The book of love, p.25
The Book of Love, page 25
* * *
—
After she finished the first book about Lavender Glass, Laura acquired all the other Caitlynn Hightower books at the library. When Ruth caught her reading The Sea Is Not Deeper Than My Love, she’d said, “Are you sure you’re old enough for those?”
Laura said she had already read the first three, so she thought she probably was, and Ruth laughed. “Fine. I guess. Half the nurses are die-hard fans of hers. She’s a nice lady. Always sends the NICU cookies at Christmas.”
Laura said incredulously, “You know her? Caitlynn Hightower?”
“That’s just a pen name,” Ruth said. “Caitlynn Hightower is Maryanne Gorch, Mo’s grandmother. I thought you knew his grandmother was a writer.”
“Yeah,” Susannah said from the kitchen table where she was using Ruth’s laptop to look up the Wikipedia page for Eleanor Roosevelt. She hadn’t even started her report yet, even though it was due in the morning. “Didn’t you know that, Laura? Everybody knows.” Laura’s report was already in her backpack.
* * *
—
Laura didn’t know much about Mo’s mother, other than that she was dead. When she looked at Daniel, he shrugged.
The stairs came through the floor of a renovated attic space where Mo was sitting like a supervillain in a chair shaped like an egg. He put down his book and said, “Oh, good. You’re here.”
“Oh, good,” Daniel said. “Pizza. Oh my God, you got Love Sends Pizza pizzas.” This was extravagance: Love Sends Pizza was where you went for birthdays or graduations. He went straight for the long plank table where there were four large pizzas in their boxes, and Laura followed. Mo had made a head start on what smelled like LSP’s fennel Parmesan with preserved lemon and roasted garlic.
“Enjoy!” Jenny said. “I’ll be downstairs refreshing Twitter and reading Facebook posts about how global warming isn’t real from people I shouldn’t be friends with. Yell down if you need anything.”
“Thanks, Jenny,” Mo said. “Oh, hey, you should take a couple of slices.”
“No, no,” Jenny said. “I’ll just eat whatever’s left over when you guys are done.”
Mo and Daniel and Laura looked at one another. “You should probably take some now,” Mo said.
The Book of Daniel
Before Laura came by to collect him, Daniel spent a while playing catch with Davey and Oliver, while Lissy and Dakota had a long conversation around the corner of the house. When he went over to ask if they wanted to join in, they looked full of regret. No, they were too busy. There were too many things they had to do. No time for catch. The world needed mending.
“Anything I could help with?” he asked.
Again, Lissy and Dakota regarded him with pity tempered with fondness. It was so nice of him to offer, these looks said. But he’d been away for so long. Everything had changed while he’d been gone.
Carousel hadn’t wanted to play catch, either. She had gotten hold of his coin collection again, and she was arranging them on the kitchen floor in small stacks while their mom sat at the table paying bills. “Which one comes from farthest away?” she said.
“That one’s from Korea,” he said.
“What about the moon?” Carousel said. “What kind of money do they use on the moon?”
“Everything’s free on the moon,” Daniel said. “You don’t have to pay for anything there. You can just have whatever you need because you need it.”
“Com-moon-ism,” their mom said, but nobody paid her any attention.
Carousel said, “They should have money anyway, because money’s pretty. Can I have your coin collection when you die?”
“What if I need it when I’m dead, though?” Daniel asked.
Carousel dumped more coins out onto the floor. She said, “Then get a job.”
At least Oliver and Davey were deliriously happy to have Daniel. He could just reach out and pluck the ball out of the air, no matter how much force they put behind their throws. That’s how tall he was. They threw the ball over and over, and he tossed it back as many times as they yelled at him to throw it. Every time he threw it, a feeling came over him that he could have thrown the ball even farther and even farther still. He could have thrown it up so high in the air, it would never come down again. He could have used magic to do that, and wouldn’t the twins have been amazed? He could have done other things, too. He could have turned the whole yard into Disney World, maybe, or all the grass to silver. Daniel could have summoned every dog in the neighborhood so his brothers and sisters wouldn’t miss Fart. He could have gone back to Lewis Latimer and made Ms. Fish understand why Carousel ought to be called by the name she’d chosen for herself. He could go tell Susannah how he felt, and if she didn’t feel the same, well, he could make her feel differently. He could make her happy. Daniel had potential, a thing he’d never been sure he had before. He had the potential to do things that other people couldn’t. He had come back from the dead, and wasn’t it kind of a waste to stand here in the yard playing catch with his brothers? Wasn’t it kind of a waste to die again when there was still so much life he could have? Yes, and that was okay, too. He would be wasteful. And then he would be dead.
Right now Davey and Oliver wanted as much time with Daniel as they could get. But they were twins. When Daniel was gone, they’d have each other. And when Daniel was gone, he’d have nobody. So he was going to make the best of the time he had now and catch that ball every single fucking time. You didn’t need magic to catch a ball.
The afternoon was fading when he and Davey and Oliver went inside again, his brothers flopping down on the floor in front of the TV to play a video game. Carousel and his coin collection were gone, and his mom was cutting up eggplant and salting the slices, laying them down on a plate.
“Eggplant Parm for dinner,” she said.
“You need help?” he said.
“I got it,” she said. “Don’t think I don’t see everything you’ve been doing since you got home. Taking care of everyone. Honey, it isn’t that I don’t appreciate it, but you know you don’t have to do it all.”
“No,” Daniel said. “I know. It just seemed like you and Peter had a lot on your plate and I wanted to help some.”
She looked at him ruefully. “I will admit that we let some things slide in the last couple of months. This year, I don’t know what it is. It’s just been a hard year. Nothing big. I don’t think. Just, life. You know?”
“I think so,” he said. “Sorry.”
“Why?” his mom said. “Daniel. You don’t have to feel responsible for everything.”
He said, “Okay.”
“You around tonight?”
“Going out soon,” he said. “Not really sure when I’ll get back.”
“Mysterious,” his mom said.
“Mom? Did Dakota or Lissy ever have any problems in Ms. Fish’s class? I was trying to remember. She was fine with me, but Mo said some stuff and I was wondering—”
His mom put her knife down. She said, “If she has trouble with Black kids?”
“Yeah,” Daniel said.
“I’ve been asking myself the same question,” his mom said. “Lissy and Dakota were such sunny kids when they were Carousel’s age. They could have had an actual troll as a teacher and neither one would have noticed as long as there were crayons and glue sticks and enough construction paper. But you, you were a handful, and Ms. Fish adored you. Carousel on her worst day isn’t even close to you, and Ms. Fish suggested we look into therapy. So your dad and I are going to have a talk tonight. We’ll figure this out.”
“Okay,” Daniel said. “Good. Hey, Mom?”
She was slicing up eggplant again. Vigorously.
“You know how sometimes you feel like you can do anything you want? Anything at all?”
His mom said with finality, “Everybody feels that way when they’re young.”
The knife came down again.
On the blackboard paint in the living room, someone had written 2 return 2 remain. But unlike in Mr. Anabin’s classroom, it came off when Daniel wiped.
* * *
—
The attic ran the length of the Gorch house: a long open space with a pitched ceiling and soft carpets in blues and scarlets scattered on the floor. A glass partition at the far-right end separated a recording studio from the rest of the space, and all along one long wall, alcoves had been carved out of the eaves. In each alcove there were instruments on various stands and in display cases. Some of them were unlike any instrument Daniel had ever seen.
On the other long wall was a row of tall casement windows: through them there was a rose garden and small lights along a spiral path of crushed shells; beyond the white path, a low rock wall grown over with more rosebushes, climbing roses; beyond the roses and the wall and the path, the vertiginous drop and then the lustrous seam where the eye insisted sky and ocean met.
Daniel stood before the windows. He didn’t wish to talk about magic with Laura and Mo. He didn’t want to be here at all. It would be an easy thing, in fact, to unlatch the window and go flying out. To use his human fingers for one task and then to become a bird and fly away. What would it feel like?
In the garden down below, a white shape moved upon the white shell path. It raised its head and looked up at Daniel through the locked window.
He must have made some noise because Mo said, “What? Is someone out there?”
“Is it the tiger?” Laura said.
They joined him at the window, but the wolf was gone again.
“There’s nobody there,” Mo said. He sounded disappointed.
“Sorry,” Daniel said. He went and sat at the piano and pressed the middle C key down so lightly it made no sound at all. Perhaps the wolf had not been there. He played the note again, more decisively this time, and then began to pick out some pop song Lissy had been singing all afternoon. “Nice piano,” he said. How did you get a baby grand up those stairs and into the attic anyway? He would have liked to watch. Of course, if you could do magic, you could just float it up. Or shrink it down to the size of a walnut and put it in your pocket. Carry it up that way. The urge came upon Daniel to see if that was something he could do, turn the piano into a walnut, and so he got up and sat down in an armchair instead.
“It was my mom’s,” Mo said.
Laura said, “What’s the deal with your mom anyway, Mo?”
Which was just like Laura, to just get in there and ask all the awkward questions. Everyone should have a Laura, although if you had a Laura, you had to accept that you were also going to get questions.
Mo said, “She died when I was nine. Bad heart.” As he said it, he looked at Daniel with a kind of absolute loathing. Daniel looked away.
“That sucks,” Laura said.
“All of this”—Mo gestured at the room full of instruments—“These belonged to my mom. Cara. She grew up here, but she was younger than your parents, I think. By the time she was fourteen, she was commuting once a week to Boston for classes at the conservatory at Berklee. But she didn’t like performing. She just liked instruments and so she got a degree in ethnomusicology and went all over the world researching rare instruments. Historical instruments. Things people still play but play differently now. Instruments archeologists find in tombs that nobody’s ever seen before. She came home with a lot of weird shit. She stored most of it here in my grandmother’s house because she had this tiny apartment in Manhattan. I don’t really remember it, but I do remember it was tiny.”
“And now it’s all yours? All of this?” Laura said.
“Yeah,” Mo said. “Jenny says there’s a trust or something. When I turn twenty-one it’s all mine.”
“If you live that long,” Laura said.
“I’m planning on living a lot longer than that,” Mo said. “Got a lot of stuff I want to do. So let’s talk about today. What we learned. What we’re going to do next.”
“Excellent,” Laura said. “I made a list. Feel free to add anything I left out. Okay, one, Mr. Anabin is a terrible magic teacher. Two, it’s his birthday tomorrow and we are all supposed to magically acquire presents for him. Also we still don’t know how we died. Three, Bowie is a lot more advanced at magic than we are. Four, the Malo Mogge person is clearly a part of all of this, and maybe the tiger, and Hannah disappearing, and five, Daniel.”
“What?” Daniel said.
Laura crossed her arms. She said, “You’re problem number five.”
“Because I don’t want to do magic?” Daniel said. “Doesn’t that make me the opposite of a problem? Only two get to remain, remember? I stay out of the competition and then you and Mo just have to figure out how to be better than Bowie.”
“Fine by me,” Mo said.
“No!” Laura said. “We agreed we were going to stick together. Which means Daniel is going to do his best to keep on Mr. Anabin’s good side. Right?”
“Fine,” Daniel said. “I’ll think about a birthday present.”
Mo said, “Tell me about Malo Mogge again.”
They ate the last pieces of pizza while Laura described Malo Mogge in as much detail as she could summon up. Daniel had very little to add.
“We could ask Mr. Anabin about her,” Mo said. “Or I guess we could ask her about Mr. Anabin, if any of us run into her again.”
“Maybe she was the person you saw last night,” Laura said. “The one who waved at you.”
“No,” Mo said. He sounded very certain.
“What about one of those tie pins shaped like a clef symbol? Aren’t music teachers supposed to like things like that?” Daniel said.
Laura said to Mo, “Did you and Rosamel talk about the night we died?”
“Yeah. We did. What I remember is Susannah kissing Rosamel during ‘The Kissing Song,’ ” Mo said. Laura made a face. “And you kissed Daniel. And that’s pretty much what Rosamel remembers, too. She said she went home after that because she was already in trouble with her mom for missing curfew the night before. She said when she left I was over on the carousel with you guys.”
“With me?” Laura said.
“Yeah,” Mo said. “You and Daniel. I don’t remember that, either.”
“This is pointless,” Daniel said. “Even if we remember something, how can we be sure it’s a real memory and not just like all of this Ireland stuff?”
He went over to the window again. Here was the moon on the spiral path, the low wall, the shadowed rosebushes. There was no wolf.
Laura and Mo joined him at the window.
“Even if it’s pointless, we still have to try,” Laura said. “We died and we came back. How many people get a second chance like that?”
“How many people get a chance after they die to come back and say goodbye to their family?” Daniel countered. “Glass half-full, glass half-empty, you’re acting like it’s glass free refill.”
“My grandmother loved roses,” Mo said, and Daniel remembered Mo had no family left to say goodbye to.
“It must be incredible when they’re all in bloom,” Laura said.
“Yeah,” Mo said. He unlatched the window. The night was still far too warm for December, though colder than it had been. Daniel watched as Mo opened his hand, extended his fingers. He reached through the window, fingers describing a motion like pulling something out of the air. As Mo did this, the rosebushes began to rustle and quiver. On the bushes, bare branches began to send out new shoots, then the small, dark curls of leaves. Buds appeared and unfolded themselves into yellow and pink blossoms.
“Oh, let me try!” Laura said. She held out her right hand, palm up, and lifted it in an abrupt motion. Every white fragment of shell upon the path rose into the air and became a cloud of white moths beating their wings, churning the air. The smell of roses climbed up to the window and began to seep into the attic room, overpowering and familiar. It was the smell of darkness and death and Bogomil. Daniel looked at Laura and Mo, but they were staring out at the garden, enchanted by their own magic.
Didn’t they remember?
“Shut the window,” Daniel said. “Before the moths get in.”
When neither paid any attention to him, he did it himself. As he pulled the window shut, Laura turned the cup of her palm down. Every white moth fell back to earth and became shells in a neat spiral again. But the bushes still blazed with roses.
“Come on, Laura,” Daniel said. “We should head home.”
Mo said, “Isn’t there stuff we still need to talk about?”
“Not tonight,” Daniel said.
Laura said, “We could stay a little longer. I want to check out the instruments. Look, there’s a harp. I’ve never played a harp.” She disappeared into an alcove. “Is there anything she didn’t collect? This is everything I can think of, every single instrument.”
“Everything but a Katzenklavier,” Mo said. “No Apprehension Engine, either.”
“Stay if you want,” Daniel said. He’d never heard of either of those, and he bet Laura hadn’t, either. “I’ll text you if I see a tiger on the ride home so you can take a different route.”
“Who cares,” Laura said. “It’s probably just Bogomil anyway. Not a real tiger.” She had begun to produce a series of rippling, watery chords on the harp. It seemed to Daniel it was not precisely in tune, but that only added to the otherworldly effect.
