In Her Skin(53)

To avoid any misunderstanding, Vonnie includes a definition of my “disorder,” which I am confident she has lifted from either Dr. Silver or the Internet, or both.

Bolting, also referred to as wandering, elopement, and fleeing, is the tendency for an individual to try to leave the safety of a responsible person’s care or a safe area, which can result in potential harm or injury. This might include leaving the classroom without permission. This behavior is considered common and short-lived in toddlers, but it may persist or reemerge in children and adults. This makes wandering a potentially dangerous behavior.

This is not amnesia, this is something else, something concocted. And I know enough to know that this is something I do not have.

There is even a plan if I should be found bolting:

Call office with name and last location. Office staff will notify all staff, “Code V, Room (last location seen).” When student is located, contact office and all staff will be notified with the announcement “Code canceled.”

All staff will look outside their windows and immediate hallway areas. Staff will search second-floor restrooms, work areas, and other nonclassroom areas. Staff will search first-floor restrooms, work areas, gym, cafeteria, and library. Staff will immediately search the outside perimeter of the building.

I am a code: a secret language specific to me if I try to leave school.

Everything in the room—the white tiles, the sea glass on the windowsills, the copper pans hanging from the ceiling—seems to expand and contract every time I breathe.

“Where are you?” you yell from the front hall, carrying in an armful of the blueberry branches that grow in the sandy strip alongside our rented house. “Look what I got to before the birds did!”

Your mouth is stained from the berries and you catch me closing out the open file on the screen. You set the berry branches on the white marble counter and walk to the computer. “Whatcha looking at?”

I swallow, woozy. “I wasn’t looking.”

One beat, then two. The silence is heavy. Then: “Your life is better now, Vivi. You can’t say it’s not.”

I can’t say it. “You’re right.”

You step behind and put your arms around me to tell me a story, about you and Vivi, the way you can now that I know you know I am Jo. It’s one I’ve heard before, about a boy who bullied all the girls in elementary school with crude suggestions about their “lips”—not the ones on their mouths, and something he’d picked up from porn or an older brother—but especially Vivi, and how you clotheslined him at school, with an actual cord clothesline, and your stories are fun, and I am grateful for this. You even tell me how brave Vivi was, leaning over and spitting in his face, and I know you’re making this part up, but it’s somehow for my benefit, this mythology about the girl I’m supposed to be.

I cross my hands over my heart and hold your wrists. Just when I am ready to harden my heart to you, you are so sweet. These are the moments when I imagine you and me growing old together, sitting in a café in France or maybe Spain, wearing smart clothes and smoking and being old and cool and free.

That night, slipped under my pillow in the airy loft room I share with you, is a tiny black velvet-covered box with BARMAKIAN written in gold. I creak it open. Inside is a pair of perfect sparkling diamond earrings, with a note.

The time has come for you to have your own. Kisses, T.

*

I used to think Wolf liked to come to the Glass Globe because Massachusetts was short on gaudy attractions like Disney World, for example. I never got why anyone would want to see a world map that hasn’t been accurate since 1935, but the glass room has one, is one, a “Mapparium” that’s really a big, old, hollowed-out, indoor stained-glass planet Earth that you can walk inside. They know Wolf by now and let him in free, and there’s always a mass of tourists, so it’s easy to get absorbed. Wolf likes to point out that it’s the only place where you can see the world without distortion, as it is, with the continents and the oceans all the right size. I never had the heart to point out that, like the audio says, which he’s heard a hundred times, even if the sizes are right, the Glass Globe represents a world that doesn’t exist anymore, because the political boundaries have changed. There’s no Indonesia or Israel, but there is still a Soviet Union and Siam.

I don’t have a lot of time. In the two days we’ve been back in the city, they’ve been watching me closer than ever.

What Wolf likes best is to watch the workers clean, and that’s how I’ll find him. A cherry picker sets up on the glass bridge that spans the width, and a worker gets lifted on its arm three stories up to clean each panel with a long broom. Wolf doesn’t need to tell me—people are simple—for me to understand that he likes the fact that here, the world can be made clean.

Wolf stands in the dead center of the wide bridge, ignoring irritated tourists who want his prime viewing spot. The lights reflect blue on his bare arms. He’s staring at Africa, and his hair fans over the left side of his face, so I cannot read where he is. He coughs into his hand every few seconds, a juicy cough, and people move away. I hold my breath, hanging out by the Indian Ocean, because the Glass Globe is also a whispering gallery where you can hear in Australia things people say in Greenland. Wolf knows my breathing.

I pass right behind him. It is everything I can do not to touch his shoulder as I slip the note into his backpack, but he would startle, the reaction of one used to pickpockets and other kinds of thieves. He will hate this note that puts him on call, that asks him to do, at my bidding, the unthinkable. But when you’ve done the things Wolf has done, unthinkable is relative.