“No,” he’d said, “Mommy doesn’t eat pretzels,” which I could have told her, followed by, “And this is Cornelia’s house, so she gets to have some.” He said my name “Cuh-nelia.”
It had been some time since I’d eaten crunchy, miniature pretzels (in my Philly days, I’d eaten more than my share of the soft ones, hot, chewy, and clutch-purse-sized), and maybe it was because of the company or the utter absence of trans fat or both, but they tasted divine. Somewhat less divine when swallowed whole, however, which is how I consumed my third one because, just after I’d popped it in my mouth, I heard the den doorknob turning and didn’t want to be caught snatching food from the mouths of Piper’s babes.
It turned out not to matter, though, because when she emerged from the den, Piper was so unsettled, I could’ve been using her children to mop my floor and she wouldn’t have noticed. She was stuffing papers back into her portfolio with the urgency one would use to put out a grease fire, and when she looked at me, her face was crimson, her eyes were wild, and, if a smile can be hysterical, Piper’s was.
“I just remembered something I left on the stove, Cornelia.” Her voice was uncharacteristically high and thin. “Could you watch the kids for a minute? I’ll be back in two shakes.” And she was gone.
“What’s up?” I asked Teo, in a low voice, as soon as I’d reignited the kids’ interest in Box.
“She’s got a sick friend who started a new course of treatment a few weeks ago and wants to discontinue. Piper wanted my opinion.” He ran a hand through his hair and sighed. “No she didn’t. She wanted me to tell her that her friend should keep going with the treatments.”
“Did you?” I asked. I took Teo’s hand. His face was suddenly so tired.
Teo shook his head. “No. I told her that in my highly unofficial opinion, the friend should stop. Today, if she wants.”
A shudder ran through me. “Oh, God, Teo, you don’t think the friend is really Piper, do you?”
“Piper had a copy of the woman’s medical records; the name on every sheet was blacked out, but, no, whoever this woman is, she’s too sick to hide it.”
I watched Carter pop up like a jack-in-the-box, watched Meredith fall on the floor laughing. Absently, I lifted Teo’s hand and kissed it. “Thank God.”
Teo watched the kids for a second, then said, “The friend has two children, too.”
I didn’t say anything because there was nothing to say. Then, eerily, somewhere in our house, music began to play. Even before Meredith and Carter began singing the words, I recognized the song. The theme from Sesame Street.
“Piper’s cell phone,” I said. Teo walked back into the den and came out carrying the Coach tote.
“Where’s Mommy?” Meredith’s eyes filled, but she didn’t burst into tears. Instead, she sat down on the floor and rubbed her eyes with her two fists like a child in a movie.
“Your mommy will be right back,” I told Meredith. Carter stood very still for a moment, then sat down beside Meredith.
“Your mommy will be right back,” he told her.
But ten minutes and four missed cell phone calls later, Piper still wasn’t back. Because I began to worry that someone was desperately trying to reach Piper and because each time the Sesame Street theme song played, Meredith came closer to dissolving into sobs, I picked up the tote and walked across the street.
Even before I got to the front steps, I heard it. A wretched, unloosed, primeval keening. A sound that couldn’t possibly be coming from a human being, except that it was. I stood on the front porch, hearing the sound. I stood there. I even started to open the door. The knob was in my hand. Then I turned around and walked back home.
FIVE
The discovery of a complete unified theory, therefore, may not aid the survival of our species. It may not even affect our life-style. But ever since the dawn of civilization, people have not been content to see events as unconnected and inexplicable. They have craved an understanding of the underlying order in the world. Today, we still yearn to know why we are here and where we came from.
—STEPHEN HAWKING, A Brief History of Time
Dev was figuring things out.
Of course, Dev was always figuring things out, or trying to. Figuring things out was an essential property of Dev the way impenetrability is an essential property of matter or oddness is an essential property of the number three. Nothing unusual about the figuring-out part.
But the things part? Unusual. In fact, if Dev had a list of the things he’d been figuring out lately, the only typical, unsurprising item on it would have been string theory. And string theory was hanging on to its place on the list by the skin of its pointy teeth because string theory was proving to be a very tough nut to crack, so tough that Dev was beginning to suspect that impenetrability might be one of its properties, too.
But Dev didn’t mind. For one thing, when it came to theories, hard was good, nothing wrong with hard, and even the guys who came up with string theory didn’t seem to get it, not completely. For another, Dev was too happy to mind, too happy and too astonished. If you’d told him a few months ago that pretty soon he’d have worked out more about being happy at school than about string theory, he’d have told you, in his polite Dev way, that you were stark, raving nuts. While it was true that before he’d tumbled into the nightmare of seventh grade, Dev had sometimes been happy in school, mostly it had been coincidence: Dev happened to be happy, and he happened to be within the walls of a school.
Now, though, if happiness were a fire, school was what fed it. School—this school, Liberty Charter—was feeding Dev in ways no other school ever had. And even though Dev still didn’t know what was written on them, he knew that the papers from the Berkeley psychologist had somehow made it happen. Lake had waved the papers like a wand (or faxed them, more likely, since she’d set it up from California), and they’d worked magic.
Magically, a Dev-size space had opened up at a quirky hybrid of a school the likes of which Dev hadn’t known existed: you had to apply, but it was free, a regular public school with basketball, band, and chess club, but also with something called “Non-Age-Specific Grouping.” As far as terms went, Non-Age-Specific Grouping struck Dev as clumsy and patched together, but as far as ideas went, NASG rocked. NASG meant that kids like Dev—and NASG seemed to be based, at least in part, on the idea that there were other kids like Dev—could take pre-calc with juniors and advanced bio with seniors.
Seniors. Liberty Charter had them, too. Seniors, juniors, SAT prep, prom, and homecoming because Liberty Charter was a high school, and that meant the Berkeley papers must have worked magic on Lake, too, because after years of swearing Dev would skip grades over her dead body, during their second night in their new town house, she’d said, “Let’s jump you up. Ninth grade. What do you think?” And her body, as she sat in that taut, waiting, coiled-spring way of hers, was the total opposite of dead.
So suddenly school was a place where, in English, Dev found himself reading a poem by a guy named Wallace Stevens that ended: “For the listener, who listens in the snow, /And, nothing himself, beholds /Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is,” which in itself seemed unreal, just too good to be true, a teacher handing out a piece of paper with words like those on it.
But more unbelievable was that when Dev raised his hand, took a deep breath, and said, “The first thing I thought of was Charles Darwin. Which might sound kind of weird. But he started out believing in God. Then, after he discovered so much about how nature works, he had to, you know, let God go. I remember he said something like, ‘There are parasitic wasps whose whole existence is about breeding inside the bodies of caterpillars. No god would create a creature like that,’” nobody, not one person in the class, rolled his eyes or faked gagging herself with her finger.
In fact, when Dev continued by saying, “I personally think that you can believe in God and evolution, but Darwin didn’t. He had to decide between truth and God and he picked truth, and that’s kind
of like seeing the nothing that’s there, like God got replaced by nothingness. And even if you don’t, like, think Darwin was right, it was still a pretty brave thing to do,” another kid in the class shot his hand up.
“Yeah, totally brave,” the kid said, nodding, “like Galileo. Back then, saying the earth wasn’t the center of the universe was like saying God is nothing, but Galileo wouldn’t keep his mouth shut. The dude got arrested for saying that!”
The teacher, Ms. Enright, didn’t sneer and say, “Did you losers spend your summer vacation reading The Origin of the Species and some book by Galileo?” She didn’t even say, “This is English, not science class, guys,” in that reminding voice teachers use. She didn’t say much of anything, but definitely she didn’t sneer. Ms. Enright let the class talk, and then, the next day, she brought in copies of a Robert Frost poem called “Design” and said, “What Dev said yesterday made me think of this poem. I’d love it if you all would read it and talk about it. There’s an ‘if’ in the last line that just chills me to the bone, always has.” So that the rest of the day, Dev walked around with the sentence “What Dev said yesterday made me think of this poem” stretched over him, like a rainbow only he could see.
Yeah, school was on the list of things Dev was figuring out. Friendship, too. The Galileo kid turned out to be a sixteen-year-old soccer star and entrepreneur named Aidan Weeks, facts Dev found out during a conversation that started with Aidan setting his tray down next to Dev’s at the lunch table and saying, “You obviously know a lot about Darwin, but what do you know about cutting grass?” and that ended with Aidan asking Dev to be his business partner.
“My old partner Ritchie got a C in physics and quit on me. First C of Ritchie’s life, and his dad makes him quit his very lucrative job to study more.” Aidan stood up. “Cutting grass, raking leaves, shoveling snow.” He emphasized each task by slapping the table with one cinnamon-colored hand. “Think about it.”
“I will,” said Dev. What he really meant was that he had to convince Lake. If it were up to him alone, he would’ve said “You got yourself a partner” as fast as he could get the words out.
As Dev was putting his tray on the tray-conveyor belt, he heard Aidan’s voice again, shouting, “Hey, Dev!”
Dev turned around. Aidan stood near the door of the cafeteria. “Yeah,” shouted Dev.
A bunch of kids in the cafeteria were looking at Dev now, and the expressions on their faces made Dev understand that Aidan Weeks was somebody at Liberty Charter.
“Did I mention the job is very lucrative?” shouted Aidan, grinning.
Dev shouted, “Uh, yeah, I think you did,” and the smile that suddenly cut across his face was so big and real, he turned back toward the conveyor belt so that he could keep it to himself.
That night, Dev sat at the dinner table wolfing down white bean and chicken chili, his favorite, and tried to come up with the best way to spin the job idea so that Lake would go for it. Actually, he was 99.9 percent sure Lake was spin proof. Lake didn’t just have a built-in bullshit detector, she had a state-of-the-art, atom-splitting bullshit annihilator. So mostly Dev spent dinnertime just getting his nerve up.
But before his nerve was anywhere close to as high as it needed to be, as Dev mopped up the last of his chili with the last of his corn bread, his mother said, wryly, “Well, it doesn’t seem to have affected your appetite much.”
Crap.
Dev took his time chewing and swallowing the corn bread before he asked, “What?”
“Whatever’s on your mind,” said Lake.
“Oh,” said Dev. Crap, crap, crap, crap, crap.
His mother gave him her ice blue, laser-beam stare. How did she do that? Could it be good for a person to stare like that? Didn’t her eyeballs start to dry out?
Dev didn’t point out this potential health hazard. Instead, he said, finally, “Did you know that the two main theories all of modern physics is based on are totally incompatible?”
Lake threw back her head and laughed.
“It’s true,” Dev said, relieved. “Relativity and quantum mechanics. On their own, they’re full proof, the solidest theories around. And they explain pretty much everything. But they cancel each other out; no way can they both be true.”
“Sounds like a problem,” said Lake, nodding, the laughter still hovering around the corners of her eyes and mouth.
“Yeah. It is. Or it was. Have you ever heard of string theory?”
“Nope.” This struck Dev as funny because if anyone seemed to be made up of zillions of tiny vibrating strings, it was Lake. Dev remembered how one of the books he was reading talked about the “resonance” of the ultramicroscopic strings, how they vibrated like the strings of a musical instrument. Dev looked at his mother and imagined her strings making tense, layered, glittering music, like those Bach fugues she listened to all the time. Music so complicated you could hear the math in it.
“Well, string theory just might be the unified field theory everyone’s dying to find,” said Dev. “String theory makes the other theories compatible. Some people call it the theory of everything.”
“Wow,” said Lake, raising her black eyebrows. “The theory of everything. Sounds like one theory worth looking into. Tell you what, you loan me a book on string theory, and then we’ll talk about it together. Deal?” She gave Dev a smile.
“Deal.”
Dev slid his gaze down to his empty bowl and held it there for a few seconds. Then he slid it back up and met his mother’s eyes.
“Okay,” he began, “I met this kid at school.”
She said yes. There was a wide, empty, cavernous moment when Dev knew she was going to say no. But then she walked around the table, hugged him from behind, and pressed her cheek to his.
“Yards only,” she said. “I don’t want you going inside any strange houses. And you ride your bike. After I get to know this kid, maybe he can pick you up, but no highway driving. Neighborhood roads, and that’s it. Got it?”
“No strange houses. No highways,” said Dev. “Got it.”
She didn’t let go; Dev’s face could feel her smiling, the lift and nudge of her cheekbone. He knew she was glad about Aidan.
“Mom, your hair’s tickling me.”
“Oh, gosh, so it is. Sorry about that.”
“Mom, I can’t breathe.”
“Hmmm. That’s no good. Let’s hope you don’t lose consciousness.”
“Mom!” Dev started laughing then, which was what Lake had been waiting for, what she always waited for, so after one more squeeze, she let him go.
Aidan Weeks was a talker.
“I’m a talker,” he told Dev. “Most of these yards, I could do on my own, but listening to nothing but leaves rustling and birds chirping drives me bananas.”
Without meaning to, Dev let out a laugh that was more like a snort.
“What?” asked Aidan, pretending to freeze, midrake.
“Bananas?” said Dev, trying not to snort again. “Sorry, man. But, who says that?”
Aidan grinned and got back to raking. “I told you, I’m a talker. When you talk as much as I do, you basically end up using every word out there.”
It was Saturday, the kind of tricky October Saturday that contains equal parts hot sun and cool air, so that you keep taking off your sweatshirt and putting it back on, taking off, putting on until, pretty soon, you’re laughing at yourself. When the sun was out, the leaves caught in Dev’s rake were the reddest and goldest things he’d ever seen, so much color rubbing up against itself on the surface of each leaf, Dev imagined he could smell smoke.
“You live in this neighborhood?” Dev asked Aidan. “It’s a great neighborhood.” It was great. Dev couldn’t remember being in a neighborhood he liked more: big trees, the houses close together, old, spacious, and interesting, all stone or brick with roofs made of gray, blue, and pinkish slates, a sunporch or a sunroom pulling light into every house.
“Nah,” said Aidan, sheepishly. “You notice the
neighborhood you rode through to get here?”
Dev had noticed it. You’d have to be blind not to notice that neighborhood. The houses were newer than these and huger and each sprawled like a section of storybook village across the center of an enormous, pool table–green lawn. Dev gave a low whistle.
“Yeah,” said Aidan, shaking his head, “I know. My dad’s one of those guys who can make money in his sleep. He says it’s a knack, like he can’t really take credit for it.”
Dev gave Aidan’s rake a push with his own. He grinned. “Guess he’s not giving it to you, though.”
“Nope,” chuckled Aidan. He ran the back of his hand across his forehead and pretended to shake off the sweat. Then, he jerked a thumb toward the largest pile of leaves. “What do you think? Bag?”
As they took turns shoving leaves into a black trash bag large enough to hold a giant panda (“Construction-site bags,” Aidan informed him. “The best of the best, don’t settle for less”), Aidan said, “So you wanna hear my story?”
“Is it interesting?” asked Dev, giving him a skeptical look.
Aidan shrugged. “I’m a black kid with two white parents. Most people think that’s interesting. I like to explain it up front, before people find out and do the ‘uh-that’s-your-mom-then-act-all-shocked-then-feel-bad’ routine.”
“A preemptive strike,” said Dev, nodding. “Good strategy.”
It turned out that Aidan’s mother was Irish from Ireland (“Hence, the name. Aidan: it’s Irish, not girlish”), and that she swore like a street punk (“f-bomb this, f-bomb that, when she’s not even mad”), which maybe all Irishwomen did, maybe just her and Aidan’s grandma (called Mammo, like ammo), Aidan wasn’t sure, but she was pretty nice anyway, and his dad, the money-in-his-sleep dad, was the only dad he’d ever known.
“Not a case of ‘biological didn’t bother,’ though. My biological dad—the African-American dad—bothered as long as he could. Then he went to work at this new job at some fancy engineering firm in New York?” Aidan paused for effect. “Dropped dead. Aneurysm. Imagine that? Twenty-eight years old; new, handsome, genius son at home; first day on the job and wham.”