Where You End (3 page)

“I got sick,” I say. “I mean, I don't feel good.”

“Yeah, you look like shit. I tried to call you. What's with your phone?”

Oh Adam. Do you know that only one percent of stars are massive enough to explode into a Supernova? That the life of a star depends on its mass, what it's filled with, that most stars end up white dwarfs? Do you know that if it
wasn't for time we would all still be stars? I was trying to
stop time; that's what I was doing. Someone caught me trying to stop time.

“Battery's dead,” I say.

“Everybody's pretty pissed. Your mom's worried. We had to call her after forty-five minutes of waiting here.”

Forty-five minutes is a while. I could have been gone in forty-five minutes.

“Okay,” I say, “I'm sorry. How was the Winogrand?”

Adam looks confused. “How was Winogrand …
Meem, what's wrong with you? You're late. You didn't call anybody. There's a bus full of people waiting. Winogrand was crowded and awesome. Where were you?”

“Can you tone down the yelling? I told you—I don't feel good, Adam. I had to sit down.”

“Sorry. I was just a little worried. We didn't know where you were. I looked everywhere.”

You didn't look in outer space, my friend, not in space, where Picasso's daughter hunts you down and asks you if you believe in God. She could have been a ghost, or some kind of divining angel. She could be whatever appears after you fuck up—to help you find your way again.

“Anyway, watch out,” Adam warns me. “Ms. D is in a really shitty mood. Someone pushed a sculpture in the garden and the guards cornered her about it. They told her they wanted to call the school. They were trying to blame it on one of us because we were the only group of kids around. How fucked up is that? Like, hey, someone knocked a Picasso, it must be some dumbass kid from Sterling with nothing better to do … ”

“Pretty fucked up … ” I mutter.

“It was a Picasso, for godssake. That's got to be hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

I start to correct him, then hold my tongue. Adam is walking really fast. He's not listening anyway.

He's telling his story.

“Ms. D lost it. Went on and on about how she knows her students and how dare they suggest and why not ask the bored tourists … You should have seen it. She was sharp. I think the leather jacket's getting to her.”

“How did they know someone pushed it?”

“What?” he says, confused.

“How do they know it didn't just fall?” I ask.

Adam tucks his chin in.

“Meem, you of all people know a sculpture doesn't just fall. It's
attached
. With a metal rod. On a pedestal. The wind didn't knock her down. She probably hit the wall on the way down. Can you imagine? It was on the ground. I saw it.”

“You saw it?” I ask. Then I stop and remember. The girl in the T-shirt. The look. Nobody else was wearing a T-shirt. That was Paloma.

“Was it broken?” I ask.

“I'm not sure. It was kind of nice actually, in a morbid way. You would've wanted a picture.”

Adam looks at me, smiles, and turns my shoulders toward the bus. “Let us go, my friend,” he says, and we walk toward Ms. D and the rest of the impatient circus.

As she walks toward me, Ms. D's face is too stiff to read. Could Ms. D know what happened? Maybe that's why she was so defensive.

“Miriam, get on the bus and call your mother please,” she says.

I hold the phone in my hand and consider the chances of Ms. D bluffing. No chaperone likes to take responsibility for vandalism. This would be a disaster for the school.
Heartbroken artsy girl attacks bronze woman. Privileged student beats defenseless sculpture. Teenage angst knocks down timeless art.
Maybe Ms. D knows, and she's just buying time.

“I'm sorry, Ms. D. I got sick.”

“We'll deal with it later, when we get to school. Call your mom.”

“We already spoke,” I say.

Ms. D rolls her eyes and tells me to just get on the bus. No “please” this time.

Elliot must be inside. I know he is. That'
s how this whole thing started, even if the carousel seems so long ago, a place I can't get to anymore, a door that's been shut by the timeline. The last time I felt this kind of urgency was with Elliot. But when I remember he's not mine to confess to, instead of feeling disappointed I feel a delicious calm come over me, as if all this fear has a purpose I haven't discovered yet. All that bigness narrows and, like a needle, I focus and point. I know something you don't know. I'm late because I pushed a priceless work of art. You don't know me.

I follow Adam up into the bus and slip through a few whispers, but most of the class is already lost in a sea of music, their headphones like garlands across their heavy heads. Elliot and Maggie have settled in the back, his scarf around her neck, her hair on his shoulder. They are not talking. They could be on a riverboat in Paris, on a jeep in the Serengeti.

Wherever they are, they're together, looking out. I twist my hair into a loose bun. It's always been tangled enough to stay tied. I see the phone number on my arm again, but instead of hiding it under the sweater, I let my arm drop to my side. Let them see it. I stare at Elliot and Maggie. I'm not scared. My secret soothes me. Maggie is distracted, but I catch Elliot's eyes. He closes them to shut me out. Adam tugs at my sweater.

“Meem, sit down.”

Someone saw what I did, but they haven't told on me yet. Someone saw what I did, but they want to talk to me first. Someone saw what I did and they think it means something. We can help each other, the girl said. She'll know what she wants.

“Hey Adam,” I say, “what do you know about Picasso?”

“He's dead. Will you sit?

I sit and smile.

First, there was dark matter. The beginning was pitch black.

three

In our kitchen, my mother looks up deviled eggs in
The Art of Simple Food
.

“Stuffed eggs,” she says with her finger on the recipe index. “Stuffed eggs.”

She rubs the grease off the side of her nose, a sign of worry.

I know them well, the signs. Driving with both hands on the wheel, buying a new plant at the nursery, eating chips out of a pretty ceramic bowl, loading the dishwasher before we've finished dessert, dog-earing furniture catalogues, looking up a recipe she's made a hundred times. My mother is a coping machine. And despite her efforts to keep it together, my job is to try and pull her apart like a pack of frozen chicken breasts. I used to justify it as a way of reminding my mother she was human, but now it feels like I'm pounding her just because I can.

“Miriam. Come here.”

She turns the faucet on with her wrists, to wash off any raw egg, and instructs me to sit down on one of the mismatched chairs around our kitchen table. I choose the yellow one with the teetering leg.

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

“So?”

“So.”

“What happened?” she says.

The controlled tone would be scary if I didn't know this technique. It feels familiar and safe. I sink back to my role in our game.

“I was late.”

She's using a needle to poke one hole on the bottom of each eggshell. She waits until she's finished to look up. Good. She's going to play.

“Why were you late?” she says.

“I kind of got lost.”

“On the Mall?”

“Yes.”

A variety of herbs are laid out on a clear cutting board: basil, parsley, chives. They come from little pots on the kitchen windowsill. It's usually my job to pick them. When I was a kid, if I gave her the wrong one, Mom would put it in my pocket so I could smell it all day until I knew the difference between cilantro and parsley, lavender and rosemary. I was also a sort of prodigy in the produce section. More than once, I remember sticking my face in a green plastic bag and, with great confidence, declaring the name of an obscure vegetable.

“Adam said you were sick,” she says.

She rolls the basil up into little green cigarettes, preparing to slice them and let the magic out of the leaves. Once I got old enough to use a knife, that was my favorite part. I teeter back and forth on the yellow chair's lame leg. Adam must've called her after the bus.

“Adam doesn't know.”

“Doesn't know what?”

“Doesn't know anything.”

“Doesn't know anything?”

“Doesn't know why.”

“Why what?”

“Why I was late.”

“You said you got lost.”

“Yes.”

The timer rings eight minutes, and she dips a slotted spoon in the pot, fishes out an egg, and drops it carefully in a bowl of cold water. Six times.

“He was worried,” she says.

“I know. He worries.”

“So, were you sick or were you lost?”

Normally, before Elliot, this is when I would give up and remember my mother's heart is painfully accurate, most of the time. And I would join her at the sink, help peel the eggs and drop my guns. I would tell her what happened, how I'm feeling, who said what at school and why they shouldn't have, and how we read this great story and someone made a stupid comment, and I can
't wait to get out of high school etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And she would nod and laugh her deep strong laugh and remind me that everyone is different, Miriam, but we all deserve the same respect. But I would know, instinctively, what that actually means: that she thinks I'm smarter than everyone else, and so I should oblige.

Before Elliot, this is when I would spill.

Today I can't. Today I keep quiet about the carousel and Picasso and Paloma, because this feels like my problem, like it's more than what she could possibly understand. Something separates her life from mine. Maybe this is what happens after you fall in love.

When you start out, if you're lucky, your parents are the closest thing you have to yourself. They're your safe spot, your personal believers. Then, if you're lucky again, you meet a guy who makes you feel like you might be different than what you imagined, more … like everything in your body has a purpose and that purpose comes to life when he's around. Only when he's around.

All of a sudden, he's the only one in the entire world who knows you, so nothing is ever the same. You come home, and your parents kiss you in that spot on your head where they've always kissed you, but they don't know. They sit at the same table and make the same jokes, but they don't know what's in your head. They don't know your laugh and who it's for. Not anymore. It's not your hands they're holding, your face they're kissing, your voice they're listening to. They are loving a memory.

Only you know the present tense, the stuff that makes your blood move and your lungs work. All of that belongs to the person you just said goodbye to, the guy who you can still smell on your shirt. And you don't recover from that. Even after the guy drops you. They still can't know you anymore.

Mom peels off the shells and dumps them into the disposal on her own, and I get chills from the sound of them crick-cracking into egg dust.

“I heard there's a Winogrand exhibit at the Gallery,” she says, before I can make my escape.

“Really?”

“Really. Is that where you were, Miriam?”

“Yes,” I say, grateful for an honorable way out. Of course that's where I was.

“You lost track of time at the Gallery?”

“Yes,” I say, pretending to give in, sort of soft and dejected, the best kind of fake.

You got me, Mom. I was actually looking at photographs, just like you would've been, just like you do every day. I was studying the masters. I got lost in the art. It was
that
good.

“It was the 1964 photos, right?” she asks as she scoops out the yolks and leaves twelve little rowboats wiggling on the board.

I can tell she's struggling to rein in her excitement. Only a genius skips the field trip to gaze at modern art. And everybody wants a genius, no matter how deviant.

“Yes. It was amazing. They had all the best pictures, the white sands picnic and everything.”

“No?”

“Yes,” I sputter like a faucet that's been turned off for too long, my lies the brown muck. “The Daley Plaza, the lady with the pink headband … ”

“The woman in the garage.”

“Exactly. The woman in the garage, with the baby. That one is gorgeous.”

There's a word you don't hear every day at the Feldmans'. Certainly never to describe a photograph. Mom should smell this one, but she stays quiet.

“Where's the mayo?” I ask, all puffed up from my perfect fib.

“I'm doing olive oil tonight,” she says. “I'm glad you liked it so much—the exhibit. You should've told me the truth though, Miriam … ”

I nearly choke on my own spit.

“It's important,” she says. “There's nothing wrong with going to see art, but you should've been on time, and you should've told me the truth.”

I breathe out.

“I know, I know. I'm sorry. He's my favorite, you know. I got caught up.”

“Lange is your favorite,” she says.

Then she flips her palm, drops all the green bits into the yolks and starts stirring, never lifting her head from the bowl, waiting for me to rescue myself. My silence always wins, though, because she's the mother, and I'm her baby, and she's the one who's left with the worry. All my mother
can do is rip a page out of her cookbook and shove it under the wooden leg of my chair.

“There,” she says.

And, for a minute, I feel sad the chair is the only thing we can get straight in this house. Sad for my mother, not for me.