“I don’t . . .” I lick my lips, fumbling for an explanation that won’t sound ridiculous. “When you run you sometimes do weird things. Because of the endorphins and stuff. It’s kind of like a drug, you know? Messes with your brain.”
“I liked it,” he says. “You looked . . .” He trails off for a moment. His face contracts slightly, a tiny shift I can barely make out in the dark, but in that second he looks so still and sad it almost takes my breath away, like he’s a statue, or a different person. I’m afraid he won’t finish his sentence, but then he says, “You looked happy.”
For a second we just stand there in silence. Then, suddenly, Alex is back, easy and smiling again. “I left a note for you one time. In the Governor’s fist, you know?”
I left a note for you one time. It’s impossible, too crazy to think about, and I hear myself repeating, “You left a note for me?”
“I’m pretty sure it said something stupid. Just hi, and a smiley face, and my name. But then you stopped coming.” He shrugs. “It’s probably still there. The note, I mean. Probably just a bit of paper pulp by now.”
He left me a note. He left me a note. For me. The idea— the fact of it, the fact that he even noticed and thought about me for more than one second—is huge and overwhelming, makes my legs go tingly and my hands feel numb.
And then I’m frightened. This is how it starts. Even if he is cured, even if he is safe—the fact is, I’m not safe, and this is how it starts. Phase One: preoccupation; difficulty focusing; dry mouth; perspiration, sweaty palms; dizziness and disorientation. I feel a rushing blend of sickness and relief, a feeling like finding out that everyone actually knows your worst secret, has known all along. All this time Aunt Carol was right, my teachers were right, my cousins were right. I’m just like my mother, after all. And the thing, the disease, is inside of me, ready at any moment to start working on my insides, to start poisoning me.
“I have to go.” I start up the hill again, nearly sprinting now, but again he comes after me.
“Hey. Not so fast.” At the top of the hill he reaches out and puts a hand on my wrist to stop me. His touch burns, and I jerk away quickly. “Lena. Hold on a second.”
Even though I know I shouldn’t, I stop. It’s the way he says my name: like music.
“You don’t have to be worried, okay? You don’t have to be scared.” His voice is twinkling again. “I’m not flirting with you.”
Embarrassment sweeps through me. Flirting. A dirty word. He thinks I think he’s flirting. “I’m not—I don’t think you were—I would never think that you—” The words collide in my mouth, and now I know there’s no amount of darkness that can cover the rush of red to my face.
He cocks his head to the side. “Are you flirting with me, then?”
“What? No,” I splutter. My mind is spinning blindly in a panic, and I realize I don’t even know what flirting is. I just know about it from textbooks; I just know that it’s bad. Is it possible to flirt without knowing you’re flirting? Is he flirting? My left eye goes full flutter.
“Relax,” he says, holding up both hands, a gesture like, don’t be mad at me. “I was kidding.” He turns just slightly to the left, watching me the whole time. The moon lights up his three-pronged scar vividly: a perfect white triangle, a scar that makes you think of order and regularity. “I’m safe, remember? I can’t hurt you.”
He says it quietly, evenly, and I believe him. And yet my heart won’t stop its frantic winging in my chest, spinning higher and higher, until I’m sure it’s going to carry me off. I feel the way I do whenever I get to the top of the Hill and can see back down Congress Street, with the whole of Portland lying behind me, the streets a shimmer of greens and grays—from a distance, both beautiful and unfamiliar—just before I spread my arms and let go, trip and skip and run down the hill, wind whipping in my face, not even trying to move, just letting gravity pull me.
Breathless; excited; waiting for the drop.
I suddenly realize how quiet it is. The band has stopped playing, and the crowd has gone silent too. The only sound is the wind shushing over the grass. From where we are, fifty feet past the crest of the hill, the barn and the party are invisible. I have a brief fantasy that we’re the only two people out in the darkness—that we are the only two people awake and alive in the city, in the world.
Then soft strands of music begin to weave themselves up in the air, gentle, sighing, so quiet at first I confuse the sounds for the wind. This music is totally different from the music that was playing earlier—soft, and fragile, as though each note is spun glass, or silken thread, looping up and back into the night air. Once again I’m struck by how absolutely beautiful it is, like nothing I’ve ever heard, and out of nowhere I’m overwhelmed by the dual desire to laugh and cry.
“This song is my favorite.” A cloud skitters across the moon, and shadows dance over Alex’s face. He’s still staring at me, and I wish I knew what he was thinking.
“Have you ever danced?”
“No,” I say, a little too forcefully.
He laughs softly. “It’s okay. I won’t tell.”
Images of my mother: the softness of her hands as she spun me down the long polished wood floors of our house, as though we were ice-skaters; the fluted quality of her voice as she sang along to the songs piping from the speakers, laughing. “My mother used to dance,” I say. The words slip out, and I regret them almost instantly.
But Alex doesn’t question me or laugh. He keeps watching me steadily. For a moment he seems on the verge of saying something. But then he just holds out his hand to me across the space, across the dark.
“Would you like to?” he says. His voice is hardly audible above the wind— so low it’s barely a whisper.
“Would I like to what?” My heart is roaring, rushing in my ears, and though there are still several inches between his hand and mine, there’s a zipping, humming energy that connects us, and from the heat flooding my body you would think we were pressed together, palm to palm, face to face.
“Dance,” he says, at the same time closing those last few inches and finding my hand and pulling me closer, and at that second the song hits a high note and I confuse the two impressions, of his hand and the soaring, the lifting of the music.
We dance.
Most things, even the greatest movements on earth, have their beginnings in something small. An earthquake that shatters a city might begin with a tremor, a tremble, a breath. Music begins with a vibration. The flood that rushed into Portland twenty years ago after nearly two months of straight rain, that hurtled up beyond the labs and damaged more than a thousand houses, swept up tires and trash bags and old, smelly shoes and floated them through the streets like prizes, that left a thin film of green mold behind, a stench of rotting and decay that didn’t go away for months, began with a trickle of water, no wider than a finger, lapping up onto the docks.
And God created the whole universe from an atom no bigger than a thought.
Grace’s life fell apart because of a single word:
sympathizer. My world exploded because of a different word: suicide.
Correction: That was the first time my world exploded.
The second time my world exploded, it was also because of a word. A word that worked its way out of my throat and danced onto and out of my lips before I could think about it, or stop it.
The question was: Will you meet me tomorrow? And the word was: Yes.
Chapter Ten
Symptoms of Amor Deliria Nervosa:
PHASE ONE
preoccupation; difficulty focusing dry mouth perspiration, sweaty palms fits of dizziness and disorientation reduced mental awareness; racing thoughts; impaired reasoning skills
PHASE TWO
periods of euphoria; hysterical laughter and heightened energy periods of despair; lethargy changes in appetite; rapid weight loss or weight gain fixation; loss of other interests compromised reasoning skills; distortion of reality disruption of sleep patterns; insomnia or constant fatigue obsessive thoughts and actions paranoia; insecurity
PHASE THREE (CRITICAL)
difficulty breathing pain in the chest, throat, or stomach difficulty swallowing; refusal to eat; complete breakdown of rational faculties; erratic behavior; violent thoughts and fantasies; hallucinations and delusions
PHASE FOUR (FATAL)
emotional or physical paralysis (partial or total); death If you fear that you or someone you know may have contracted deliria, please call the emergency line toll-free at 1- 800-PREVENT to discuss immediate intake and treatment.
I’d never understood how Hana could lie so often and so easily. But just like anything else, lying becomes easier the more you do it.
Which is why, when I get home from work the next day and Carol asks me whether I don’t mind having hot dogs for the fourth straight night in a row (the result of a shipment surplus at the Stop-N-Save; we once went a whole two weeks having baked beans every day), I say that actually, Sophia Hennerson from St. Anne’s invited me and some other girls over for dinner. I don’t even have to think about it. The lie just comes. And even though I still feel sweat pricking up under my palms, my voice stays calm, and I’m pretty sure my face keeps its normal color, because Carol just gives me one of her flitting smiles and says that that sounds nice.
At six thirty I get on my bike and head to East End Beach, where Alex and I agreed to meet.
There are plenty of beaches in Portland. East End Beach is probably one of the least popular—which of course made it one of my mother’s favorites. The current is stronger there than it is at Willard Beach or Sunset Park. I’m not exactly sure why. I don’t mind. I’ve always been a strong swimmer. After that first time—when my mother released her arms from around my waist and I felt both the surging panic and the thrill, the excitement—I learned pretty quickly, and by four I was paddling out by myself all the way past the breaks.
There are other reasons why most people avoid East End Beach, even though it’s only a short walk down the hill from Eastern Prom, one of the most popular parks.
The beach is nothing more than a short strip of rocky, gravel-flecked sand. It backs up against the far side of the lab complex, where the storage and waste sheds are, which doesn’t make for particularly pretty scenery. And when you swim out at East End Beach you get a clear view of Tukey’s Bridge and the wedge of unregulated land between Portland and Yarmouth. A lot of people don’t like being so close to the Wilds. It makes them nervous.
It makes me nervous too, except that there’s a part of me—a tiny, little flick of a part—that likes it. For a while after my mom died I used to have these fantasies that she wasn’t dead, really, and that my father wasn’t dead either—that they had escaped to the Wilds to be together. He had gone five years before her, to prepare everything, to build a little house with a woodstove and furniture hewed from tree branches. At some point, I imagined, they would come back and get me. I even imagined my room down to the smallest detail: a dark red carpet, a little red and green patchwork quilt, a red chair.