“You’re becoming a regular medievalist, Crocodile,” he’d say. “What have I done to you?”
He was right. It was his fault. Medieval art was Finn’s favorite, and over the years we’d spent hours and hours looking through his books together. This third time at the festival, Finn was already getting thin. It was chilly enough for wool sweaters and Finn was wearing two, one on top of the other. We were drinking hot mulled cider, and it was just the two of us, alone with the greasy smell of a pig roasting on a spit and lute music and the whinny of a horse about to go into a fake joust and the jangling of a falconer’s bells. Finn saw the boots that day and bought them for me because he knew I’d love them. He stayed with me at that bootmaker’s stall, tying up rough leather laces for me again and again like there was nothing he’d rather be doing. If they weren’t right, he’d help pull the boots off my feet. Sometimes his hand would brush my ankle or my bare knee and I’d blush. I didn’t tell him this, but I made sure to choose a pair two sizes too big. I didn’t care how many pairs of socks I’d have to wear with them. I never wanted to grow out of those boots.
If I had a lot of money, I would buy acres of woods. I would put a wall around them and live there like it was another time. Maybe I would find one other person to live with me there. Someone who was willing to promise they’d never speak a word about anything in the present. I doubt I could find anyone like that. I’ve never met anyone yet who might make that kind of promise.
There’s only one person I’ve ever told about what I do in the woods, and that’s Finn, and I didn’t even mean to tell him. We were walking back to his apartment from the movie theater after seeing A Room with a View. Finn started talking about how all the characters were so enchanting because they were so tightly wrapped and it was so beautiful to watch them try to unwrap one another. So romantic, he said. He said he wished things were like that now. I wanted him to know I understood—that I would do anything to go back in time—so I told him about the woods. He laughed and bumped his shoulder against mine and called me a nerdatroid and I called him a geek for spending all his time thinking about painting, and then we both laughed because we knew we were right. We both knew we were the biggest nerds in the whole world. Now that Finn’s gone, nobody knows that I go to the woods after school. Sometimes I think nobody even remembers those woods exist at all.
Three
The portrait was never given to us. Not officially. Not with words.
That’s because it was never finished. That’s what Finn said. We had to keep going back for just one more sitting and one more sitting after that. Nobody argued about it except Greta, who stopped going to Finn’s on Sundays. She said if Finn was only doing the background, he didn’t need all of us there. She said she had other things, better things, she could be doing with her Sunday afternoons.
It was a cold cold morning in January, the first day back to school after Christmas vacation, and we were waiting outside our house for the school bus. Our house is on Phelps Street, which is one of the last streets on the bus route. We live on the south end of town, and school is a little way out of town on the north side. By road it’s about two miles, but if you cut through backyards and come in through the woods—which I sometimes do—it’s much less.
Because our house is one of the last the bus gets to, it’s always hard to know exactly when it will show up. Over the years, Greta and I have spent a lot of time out there waiting, staring down the line of front lawns on our street. Phelps has a mix of capes and ranches, except for the Millers’ Tudor, which sits up a small hill on the cul-de-sac. It’s obviously a fake Tudor, because there was nobody in Westchester except for the Mohegan Indians in Tudor times, so I don’t know who the Millers think they’re fooling. Probably no one. Probably it never even crossed the Millers’ minds. But it crosses mine. Every single time I see it. Ours is the light blue cape with black shutters and a sprawling red maple out front.
That morning I was jogging in place to stay warm. Greta was leaning against the maple, studying a pair of new suede ankle boots she had on. She kept taking her glasses on and off, breathing on them, then cleaning off the steam.
“Greta?”
“What?”
“What better things do you do on Sundays?”
I wasn’t sure I really wanted to know. I wrapped my arms around my coat, pulling it in tighter.
Greta turned her head slowly and gave me a big close-lipped smile. She shook her head and widened her eyes.
“Things you can’t even imagine.”
“Yeah, right,” I said.
Greta went to stand on the other side of the driveway.
I figured she meant having sex. But, then again, maybe not, because I could imagine that. I didn’t want to, but I could.
She took her glasses off again and turned the lenses white with her breath.
“Hey,” I called over to her. “We’re orphans again. It’s orphan season.”
Greta knew what I meant. She knew I meant tax-season orphans. Every year it was the same. There’d be the buzz of Christmas and New Year, and then our parents disappeared for all the worst months of winter. They’d leave the house by six-thirty in the morning, and most nights they wouldn’t be back until at least seven. That’s what it’s like to be the offspring of two accountants. That’s how it’s been for as long as I can remember.
In tax season, when our parents had to leave before the bus came, they used to have Mrs. Schegner across the street watch over us from her living room window. Nine-year-old Greta would stand waiting for the bus with seven-year-old me. Even though we knew Mrs. Schegner was there, it still felt like we were alone. Greta would throw her arm over my shoulder and pull me right into her. Sometimes, if it was taking a really long time for the bus to get there or if it started snowing, Greta would sing. She’d sing something from The Muppet Movie or sometimes that James Taylor song “Carolina in My Mind” from my parents’ Greatest Hits album. Even then she had a good voice. It was like she was another person when she sang. Like there was some completely different Greta hidden in there somewhere. She’d sing and hold me tight until she saw the bus round the corner. Then she’d say to me, or maybe to herself, “See, that’s not so bad. See?”
I didn’t know if Greta still remembered that. I did. Even when she was being mean as anything, I could look at her and remember how we used to be.
Greta glanced at me for a second, trying not to be interested. Trying to pretend she didn’t care. She put her hands on her hips. “Oh, the drama of it all, June. Your parents work late. Get over it.” She spun around and kept her back to me until the bus came trundling up the road.
I went to Finn’s with my mother three more times. We’d started going every other week instead of just once a month. And not always on Sundays. I would have loved to go down there by myself, like I used to, at least one of those times. I wanted to have a good long talk with Finn. But every time I brought it up, my mother said, “Maybe next time. Okay, Junie?” which wasn’t really a question at all. It was my mother telling me how it was going to be. It started to feel like she was using me and the portrait as an excuse to go down and spend time with Finn. It never seemed to me like they were very close, and I guess maybe she was starting to regret it. Now it was like I was some kind of Trojan horse my mother could ride in on. It wasn’t fair, and underneath it all, lying there like quicksand, was the fact that there wouldn’t be that many next times. Without ever saying it, it was becoming clear that the two of us were scrapping it out for Finn’s final hours.
On the Sunday that ended up being the last Sunday we went to Finn’s, Greta was sitting at her desk, painting her fingernails two colors. She alternated—one purple, one black, one purple, one black. I sat on the edge of her unmade bed and watched.
“Greta,” I said, “you know, it won’t be much longer. With Finn, I mean.”
I needed to make sure she understood the way I understood. My mother said it was like a cassette tape you could never rewind. But it was har
d to remember you couldn’t rewind it while you were listening to it. And so you’d forget and fall into the music and listen and then, without you even knowing it, the tape would suddenly end.
“Of course I know,” she said. “I knew about Uncle Finn being sick way before you knew anything.”
“Then why don’t you come with us?”
Greta put the black and purple nail polishes back on her little wooden makeup shelf. Then she pulled down a bottle of dark red and unscrewed the top. Carefully, she scraped the brush against the bottle’s rim. She pulled her knees to her chest and painted her toenails, starting with the pinkie.
“Because he’s going to finish that picture one way or another,” Greta said, not even bothering to look up at me. “And, anyway, you know as well as I do that if he could have, he wouldn’t have even put me in the portrait. It would have been just his darling Junie, all on her own.”
“Finn’s not like that.”
“Whatever, June. It’s not like I even care. It doesn’t matter. Any day now the phone will ring and you’ll find out that Finn’s dead, and you’ll have a whole life of Sundays to worry about. What’ll you do then? Huh? It doesn’t matter anymore. One Sunday more or less. Don’t you even know that?”
I didn’t say anything. Greta always knew how to make me lose my words. She screwed the top back on the polish bottle and flexed her freshly painted toes. Then she turned to me again. “What?” she said. “Stop staring at me.”
Four
Tax season always smelled like stew. Most days my mother left her mustard-yellow crockpot sitting on the kitchen counter, slow-cooking something for our dinner. It didn’t matter what was in the pot—chicken, vegetables, beans—it all smelled like stew once the pot was through with it.
It was four o’clock and Greta was at play rehearsals at school. She had one of the big supporting parts in South Pacific, the role of Bloody Mary, which she got because she can sing like anything and she’s pretty dark. Hair and eyes anyway, so all they have to do is put some dark makeup and eyeliner on her to make her look Polynesian. She told us she had to be at the school almost every night “ ’til late.”
It was a well-known fact that, of all the schools in the area, our school put on the best musicals. Some years there were even people from the city who came to see our shows. Theater people, choreographers, directors, that kind of thing. There was a rumor that once, maybe ten years ago, a choreographer saw the play and thought one of the senior girls was so good that he got her a part in A Chorus Line after graduation. Every year that story goes around, and even though everyone says they don’t believe it, you can tell really they do. Really they want to believe that a fairy-tale thing like that could happen to them.
The temperature had been in the single digits for a few days, too cold for the woods, so I was home alone, sitting at the kitchen table doing geology homework, when the phone rang.
“Mrs. Elbus?” a man said. The voice was blurry. Watery.
“No.”
“Oh . . . right. Sorry. Is Mrs. Elbus there?” Not just watery, but with an accent. English maybe.
“She’s not home yet. Can I take a message?”
There was a long pause, then, “June? Actually, is this June?”
This man, who I knew I’d never spoken to before, knew my name, and it felt like he was reaching his fingers right down the phone wires.
“Call back later,” I said. Then I quickly hung up.
I thought of that movie where there’s a girl babysitting and someone keeps calling, saying he can see her and that she should check on the children, and she gets more and more freaked out. That’s what that phone call felt like. Even though the guy hadn’t said anything creepy, I walked around the house, locking all the windows and doors. I sat down on the kitchen floor next to the fridge and opened up a can of Yoo-hoo.
Then the phone rang again. It rang and rang until the answering machine got it. And there was that same voice.
“I’m sorry, really sorry, if I frightened you. I’m ringing about your uncle. Uncle Finn in the city. I’ll try back later. That’s all. Sorry.”
Uncle Finn. He knew Uncle Finn. My whole body went cold. I stood up and poured the rest of the Yoo-hoo down the sink. Then I paced back and forth over the brown linoleum tiles of the kitchen. Finn was gone. I knew Finn was gone.
I picked up the phone and dialed his number, which I knew by heart. It rang twice before it was answered, and when I heard the click of someone picking up, a flood of joy spread right through my chest.
“Finn?” It was quiet on the other end and I waited. “Finn?” I said again. I could hear the desperation creeping into my voice.
“I’m . . . I’m afraid not. He’s not . . .”
I hung up the phone quick. The voice was the same. It was the same man who’d left the message on our machine.
I ran up to my room. It had never seemed so small. So shrunk down. I looked around at my stupid fake candles and my big dumb collection of Choose Your Own Adventure books, my gaudy red comforter with the fake tapestry print on it. The city seemed like it was a thousand miles away. Like without Finn it didn’t have the weight to stay put. Like it might just float away.
I crawled under my bed and closed my eyes tight. I stayed under there for two hours, breathing in stale stew, pretending to be something ancient and entombed, listening for the back door to open so I could press my hands tight over my ears before I had to hear someone playing that stupid answering machine message again.
Five
What Greta said—that she knew about Finn being sick before I did—was probably true. She wasn’t there when I found out. The day I found out, I was supposed to be going to the dentist with my mother, but then, without saying a word, she turned left on Main instead of right and the next thing I knew we were at the Mount Kisco Diner. I should have known something was weird about the whole thing from the start, because Greta and I always went to the dentist together and that time it was just my mother and me. Maybe she was hoping I’d be so relieved not to be going to the dentist that the news about Finn wouldn’t seem so bad. She was wrong about that. I like going to the dentist. I like the way the fluoride gel tastes, and I like that for the twenty minutes I’m sitting in Dr. Shippee’s chair, my teeth are the most important thing in the world to him.
We sat in a booth, which meant we had a jukebox. Before I even asked, my mother passed me a quarter and told me to pick some songs.
“Something good, okay?” she said. “Something happy.”
I nodded. I didn’t know what we were about to talk about, so I chose “Ghostbusters,” “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” and “99 Luftballons.” The jukebox had both the English and the German versions of that song. I chose the German because I thought it was cooler.
My mother ordered a cup of coffee, no food. I ordered lemon meringue pie and chocolate milk.
“Ghostbusters” started to play as I flipped through the jukebox songs. I turned the pages, reading the titles one by one, wondering if I’d made the best choices. Then my mother’s hand was suddenly on top of mine.
“June,” she said, looking like she was almost going to cry.
“Yeah?”
She said something so softly I couldn’t hear any of it.
“What?” I asked, leaning across the table.
She said it again, but I could only see her lips moving, like she wasn’t even trying to make herself heard.
I shook my head. The jukebox blared out Ray Parker Jr. singing about how he wasn’t afraid of ghosts.
My mother pointed to the space next to her, and I walked around to her side of the table. She took my head in her hands and pulled me in so her mouth was almost touching my ear.
“Finn’s dying, June.”
She could have said that Finn was sick—even really sick—but she didn’t. She told me straight out that Finn was dying. My mother wasn’t always like that. She wasn’t usually one for harsh truths, but this time she must have figured it would mean les
s talking, less explaining. Because how could she possibly explain something like this? How could anyone? She pulled me closer and we stayed like that for a few seconds, neither of us wanting to look the other in the eye. It felt like there was a traffic jam in my brain. A hundred different things I was supposed to say.
“Lemon meringue?”
The waitress was suddenly standing there holding out my pie, and I had to pull away and nod. I looked at that ridiculous fluffy cheerful meringue and couldn’t believe that only a few minutes ago I was a girl who would have wanted something like that.
“What kind of dying?” was what I finally said.
I watched as my mother traced her index finger against the table. AIDS, she wrote. Then, as though the table was a blackboard, as though it could remember what she’d written, she rubbed it out with the flat of her hand.
“Oh.” I got up and went back to my side of the table. The pie sat there taunting me. I stabbed my fork into that stupid hopeful meringue and pulled it apart. Then I slid closer to the jukebox and pressed my ear against the speaker. I closed my eyes and tried to make the whole diner disappear. As “99 Luftballons” started up, I sat there waiting for Nena to say “Captain Kirk,” the two words in that whole song I understood.
Six
The coffin wasn’t open at Finn’s funeral, and everyone was grateful for that. Especially me. I’d been imagining his closed eyes. His thin-skinned eyelids. I’d been wondering how I would stop myself from laying gentle fingers against them and sliding them open. Just to see Finn’s blue eyes one more time.
The funeral was exactly a week after the phone call. It was a Thursday, and we were missing the afternoon of school for it. I was pretty sure that was the only reason Greta agreed to come. This was also one of the few days in my life that I’d ever seen both my parents off on the same day during a tax season.