He was staring at me, ARE YOU CRAZY? I wondered if I was crazy, if I’d have to be carted away to an asylum. Why did the worst, the most unspeakable things happen only to me? William had not ever been the prisoner of May Hill—that was something I could guarantee. William did not “accidentally” lose the Geography Bee. He did not see naked teenagers strolling through the orchard. I rolled up into the blanket and shut my eyes, and not for the first time that spring I wanted to die.
Deep into the misery, unaccountably desiring more, in a terrible leap forward I saw that any number of disasters could destroy the crop that was here and now in its perfect beauty. There might be freeze or drought or hail or wind. The trees smashed and withered, the apples stunted or pocked.
William said, “I think I’m going to see if Pa will drive me to school for the afternoon.”
“What?” I said, turning my head so I wasn’t facedown in the grass. Neither one of us had ever thought to go to school for any part of Blossom Day. “What,” I inquired, “do you mean?” I’d forgotten all about Brianna. He was gathering up our things without saying a word, and then he unrolled my part of the blanket. Even as he worked to clear the campsite I couldn’t believe what he was doing. Next he was walking away with the basket and the bundle in his arms. When he was far down the path, when he was almost home I was still sitting there asking What?
15.
The Historical Beginning of the Infinite World
So, one minute we were children in the orchard, and the next it was decided by someone, somehow, that William and I were too old to share a room. We were eleven and twelve. I couldn’t believe it, the bunk beds ripped apart, the steel web that held his mattress no longer my nighttime ceiling, my sky. He swept up everything he loved in our room, all the Lego embedded in the carpet, every tangled wire, every connector and specialized wrench, all his comics, his books, his long tube socks, his two plastic banks heavy with quarters, and he moved down the hall to my mother’s office. I stood by the bed, holding on to the post after the top bunk was removed, feeling as if the injury to the furniture had been done to me, as if something of myself had been lopped off. He wouldn’t look in my direction as he packed up his possessions, the Tintin compendium stacked on top of The Complete HyperCard Handbook.
“Don’t go,” I managed on his last load.
He was standing in the door with a laundry basket filled with fat white pipes, a dismantled radio, and a samovar-type thing he’d taught me was a carburetor. “You can spread out,” he suggested, nodding his head at my doll junk and dozens of pulpy books about the babysitters.
“Don’t—” I tried again.
“Francie, don’t be silly.” My mother swooping in, offering up her idea of comfort. “He’s just down the hall. He’s ten steps away.”
“Don’t go,” I said once more.
“He needs more space”—the twentieth time for the explanation. “And you do, too.”
“I don’t. I have plenty.”
William turned the basket lengthwise to get it through the door, and out of the room he went.
That night it was impossible to even close my eyes with so much light, so much air above me. I had curled up by William’s bed in his new room but my mother had flapped me away, the arms of her black sweater like wings. “Good night, William, good night!” I called through those wings. “Good night,” I cried, “good night.”
“Okay, Imp,” he had to say, “good night.”
There was nothing to be done about the situation but wait until the house was still and take those ten steps back down the hall, pillow and blanket in hand.
His arm was draped over the side of the bed, William now so close to the floor, his knuckles in the pile of the rug. I was still wearing zip-up fuzzy one-piece pajamas all the long way down to the enormous plastic feet, mine in red, William’s, before he’d forsaken them, in blue. Already the room smelled of him, of us, I couldn’t tell which part of our smell he’d taken with him. It seemed important to let him know that I would never ever leave him, and also that I was fine, I was near, a pull of his toe before I covered his bare leg. He did lift his head, his lids fluttering, his eyes open for an instant. I lay myself down in the corner of the hard floor, the smallest bare place between the shelf and the desk, no crib for my head. But it was all right now because his breathing, his adenoidal inhalations, that syncopated stuffiness, was my breathing, too, and mine his. And so we could safely sleep.