The Museum of Intangible Things (19 page)

We got off easy for “accomplice to Tasering and grand theft auto.” I don’t know how we got the judge to give us the same community service assignment, but she did, and now Danny and I have a built-in date, early Saturday mornings, where we prepare the day’s meals for a women’s homeless shelter. We have to wear hairnets.

On the menu today: fruit salad. We’re learning to cut the meat of the grapefruit—the pink, pulpy part—from its membranes. It’s called “supreming.” We do a little “Stop in the Name of Love” choreography before we start. After we’re finished, we meet in the walk-in and engage in some grapefruit-flavored kissing. Luckily the grapefruit smell drowns out the oniony sour milk–pickle odor that is a perpetual fixture inside the refrigerator.

“You are so hot in this,” he jokes, tucking his rubber-gloved finger beneath the elastic of my hairnet and lifting it off.

I wrap one leg around his waist, and he grabs my athletic rear end, pulls me closer, and then cruelly breaks away, coming to his senses.

“Margaret wants her cottage cheese,” he says.

“And you are the biggest tease.”

He’s sweet with the ladies, who drew a terrible lot in this life. When I see them, lining up for their coffee and cheese and cheap white-bread toast, I think,
There, but for the grace of God, go I
. Another thing I learned from AA.

On Sundays, I work with Ms. Brennan at Operation Save Our School. I share with her what I’ve learned from my attic days at the private school, and we try to figure out a way to fix Johnson High’s curriculum. We’re planning a walkout after Christmas, demanding to be educated.

Sunday evenings, I see my dad.

I’m helping him finally take the boat out of the water, on a balmy sixty-degree Christmas Eve in New Jersey, and I’ve decided to forgive him, because resentment can lead to health problems.

And it’s Christmas. And Zoe’s not here to fuel my anger and keep me strong and resistant to him. To stop me from being an enabler. “
How many chances does he get
?” I can hear her say from somewhere in outer space.

“So you lost the job for good, huh?” I ask him.

It’s the cardinal rule of weathermanning. You cannot speak of global warming, ever. It’s not reporting the weather drunk that bothered the execs. Weatherpeople, like game-show hosts, are drunk all the time on the air. It’s the only way they can survive their meaningless existence. But you cannot ever “acknowledge the existence of a large-scale climatological issue with its roots in the use of fossil fuels by humans.” This is in every weatherman contract. It pisses off the advertisers. So I don’t know how my father will find another job. He needs a Plan B.

“You’re not supposed to acknowledge the existence of a large-scale . . .”

“I know, Hannah,” he says.

“You can’t go back to the weather center. The technology has surpassed you,” I say to my father. We’ve hooked the boat to the trailer and have pulled it up the boat launch. We’re waxing the bottom because that’s what you’re supposed to do before you put it in dry dock. We are doing a very cursory job, however. The boat is a piece of shit. “You don’t even know how to use e-mail . . . Maybe you can come up with a schtick, like rapping the weather. I think I saw that on YouTube.”

He continues squeaking the all-natural sea sponge along the scummy underside of the boat.

“Maybe you could take some computer classes. Or you could move to a very remote market. There are a lot of tornadoes in the Southeast these days.” I scoop some more Turtle Wax from the container and spread it on the boat in a swirling circular motion. The sun is setting over the far side, the Ethan Drysdale side, of the lake. It melts and drips like sweet butterscotch syrup over those who must have done something to deserve it. We observe from the shadows.

“Possibly. I have a contact in the traffic department at the local radio station. Traffic reports. On the sevens.”

“You have a face for radio,” I say.

“I guess I deserve that,” he says. He continues to look down into his bucket. He can’t look at me. His profile is still handsome. He has chiseled cheekbones and a strong masculine chin with a cleft in the middle. He actually has a face for television. “I plan to pay you back,” he says.

“Whatever,” I say. “Just stay sober. A day at a time. Work the program. I can take care of myself.”

“Oh, you can, can you?” He finally looks at me.

“Well, I have to, don’t I?”

“I guess I deserve that too,” he says, looking back into his bucket.

As he wields the sponge, his hands still shake a little, which might be permanent at this point. There are only so many benders you can fully recover from. At least as a traffic reporter on the radio, he doesn’t have to point to anything with a steady hand.

“What are you doing later?” he asks me. It breaks my heart, but I have to leave him alone on Christmas Eve.

“I have a thing,” I tell him, and he just nods. “I can see you tomorrow, though. Is there a meeting?”

He brushes a tear away, sniffs, and nods. “Yeah. I’ll go to a meeting. Watch a movie. I’ll be okay.”

“Okay,” I tell him. “Hug?”

“Hug,” he says, and he wraps me up in his familiar, warm arms.

“I miss her too, you know,” he says as I’m walking away. “Who’s going to keep me in line now? She was good at that. She saw right through me.”

“You. You can keep yourself in line.”

“Okay.”

“Okay,” I say as I walk to my car. “See you tomorrow.”

“Okay,” he says.

• • •

Noah planned the whole thing. He sent me an invitation in his chicken-scratch handwriting and told me to meet him in the woods. He also asked me to call Snozzberry, Zoe’s favorite band, and have them meet us there too.

They’re playing when I get there. Just an ambling instrumental number, perfect for accompanying people’s processional down the path through the trees that Noah had outlined with flower petals.

My mom is here. And Susan. And Karen and Jen. Danny and I walk hand in hand, the soft pad of his finger tracing nervous circles inside my palm. No one knows what to expect.

A group of about thirty people arrive. Ms. Brennan. Ice. Even Rebecca. My father must have heard about it too, because although he may not have been invited, I notice his shadowy silhouette staring down at the scene from a nearby hilltop.

Julian comes up behind us and puts his soft arm around my shoulder. He’s wearing a rabbit-fur jacket.

“Where did you find that?” I ask him, pointing to the fur coat.

“A friend gave it to me. And don’t ask me who my friend is, because if I reveal that information, I’ll be forced to drink gasoline,” he jokes. The brown rabbit fur flanks either side of his chest, but he has the zipper open to his belly button, revealing his smooth hairless pectoral muscles. He has brown eyes and a willowy body. His sandy blond hair looks perfect, as if he’d just come from a photo shoot with
Teen Beat
.

“You need different friends,” I tell him.

“That’s what college is for, sweetheart. You should try it. Come with me,” he begs, holding out his hand. “You can live in my dorm room and be my pet.” Somehow, he got into Columbia. Soon he’ll be lost in the city, becoming fabulous and better off. But I can tell he is terrified.

“You can’t have a fag hag for a pet, sweetheart.” I brush my fingers down his cheek.

“Oooo. Hannah. You said
fag
.”

“I did. But it was in a certain context.”

“That’s what I love about you. You’re so contextual.” He twirls me in toward him and kisses me on top of my head.

“That doesn’t even make sense,” I say.

“Hannah. It’s starting,” Danny says, and I join him at the edge of the “installation.” In a clearing around our weeping willow, Noah has arranged all of his favorite pieces from Zoe’s exhibits. The beating heart impaled with the kitchen knife, the flowered couch, the marionette peacock, the bill of rights written on the roll of toilet paper. He even, somehow, mysteriously, has dredged up my rusted hot dog cart from the lake and decorated it with dozens of red roses. In the trees he has hung all of Zoe’s designs. They glisten and wave in the wind like flags of fabulosity. In the center, on the ground, Noah has arranged the torn-out pages of Zoe’s copy of
On the Road
into four enormous letters, spelling out the word LIFE.

I had forgotten until this moment that “Zoe” actually means life in Greek.

He cues the band to play Zoe’s favorite song, and when they are done, he lights a fuse. The letters, one by one, spark and sizzle alight. And they burn brightly with a blue and orange fire. When they’re done, a couple of bottle rockets shoot off over the lake, illuminating the willow and the grove and all the crying people around it. “Thank you,” he says robotically. “I know she can see this, where she is.”

His mom scoops him into a flying hug. And the band keeps playing as we mill around a little, drinking eggnog and apple cider. I can’t stay for long, though. No one can understand exactly what grief feels like for another person, because depending on your relationship to the deceased, you feel your grief differently from everyone else on the planet. I won’t say my grief was deeper. But I will say I can’t stay for long. It feels like my heart has been scooped out with a melon baller.

“Tomorrow will be better,” I promise Danny through my tears. “But now I need to go.” He’s been pretty understanding about my good days and my bad days. More understanding than he needs to be. “We’ll try again tomorrow?”

“Yes,” he says. “Merry Christmas, Hannah.”

“Merry Christmas.”

My mom drives me home, and we lay together head to foot like a pair of shoes in a shoebox on the couch listening to really old Patti Page Christmas carols. People’s Christmas lights blink on and off in the reflection of the lake outside our window. There is no snow. She holds me as I promise to shed my last tear about this, and she tells me things will get better.

And I believe her. Because in some ways they already have.

(EVER AFTER)

The rest of my life has been spent repairing the Zoe-shaped hole she left in my heart. And since she gave me a recipe for doing that, I’ve been quite successful at it. I define what I want and have the audacity to go after it. And whenever possible, to the appropriate questions, I say yes. Do you want to eat oysters? Do you want to scuba dive? Do you want to photograph zebras in Kenya? Do you want to finally visit Sweden? Want to go for a run? Meditate? Go skiing? Save the polar bears? Will you marry me? Yes.

I let myself be gluttonous sometimes.

And I’m never rude, necessarily, but there are times when I remind myself to stop giving a shit.

I have a framed picture of me and Danny in our crimson and white graduation gowns, tucked away in a box in my closet. His eyes are bright and gleaming, and they are crinkled delightfully in the corners. His knuckly fingers clasp tightly around my shoulder. He was my first love. And even now, when I look at it, there’s a happy-sick twinge in my heart.

But they call it first love for a reason.

Because other loves come after that. Especially in lives as long as ours.

I have left behind what tethered me to the lake. The sadness. The self-pity. The dark tentacles of the murky sea monster only I could see. And I have come to appreciate the ocean. How the sun and salt together can leave things weightless, easy, and smooth around the edges. Like sea glass and driftwood.

I write a letter once a month to Noah, about thrift or tenacity or denial or honesty or hypocrisy or beauty, and I send it to him at his office in NASA, where he studies a very specific exoplanet around an M-dwarf star between the constellations of Cygnus and Lyra . . . and he searches for life.

Above all, I want to thank the “villagers” who help my daughter thrive in my absence. Without the village, nothing is possible. Special thanks to Dani Dexter, babysitter extraordinaire, the beloved Miss Ashley, Dina and Jonathan, Lisa, Paulina and Anthony, Lynne and Lou, Greg S., Kathy and Dave, Gary and Mary, and a whole host of other awesome parents from the South End and Shady Hill School. Thank you for loving my kid.

This is weird, but I really want to thank Mayor Thomas M. Menino, for doing his best to make Boston a safe haven for artists and their families. You will be sorely missed, Mr. Mayor.

Thanks also to these safe havens: the Writers’ Room of Boston, Grub Street, the Boston Public Library, and Lighthouse Writers in Denver.

I am deeply indebted to my Alloy family, Sara Shandler, Joelle Hobeika, and Josh Bank. Thanks for cheering me on and hearing me out and for supporting me and my work, even when both of those things can get “difficult.”

For taking a chance on me and providing fresh sets of eyes and expert editorial guidance, special thanks to Team Razorbill: Jessica Almon, Jocelyn Davies, and Ben Shrank.

I want to thank my husband’s family for raising the perfect human. And of course want to thank Gregg and Cadence. My heart and my other heart.

Thank you for reading.

Namaste.