No Book but the World: A Novel (20 page)

T
HEY SET OUT
for a walk together on the morning of the shortest day of the year, Kitty and Ava with Dilly in the backpack. Kitty and the baby had come up the day before in order to attend one of Ava’s Singalong Lady sessions at the Freyburg Library, an experience that proved electrifying for Dilly. Unable to remain in Kitty’s lap, she’d meandered around the circle of parents and children all seated on the rug, shaking the maraca she’d been given from Ava’s duffel, and dancing, along with a few of the other toddlers, in the primal way of their kind: they were fat-bottomed vaudevillians in their diapers, yet somehow lithe as sea creatures. She eventually planted herself directly behind Ava, who sat cross-legged strumming her guitar. There Dilly became transfixed, letting one plump starfish hand drift and settle on Ava’s shoulder.

Kitty and Dilly had spent the night in the Annex’s guest room (which Kitty could not help thinking of as Noah Salinas-Buchbinder’s old room), where they’d eschewed the portable crib and deliciously shared the bed, then risen to see that during the night the world had been dusted with white. “Snow!” Kitty cried, holding Dilly up to the window. “Snnooow,” her daughter echoed reverently. After breakfast the three ladies bundled up and set out the back door. The meadow, as they crossed it, was fully bathed in golden sun; it steamed damply, the snow already melting, but when they came to the mouth of the old woods path, they could see pennants of white extending in the long shadows beyond each tree.

Ava had made one trip back up to Perdu since Thanksgiving. Kitty was able to glean information a question at a time. Ava had stayed at the funny little guesthouse again. (“I thought you hated it?” Kitty said; Ava responded simply, “It’s not that bad.”) Yes, she’d seen Fred again—twice. No, he hadn’t told Ava anything about what happened. He looked thin, thinner even than in November. As with the first visits, he’d sat hunched in his prison greens, bouncing his body, looking at his feet, mumbling only a few fragments of speech and then only snatches of nursery rhyme—
Here is the church, here is the steeple
—and something else, a sentence he repeated several times, which Ava hadn’t been able to place at first:
Where I live everything is so small
. Only with Fred it came out:
Ah-where I live-ah everything is so ah-small
. Only later, during the eight-hour car ride home, by turning it round and round in her own mouth, did it dawn on her: a line from
The Little Prince.

“I remembered it,” she said, “from reading aloud to him when we were small.”

They walked in silence along the snowy path. It was colder the deeper into the woods they went.

“And what comes next?” Kitty probed gently.

Ava stopped, confused. “In the book?”

“No, I mean—will his case go to trial?”

Ava released a humongous breath. It hung white and shapeless in the air. Dilly made a gleeful sound, then mimicked the huff, tickling Kitty’s ear. “Unclear,” said Ava. “The lawyer’s getting his own medical expert to examine the results of the autopsy. Supposedly it’ll help him decide whether to advise entering a plea.”

“So that’s good, right? I mean he’s being aggressive, proactive?”

Ava nodded. “Yes, I’m liking him more. Apparently most assigned counsels would never even suggest something like that, bringing in an expert, because of the expense. Dennis and I said we’d pay.”

Lo-Impact Solutions was still a young, one-guy operation, and Ava could hardly pull in much as the Singalong Lady. Kitty said, “Tariq and I would really like—”

“Thanks.” Then perhaps in apology for cutting her off, Ava leant close to Kitty and kissed her. A rare occurrence. Kitty was moved.

“Me,” said Dilly. Kitty could feel the weight of the backpack shift as her daughter craned forward, and Ava, laughing, went on tiptoe to kiss the baby. Dilly was at the stage where she liked to offer the wettest, innermost part of her pucker, and Ava—poor physical-contact-averse Ava!—came away duly slimed. Kitty caught her eye as she did her best to inconspicuously wipe off the saliva, and in the next instant both women were helpless with laughter.

“Ha!” chimed Dilly, stiff with delight. Kitty felt the entire backpack spring to attention. “Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!”

Each puff of mirth perforated the air. Kitty could tell, by the distribution of weight and the pause between Ha!s, that her daughter had flung back her head and was watching her cottony breaths vanish one by one. Dilly’s vigor delighted and humbled and sometimes frightened her. She could not imagine letting this girl run free.

They walked on, down the path that curved through the woods, pointing out rabbit prints and deer scat to each other and to Dilly, stopping to watch a flock of cedar waxwings scatter, startled, from a holly bush. How clean the world was still! How clean the world was here, in Batter Hollow, only a few hours up the Hudson from Brooklyn, but somehow further distant. Kitty closed her eyes and drew in a breath, silvery, astringent. Oh, this world that continued to produce waxwings and berries, toddlers and snow! This woods with its snow-frosted carpet of leaves, its great columns of trees, its immaculate hush, broken now by the chitter of a chipmunk, the coo of a dove, the fall of a nut.

“I forget how much I love it here,” she declared.

“You don’t love it here.”

“I do!” protested Kitty, laughing.

“But you never come,” said Ava.

“Oh, Bird,” sighed Kitty.

Yet it was true. Ever since her brother and sister-in-law had moved back to Batter Hollow two years ago, she’d rarely come to visit. Highly understandable, she thought, since first she’d been pregnant and then a new mother, and still seeing patients throughout all of it except for a measly three-month maternity leave. But perhaps Ava was more aware than Kitty had realized that the reason her visits were so infrequent was not strictly a matter of logistics.

“Really,” Kitty had said dryly, when Dennis told her they’d bought the old Annex, the ivy-covered whitewashed brick cottage that had for so many years housed the quiet and stately Salinas-Buchbinders. “Why’d you do that?”

“We like it here.” She heard in his plural pronoun fathoms of spousal loyalty she thought squandered. Or not squandered; that was too harsh. Misspent. “It suits us,” he went on. “And of course it holds so much meaning for Ava.”

“Of course.”

If he perceived in the flatness of her echo a note of aspersion, he did not comment. Taking her cue from him, she allowed her feelings to remain unarticulated. To him. To Tariq she confessed she was furious: at Ava for her solipsism, which apparently had the black-hole-like ability to bend other bodies toward it, and at Dennis for proving himself thus bendable.

It was morbid, regressive, was it not? This she demanded of Tariq. To move back to the forsaken grounds of her father’s glory days, to a place that had already, by the time she and Ava were children, been inhabited as much by echoes as by real people. And to drag Dennis away from his job with Greensleeves to a place he bore almost no connection to, a place so dilapidated now that four of the original five cottages had been razed, and the unpaved lane that led to the remaining cottage had become roughly pocked and gouged. Besides, Kitty, newly pregnant when they announced the move, could not help taking their desertion personally.

Back when her best friend and brother had first become a couple, some seven years earlier, Kitty had been publicly magnanimous and privately titillated, but in any case genuinely excited. She’d been living in Boston, interning at a residential treatment center for addicts as clinical training for her master’s, and was therefore not only physically distant from the courtship but also sleep-deprived and overcaffeinated, factors that somehow combined to cast news of the romance in a rarefied, fantastical light. Ava and Dennis? Her jaw fell open.
Ava
and
Dennis
? How bizarre, how unlikely, how very nearly incestuous. And how the pairing seemed to confer a new, exalted status on them both.

That Ava could rise, in Dennis’s eyes, from the drear, sexless ranks of kid-sister’s-immature-friend; that Dennis could emerge, in Ava’s eyes, from the uninspiring role of best-friend’s-boringly-conservative-brother—these facts foretold limitless possibility, not just for them but for everyone, for the general human capacity to metamorphose. Kitty could hardly imagine the two of them finding each other attractive. When she summoned to mind their most deeply defining characteristics, she could think of nothing but Dennis’s preference for the mainstream, his essential squareness; and Ava’s inability to pass for mainstream, however hard she tried.

And she had tried painstakingly hard. Kitty thought of the time she’d gone out for cheerleading, their freshman year of high school. She’d known Ava wouldn’t make the squad, no matter how perfectly she executed the routine or reproduced the hairdo. She’d watched her friend practice and prepare, all the while biting her tongue, for how could she say there was no point, that there hung about Ava at all times an aura of otherness? It was more than the mere fact of her provenance. Yes, kids knew she came from Batter Hollow, but they knew this about Kitty, too, and it proved no liability in her case.

How painful was it to remember the time Ava, as a junior, had fallen hard for Chris Rachette, a three-varsity senior with ruddy cheeks, ripped jeans, a Saint Christopher medal and a black Miata. The way she’d hung about his locker, gone to his games, angled for rides in his car. He must have thought she was cute, must have had a taste for the quirky, because he’d encouraged it; Kitty saw with her own eyes how this was true, how he’d stretch his arm up the wall and lean in, how he’d bestow on her his famous lopsided grin, how he’d once used his own finger to brush aside a strand of Ava’s heavy dark hair. And what had Ava done? Written him a letter. Kiss of death. Long, earnest, heartpouringly honest. Not popped on impulse through his locker vent but delivered to his house through the U.S. mail. Envelope, stamp, formal, legal, the act intractably committed and radiating intent. What was Chris Rachette to do after that but start ignoring her in the halls, answer her greetings only when they were unavoidable with a vague
hey
, take Stacy Figueroa to the prom?

Kitty remembered the aftermath, too: Ava flung sideways across Kitty’s bed, shaking with sobs, crying like her stomach hurt, and her face, when she lifted it from the bedclothes, blotched pink and white, a mask of agony. “Chris Rachette’s a big dick,” Kitty had soothed. “Really. He’s just a giant penis. He’s a big doody.” This last elicited a soggy laugh, as she had hoped it might. “I’m serious. I’m going to get a red Sharpie and write B. D. on his forehead.”

So there was this, too, the history of her pity for Ava, informing her response to the news that Ava and Dennis were dating, fanning her happiness, however skeptical, for them, and allowing her to put her reservations aside. But when they announced, only a few months into it, their intention to wed, she felt her hackles rise. “Why marry?” she quizzed Ava over the phone.

“Because we want to,” Ava explained, slowly, absorbedly, as though the words’ simplicity belied complicated origins. “We’ve talked about it, Dennis and I, about how it feels right, to us both, not to be formless, not to be casual about what we feel.” She went on with the explanation at some length, in increasingly meandering and vague fashion, never coming out and saying what Kitty believed was really at stake: Ava’s determination to refute her parents’ choice. If Neel and June had elected not to marry legally but to live outside the social contract, then Ava would hasten to marry early and secure a spot within it. All that talk of “we” and “us both” was smoke screen, or else self-delusion; Kitty felt sure this was about Ava’s desire, period.

“Why marry?” she quizzed her brother next, determined to get at least one of them to examine the decision critically, and reasonably confident that if she could engage Dennis in a conversation he’d begin to see there were other, more favorable options.

But Dennis, in what must have been an act of unintended gallantry, did Ava one better. “I want to,” he said. Simply, but with such finality that even Kitty knew better than to press.

The wedding took place a few months later on a sleety afternoon in March. A bare-bones ceremony at City Hall, with sandwiches and cake at a restaurant afterward. Ava was twenty-five, Dennis thirty-two. She wore a sleeveless white sheath, daringly simple and beautifully cut, if rather too bare for the wintry weather; the whole time they were in the restaurant she never warmed up. Dennis looked euphoric in a dark suit and flowered tie. He spent some untold portion of the reception, before Kitty herself rid him of it, with some older relative’s coral lipstick print on his cheek, and something about his unknowingness, his blithe ignorance of what was all too plain to others, made her, unexpectedly and with startling force, want to weep.

Neel was less than two months away from his third and fatal stroke, but of course no one knew that then, and at the reception he yet managed to hold court, still imposing in his wheelchair, his white curls still buoyant, if more sparse, and the unparalyzed side of his face alternately scowling and twinkling as various of the guests came to have an audience with him, bending or kneeling by his chair. Irony of ironies: the great iconoclast authoritative to the end. When Kitty stooped to kiss him he beamed with lopsided vitality. She could not help finding his visage a little frightening, but made herself smile back. “There she is,” he declared with what seemed proprietary satisfaction. “Bonny to the end.”

June was there with him of course, looking a little tired, Kitty thought. They’d also brought Fred. Kitty, who’d seen him only a handful of times since she’d gone off to college, didn’t recognize him at first. At twenty-two he was rakishly, jarringly handsome in his sports jacket, jeans and high tops. Her first impression was that he’d changed, emerged, outgrown his tics and quirks. But then she saw how he ducked his head and swung it away, in almost equine fashion, from those who attempted to engage him, and how he kept close to his mother the whole afternoon, and how he appeared to vibrate compulsively on the balls of his feet. When she went to say hi, he bobbed his head quickly in her direction and then seemed to scan the air above her for someone or something he’d rather see.