Holding Up the Universe (15 page)

Five hours later, the top half of the house has been demolished by a team of sledgehammers and circular saws. The emergency workers have erected scaffolding and a long, wide bridge up to the second-floor window. They've fitted supports to keep the roof from collapsing, and when the sun comes up, they unroll this black tarp and circle the house with it—for privacy, I guess.

It's clear that something needs to come out of there, and whatever it is, it's big.

I sit on our roof so I can see right over the tarp. An enormous stretcher—I'm not sure what else to call it—is hauled out of the truck and rolled up onto the bridge. The emergency workers are racing back and forth, and a handful of them anchor the stretcher in place. And then the crane goes cranking forward and reaches its claw into the bowels of the house.

The tree outside my bedroom window suddenly starts to shake and a head appears. This skinny little kid pulls himself up next to me. “Move over,” he says.

I make room for him, and together we sit there. We watch as the claw comes up and out, and inside the claw is a pair of arms and a pair of legs.

“Is she dead?” Dusty whispers.

“I don't know.”

The arms start waving and the legs begin kicking. It's like King Kong clutching Ann Darrow. “Not dead,” I say.

The crane sweeps around till it's above the bridge and all that scaffolding, and then lowers itself over the stretcher. Very gently, like it's playing a game of pickup sticks, the crane releases the arms and legs until I can see that they belong to a girl.

The largest girl I've ever seen.

“Told you,” Dusty says.

The sky is bright and blinding. It's like I've never seen it before, and oh, it's so beautiful and I'm alive! I'm alive! If I die right now, at least I've seen the sky like this—all blue and brilliant and new.

My chest is still clenching, but some of the clenching releases and it's because these nice men and women are here and I'm not dead and I'm not going to die in there, in that house. Not to say I won't die here in the yard, but at least the air is fresh and I can breathe and there are trees and sky and birds and over there a cloud, a fluffy one, and there is the smell of something, flowers maybe. I want to say
Look at me, Dean, Sam, Cas! I'm out here just like you.
And then I think how they're my only friends, even though they don't know it. And oh my God, I'm crying again, but then I must pass out because when I wake up I'm being bumped all around, and I'm in the back of a truck, not even an ambulance like a regular person. I stare up at dingy metal instead of blue, and all at once I feel humiliated. How many people did it take to break me out?

I try to ask my dad, who sits back against the rattling metal wall, head jostling up and down, but his eyes are closed, and I can't speak and suddenly I think,
What if I never speak again?

Dad opens his eyes and sees me staring at him, and he smiles, but he's not fast enough. My chest is clenching tighter and tighter, and I don't want to be here in this truck. I want to be in my bed, in my room, in my house. I don't want to be out here, in this world.

I want to say
Take me home, please, if there's anything left of it,
but then something sweeps over me, and it's this kind of quiet, peaceful feeling, and that's her, that's my mom. I breathe slower, to try to make it last, to try to keep her with me.
Live live live live…
I think it as hard as I can before everything goes black, and as I drift off I remember.

Rappaccini's daughter.

Beatrice.

Her name was Beatrice.

When I get home from school that day, a security vehicle is parked in front and a guard sits behind the wheel, sound asleep. I check to see if anyone is looking and then I walk right in.

There's only half a living room. The sofa is oversize and drooping in the middle like a hammock. A framed picture lies faceup on the floor, and it's of a man and a woman and a little girl. The girl is out of focus, and you can tell she's laughing. In the photo, she's just a regular-size kid.

The kitchen is a typical kitchen. For the most part, it's intact, only a little dust. I go to the fridge first because I can't help it, I want to see what's in there. I expect a banquet suitable for Henry VIII, but it's just your run-of-the-mill stuff—eggs, milk, deli meat, cheese, diet sodas, juice. On the outside of the door is a single magnet:
OHIO WELCOMES YOU.

I walk through the whole house. It's smaller than ours, and it doesn't take me long to find her bedroom. Even though part of the front wall is missing, I don't go in because it doesn't feel respectful. Instead, I stand in the doorway. The walls—the ones that are left—are lavender, and there are bookshelves, floor to ceiling, on every single one. The books look like they might spill out and overtake the room, maybe the whole house.

The bed is the focal point of the room and looks specially built. It's a king-size bed that pretty much fills all the space. It sits on top of this metal—steel?—platform, and beside it is a single pair of slippers. It's the slippers that get me. They look delicate, like they were made for a girl Dusty's age. The sheets have daisies on them, and they're thrown all around, as if a tornado's blown through. One of the pillows lies on the floor. A stack of books sits by the bed, and it takes me a second to see that these are six copies of the same book,
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
by Shirley Jackson, although the bindings are different. I think,
She must really love that book.

When I leave, I try not to touch anything except for one copy of the Shirley Jackson book and the Ohio magnet, both of which I take. I don't know why. Maybe it makes me feel closer to the girl who lives there. Outside, the guard is still sleeping, and I rap on the glass to wake him up. When he rolls down the window, I say, “Stay alert, buddy. I imagine everything they own is in that house, and they've been through enough without losing it to looters.” Of course the book and magnet don't count.

I knock on the door of Marcus's room and then walk on in. His walls are covered with posters—mostly of basketball players. There's a hoop attached to the closet door. A gangly, shaggy-haired kid hunches on the floor in front of his computer. He's playing a video game—the shoot-everyone-and-blow-shit-up kind.

I do what I usually do—look for the signs that this is my brother. The pointy chin, the messy hair, the mopey expression. I look for the pieces and put them together because this is how I know it's him.

“Can I ask you a question?”

“What?” He doesn't take his eyes off the screen.

“How do you remember people so well? How do you tell them apart?”

“What?”

“Take Squinty.”

“Her name's Patrice.”

“Whatever. Patrice. How do you pick her out of a crowd?”

“She's my girlfriend.”

“I know she's your girlfriend.”

“Do you know what she'd do to me if I couldn't pick her out of a crowd?”

“Yeah, but what is it about her that tells you it's her?”

He pauses the game. Stares at me for, like, a whole minute. “I just look at her. I just know. What's wrong with you? Have you gone crazy?”

My eyes move past him to the walls of basketball players. I want to ask if he can tell them apart without their jersey numbers or names on the back. When I look at him again, he's still staring at me, only his features have shifted so that he's brand-new. I say, “Never mind. I'm just messing with you.”

I go back into my room and dig out the old composition notebook I keep hidden away in a drawer and start flipping through it. This is where I sort out the projects I build—drawing them, planning them out. But in between the brainstorms and sketches and blueprints and lists of materials needed, there are passages like these:

Went to Clara's Pizza with the family. Got lost coming back from bathroom. Took me a while to find them. Dad finally had to wave me down.

I was so wiped out after Saturday's game (we won in straight innings) I didn't even recognize Damario Raines when he came up to congratulate me.

Every few pages, entry after entry. Nothing earth-shattering or alarming until you start adding them up. As I'm reading them now, a feeling settles over me like a blanket, but not the warm, comforting kind. More like a thick and scratchy blanket thrown over the head just before you're shoved into the trunk of a car.

There is something wrong with me.

Of all the people in the world, I feel like the girl would understand. I sit there the rest of the night thinking,
I hope she makes it.
And even though the news is protecting her identity, and all I know is her last name, I write her a letter to tell her this, tuck it into her favorite book, and go online to find the mailing address for the local hospital.