My oxfords crunched up the sculpture garden path toward the glass pavilion. My body was numb and made of feathers. People and sculptures grew denser until I was in thick with picnickers packing up, mothers chasing toddlers, tourists posing, the spindly legs of the red Calder spaceship teetering.
Oof. I was on the grass. I’d tripped on an outdoor light.
“I need help.”
It was a story Joe once told. He was in Indianapolis for the NFL Combine and he’d gotten food poisoning. He’d spent all night on the tile floor of his hotel bathroom burning with fever. Vomit, sweat, diarrhea: name an orifice, there was something coming out of it. He found himself moaning, “I need help. Someone help me.” As a doctor, Joe knew he didn’t need help. His body simply had a bug and the quicker he expelled it, the better. But he found himself “made better in another way” by the act of repeating those words. “I need help. Somebody help me.” He said them over and over until he started laughing. The next morning at breakfast he overheard people at the buffet. “Did you hear that poor fucker last night? I hope somebody helped him.”
I hated that story. Joe was my Competent Traveler. He wasn’t the one who laughed naked on the shower floor of a Holiday Inn Express. He didn’t cry out helplessly to no one.
I’d forced myself to forget the whole episode. Until now.
I picked myself up off the grass. I sprinted the rest of the way, a bead of red running down my shin.
The glass of the pavilion was pure reflection. Orange the color of the birch leaves. Flat-bottomed clouds skipped across the sky. In a patch of inky ocean, I could make out Spencer standing with his back to me.
A sign: CLOSED FOR INSTALLATION. The door was propped open.
Spencer conferred with a gaggle of art types, at their feet a patchwork of furniture pads. Men in blue rubber gloves. The guy from before, still with the level in his teeth. An older woman with wild gray hair and harlequin-patterned tights spoke with her hands. Spencer noticed me over his shoulder. He shot me a very annoyed look.
Annoyance! How quaint!
I spotted Timby in the corner, legs folded impossibly underneath him, examining with quiet concentration the contents of my purse.
Timby with his pinch pots and darling belly and paper airplanes and backward Ys and his love of winter and carbs and walking sticks and his scavenging for clues to help him better understand the screwy adult world. Timby, it’s not your fault my mother died when I was your age. You don’t know that all the time you have with me from now on is a gift. It’s not your fault I can’t absorb that lesson myself. That I’m cobbled together from broken promises of jigsaw puzzles never started and pot-holder kits unopened. That’s why Timby reads Archie! It’s a steady group of characters behaving predictably. It’s a world with the guarantee of small-scale problems. How do I break it to you that people aren’t predictable? That life is confounding and sadistic in its cruelty? That when things go your way, it never makes you as happy as you’d expected, but when things go against you, it’s a cold-water jolt, an unshakable outrage that dogs you forever. But I can be steady. I will show you kindness and bring you snow— “Mom?” In Timby’s hand was the ring of keys with the lanyard of baby blocks.
D-E-L-P-H-I-N-E.
From school! The ones I’d stolen. And completely forgotten about.
I darted toward him.
In my side vision, horror on the faces of Spencer, the installers, and the hip older woman, their mouths trying to warn me off something.
But I needed to get that awful name out of Timby’s hand.
I raised my chin just in time to see a flat piece of metal with layers of green enamel, mottled like mold, across my field of vision.
Clunk.
The last thing I heard before I sank to the floor was Timby’s voice.
“What are you doing with Delphine’s mom’s keys?”
Troubled Troubadour
Long before Eleanor met Bucky, she’d heard the stories.