The Excellent Lombards(43)

That was a stunner. Mary Frances, darling, how can I thank you for coming to me? Brianna has been a handful since the day we adopted her. Yes, it’s true, I’ve never told anyone that she is not my own—and that I’ve never loved her. My own real child would never do such a terrible thing, nor would she have so much of that…hair.

But again: Wait! Another shocking question was coming to me. Did Brianna know which Bershek twin was hers or were they interchangeable? I almost—almost right then cried out. Did the Bersheks even know which one of themselves was the real boyfriend?

William calmly went on reading while on my side of the blanket the earth kept quaking. The last shock: What if May Hill was in the orchard and saw them?

I said to William, “What do you want to do?” What I really meant was, We should get out of here. We had to leave in case Adam&Eve floated past again. And yet it was our property and so we should build a fort. We had every right to throw stones at the marauders. All my questions and knowledge were like beats within my head, a drumming. I started to pick the grass furiously without even knowing what my hands were doing, trying to outsmart the rhythm.

William muttered, “Reading is okay.”

“What what what what time is it?”

He looked at me, his book closing, his place lost. “What is the matter with you?”

I wanted to tell him everything, wanted especially to tell him about being held prisoner by May Hill, and how every time I saw her I became terrified, my heart always racing even if she was in the far distance. I wanted to cry when I thought of being trapped in her room, the event having grown more harrowing, so that I’d started to believe I’d been there for a few days and then a week had passed. But instead of describing my captivity I said, “I just saw Brianna and one of the Bershek twins naked.”

He was staring at me, ARE YOU CRAZY? I wondered if I was crazy, if I’d have to be carted away to an asylum. Why did the worst, the most unspeakable things happen only to me? William had not ever been the prisoner of May Hill—that was something I could guarantee. William did not “accidentally” lose the Geography Bee. He did not see naked teenagers strolling through the orchard. I rolled up into the blanket and shut my eyes, and not for the first time that spring I wanted to die.

Deep into the misery, unaccountably desiring more, in a terrible leap forward I saw that any number of disasters could destroy the crop that was here and now in its perfect beauty. There might be freeze or drought or hail or wind. The trees smashed and withered, the apples stunted or pocked.

William said, “I think I’m going to see if Pa will drive me to school for the afternoon.”

“What?” I said, turning my head so I wasn’t facedown in the grass. Neither one of us had ever thought to go to school for any part of Blossom Day. “What,” I inquired, “do you mean?” I’d forgotten all about Brianna. He was gathering up our things without saying a word, and then he unrolled my part of the blanket. Even as he worked to clear the campsite I couldn’t believe what he was doing. Next he was walking away with the basket and the bundle in his arms. When he was far down the path, when he was almost home I was still sitting there asking What?





15.


The Historical Beginning of the Infinite World




So, one minute we were children in the orchard, and the next it was decided by someone, somehow, that William and I were too old to share a room. We were eleven and twelve. I couldn’t believe it, the bunk beds ripped apart, the steel web that held his mattress no longer my nighttime ceiling, my sky. He swept up everything he loved in our room, all the Lego embedded in the carpet, every tangled wire, every connector and specialized wrench, all his comics, his books, his long tube socks, his two plastic banks heavy with quarters, and he moved down the hall to my mother’s office. I stood by the bed, holding on to the post after the top bunk was removed, feeling as if the injury to the furniture had been done to me, as if something of myself had been lopped off. He wouldn’t look in my direction as he packed up his possessions, the Tintin compendium stacked on top of The Complete HyperCard Handbook.

“Don’t go,” I managed on his last load.

He was standing in the door with a laundry basket filled with fat white pipes, a dismantled radio, and a samovar-type thing he’d taught me was a carburetor. “You can spread out,” he suggested, nodding his head at my doll junk and dozens of pulpy books about the babysitters.

“Don’t—” I tried again.

“Francie, don’t be silly.” My mother swooping in, offering up her idea of comfort. “He’s just down the hall. He’s ten steps away.”

“Don’t go,” I said once more.

“He needs more space”—the twentieth time for the explanation. “And you do, too.”

“I don’t. I have plenty.”

William turned the basket lengthwise to get it through the door, and out of the room he went.

That night it was impossible to even close my eyes with so much light, so much air above me. I had curled up by William’s bed in his new room but my mother had flapped me away, the arms of her black sweater like wings. “Good night, William, good night!” I called through those wings. “Good night,” I cried, “good night.”

“Okay, Imp,” he had to say, “good night.”