Donna Tartt - The Goldfinch

Terrified she was going to catch me staring, unable to wrench my eyes away, I watched her studying my iPod with bent head: ears rosy-pink, raised line of scar tissue slightly puckered underneath the scalding-red hair. In profile her downcast eyes were long, heavy-lidded, with a tenderness that reminded me of the angels and page boys in the Northern European Masterworks book I’d checked and re-checked from the library.

“Hey—” Words drying up in my mouth.

“Yes?”

“Um—” Why wasn’t it like before? Why couldn’t I think of anything to say?

“Oooh—” she’d glanced up at me, and then was laughing again, laughing too hard to talk.

“What is it?”

“Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Like what?” I said, alarmed.

“Like—” I wasn’t sure how to interpret the pop-eyed face she made at me. Choking person? Mongoloid? Fish?

“Dont be mad. You’re just so serious. It’s just—” she glanced down at the iPod, and broke out laughing again. “Ooh,” she said, “Shostakovich, intense. ”

How much did she remember? I wondered, afire with humiliation yet unable to tear my eyes from her. It wasn’t the kind of thing you could ask but still I wanted to know. Did she have nightmares too? Crowd fears? Sweats and panics? Did she ever have the sense of observing herself from afar, as I often did, as if the explosion had knocked my body and my soul into two separate entities that remained about six feet apart from one another? Her gust of laughter had a self-propelling recklessness I knew all too well from wild nights with Boris, an edge of giddiness and hysteria that I associated (in myself, anyway) with having narrowly missed death. There had been nights in the desert where I was so sick with laughter, convulsed and doubled over with aching stomach for hours on end, I would happily have thrown myself in front of a car to make it stop.

iv.

ON MONDAY MORNING, THOUGH I was far from well, I roused myself from my fog of aches and dozes and trudged dutifully into the kitchen and telephoned Mr. Bracegirdle’s office. But when I asked for him, his secretary (after putting me on hold, and then returning a bit too swiftly) informed me that Mr. Bracegirdle was out of the office and no, she didn’t have a number where he could be reached and no, she was afraid she couldn’t say when he might be in. Was there anything else?

“Well—” I left Hobie’s number with her and was regretting that I’d been too slow on the draw to go ahead and schedule the appointment when the phone rang.

“212, eh?” said the rich, clever voice.

“I left,” I said stupidly; the cold in my head made me sound nasal and block-witted. “I’m in the city.”

“Yes, I gathered.” His tone was friendly but cool. “What can I do for you?”

When I told him about my father, there was a deep breath. “Well,” he said carefully. “I’m sorry to hear it. When did this happen?”

“Last week.”

He listened without interrupting; in the five minutes or so it took me to fill him in, I heard him turn away at least two other calls. “Crikey,” he said, when I’d finished talking. “That’s quite a story, Theodore.”

Crikey: in a different mood, I might have smiled. This was definitely a person my mother had known and liked.

“It must have been dreadful for you out there,” he was saying. “Of course, I’m terribly sorry for your loss. It’s all very sad. Though quite frankly—and I feel more comfortable saying this to you now—when he turned up, no one knew what to do. Your mother had of course confided some things—even Samantha had expressed concerns—well, as you know, it was a difficult situation. But I don’t think anyone expected this. Thugs with baseball bats.”

“Well—” thugs with baseball bats, I hadn’t really meant for him to seize on that detail. “He was just standing there holding it. It’s not like he hit me or anything.”

“Well—” he laughed, an easy laugh that broke the tension—“sixty-five thousand dollars did seem like a very specific sum. I have to say too—I went a bit beyond my authority as your counsel when we spoke on the phone, though under the circumstances I hope you’ll forgive me. It was just that I smelled a bit of a rat.”

“Sorry?” I said, after a sick pause.

“Over the phone. The money. You can withdraw it, from the 529 anyway. Large tax penalty, but it’s possible.”

Possible? I could have taken it? An alternate future was flashing through my mind: Mr. Silver paid, Dad in his bathrobe checking the sports scores on his BlackBerry, me in Spirsetskaya’s class with Boris lazing across the aisle from me.

“Although I do need to tell you that the money in the fund is actually a bit short of that,” Mr. Bracegirdle was saying. “Socked away and growing all the time, though! Not that we can’t arrange for you to use some of it now, given your circumstances, but your mother was absolutely determined not to dip into it even with her financial troubles. The last thing she would have wanted was for your dad to get his hands on it. And yes, just between the two of us, I do think you were very smart to come back to the city on your own recognizance. Sorry—” muffled conversation—“I’ve got an eleven o’clock, I’ve got to run—you’re staying at Samantha’s now, I gather?”

The question threw me for a loop. “No,” I said, “with some friends in the Village.”

“Well, splendid. Just so long as you’re comfortable. At any rate, I’m afraid I have to dash now. What do you say we continue this discussion in my office? I’ll put you back through to Patsy so she can schedule an appointment.”

“Great,” I said, “thank you,” but when I got off the phone, I felt sick—like someone had just reached a hand in my chest and wrenched loose a lot of ugly wet stuff around my heart.

“Everything okay?” said Hobie—crossing through the kitchen, stopping suddenly to see the look on my face.

“Sure.” But it was a long walk down the hall to my room—and once I closed the door and climbed back in bed I began to cry, or half-cry, ugly dry wheezes with my face pressed in the pillow, while Popchik pawed at my shirt and snuffled anxiously against the back of my neck.

v.

BEFORE THIS, I’D BEEN feeling better, but somehow it was like this news made me ill all over again. As the day wore on and my fever climbed to its former dizzying wobble, I could think of nothing but my dad: I have to call him, I thought, starting again and again from bed just as I was drifting off; it was as if his death weren’t real but only a rehearsal, a trial run; the real death (the permanent one) was yet to happen and there was time to stop it if only I found him, if only he was answering his cell phone, if Xandra could reach him from work, I have to get hold of him, I have to let him know. Then, later—the day was over, it was dark—I had fallen into a troubled half dream where my dad was excoriating me for screwing up some air travel reservations when I became aware of lights in the hallway, a tiny backlit shadow—Pippa, coming suddenly into the room with stumbling step almost like someone had pushed her, looking doubtfully behind her, saying: “Should I wake him?”

“Wait,” I said—half to her and half to my dad, who was falling back rapidly into the darkness, some violent stadium crowd on the other side of a tall, arched gate. When I got my glasses on, I saw she had her coat on like she was going out.

“Sorry?” I said, arm over my eyes, confused in the glare from the lamp.