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“I mean she does it for you. That wildness? Come on, Gene. You know perfectly well that’s for you.”
Her father’s voice was hushed, furious. “You think I told her to knock that kid in the river?” he said. “I don’t tell her to be wild, Christ Almighty. She just does it.”
“You don’t have to tell her,” her mother said. “Any fool can see it makes you happy.”
Their father slapped her across the face, his palm making a loud, wet noise against her cheek. Faith looked stunned, then tears filled her eyes. “That didn’t hurt,” she said.
He hit her again, harder this time. Phoebe, standing to one side, began to whimper.
Faith was shaking, her thin limbs covered with gooseflesh. With each breath her ribs stood out like a pair of hands holding her at the waist. “Didn’t hurt,” she whispered.
He hit her again, so hard this time that Faith bent over. For a moment she didn’t move. Phoebe began to howl.
Then he lifted Faith into his arms. She clung to him, sobbing. Their father was crying, too, which frightened Phoebe—she’d never seen him cry before. “How could you scare me like that?” he sobbed. “You know you’ve got my heart—you know it.” He sounded as if he wanted it back.
“It was hard,” Barry told her with relish. “I had to order the parts from this store in New Jersey, Edmund Scientific. Then I just figured it out, you know? Studied Dad’s sketches.”
He was flushed, dark eyes fastened to the small machine. He turned a knob and the buzzing sound became a loud ringing. “Think about it,” Barry hollered over the racket. “You know? I mean, think about it, Pheeb.”
Phoebe was overwhelmed—by the whispery trace of their father, which seemed caught against its will in this shrill contraption; by her own fragile closeness to Barry, which seemed in constant jeopardy.
“I’m going to make them all,” he said rather grimly. “Every single one.”
Phoebe nodded, smiling at her brother. Her head ached. Much as she longed to share in Barry’s awe, she wished he would turn the thing off. She tried to imagine their father here—his reaction to the leftover drawings, even Barry’s machine. And she knew that he wouldn’t give a damn.
She was not a presence at high school. If someone thought to include her, Phoebe was included, but if she stood up and left mid-party, as often she had, phoning a taxi home among the bright potholders and fruit-shaped magnets of someone’s kitchen, few people noticed. Handed a hit of acid once, she’d slipped it into her pocket (kept it to this day), but nobody caught the move. “Hey, were you okay with that?” they’d asked days later, for apparently it was powerful, someone had flipped out. Phoebe pictured herself in the eyes of her peers as half ghostly, a transparent outline whose precise movements were impossible to follow. During free periods she had no place to go. Often she simply wandered the halls, feigning distraction and hurry, afraid even to pause for fear that her essential solitude would be exposed. A glass case full of old trophies stood near the school’s front doors, shallow silver dishes from state swim meets, faded ribbons; they were dusty, inconsequential, no one looked at them. As an excuse to stop walking, Phoebe sometimes would pause before that case, pretending a trophy had caught her attention—I’m nothing, she would think, I could disappear and no one would notice—her face reddening in shame as she stared at the meaningless trophies and waited for the bell to class.
“Because IBM made him sick,” Phoebe said, angry at the quaver in her voice.
Her mother snorted, turning on her heel. “That’s ludicrous,” she said, heading for her bedroom.
Phoebe charged after her. She felt crazed. How could it be ludicrous? That was the story of her father. With every move, every gesture—for years—her mother had confirmed it. “Mom,” she pleaded, “I can’t believe what you’re saying.”
“I can’t believe what you’re saying,” her mother replied. “You’re telling me your father got leukemia, a blood disease, from working as a manager at IBM? What, from chemicals or something? What are you saying?”
“No! You know!” Phoebe was shouting. “Everyone knew, because he—” Explaining felt useless. “Not chemicals, but—”
“What? Radiation?”
“No, no! Because he hated working there.”
“Oh please,” her mother said. “Spare me.”
Phoebe felt as if she’d been struck. Her mother sat on the bed and pulled off her pumps. She set them side by side on the polished floor.
“Do you ever miss those times?” Phoebe asked.
“What times?”
“You know. The sixties.” The term sounded foolish.
Karl sucked at the pipe, eyes narrowed. “It was good,” he said, breathing smoke. “Like falling in love. Sure, you want the beginning. But you know already the end.”
Phoebe took the pipe. The smoke was soft as felt in her lungs. “What’s the end?” she asked.
Karl shrugged. “Same like everything,” he said. “Goes too far, becomes the opposite.”
Phoebe changed into her sleeping shirt, turned off the light and lay on the bed, arms folded. The ceiling was made of white squares that sparkled faintly. Her heart pounded in her ears. Something was wrong. She’d failed, Phoebe thought, but at what? Imagining herself in Europe, she’d always pictured someone else, physically even, a tall blonde with an answer for everything—as if, in the course of this journey, she would not only shed her former life but cease to exist as herself. Yes, she thought, to leave Phoebe O’Connor behind and be reborn as someone beautiful, mysterious. But the opposite had happened; her own narrow boundaries had hemmed her in, keeping everything real at a distance.
On the train they sat side by side, passing soft fields that leaned and shook as if water were pouring across them. Where the grain had been cut a sharp stubble remained, glinting like broken glass in the sunlight. Pietro’s clothes were clean but smudged, as if he owned few outfits and wore them often. Despite his physical slightness, there was a strength about him.
“I did,” she said in a dreamy, distant voice. “But it’s over now.”
“Is good you go to your sister,” Pietro said.
Phoebe nodded her agreement. She was floating like the priest, suspended in warm liquid.
“When you can go?” he persisted. “Maybe today. Perhaps we walk together to the station. You have there your bag?”
Phoebe turned, looking him full in the face. “I lied to you,” she said. “My sister is dead.”
She caught a faint reflexive action somewhere in Pietro’s eyes, an infinitesimal quickening. “You are alone?”
“Yes,” she said, smiling, for something had opened, the world was flooding inside her.
“We go outside, Phoebe,” Pietro said, standing, taking her by the hand. “Soon I take the train, I have already my ticket, but we must speak.”
Dear Mom, Phoebe and Barry, My French is the worst but luckily we have a friend who translates. Everyone in Paris keeps talking about the demonstrations of two years ago when they tore up cobblestones from the roads and threw them at the cops and they built barricades like the French Revolution. The whole country went on strike for a couple of weeks literally no one worked or studied they just wandered through the streets talking to each other. Nobody locked their doors people slept in strangers’ houses and fell in love and pulled the hands off the clocks outside because time was stopped. (Remember Mom?) Everyone says how it was the most incredible time of their life and how depressing it was when the whole thing finally ended and they were just students again, supposed to take exams and get jobs and all that. Some people say they almost wish it never happened so they wouldn’t know how things could be and they’d still be happy. Love, Faith