Then I called the same number and asked for Michael instead.
Michael picked me up in his father’s old car, and we headed west. For half an hour or so we drove aimlessly, talking. Michael’s hair looked even longer than on Halloween, and he wore old jeans and a black t-shirt under a moth-eaten sweater. I thought he looked wonderful.
Michael said he hated school. He hated America, too, but he also loved it. He talked on and on about politics, and I nodded from time to time, secretly a little bored. He handed me a paperback copy of On the Road by Jack Kerouac and said I must read it.
Finally he pulled the car into an old cemetery, the Gideon Putnam. “This place is supposed to be haunted,” he said.
I looked out the car window. It was a bleak November day, the sky an opaque mass of gray clouds. The cemetery grounds were covered in dead leaves, interrupted by mausoleums, crosses, and statues. An obelisk served as monument for one grave, and I wondered idly who might be buried under such an imposing object. Who chose burial monuments? Were the wishes of the deceased taken into consideration? It was a subject I’d never considered before, and I was about to ask Michael’s opinion when he leaned over and kissed me.
We’d had kisses before, of course. But today his lips felt unusually warm, and he held me harder and closer. It’s not easy describing kisses without sounding soppy or stupid. What I want to convey is that this kiss was important. It left me feeling out of breath and dizzy (another stupid word, one that I use too often). When he initiated a second kiss, I had to pull away. “I can’t,” I said. “I can’t.”
He looked at me as if he understood. I didn’t know why I’d said it, actually. But he held me not so tightly for a minute or so until we’d both calmed down.
He said, “I love you, Ari. I love you and I want you. I don’t want anyone else to have you.”
From reading, I knew that the first time someone declares love is meant to be special, almost magical. But in my head, a voice (not my own) was saying, “Ari, the whole world is going to have you.”
“Someone is watching me,” I told my father the next day.
He was wearing a particularly beautiful shirt, the color of smoke, with black enamel buttons and onyx cuff-links. It made his eyes seem gray.
He looked up from the physics book he’d opened, and his gray eyes looked shy, almost embarrassed, as if he’d heard my thought. “Someone is watching you,” he said. “Do you know who it is?”
I shook my head. “Do you?”
“No,” he said. “Are you able to define chromism and isomerization?” In this way he changed the subject, or so I thought at the time.
The next morning I awoke from another crossword-puzzle dream with two clues — “sea cow” (seven letters) and “snakebird” (seven letters). I shook my head, trying to recover the grid, but I couldn’t visualize it. So I dressed and went down for breakfast with a familiar sense of frustration at the limits of my intelligence.
For weeks I’d noticed that Mrs. McG seemed distracted. The morning oatmeal was more burnt than usual, and the evening casseroles some nights were inedible.
That morning, as she was taking a saucepan of oatmeal from the stove, she dropped it. The pan hit and bounced, and the glutinous cereal splatted against the linoleum and spattered her shoes. Aside from a quick inward breath, she barely reacted. She simply went to the sink and came back with towels.
“I’ll help,” I said, feeling guilty at my glee that I wouldn’t have to eat the stuff.
She sat back on her heels and looked up at me. “Ari,” she said, “I do need your help. But not with this.”
She cleaned up the mess and came to sit with me at the kitchen table. “Why don’t you spend time with Kathleen these days?” she said.
“She’s too busy,” I said. “With school stuff — you know, the play, and the band, and all.”
Mrs. McG shook her head. “She dropped out of the play,” she said. “And she quit her flute lessons. She’s even stopped nagging me to buy her a cell phone. She’s changed, and she makes me worry.”
I hadn’t seen Kathleen since Halloween. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know.”
“I wish you would call her.” Her hands scratched her forearms, on which I noticed a reddish rash. “I wish you’d come and spend the night. Maybe this weekend?”
I agreed to give Kathleen a call.
“Mrs. McG, have you ever seen a photo of my mother?” I hadn’t planned to ask that question, but it was something I’d been thinking about.
“No, I never have,” she said slowly. “But there might be something in the attic. That’s where they put all her things. When I first started working here, Miss Root and Dennis were gathering them up for storage.”
“What sorts of things?”
“Clothing and books, mostly. Your mother apparently was quite a reader.”
“What sorts of books?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” She pushed her chair back away from the table. “You might want to ask your father about that.”
I excused myself and headed upstairs. The staircase to the third story was uncarpeted, and my footsteps sounded loud as I went up. But the attic door was locked.
So I went on up the final set of stairs, the air growing colder with each step. The top of the house was uninviting, always too hot or too cold, but today the cold didn’t bother me.