The Hypothetical Girl (16 page)

Then there was the time she went all the way to Anchorage to see the man from graduate school who had taken a teaching job there. He had written her weekly, and so terribly sweetly, for seven years, culminating in an invitation to visit that made her heart so hopeful, so pumped with the adrenaline elixir of affection, she felt it would ignite from the warmth. She had arrived to find he had a family of six, a new baby in the arms of his second wife. “I never dreamed you would actually come,” he had said. “I am so, so sorry.”

But, most serious of all, her heart had weathered the foibles of her husband, Rick, he of the somber, nuanced paintings of little villages set among hills, the woman doing a rope trick, the woman balancing a planet on
her head, the woman on fire. What love, what passion was inscribed in those paintings. Love of color, color of love, love of light, light of love, love of her own aspect and appearance, which appeared in so many of them. Sadly, her husband told lies the way other people ordered Chinese food—he’d memorized the entire menu of untruths and partook thereof with a certain regularity and purpose. It was as if he felt it was his constitutional right to lie, listed in the Bill of Rights of his body. It was his tongue, after all, his vocal cords, his mouth. Does not one have the right to use one’s own organs any way one pleases, seeing that they belong to oneself?

Her heart had taken that particularly hard. It told her husband’s vocal cords that they were unethical and insensitive, and would carry a stain from this. Her heart was very proud of the fact that it did not, ever, lie. Just as it was its job to filter out the soiled blood from the sweet every minute of every day, it was the heart’s job to stick with verity.

Her heart took this truth job oh so seriously and thought that the vocal cords, the mouth, and the tongue of the husband should take their jobs seriously as well.

“Sorry,” said the man’s mouth. “It wasn’t meant to hurt her.”

Her heart had survived these things. But Ophelia knew she owed her heart something for all this wear and tear. A favor. She had thought up a number of things to do for her heart over the years, to make it feel
safe, and better. For example, when it was feeling very upset, pounding out a drumroll of angst, she would sometimes lay her heart down on the pillow beside Lillypie, sleeping, for a while, and that seemed to calm it immensely. Lillypie still sucked her thumb; she had the habit of lisping out the smallest yet most momentous things in her sleep between the sucking sounds. Like “Right here, bunny, next to me,” and “These dandelions are my friends.”

The heart loved that, to lie beside Lillypie and listen to the sentences. And loved it most when Lillypie would laugh, with abandon, as she slept. While the heart didn’t know exactly what Lillypie was laughing about, it didn’t care. That laughter was the heart’s food. A heart vitamin infusion. No matter what had happened during the day, Lillypie’s laughter soothed it, calmed it down and made it whole again. The ventricles squeezed open and shut in response. The left atrium and right atrium strummed in pleasure. Her heart whispered, “I love you so much,” to her daughter’s ears and her daughter’s ears smiled. “Love you back,” they said. And all was well then. Or better, anyway.

This was one way she had kept her heart happy for years. Yet there were people who frowned on this behavior. “One shouldn’t let one’s heart sleep next to one’s child,” they said. After a certain age, it was considered a bad idea. Lillypie was now six, too old, they said, to be lying next to an open, beating heart at night. No matter
what that heart needed, the child’s needs were more important, and she needed to sleep and sleep alone.

“But it doesn’t wake her,” Ophelia protested. “She doesn’t even know it’s there.”

“Doesn’t matter,” said these self-appointed experts (and most everyone had an opinion about the heart, wherever she went).

So, in time, she had stopped laying her heart next to Lillypie and had taken up other things to soothe it.

A more recent tactic was to take her heart with her to the computer, flick it on so its blue gaze would blink open, like a wide and square eye. Then she would go online to find friends for her heart.

At first her heart protested. “Not real,” it said. “C’mon!”

In time, however, her heart had grown to see the value. There were folks to meet, love to be had, though it was a very muffled love, mediated as it was through the screen and the keyboard upon which Ophelia typed.

On one particular lonely night, after Lillypie was asleep in her bed, watered and storied and tucked in, Ophelia took her uncaged heart to her computer and typed in the URL of Catchahubby.com. Faces bloomed; descriptions of the owners’ own lonely, lonely hearts bloomed across the screen. Her little heart fluttered, its mitral valve gasped, and then, did it giggle? She touched it softly, between the ears. She typed in words to one person in particular, a man with sad sad eyes.

“Greetings,” the man typed.

“Hi,” she typed back.

The man was sad, he said, because his own daughter had rejected him, forced by his ex-wife to choose. Ophelia’s heart sighed in her lap. As the conversation progressed, she could feel it shuddering. And then, as the man described his situation, all alone, with neither wife nor child, her heart began softly to weep.

This is too sad, said her heart. Try someone else.

A man appeared on her screen with a hungry look.

“Hello there,” he typed. “Whatcha doin’?”

Tell him we are just sitting here, wondering where love is.

“Just here,” she typed.

“You are gorgeous,” the man typed.

“You 2,” she typed.

“Skype?” asked the man.

She turned on her computer’s camera. There was the man, his hairy undressed chest shockingly visible. His mouth agape.

“Down on all fours,” he commanded.

X
out,
x
out, her heart screamed. She did, but for the two of them the chesty man lingered, like an afterimage in the air, for some time. His brutish face a slash across the night.

Then Ophelia found another man, a man who lived nearby. He typed that he liked her face. He had a
daughter, as she did, asleep in another room. He asked what her favorite color was.

This is more like it, the heart said.

“Purple,” she replied.

“Me too,” he typed. “Me too! What do you do?”

“I work for an insurance company,” Ophelia typed. “You?”

“I make things,” he typed back.

“Skype?” she typed.

She was a bit afraid to Skype after the brutish-man incident, but she tentatively turned on her camera. A beautiful man stood there, holding a beautiful kite. It was purple, with orange wings, like a jungle bird.

“Beautiful,” she said.

“So you like it?”

“I do,” she answered.

“I made it.”

Ask him where he flies such a kite, said her heart.

“I fly it on the beach, you should come. I have many!”

Her heart smiled.

“Sounds fun,” she said.

O
n the weekends Ophelia would take her daughter to ballet. Lillypie was going to be in a recital and she would be gone all morning, practicing pirouettes and sashays and relevés. In the recital she was to be a squirrel.

“I don’t want to be a squirrel,” she confided in her mother over a grilled cheese sandwich with pickles at a diner, their after-ballet tradition. “I want to be one of the forest fairies.”

“Fairies are fun but squirrels get to jump, they get to spin.”

“I still want to be a fairy,” she said. “Fairies can spin.”

“I know, love,” Ophelia said. “I will ask and see if we can make you a fairy.”

“Thank you, Momma,” Lillypie said, her eyes filling with gratitude.

After dropping off Lillypie at her class, Ophelia drove to the beach and met the man who made things, the man with the kites. He was standing right there on the beach, in the wind, and the kite was right next to him, straining on its string, a playful bird on a leash. When he saw her, his eyes bloomed and he let the kite leap. It jumped into the wind and did a little orange and purple dance there. She thought of Lillypie, and how much she would love the bright bird kite, and how she might like the man with the kite.

“Here,” he said, and handed her the spool of string. Their fingers touched. The kite pounced out of his hand into hers and she could feel it pulling toward the sun. It was as if he had handed her an enthusiastic living thing.

It was a windy day, a bright day; the kite made a loud flapping sound. They barely spoke, these two, just took
turns unspooling the kite into the sky, and watching it. They laughed, and ran, and he chased her as she bolted down the beach and when he caught her he placed his hands on her hips, holding Ophelia as she held the kite. In her chest her heart nodded.

When she went to retrieve Lillypie, she asked the ballet teacher if there was any way at all that Lillypie could be a fairy. “She is going through a hard time,” Ophelia said.

“I know, she told me,” the ballet teacher said. “Her father is far away and she isn’t sure if he will return?”

“Something like that,” Ophelia said.

“I will see what I can do,” the teacher said.

That night when she tucked in Lillypie, Lillypie asked, “Momma, do I get to be a fairy?”

“We are seeing what can be done.”

“Oh, thank you, Momma, thank you!”

“Don’t thank me yet,” Ophelia said.

A
fter Lillypie fell asleep, Ophelia went downstairs and made her tea. She sat on the couch cross-legged with her feet tucked upon her thighs.
You are a good person
, she chanted to herself.

Then she unlatched and opened the little door to her chest. Her heart practically flew out. Kite man! Kite man! it said.

I know, she said.

She flipped on the computer to look for him but he wasn’t there. In his place was a host of unfamiliar faces, each one with a full load of sorrow and loneliness.

Where is he? her heart asked, with a sigh.

No idea, she said.

Try to find him!

O
phelia did a search on “Kite,” “maker,” and the name of her town.

Nothing. She realized that, clearly undergoing some bout of temporary insanity, she had never even asked the man his name.

That wasn’t smart, said her heart.

Don’t get snippy, she said.

She went back to the couch and was about to replace the heart in its cage when her heart said, Not yet. We aren’t done. We need to find the kite man.

What do you want from me? she asked.

More than this. In her hands her heart was shaking.

I am sorry, she said. I am sorry, heart.

Her heart looked up at her. Are you? it asked. Really?

Then take me upstairs, let me lie beside Lillypie and hear her laugh in her sleep.

Heart, you know she is too old for that now.

Please, begged her heart. Please.

O
phelia could see that her heart would have its way, so she cupped it in her hands as she begrudgingly mounted the stairs and then quietly entered Lillypie’s room. Her daughter was sleeping so deeply, her head indenting the pillow, tiny snores emitting from her nose, the sucking sound of her mouth around her thumb, a menagerie of stuffed animals all around her. Ophelia carefully placed her heart on the pillow beside her.

Her heart settled in and sighed. It breathed in the smell of little girl, a compilation of dust, popsicle sweat, and Love’s Baby Soft shampoo. It was the smell of dreams and hope. It also had a vague scent of sadness. “Just make me a fairy,” Lillypie suddenly said, from the midst of her dream.

The heart listened.

The heart was sad also; it knew there was little chance of finding the kite man. It knew that love had slipped away, just like a kite on the wind that had escaped its string. The heart was sure of only one thing, one thing in the world: Lillypie, the smell of her, her solid body, her own fledgling beautiful heart, one foot splayed off the edge of the bed, her small hands tucked beneath her head.

You will be a fairy, her heart whispered to Lillypie’s dream.

Thank you, the dream said.

You are welcome, said the heart, closing its eyes. You can take me back now, it said to Ophelia. Put me in my cage. And for a while, I think I would like to just stay there.

I understand, said Ophelia. And for a long time after that, she left her heart there inside her chest. She did not go on the computer and type words to the universe of lonely men. She just lived her life, day to day.

And it was okay. Lillypie did get to be a fairy after all, and an ecstatic, leaping, twirling fairy she was. She was the best of the fairy pack, it was obvious to everyone.

C
larissa was in the park with her dog when a man stepped up to her, quite unexpectedly.

“What is his or her name?” the man asked.

It took Clarissa a moment to register the question—she was taken aback by the man himself, his blue eyes reminding her suddenly of those early pictures of the earth, taken from the moon.

“Zeus,” she said; “it’s a he. I mean a boy.”

“Beautiful dog,” said the man. His own dog loitered nearby, a scrappy thing, with a patch of fur missing from one side, like a worn-out rug. One could hardly reply with a compliment about this man’s dog’s beauty. A pause followed that was uncomfortably long, until Clarissa filled it by asking the man’s dog’s name.

“You won’t believe it if I tell you,” the man said.

“Try me,” said Clarissa.

“Juno,” said the man. “It’s a she.”

They laughed a bit, each one thinking how odd and strange it was to meet another person who had a dog named after a deity of antiquity, not to mention that these two deities were married to each other. Each had met many people online with whom they had experienced coincidences, but somehow in the real world such things seemed, well, realer, and coincidences more coincidental.

“Live around here?” the man asked.