“That’s what you did wrong. I’m sure you were undecided about it.”
“No, I wasn’t. I’ve been trying to get your attention since the first day of school. I just backed off when your brother was killed.”
“I don’t make anyone happy,” I warned.
“I’m already happy, and don’t say you’ll make me unhappy. I was vaccinated against it.”
“You’re such an idiot,” I said, but softly. I looked at myself in my full-length mirror on the closet door. “Do you think I need to wear makeup? I mean, more than just lipstick?”
“I don’t know anything about makeup, but I wouldn’t want to change anything on your face.”
“I could be sexier.”
“My heart can stand only so much excitement,” he replied, and I had my first laugh of the day.
“Okay. I’m sorry I was so cold before. Come get me in the morning.”
“Did you hurt the psychiatrist?”
“She won’t be the same. I pity her next patient.”
He laughed.
“Let’s not talk about it. Let’s not talk about any of it, Aaron.”
“Fine with me,” he said. “I’m satisfied just talking about you. See you in the morning.”
“Okay. Now you can wash your car for the tenth time in two days,” I told him.
After I hung up, I did feel better. I didn’t put on anything special for dinner. It was still early, so I started some homework, and then, when it was time to go down, I sucked in my breath, gazed at myself in the mirror, and decided right there to leave that sweet little girl who was once in my body behind. Like a pair of shoes gone out of style.
Suddenly, that made it far easier to walk past Willie’s room and treat it as if it had been boarded up. There’s no one in there, I told myself. There’s no lift on the stairway and no wheelchair at the bottom. There is no physical-therapy equipment in Grandpa’s den.
And Mrs. Camden? She was simply some guest Grandpa had invited to stay for a while.
I could feel the coy new smile on my lips. I would probably become so difficult to tolerate that they would all ignore me. It would be easier for me to forget what was happening here.
But I wouldn’t forget Willie. Oh, no. Everything I did from now on would be to help me remember him.
I bounced down the remaining steps and headed for the dining room. When everyone saw me and stopped talking, I smiled again.
“I’m absolutely starving,” I said, and sat quickly. I reached for a piece of bread and practically shoved it down my throat.
No one spoke.
The looks on their faces were priceless.
It was as if a total stranger had just walked into the house and taken my seat.
11
At dinner, Grandpa Arnold didn’t ask me anything about my conversation with Dr. Patrick, nor did he mention anything she had told him about our tense little discussion. Perhaps she had told him that the best way to handle me was to ignore me. I knew that was what everyone was doing now, handling me. They had been doing that since the day Willie died. I had resented it until now. Handle me, I thought. Cater to my every whim and need. I could be as selfish as anyone else, if I had to be.
As if to underscore what I was thinking, my grandfather and Mrs. Camden talked about everything else but me and the boy in Willie’s room. I didn’t know if he was putting on a show for me to demonstrate that he could be just as aloof about it all as I was, but Grandpa Arnold was even more interested in Mrs. Camden, her early life, her education, some of her nursing experiences, and how she had come to live in Prescott. It was almost as if I wasn’t there, but I was interested in her answers.
Shortly after her husband had died, Mrs. Camden said, she had taken a private-duty nurse position at the home of one of the founding families of the community, the Brocktons. The matriarch of the family had been a vigorous woman in her early eighties, but she had rapidly fallen into what Mrs. Camden called dementia. It had gotten so she didn’t even recognize her own children and certainly not her grandchildren.
Of course, I wondered how you could forget your own family. I almost unintentionally turned the conversation to the boy when I asked, “Isn’t that just amnesia?”