered how Margaret died. A surprising number told me not to make any important decisions for a year. At least a year. They were forgetting that I was thirteen. What life-changing choices did they think my parents would let me make? I couldn’t decide what T-shirt to wear, what breakfast cereal to pretend to eat, what route to take when I biked from my house to the bookstore. I couldn’t do or say anything without anguish and regret.

One afternoon, a woman came in. I knew I’d met her somewhere. At first she didn’t notice me. She seemed to be on a mission. I watched her guiltily scanning the shelves, like someone searching for a book about sex or some intimate health problem. Red hair, jumpy. Roughened, papery skin. She looked like an older version of Aaron’s mother. Then I realized that was who she was.

I willed her not to buy anything, but it didn’t work. The book she set on the counter was called
Ordinary Grief: Helping a Loved One Survive Loss
. I looked at the title, then at her. Finally she saw me.

“Nico, sweetheart,” she said. “I didn’t recognize you. You look so grown up.”

“Thanks,” I said. When had I become “sweetheart”? I’d only met her twice. The first time was after a school Christmas concert. Margaret and Aaron introduced the parents, and then stood back and watched them squirm. Everyone knew the score. Aaron and Margaret were going out, my parents didn’t approve, Aaron’s parents weren’t pleased by their disapproval. It took about a minute to run out of conversation, and then we all stood around scuffing our feet on the auditorium carpet.

The second time was after the Senior Show, when the tide of Aaron and Margaret’s triumph practically swept both families into each other’s arms. Celebrity leveled the playing field. They were the parents of stars! They still didn’t have much to say, but they seemed leisurely and calm, like sunbathers basking in the light of their children’s success. Were Aaron’s parents at the funeral? I thought so. I couldn’t recall. Their faces swam up and sank back into the black pool of that rainy day.

Aaron’s mom seemed to be deciding whether or not to hug me. Don’t, I telegraphed. Please don’t.

“How are you, Nico?” she said.

“Okay,” I said. “I guess. How’s Aaron?”

Aaron’s mother eyed the book and let it answer for her.

“Not great,” she said. “It’s been hard.”

“I know,” I said.

“I’m sure you do,” she said.

“Say hi to him for me,” I said. “Tell him to stop by the store and say hi.”

“I will,” she said.

“Really!” I said, startling myself. “I’d
really
like to see him.”

“I will,” she repeated. “Take care of yourself, dear.” On her way out, she turned and gave me a thin, heartfelt smile. The staircase spirit mimicked,
I’d really like to see him
.

One afternoon, my former fourth-grade teacher walked into the bookstore.

“How are you, Nico?” she said.

I said, “Mrs. Akins! How are
you
?”

“Retired.” She smiled apologetically.

I said, “You look the same.”

She held out her arms, and I let myself be hugged, though it meant climbing down from behind the counter. She squeezed me until her amber beads scooped painful dents in my chest.

Kids used to make fun of her, because in the midst of a lesson she’d suddenly clap her hands and say, “Now it’s time for
play
!” Then we’d fold origami cranes for world peace or make torn-paper collages. Margaret told me that Mrs. Akins used to teach her classes that the origami was in remembrance of the children who were killed or had their faces melted off when we dropped the A-bomb on Hiroshima. But the school made her stop teaching that; they said it upset the students. After that Mrs. Akins talked to us about tolerance and understanding. Some kids had trouble folding the cranes. But I felt as if the bird was already there, nesting inside the paper, waiting to be set free.

“It’s so hard,” Mrs. Akins said now. “When my mother died . . . you know, I think maybe you were in my class. All I remember is throwing up every day before work.”

I’d always liked Mrs. Akins, though to me she was just another teacher doll that wound itself up when school began and ran down at three. I vaguely remembered she used to be Miss Something Else. We’d made her Happy Wedding cards, and when she’d returned after her brief honeymoon, the class went wild from the embarrassment of thinking she might have had sex. I’d never imagined her having a mother, let alone one who could die. I’d never dreamed she could have been grieving even as she’d ordered us to play.

Pressing me to her pillowy chest, Mrs. Akins wept, and so did I. I knew she was crying about her mother and not about Margaret, or maybe a little about Margaret, but still, we were crying about the same thing.

At last Mrs. Akins released me and, fixing me with her glittery eyes, said, “There’s no reason you should believe me, Nico. But trust me when I say that your sister is looking out for you. I don’t know where they go, but wherever it is, they can watch us. And they can intercede. Right now, even as we speak, your sister is finding a way to help you feel less lonely. Or maybe someone to help you. Right now—”

My father emerged from his office, blinking as if he’d been writing in the dark.

“Dad, you remember Mrs. Akins?” I said.

“Of course!” Obviously, he didn’t.

“My fourth-grade teacher,” I said. “Remember we all made those origami birds?”

My father said, “Nice to see you, Mrs.—”

“Akins,” I said.

“Mrs. Akins,” said Dad.

“I’m so sorry for your loss,” Mrs. Akins said.

“Thank you,” said my father. “Did Nico help you find what you were looking for?”

“To be honest,” said Mrs. Akins, “I just stopped in to say hello. My book club is still deciding. . . .”

“Come back any time,” my father said.

“I will,” she said. But I didn’t believe her. I would have done anything to make her stay, to hear more of what she knew— anything but ask her, with my father watching.

Then she was gone, and in the tinkle of the doorbell, I heard the staircase spirit giggling over everything I should have asked in those few precious moments before my father scared away the messenger from my sister.

Six

I
T WAS LIKE BEING UNDER A CURSE TO SPEND ALL THOSE HOURS IN
Goldengrove and not be able to read. Like being in prison, unable to escape into a book. When I did read, I was only trawling for scraps of information that I found and then wondered why I’d wanted to know them.

I should have been rereading the Narnia stories I’d loved as a kid who longed to enter another dimension through a wardrobe or a snow globe. I should have stuck with the books on botany or marine biology, the ones that described how all of history and world culture had converged to produce the pepper in your shaker.

But the only books that attracted me now were the last ones I should have gone near. I pored over books about the heart. Not as in heartbreak or heartthrob or sweetheart, but as in heart attack, heart disease. As in hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. As in long QT syndrome. As in congenital coronary artery abnormalities. Every sentence confirmed my worst fears. The effect was so instant and physical, I’d have to go to the bathroom, but then I’d return to where I’d left off.

Every expert whose kindly face and spotless white coat graced a jacket flap regretted to inform me that these problems were genetic. Fortunately, the conditions were rare. Unfortunately, I was doomed. I read about the symptoms I already had, the dull ache over my breastbone, the grinding in my chest, and new ones—dizziness, palpitations—I developed as I read them. I read greedily, compulsively, and with a shame that, when a customer walked in, made me hide the medical books inside picture books on African lions and New England barns.

I’d read until I had to sit on the floor until the store stopped spinning. Then I’d scoot from the health section to the death-and-dying shelf.

I started with books that promised to help you recover from grief, books whose authors, nearly all female, looked even kindlier and more sympathetic than the cardiologists. Their motherly head shots were meant to persuade me that they knew what I was feeling and wanted me to feel better. They hoped that it might comfort me to read about the personal tragedies—a loved one’s illness or death—that had made them want to help me. They’d gone to graduate school, they had practices, gave lectures, traveled the world. Every day they dealt with people suffering just like me. They urged me to reach out, talk to others in my situation. They illustrated their anecdotes with pie charts and graphs. There were workbook pages for me to jot down my thoughts, tests on which I got zero. What if I couldn’t think of one activity I enjoyed? What if I couldn’t find one thoughtful favor to do for someone else? The books advised me not to blame myself if I couldn’t get with their programs, but they didn’t offer alternate ones, which only made me feel more alone.

I paged through the book Aaron’s mother had bought:
Ordinary Grief: Helping a Loved One Survive Loss
. I skimmed until the writer, a Dr. Marion Staley, PhD, described bringing home a new kitten that refused to crawl out from the sofa. She suggested that I think of the grieving relative as that poor, confused kitty. That was when I shut the book and put it back on the shelf.

I began to wonder if I’d inherited something else from my father. The only books that kept my attention were a little like the one he was writing. Not end-of-the-world books, exactly, but books that told you what people in other eras and societies imagined happened to you after death. I read
The Egyptian Book of the Dead
and
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
, and though I skipped a lot, I understood the basics. The dead passed through realms and kingdoms, worlds of dark and light, as they shed their memories and slowly let go of their love for the living. I imagined Margaret moving from place to place, each realm more hushed and peaceful and farther away from us.

My days fell into a sort of pattern—a holding pattern, I knew. But at least it was holding.

At noon, my father went into Goldengrove to talk business with Elaine before she had to go get Tycho. I left home at around the same time and biked into town and met Dad for lunch at the Nibble Corner.

The bike ride was my favorite part of the day: the gentle, curving, slow descent through the fragrant misty woods, then a dash across two meadows—one golden, one green—and by then I was on Main Street. I loved the clear air, the sun on my forehead, the landscape streaming past. My bike was a vintage dark red Schwinn that Margaret gave me when she got her driver’s license. It was a part of me when I rode it, and I loved it the way cowboys in old movies loved their horses.

Every day, my father and I ordered grilled Swiss on rye with tomato. The first time, our waitress—Hi! I’m Valerie!—made cow eyes at Dad and said she’d been in Margaret’s class and she was sorry for our loss. But pretty soon she’d just say, “The usual?” and Dad and I would nod. That was the advantage of always eating the same lunch. We didn’t have to talk to Valerie. I didn’t have to decide.

As we polished off the Nibble Corner’s buttery, warm, melted cheese, my father and I concentrated on our sandwiches as if we were teasing the flesh from some lethally bony fish. I chewed slowly and without stopping, to keep my face from going slack and collapsing like a pudding. For my parents’ sake, I was trying to act remotely sane. And in a way, I was. I could get through an hour or so without thinking about my sister. Then a wave of sorrow would crash into me and knock me flat.

Sometimes, when the silence thickened, my father would ask me what I was reading.

Living with Heart Disease
.
Surviving Loss
.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
.

“Nothing much,” I’d say. In the old days, he might have kept asking till I came up with an answer, but now we acted as if the tiniest pressure could shatter our eggshell selves.

The only subject he liked to talk about was
Eschatology for Dummies
. I wondered if his ideas about the afterlife had changed now that Margaret might be there. I wanted to test my theory that Margaret was relocating, in stages, to a more comfortable dwelling. But it seemed safer not to ask, and besides, my father’s subject was the apocalypse and not the ragged hole that one death could rip in a few fragile lives.

Though he’d been working on the book for years, he never got tired of thinking about how people coped with their fear or their hope that our planet might not last forever. He wasn’t religious, he didn’t have an agenda based on his own beliefs. He was simply interested, in a scientific way, in how his fellow humans imagined the unimaginable. He liked the fact that I cared about ecology and the earth. Sometimes I felt that he was planning to interview me for a final chapter about whether us gloomy, Al Gore types really believed, in our heart of hearts, that fossil-fuel emissions would strangle the planet. What would I tell him? I believed it. I didn’t. I did. I couldn’t.

At Goldengrove, whenever customers bought novels about the rapture, my father inquired if they just liked the plots, or if it was something they expected to happen. He always asked so politely, with such a genuine desire to know. He never went near
my
questions: Would they be raptured wearing their clothes? What would happen to their cars if they were vacuumed off the highway?

It was calming, like listening to bedtime stories, eating grilled cheese, and hearing Dad go on about the Micronesian tribe building a landing strip for the planes that would fly them to heaven, or the Siberian shamans who banged their drums until the gods destroyed the world just to make them keep quiet. Or the Aztecs who thought that they’d outlived four suns, and that the fifth would burn out unless they quenched its thirst with human blood. He spent a whole lunch explaining how the Norsemen were convinced that you could tell the end was coming because winter would follow winter without a summer in between.

“Kind of like global warming,” I said.

“You got it,” said my dad.

One afternoon, I sensed a change. Nothing dramatic, but noticeable enough so that when I asked my father how his writing was going, I could tell from the way he said, “Not bad,” that he meant, “Really good.”

He said, “Listen, Nico, I’ve been working on a chapter about a doomsday cult that lived around here.” He was staring at me with an intensity that, for one dizzying second, made me think he’d
joined
some sect of fanatics. People did stranger things. I’d read a book about two brothers whose mother died, and they gambled away every penny of the fortune she’d left.

“When?” I said.

Dad said, “The nineteenth century. Their leader, Williams Miller, calculated that Christ would arrive to inaugurate the millennial kingdom on October 22, 1844.”

“Exactly?” I said.

“Exactly,” my father said.

“Cool,” I said. “Smart guy.”

“Nico, Nico.” My father smiled.

I said, “So how many suckers did he get to believe him?”

“Fifty thousand,” said Dad.

“No way,” I said.

“Way. They were all so convinced that they gave away their possessions, their house and farms, their cows, their horses, their—”

“Who’d they give them to?” I said.

“I don’t know,” said Dad. “How strange I never thought about that. Neighbors? Relatives? Friends? The faithful wouldn’t be needing their donkeys when God beamed them up into heaven.”

After a while, I said, “Dad . . . So how did it work out?”

“Right. On the appointed day they dressed in white robes and climbed the highest mountain and waited for the saints to pop out of their graves and witness the believers rising into the air to be married to the Bridegroom Christ. They stayed on the hill for forty-eight hours. Everybody singing and dancing and playing homemade flutes. The whole crowd watching the sky.”

He leaned across the table. “You know how when you’re supposed to meet someone, and the person is late, and you look up every two seconds to see if the person has arrived?”

“I guess.” I was trying to remember if I’d ever met anyone anywhere by myself, let alone if I’d been early. Aaron and Margaret were always on time when they’d picked me up after a movie. When I met Dad at the Nibble Corner, he was always there before me. I wondered if he meant Mom.

“That’s what it must have been like. Two days of thinking that an angel was going to land any minute. Imagine the stiff necks.”

I pictured the crowds of people shivering in their thin white garments, holding hands and singing hymns and leaning into each chill October breeze as if it were the headwind stirred up by the angel. I saw them swaying like wheat, like birches, turning briefly into trees and then back again into humans.

“Nico?” said Dad. “Are you with me?”

“So then what happened?” I said.

“I just told you,” said Dad.

“Sorry,” I said. “Tell me again.”

“What do
you
think? After two days, when the angel still hadn’t arrived, the elders called an emergency conference. They’d decided there’d been a miscalculation, and their leader went back to his actuarial tables so he’d get the date right the next time. Their neighbors attacked them on their way home. You know, Nico, I never realized it was probably because the neighbors assumed that they’d want their farms back. I guess I never thought about it till you asked whom they gave their stuff to. That’s why I like talking to you about this—”

“Thanks,” I said. “Me too.” I hoped I sounded convincing. After a beat Dad said, “When it didn’t happen, when
nothing
happened, the Millerites always referred to it as the Great Disappointment.”

That
was what disappointed them, that they were still alive? That someone you loved could disappear—now, that was the nasty surprise.

“The Great Disappointment,” my father went on. “That pretty much sums it up. Whatever you hope for, you’re not going to get. I know I shouldn’t be saying this to my kid, who I want to have a positive outlook. But I don’t know, Nico. Sometimes, ever since . . . I keep thinking . . .”

“Thinking what?” Ever since
what
? I wanted to make him say it.

“You know what Janis Joplin called it?”

“Called what?”

“The Great Disappointment. The always being let down by life. She called it the Saturday Night Swindle.”

“Who’s Janis Joplin?” I said.

“Very funny,” my father said.

“Margaret thought she was cheesy,” I said.

My father said, “She would have loved Janis. Eventually. Another year or two, maybe.”

We checked out each other’s grilled cheeses, and each took small bites of our own.

“Anyhow,” said my father, “the point is . . . the hilltop where they waited for the angels isn’t far from here. I think the town library might have some old newspapers that might help us figure out where it was.”

Help
us
? When had Dad’s rapture fantasies become a family project?

“We could go there and walk around and see if we can . . . I know this sounds crazy, Nico, but maybe we’d
feel
something. Some leftover . . . vibration.”

“It does sound crazy, Dad.
Vibration
?”

“Come on, Nico. It’s worth a try. Just to see.”

Dad’s hippie-dippie project was making me want to put my head down on the table.

“Sure, Dad,” I said. “That would be great. Find out where it was.”

O
NCE MY FATHER REALIZED THAT
I
COULD HANDLE THE CHALLENGE
of running the bookstore, he began spending more time at the library to search the archives for information that might help him pinpoint the site of the Great Disappointment. I liked having the place to myself. I could relax and read about heart disease and the afterlife without worrying that my father might catch me.

It seemed like a good sign when, for a break from the death books, I started skimming the books about sex, idly stroking the crotch of my jeans and listening for the doorbell. I couldn’t tell much from the line drawings of smiling men and women twisted into pretzels, diagrams that reminded me of those pamphlets explaining how to install your new electronics purchase.