After Eli (9 page)

Jasper began to yell.

Then Journey said, “I’ll go tell Isabelle!” and cut off running toward the road, and Jasper hollered, “No,
I’ll
tell her!” and went batting off after her.

So I went back to hoeing and hoed blue potatoes so fast that I came close to hoeing off my toes. I was that excited about having an invitation from Isabelle.

It was just lousy timing that right then Peter Reilly called up to see if I wanted to go to the movies that next night, because his brother, Tony, was going to drive him and Amanda into Fairfield and if I came along, Amanda would bring her girlfriend Yvonne Boudreau, who has a belly-button ring and blue hair. Any other time I would have wanted to go. The blue hair makes Yvonne look like a Martian, but a cute Martian, and she talks a lot, which means you don’t have to say much but can just nod every once in a while and think about your own stuff and look at her chest.

Peter got ticked off when I said no, I was busy.

“Busy with
what
?” he said. “What have you got to be busy with?”

I didn’t want to tell him, but he kept at it until finally I said, “I promised I’d go over to the neighbors’.”

Then Peter wanted to know which neighbors and what were we going to do there, and I said it was sort of like a club meeting, which was the only thing I could think of to get him off my back. I’ve always been a lousy liar, which is one of the things Eli was always saying we had to work on someday. When he got back from Iraq, he said, we’d devote a whole Education Day to deception and prevarication.

Peter said I sounded stupid, and what was wrong with me and was I turning into a douche, and then he hung up. Which is because the only kind of club Peter knows about is the one his father goes to at the VFW on Friday nights to drink Jim Beam and play poker.

By Saturday, though, I was so nervous that I wished maybe I’d just
répondez-vous
-ed no to the twins and gone to the movies with Peter and Amanda and blue Yvonne. By seven, I’d changed my clothes three times, brushed my teeth twice, and had had a lot of time to get myself all worked up thinking about what a loser I was going to look like in front of Isabelle, what with not knowing what month I’d be if I was a month and not having a favorite poem.

Then I decided that if things went really wrong, I’d just run away from home and come up with a new identity, like those people in witness-protection programs. I’d go someplace really far away, like Cincinnati, and I’d pretend to have lost my memory, which always works for people in the movies. I doubted anybody would even bother to look for me, because frankly I figured my parents would be relieved.

Actually that all made me feel better, because like Eli always said, it’s always important to have a backup plan. Later I told Walter about it, and he said “Great scheme, Danny,” in a way that told me it wasn’t.

I told my mom where I was going and she said “Fine” without looking away from where she was not exactly watching the TV, in the sort of voice that showed she really wasn’t paying any attention. It left me wondering, the way I always did, if she’d say anything different if I said, “Well, good night, Mom, I’m going out to knock over a liquor store,” or, “Gee, I’ve made this cool parachute out of an umbrella and I’m going to go jump off the Matteson River Bridge and see if it works,” or, “Good-bye, Mom, I’ve decided to move to Timbuktu.”

She didn’t used to be this way. When Eli was home, we’d go out to the kitchen most nights and help Mom make dinner, and she’d say, “Well, tell me things, boys; I haven’t seen you for hours.” And after Eli left for college, she was the same, even though then it was just her and me.

Now I think she wouldn’t even notice if I dropped dead right there on the floor. Like those people in city apartments who die and nobody realizes it for years. Or until there’s a smell.

Once last year I didn’t talk at all for three whole days, just to see what would happen. Nothing did. Which just goes to show.

I waited until twenty past seven, because I didn’t want to be too early, because it’s not cool to be early. Then I took a flashlight, because even though it was still light out, being summer, I knew I’d be coming home in the dark, and also by my third change of clothes I was wearing a black T-shirt, which doesn’t show up on the road if a pickup truck comes along with somebody like Timmy Sperdle in it, full up to the eyeballs with testosterone and Coors. Then I headed off for the Sowers house.

A
s long as I can remember, the Sowers house has been empty, just sitting there with its wood rot and its bats and the irreversible water damage happening to the grand piano that nobody ever bothered to move out of the parlor. There’s something spooky that happens with old empty houses, especially houses that are empty of people but still have all the furniture in them. I think that’s what brings ghosts. When you leave things the way they were, so that nothing changes in what they left behind.

Jim Pilcher said that when he was a kid, his uncle Steve put a twenty-dollar bill in the Sowers house, on this big old carved chest of drawers in one of the bedrooms upstairs, and said anybody could have it who would go into the house and get it, all alone at midnight.

“Did anybody ever get it?” I said.

“Not on your ever-loving life,” Jim said. “I gave it my best shot, thinking I could sure use a nice crisp twenty-dollar bill, and besides it would have been fun to shake it under my uncle Steve’s nose. So I went out to the house and I got the front door open, which freaked me out right there, because it squeaked and creaked something fierce, and then I got into the front hall — have you even been in the Sowers house front hall?”

“Yeah,” I said. “But not in the dark.”

“Well, it’s spooky as hell in the dark,” Jim said. “All these weird shadows and big black looming stuff that you can’t tell what it is. And then that hall chandelier — you remember that chandelier?”

“With all those glass prism things,” I said.

“So I’m just standing there in the front hall,” Jim said, “and all those little bits of prisms suddenly started shaking and shivering and clinking around, and I knew it wasn’t anything I’d done. It was like somebody was walking around right over it, upstairs. I didn’t like that one bit, but I took another step or two, because I still wanted to put one over on my uncle Steve. But then I heard what sounded like one of the stairs up above from the second floor creak — real loud, like somebody or something was stepping on it, coming down. And that was enough for me.”

“What did you do?” I said.

“What did I do?” Jim said. “I took off running, and believe me, you’ve never seen anybody run so fast outside of the Summer Olympics.”

Now, though, the house looked all lived in and warm, with yellow lights in the windows, and not the least full of ghosts. I figured any specter creaking around inside it would have been scared off by now by the twins. There were candles burning on the porch, the kind that are supposed to keep mosquitoes away but don’t very well, at least not around here, because our mosquitoes are too tough for citronella.

“You’re late,” Journey said.

The twins were sitting side by side on the porch steps, looking fairly human, so nobody had turned into a werewolf yet. Journey was wearing a yellow taffeta party dress and a pair of green rubber boots with frog faces on the toes. Jasper was wearing two left sneakers and a T-shirt that said
I FIGHT ZOMBIES IN MY SPARE TIME
.

“You know that you guys have a very unusual fashion sense?” I said.

“We were watching for you,” Jasper said. “But we didn’t see you because you’re wearing black like a spy.”

“If you were a captured spy,” Journey said, “would you rather be hanged by the neck until dead or shot by a firing squad?”

“Or sizzled up in the electric chair?” Jasper said.

“I’d rather not be captured,” I said.

“Shut up, twins,” Isabelle said. “Come on, Danny. Come up here and sit down.”

She was sitting in a wicker rocking chair and wearing one of those Indian-print skirts and a white top with skinny straps and silver earrings the size of hockey pucks. And she had those blue, blue eyes. Isabelle always took my breath away.

“You know Walter, don’t you?” Isabelle said.

And there on the other side of her was old weird Walter with his too-short pants and his chewed-up haircut, sitting on a little wicker stool so that his knees bent up practically to his ears.

It’s something you can’t explain exactly, why people become friends. It’s chemistry, is what they say. Maybe it’s just being the right people with the right feelings in the right place at the right time. But whatever it is, that summer Walter and Isabelle and I had it. And maybe even the twins too.

I wish I’d written down somewhere everything we talked about that night on Isabelle’s porch. At the time I thought I’d always remember, but then I didn’t, and now all that’s left of those conversations is a sort of flavor of something special and exciting and strange.

What I usually talked about with Peter Reilly and Mickey Roberts and Ryan Baker and all the rest was stuff like the Yankees and the Red Sox and the kind of motorcycle Peter was going to buy someday, when he had enough money to buy a motorcycle, and what really happened at the end of the
Sopranos
and who was dating who from school.

But with Walter and Isabelle and me, it was different. We talked about things that meant something. And we all listened to each other too, which, if you think about it, is rare. In most conversations, people don’t really listen. They just wait for you to be done talking and shut up so that they can say something of their own. Or they shut you up before you even begin, like my dad does.

All the time we were talking, the twins were running around in the grass chasing fireflies, which were blinking on and off all over the place like crazy things. Fireflies were new to them, due to there not being any in apartments in New York City.

“They’re magic,” Isabelle said. “They’re like little bits of stars.”

Then Walter, who sometimes can’t help himself, said that firefly light was really the result of an enzymatic reaction and that fireflies weren’t flies anyway, but beetles. I was worried that Isabelle would get upset with that, because even though Walter is a genius, his explanations can be real downers sometimes, but instead she just started to laugh.

“I’m not listening, darling,” Isabelle said, and she put her fingers in her ears.

It was right then on Isabelle’s porch, with the citronella candles with their fake-lemon smell and the creaking sound of rocking chairs, that I knew something was happening. That my life was beginning to change.

I knew that if at the lunch table at school, I told Peter and Mickey and Ryan and everybody that Walter was a really cool guy and we should have him come over and sit with us, they’d hoot and boo and laugh until milk came out of their noses and ask what I’d been smoking or if I’d been popping pills. They wouldn’t care that Walter knew all about parallel universes and philosophy and art and literature and beetles and all, because they wouldn’t see anything but that stupid haircut and that thing he does with his eyes.

I also knew if I took my tray over to sit with Walter, I might as well kiss my social life good-bye. Like my dad said, people judge you by your friends.

But something was changing all the same.

“Do you know how you can tell what a person’s truly like?” Isabelle said.

I said no and Walter said the Myers-Briggs Personality Test.

“No, darlings, it’s by their auras,” Isabelle said. “I learned to read them last year from this very spiritual woman, a holistic theologist, who teaches courses online. Your aura is the manifestation of your true nature. It’s why you see halos on angels and saints. Halos are really just very intense auras. On ordinary people, they’re smaller and paler.”

I could tell from Walter’s conflicted expression that he didn’t believe a word of this but didn’t want to contradict Isabelle.

“Come in the house for a minute and I’ll read yours,” Isabelle said. “You have to stand up against a plain white wall.”

The old Sowers house was really grand. The front hall had a marble floor laid out in squares, like a black-and-white checkerboard, and a huge curving staircase like something out of
Gone With the Wind
that went up to a landing with a big gold-framed mirror and then split into two staircases, one going right and the other left. Some of the spindles were broken out of the banister, and the red carpet was shabby, but you could still imagine what it must have been like at the old Sowers parties, with men in fancy suits with striped pants and women all glittering in diamonds and satin gowns.

Off to one side there was a little parlor, where Isabelle’s parents were sitting on a couch with the stuffing coming out, drinking something out of teacups and watching a news program on this very small television set. She introduced us and we all said hi. Isabelle’s father was more athletic looking than I would have expected from a professor, and Isabelle’s mother looked a little bit like Isabelle, but tireder, which was probably due to living with the twins.