The Story of Beautiful Girl (37 page)

“Julia.”

“Julia.” Lynnie looked down at the feather necklace. “That’s a beautiful name.”

“For a long time they settled in Massachusetts. Julia was in school—a regular school. They were living a regular life.”

Lynnie gazed out the windshield. The sky was gray and the houses broken. There was so much that was ugly in this world. Yet look. A blue jay was flying toward the house. It dove under the porch roof and tucked itself into the nest.

“That was a really decent thing the old lady did.”

“I still can’t believe it, Lynnie.”

“What about Buddy?”

Kate looked up at the car ceiling, and her eyes went back and forth as she bit her lip. Then she took Lynnie’s hands as if she were going to say something. Finally she pushed her lips together and shook her head.

Lynnie said, “Doreen says to forget him. But he’s still trying to get back to me.”

“Is that what you think?”

“I know it. He’ll be back”—and this word she had to work at—“eventually.”

Kate nodded and fiddled with the clasp of her purse. “Then I know he will, too.”

“Hey,” Lynnie said, her eye catching a motion in the side mirror. “Someone’s coming.”

A man had rounded the corner at the far end of the block. Lynnie turned and looked out the rear window. He was in a brown hoodie and baggy navy sweatpants and was stumbling so much, he kept steadying himself by grabbing on to the misshapen trees and chain-link fences separating the houses from the road. Lynnie recognized him not by sight, but by the hurried feeling she got inside, as though she had to breathe fast to get enough air, and she imagined in her chest a hundred jaws opening and closing, the teeth biting down while voices yelled. She felt the way she used to feel when someone around her was crying, only worse. She knew she couldn’t throw herself down and kick and scream. Instead, her breathing got harder until it stopped coming at all. She felt as if she were choking on a cloth.

She put her hands to her neck.

“This was a bad idea,” Kate said, throwing the car into gear.

Lynnie pulled at the collar of her coat.

“Are you okay?” Kate was saying as she quickly turned the car around.

Lynnie pushed her chest with her hand, trying to get the trapped air out.

“This was stupid,” Kate said, straightening the car. “I’ll get you out of here in a second.”

They were facing him now. He was many houses down, and he didn’t seem to notice them, leaning on a phone pole as he was, bent over coughing.

Lynnie tried to suck in air. She couldn’t. She tried and tried. Nothing.

“You shouldn’t see this,” Kate said, driving toward the
bent-over body. She reached across the seat. “Don’t look.” She put her hand across Lynnie’s eyes.

“No!” Lynnie said. And all the air that couldn’t get out went out. She sucked in a fresh breath. “I want to see!”

“It’s upsetting you.”

“No,” Lynnie said again. “Look at him. Slow down. Look.”

Horror and shock on her face, Kate slowed the car. As she did, four houses from this wobbling man, he let go of the pole, took a step forward, and collapsed right into a mud puddle.

“Stop,” Lynnie said to Kate.

“Are you sure—”

“Yes.”

Kate stopped the car and they looked out the windshield. They were right before him now, but he didn’t see them. He was on his side, his face half in the mud.

“He’s a mess,” Lynnie said.

“You got that right.”

“He’s a drunk.”

“You’re probably right about that, too.”

“Geez.”

“Are you okay?”

The choking was gone. The breathing came easy. She touched her chest and felt her necklace.

“What do you want to do, Lynnie?”

She thought of things she’d seen people do. She’d seen a TV show where a gang of kids came upon a homeless man in a park and poured drinks all over him and kicked him and laughed. She’d seen a woman have a fight with a bus driver and call him names and spit at his feet. She’d seen Smokes himself go at a working boy and crack a broom handle over his head.

She wanted to do all of that to him. She wanted to jump out of the car and bite him. But she didn’t bite anymore, and she didn’t
want to kick a person, even this one. She wasn’t sure if she was still scared of him or if she just didn’t want to bother.

“Go,” she said.

Kate hit the gas. “We can drive right to the police. We know where he lives.”

“No.”

“Please, Lynnie. You can identify him. It’s only right that he should pay.”

“I don’t want to go to the police.”

“Why not?”

“Because…”

“Because what?”

Past him now, they neared the corner.

“Can you help me say a word?” Lynnie asked.

Kate turned to her. “Sure. You start and I’ll finish.”

“Because he’s pa… path… pathetic.”

Kate smiled. “You don’t need my help.”

Lynnie said, “And you know what, Kate? I’m not.”

“That’s right,” Kate said. “You’re not.”

Lynnie thought about turning around in her seat to see him one last time. But it felt too good to be facing forward.

At three o’clock, back in the Capitol building, Lynnie sat down in the large room where the hearing was to be held, and a man in the front of the room stood up. “Our hearing today concerns the potential closing of the remaining residential institutions in the Commonwealth. We will take comments from members of the community.”

One by one, each of Lynnie’s friends went to a seat in the front of the room and spoke their case. Lynnie could barely listen. She kept rolling her drawings in her hands.

Finally: “Lynnie Goldberg.”

She rose, flashed a smile at Kate, and went to the front of the room. There she sat in the big wooden chair and faced the legislators.

“I am Lynnie Goldberg,” she said, taking care with every word. “From 1957 to 1980, I lived in the Pennsylvania School. I want to tell you my story, and I brought something to help me.” She unrolled her drawings and held the first one up. “This is how the School looked to me when my parents took me there. I was scared. I didn’t know what it was. Bad things happened, and I will not tell you them all. But I will tell you some.”

And she showed them through her art. Meeting Tonette. Mopping the dayroom. Getting shoved around by angry residents. Eating mush. Folding laundry. Stepping over floor puddles to use the lavatory. Hiding her art in a file cabinet. Being afraid of attendants with dogs.

She did not mention Buddy or… Julia. She did not say she looked out her window at night even now, imagining where, under the stars of Cup and Feather, her husband and her child might be.

The legislators listened with serious expressions. One woman got wet eyes. One man held his fist to his chin.

“That’s why we have to close all the institutions,” Lynnie said when she finished.

She stood up and was aware that the other advocates were applauding her. She smiled at them, relieved she’d found the courage to speak for herself—and for so many others, too.

“I did it, Kate!” Lynnie said as they burst out of the elevator into the rotunda. She grabbed Kate’s hand and moved fast.

“You did,” Kate said, letting herself be pulled along. “You talked in public, Lynnie. And your art has gotten so
good
! I’m so glad you asked me to be here.”

Lynnie threaded through the people milling about the rotunda until she and Kate reached the center. “It’s been some day,” Kate said, her voice soft though still seeming to lift off into flight.

“One of the best days ever,” Lynnie said, louder, her voice flying higher.

Then she tilted her head back and looked up into the dome, so very high above her head, and whispered the word she’d thought about for hours, the word that helped make her strong at the hearing: “Julia.” The word took wing as it left her mouth and rose into the air. It circled higher and higher and finally disappeared through the glass. Surely it would soar unseen across the state, across the world, and look down to the land and find her.

1995

A
ccording to the map,” Sam said, slowing the van, “we are at the School.”

But Homan had already seen the stone walls. He didn’t need to turn to Jean, sitting beside him in the back, as she interpreted Sam’s speech into sign. He hadn’t gotten thrown off by the changed scenery—acres of new houses across the road, now swelled to a highway—or by the many changes that had happened inside him after he’d made the leap to American Sign Language, struck up friendships with folks who worked at the Independent Living Center with Sam, and taken classes. He’d learned so much in the last years: how to transform those printed bird tracks into letters, then words, then flocks that carried him across the pages of books; how to understand maps, money, the rules of driving. Still, he instantly recognized those walls.

And there was the gate, black and tall, its tips spiked as spears. Beyond it, high on the hill, was the tower, its clock face replaced by the words “Veterans Medical Center.” Sam—whose name, Homan now knew, was Terence, though he’d always be Sam to him—had pulled the van to the shoulder, and even though Homan’s view was broken by passing SUVs and eighteen wheelers, the sight immediately pumped revulsion—and longing—through his veins.

He’d figured that would happen. Soon after the window to
communication opened, he lost interest in the Tingling, and as he read and learned, he became repelled by how easily the School had made him disappear. While he was pleased he’d worked out a good deal with King and Queen (decent income
plus
the room and board he already had at their Buddhist retreat), had grown more sure of his talents (starting a side business modifying beds, vans, and wheelchairs for friends), and had set his sights high (he’d just gotten an application to study engineering), he still wished he could wallop the big shots who’d looked down their noses at him and the guards who’d strutted about like cocks. Yet at the same time, he’d come to wonder what had happened to the School—and to Beautiful Girl and Little One. The first question took a lot of research to answer. The other question, he couldn’t answer. How could he, without knowing their names?

What about you?
Sam asked one day as Jean, a hearing person fluent in sign, interpreted. Jean was Yellow Dress, but now she wore skirts and blazers, and she and Sam were married.

What do you mean, what about me?

There must be a file on you somewhere. It might have just enough information from Redhead, or someone, to get you Beautiful Girl’s name.

They never knew who I was.

What’d they call you?

How would I know?

For a long time, Homan gave himself grief for wanting to know what happened to them. Twenty-seven years had gone by. Beautiful Girl might have passed away, and if she hadn’t, what business did he have thinking about her? Or Little One? They’d be in their own lives, maybe even with their own families and friends and jobs. He was long gone from their thoughts.

It’s basic curiosity,
one friend told him;
we all feel that with our first romances.
Another offered,
It’s guilt.

We have a different theory,
Jean signed one night before she and Sam got married.
You keep thinking of her because you still love—

Homan walked away so she couldn’t finish her sentence.

Then a month ago, Sam and Jean made an invitation. They both had job interviews in Washington, D.C., and decided to drive across the country. They wanted to see Yosemite, Mount Rushmore, maybe even places they’d been when they were younger. Homan could come, too.

I’ve got a job.

Isn’t there some place you’d like to see?

No.

It won’t feel like a road trip without you.

What part of No don’t you understand?

Yet when he went back to his little house that night and lay on his futon, Beautiful Girl came to him for the first time in so very long. Her dream self—not a fuzzy shape, but detailed and full and luscious—climbed into bed beside him. He turned to her, and there she was, gazing at him in the moonlight. Her body, though, wasn’t touching his, her expression was unreadable, and despite how much he wanted to lay his fingers on her warm skin, he held back. She was a dream, only a dream. Instead, he raised his hands and asked what she’d been doing all these years. She pointed toward the wall, which suddenly revealed itself to be covered by her drawings. He peered at them, but before he could recognize any, they faded before his eyes, becoming blank. By the time he looked back at her, she was gone.

The next day, he told King and Queen he wanted time off. The next week, he took care of all the maintenance they’d need while he was gone. And just before he left, he slit open the bottom of his yellow chair, removed the money, and finally, at long last, put it in the bank.