Chapter 44
Forty-Four
Gwen was not herself.
It would’ve been normal, the most normal thing in the world, if she was distressed. Arthur knew a thing or two about feeling
distressed. Two days after he saw Jayne Nighswander die, he stopped at the Rackham cafeteria for a cup of tea on his way to
a morning lecture. Breakfast was laid out buffet-style in stainless steel serving dishes. He glanced into a pan full of sausage
patties, flat discs of charred meat glistening with dewy drops of grease, drew a breath, and smelled Jayne burning. Arthur
turned on his heel, swiftly exited the cafeteria, and vomited into a hedge. A student on his way by glanced at him sidelong
and sighed, “Another satisfied customer.”
But Gwen didn’t seem distressed to Arthur so much as distracted. Whenever he popped by The Briars, he found her in her regular place at the kitchen island,
holding her glasses in one hand—she was usually chewing on the part that hooked over her ear—and staring fixedly into space,
as if she were trying to puzzle out an especially maddening clue in a Sunday crossword. Only there was no crossword spread
out before her and sometimes no homework either.
“I don’t know what you’re thinking about,” he said, “but the way you’re frowning, I hope it isn’t me.”
“Never, old chum,” she told him, and smiled weakly . . . and said no more.
Even when they were all together, they weren’t all together.
Once upon a time, Gwen had told Arthur that the distance between Rackham College and Gogan, Maine, was farther than it looked on paper.
It wasn’t a mile and a half; it was a thousand miles and a half.
At the time, he felt he knew what she meant—but he understood her even better now, when he could sit down next to her and still feel they weren’t even in the same room.
The essential Gwen had gone somewhere far beyond the call of his voice.
The thought made him despair, just a little.
There were no more breathtaking kisses, no more holding on to one another as they had the night she was accepted to Rackham.
It was funny, the way double murder put a damper on romance.
And anyway, there was the matter of the letter he had received, and what was in the letter. He could not find a way to tell
her. Didn’t have the stomach.
And then, five days before Gwen’s prom, Llewellyn Wren missed a step on his way down the front stairs.
Arthur got the whole story later from Colin.
Gwen’s mother came in a little before eight on a Wednesday morning, as was her habit, and was just lifting a tray of biscuits
out of the oven when she heard a sound like someone firing a rifle in the front hallway. She dropped the pan and came running.
She found Llewellyn Wren at the bottom of the stairs, grimacing and clutching his right leg. The old man had been on his way
down when the thigh bone suddenly snapped. An ambulance took him to Eastern Maine Medical, where an X-ray revealed a femur
with the inner consistency of honeycomb. His ribs were likewise hollowed out by osteopenia and were as fragile as eggshell.
He had smashed four of them.
“I didn’t know the virus could do that,” Colin told Arthur later, looking uncharacteristically nonplussed. “I didn’t know
it could even make your bones sick.”
The leg required surgery, and the first doctor consulted refused to operate on a patient who had developed full-blown AIDS.
By the following day, Llewellyn’s fever had spiked, he could not stop trembling in nervous pulses, and his right foot was turning an ominous shade of blue; it was the sort of color one saw in a dead body as blood pooled in the low points.
A surgeon was brought in from Brigham and Women’s, a skinny and expressionless Bostonian with colorless eyes who had no fear of HIV; he himself had been living with the virus for two years.
The operation to reset the fragmented bone was managed in a few hours.
A course of antibiotics took out the infection—and left Llewellyn desperately weak, in the grip of dehydration, diarrhea, and vicious stomach cramps.
Colin arranged for a hospital bed to be shipped to The Briars.
“It’s stage three,” Colin told Arthur, on the night Llewellyn returned to The Briars. “And this elevator only goes four floors.”
They were in the kitchen, then, just the two of them. Arlene Underfoot was upstairs, where a nurse was demonstrating how to
safely care for the catheter in Llewellyn’s left arm. Gwen had joined them. Arthur wasn’t sure why—maybe to make sure her
mother understood everything. He hoped Gwen wouldn’t try to help. It wasn’t very noble of him, but the thought of her accidentally
exposing herself to Llewellyn’s illness made his insides squirm with nervousness.
“They find new medicines every day,” Arthur said, a line that sounded pathetic even to his own ears.
Colin smiled sadly. “Don’t do that, Arthur. It doesn’t suit you.”
“What doesn’t suit me?”
“The language of false comfort. Maybe that kind of talk doesn’t suit any of us anymore. Not after what we did.” He paused, poking at a slice of cold pizza without any appetite. “When it comes to
evil, King Sorrow is an absolute prince compared to AIDS.”
“You think?” Arthur asked.
“I do,” Colin told him. “If there has to be evil in the world, then I’d at least like to be in charge of it.”
Arthur did not think it was the proper moment to point out what was obvious, at least to him: they hadn’t been in charge of
anything. King Sorrow had let them feel they were in charge, because it pleased him, but he had never been playing their game—they had been playing his. He was a
king, after all, and they his subjects.
No one was ever in charge of a dragon. Some snakes were too big to catch by the tail.
Driving the ’49 Cadillac was like steering a float in a parade, it was that big.
Arthur pointed it into Gogan, and rolled with the canvas top down and warm, summery air blasting in over him.
Gogan was Gogan. Someone had left a mildewed couch out on the curb.
Every fourth shop was boarded up and the plywood in the windows had been tagged with bad graffiti, big black cocks and big black boobs.
He loved it anyway. He loved the cat that stood in the middle of the street and wouldn’t move, so he had to drive around it.
He loved the loud bars, the doors flung open, and the smell of fresh beer and stale cigarettes wafting out.
He loved the bras and the underwear hanging from the branches of the trees like an eccentric’s notion of Christmas decorations.
With Gwen’s careful instructions, the Caddy wound unerringly through the maze of narrow streets and on to the Underhill house,
a narrow, three-story place with a foot-wide strip of grass for a front yard. She sat on the top step, waiting for him, and
at the sight of her, he rose up behind the steering wheel, his heart going light and funny in his chest. She stood and gave
him a shy little wave. Her prom dress was a soft, blushing shade of peach, a work of bewildering feminine complexity, with
a loose, see-through layer wrapped around a sleek, almost shiny sheath beneath. A cat’s cradle of straps laced up across her
bare back. Something about it brought to mind the sort of paper lantern that would float weightlessly into the stars, once
someone had set a candle within it.
She wobbled coming down the step and nearly twisted an ankle. He was already out of the car and kept her from falling on her
face, one hand on her hip, another on her shoulder.
“Tell me the purpose of high heels,” she said, laughing.
“They were invented to make it easier for a girl to stumble into the arms of someone tall, dark, and handsome.”
“Arthur Oakes,” she said. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you just tried out a line on me.”
“I didn’t spend six years of my life studying romance languages for nothin’,” he told her.
Two hours later, they were dancing to Simply Red, “If You Don’t Know Me by Now,” and his hands were on her hips and her face was turned up to his.
The prom was held in her high school’s gymnasium, and there was an unmistakable fragrance of sweaty jockstraps and rotten sneakers.
But the space was dramatically lit by banks of aquamarine light, and they kicked through an inch of glittering fluff, and Gwen’s eyes were as luminous as her dress.
He was readying himself for a kiss when a girl who was obviously drunk lurched into them and smashed a plastic cup of cherry punch into Gwen’s chest.
The drunk, a skinny chick with smeared lipstick, shouted, “Oh, jeez, I’m such an asshole, sorry!” and reeled away into the
milling bodies. Gwen said it was all right, she could dry her boobs off with the lap blanket in the back of the Caddy and
she had brought a cardigan she could pull over her top to hide the stain.
He led her by the hand, out into the acres of parking lot that surrounded a two-story brick fortress of a school that might’ve
been designed by the same architect who dreamt up the Black Cricket Women’s House of Correction. They found the car and Gwen
fetched a threadbare pea-colored cardigan from the passenger seat. Just as she finished buttoning it over her gown, Arthur
drew her into his arms again. The fire door to the gym was open and the music carried. The DJ put on Sinéad O’Connor, “Nothing
Compares 2 U,” and the Irish girl’s voice rang out across the warm evening. There were no stars to see, the constellations
blotted out by the yellow-tinged glare of the titanium streetlamps. They hardly danced, just held each other and rocked. Her
hair smelled like summer.
Arthur wanted her—wanted to find the body under the gown, to find his mouth with hers—but there was no playful friskiness
in either of them. Jayne Nighswander was only two weeks dead and they had both lost something, something deeper and more meaningful