“Stop interrupting, Dom,” Maddie said. “You mourned with your magical guitar.”
“I like the sound of that,” Brooks said. “Kind of like Jimi Hendrix.”
“And who am I?” Dom asked, worried they’d forget he was there.
“Hades, of course,” Maddie said, and sashayed over to him, giving him a quick squeeze of a hug. “Only the most mysterious and elusive of all the gods. The keeper of the gates of hell.”
Dom smiled. “Here is my pitchfork,” he said, and grabbed a long stick, imagining it was the two-pronged spear of the god of hell.
Maddie directed, moving them into their places—Dom sitting on the tallest stump, his throne, and Brooks approaching from the east, strumming the thick peel of paper birch that was his lyre. Or, Dom thought, laughing to himself, his magical guitar. Dom used his deepest voice and demanded Orpheus tell him why he had trespassed into the Underworld, and how he had charmed Cerberus, the three-headed dog.
Brooks/Orpheus dropped to one knee and bowed his head (Dom was impressed), and then looked to Maddie and said, “For true love.”
When it was time for Orpheus to return to the world above, Dom gave him his conditions, “You can take your dead beloved bride,” Dom boomed, his voice battling the caterpillars and the ballroom music, “but on one condition!”
“Anything,” Orpheus/Brooks said, “to return my love to me.”
Damn, Dom thought, this kid was good. He was already scheming, thinking up ways he could get the two of them to play the game again. They’d do all the love stories, one after another.
“Do not look back at your bride before you return to the light of Earth above. Or you will lose her forever!”
Orpheus/Brooks walked in a slow circle around the stumps, Eurydice/Maddie following behind, gliding in a little waltz. She let her head fall zombie-like, her long hair whipping around her shoulders, and with her face painted an eerie blue by the moonlight, she was beautiful. As beautiful, Dom thought, as the real Eurydice.
“Now!” Dom directed. “You see the sunlight ahead. You are almost there. Almost out of hell. But you can’t bear the temptation. To look back. Look back!”
Brooks looked behind him, a slow sorrowful turn of the head, and Dom jumped off his throne and looped his arm through Maddie’s and pulled her away, into the woods.
He kept pulling her even though she was trying to yank her arm away.
“Dom,” she said, “let me go.”
“Let’s go home,” he begged. “We can watch a movie. Spaceballs is on again.”
She pulled herself free and ran back to Brooks, who caught her and lifted her and it was like a movie, Dom thought, the way they looked at each other. Like they were the only two people in the world and he mourned for himself then because he knew he would never find a someone who looked at him like that. Not even if he moved far from the island, to a city maybe, where boys like him were tolerated. Where they fell in love and maybe even held hands as they walked down the street. He knew it as clearly as if those three old bitches, the Fates, were getting ready to cut the string of his life.
He walked away, down the path toward White Eagle.
“Dom?” Maddie called. “Come back. We’ll play again.”
“Yo, Dom,” Brooks yelled. “That was fresh. Don’t go, dude.”
“Fuck off!” Dom yelled.
He heard footsteps in the dry leaves—Maddie was coming to him—and then Brooks said, “Mads, leave him. He needs to cool off.”
Dom did not look back.
Since 1980, the gypsy moth has defoliated close to a million or more forested acres each year. In 1981, a record 12.9 million acres were defoliated. This is an area larger than Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut combined.
—“Gypsy Moth,” Forest Insect & Disease Leaflet 162, US Department of Agriculture Forest Service, 1989
28.
Maddie
He showed her the way to the secret garden. Held her hand as they walked through the maze and sang the code to the tune the seven dwarfs sang in Snow White.
“Left, right,” he sang. “Left, left, right, left.”
He was adorable, she thought.
It was their own private room, he said, made of living walls. There was a blanket spread over the grass, and that he’d thought of her, ahead of time, when she wasn’t even in his line of sight—it meant everything.
The music in the ballroom sounded far away and she felt safe knowing no one could find them. Only they had the secret code.
They searched the sky for shooting stars and he saw one first, and she wasn’t jealous like she’d normally be because it was his first shooting star ever. He gasped when he saw it.
They kissed some more. It had only been a few days since their first kiss but she thought she was getting better. She felt so safe with him that she almost (almost) confessed that she practiced kissing her hand each night. She wanted to be good for him.
She was used to not thinking about the words she saw on the ballroom wall. Not trying to figure it out. This was all she wanted, all she’d ever wanted. Lying next to him, their fingers twisted together, making up words for their language.
“You know how the sun slips through the leaves in the afternoon?” He paused and she closed her eyes so she could see what he was imagining, “And the shadows, they jump around. Kind of like birds, a whole lot, flapping their wings at once?”
“Yes,” she said. She saw.
“I need a word for that.”
“It’s got to have ‘dappled’ in it somewhere,” she said. “Or is that too predictable?”
“‘Dappled’ is good. ‘Flicker,’ though, might be even better. It’s like that golden afternoon sun is on fire, you know?”
She did.
He could take anything—a tree, a cloud, the change in light at quarter past five on a summer day, and turn it around and around until it was something beautiful. Like the caterpillars. While the rest of the island cowered, Brooks had learned the story of the gypsy moth, spending hours in the library hunched over science books.
“Okay,” he said, rolling onto his side so they were face-to-face, lips to lips, “this is weird. Ready?”
“Yes.”
“You’re not going to like it,” he sang.
“Just tell me already.”
He kissed her. Nibbled her bottom lip.
“Ouch.”
“Serves you right. Getting all sassy.”
“Please,” she said. “Tell. Me.”
“The girl gypsy moths,” he said, “they come out of the cocoon with working wings, but…”
“Yeah?”
“They don’t fly. They just sit there and wait for the gypsy moth dudes to come to their pad and…” He trailed a finger down the front of her shirt.
“Yeah?”
“Is it okay if I touch you?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Here?”