Paula brushed past on her way into the principal’s office. “She’s talking about the fourth grader who dresses up,” she said. “My little friend who eats lunch with me every day.” She disappeared down the hallway.
Fiona wrinkled her nose. “Oh, that kid. He asked me if he could try my sling on once. He’s weird.” She drifted away from the counter, which I was glad of, because otherwise I might have lunged across it and grabbed her neck and used my thumb to wipe those contemptuous wrinkles off her nose. And I might have pushed her septum through to the other side of her skull while I was at it. Then we’d talk about the difference between weird and one-in-a-million.
FRANK’S PRESENTATION BEGAN with the night-light and the bit about mankind’s fascination with the planets and stars. I hadn’t thought much about how all that was supposed to tie in with the story of Frank’s origins and his life until the present day. Here’s how: Frank’s story was that his father was a rocket scientist and a pioneer of unmanned travel to Mars.
The kid didn’t get any further than that. He said, “I don’t belong here,” and just stood there while the stars rotated on his axis. Then he lay down on the floor and went stiff. Miss Peppe turned on the lights and unplugged the night-light and thanked him for sharing. A couple of the kids applauded weakly and one raised his hand and asked if Frank’s dad was R2-D2 or C-3PO. Miss Peppe shushed him and I hoisted Frank over my shoulder in a fireman’s carry, grabbed the night-light, and got out of there.
I left the brownies on the desk where I’d been sitting. I hoped that the kid who raised his hand would eat one and choke on it.
“IT WASN’T MY best performance,” Frank said on the drive home. “I’m sorry you came.”
“I’m not,” I said.
“Why wasn’t my mother there?”
“Your mother had to work. She had a deadline.” I didn’t mention that she’d missed every deadline in the schedule Mr. Vargas drew up before I left New York.
“Ah. Well. She heard the chapter about her last night anyway.”
“Yeah, what happened to that part today?”
“I noticed that she wasn’t there to hear it, so what was the point? I suppose Xander couldn’t make it, either.”
“No,” I said, and left it at that.
“I understand. My father missed my birth because he was working out a glitch with the Mars Odyssey before liftoff. Xander must have had a deadline, too. The thing that’s great about Xander is that sometimes you can count on him to be there when you really need him. For example, when we needed to replace the sliding glass door. Also, the night I was born he drove my mother to the hospital and stayed with her while I made my entrance into this world.”
The rearview mirror wasn’t big enough to encompass this conversation. I pulled to the side of the road and turned around to look at him. “Wait a minute. Are you saying that Xander was there when you were born?” I asked.
“In the delivery room, holding my mother’s hand,” he said. “Feeding her ice chips. Encouraging her to push. Apparently it was quite dramatic. There was lots of blood, plus screaming of bad words that anyone with a soul would consider forgivable under the circumstances. Xander tells me that I was a little jaundiced when I emerged, so he sat beside me in a rocking chair in the nursery while they finished baking me under a heat lamp. I often wonder how differently the famously jaundiced Algonquin wits might have turned out if there had been heat lamps in their day to finish baking them at birth. It’s too bad Fiona wasn’t able to make it to my presentation.”
I was so rattled by what he’d just told me that I said without thinking, “I met Fiona in the office.”
Frank didn’t say anything and I could see that he was folding up inside himself.
“Are you okay, Frank?” I asked.
When he didn’t respond I got out of the car and came around to sit with him in the back. “Can I put my arm around you?” I asked.
“No.” After a while Frank pressed his face against my shoulder. “I met Fiona once, too,” he said. “I heard that her injury came about thanks to a surfeit of imagination and then her name was so lovely and full of promise that I decided I really ought to introduce myself. I was terribly frightened at the thought of doing that but I hoped we might be friends so I was brave. But as it turned out she was just like all the others.”
( 16 )
WINTER BREAK SAVED Frank from the hell of other children for almost a month.