Donna Tartt - The Goldfinch

Light from the street flew in black bands across the floor. Hopelessly, I thought of my bedroom standing empty only a few blocks away: my own narrow bed with the worn red quilt. Glow-in-the-dark stars from the planetarium, a picture postcard of James Whale’s Frankenstein. The birds were back in the park again, the daffodils were up; this time of year, when the weather got nice, sometimes we woke up extra early in the mornings and walked through the park together instead of taking the bus to the West Side. If only I could go back and change what had happened, keep it from happening somehow. Why hadn’t I insisted we get breakfast instead of going to the museum? Why hadn’t Mr. Beeman asked us to come in on Tuesday, or Thursday?

Either the second night after my mother died or the third—some time at any rate after Mrs. Barbour took me to the doctor to get my headache seen to—the Barbours were throwing a big party at the apartment that it was too late for them to cancel. There was whispering, a flurry of activity that I could scarcely take in. “I think,” said Mrs. Barbour when she came back to Andy’s room, “you and Theo might enjoy staying back here.” Despite her light tone, clearly it was not a suggestion but an order. “It’ll be such a bore, and I really don’t think you’ll enjoy yourselves at all. I’ll ask Etta to bring you a couple of plates from the kitchen.”

Andy and I sat side by side on the lower bunk of his bed, eating cocktail shrimp and artichoke canapés from paper plates—or, rather, he ate, while I sat with the plate on my knees, untouched. He had on a DVD, some action movie with exploding robots, showers of metal and flame. From the living room: clinking glasses, smells of candle wax and perfume, every now and then a voice rising brilliantly in laughter. The pianist’s sparkling, up-tempo arrangement of “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” seemed to be floating in from an alternate universe. Everything was lost, I had fallen off the map: the disorientation of being in the wrong apartment, with the wrong family, was wearing me down, so I felt groggy and punch-drunk, weepy almost, like an interrogated prisoner prevented from sleeping for days. Over and over, I kept thinking I’ve got to go home and then, for the millionth time, I can’t.

iv.

AFTER FOUR DAYS, OR maybe it was five, Andy loaded his books in his stretched-out backpack and returned to school. All that day, and the next, I sat in his room with his television turned to Turner Classic Movies, which was what my mother watched when she was home from work. They were showing movies adapted from Graham Greene: Ministry of Fear, The Human Factor, The Fallen Idol, This Gun for Hire. That second evening, while I was waiting for The Third Man to come on, Mrs. Barbour (all Valentino-ed up and on her way out the door to an event at the Frick) stopped by Andy’s room and announced that I was going back to school the next day. “ Any body would feel out of sorts,” she said. “Back here by yourself. It isn’t good for you.”

I didn’t know what to say. Sitting around on my own watching movies was the only thing I’d done since my mother’s death that had felt even vaguely normal.

“It’s high time for you to get back into some sort of a routine. Tomorrow. I know it doesn’t seem so, Theo,” she said when I didn’t answer, “but keeping busy is the only thing in the world that’ll make you feel better.”

Resolutely I stared at the television. I hadn’t been at school since the day before my mother died and as long as I stayed away her death seemed unofficial somehow. But once I went back it would be a public fact. Worse: the thought of returning to any kind of normal routine seemed disloyal, wrong. It kept being a shock every time I remembered it, a fresh slap: she was gone. Every new event—everything I did for the rest of my life—would only separate us more and more: days she was no longer a part of, an ever-growing distance between us. Every single day for the rest of my life, she would only be further away.

“Theo.”

Startled, I looked up at her.

“One foot after the other. There’s no other way to get through this.”

The next day, they were having a World War II spy marathon ( Cairo, The Hidden Enemy, Code Name: Emerald ) that I really wanted to stay home and see. Instead, I dragged myself out of bed when Mr. Barbour stuck his head in to wake us (“Up and at ’em, hoplites!”) and walked to the bus stop with Andy. It was a rainy day, and cold enough that Mrs. Barbour had forced me into wearing an embarrassing old duffel coat of Platt’s over my clothes. Andy’s little sister, Kitsey, danced ahead of us in her pink raincoat, skipping through puddles and pretending she didn’t know us.

I knew it was going to be horrible and it was, from the second I stepped into the bright hall and smelled the familiar old school smell: citrus disinfectant and something like old socks. Hand-lettered signs in the hallway: sign-up sheets for tennis lab and cooking classes, tryouts for The Odd Couple, field trip to Ellis Island and tickets still available for the Swing into Spring concert, hard to believe that the world had ended and yet somehow these ridiculous activities kept grinding on.

The strange thing: the last day I’d been in the building, she was alive. I kept on thinking it, and every time it was new: last time I opened this locker, last time I touched this stupid fucking Insights in Biology book, last time I saw Lindy Maisel putting on lip gloss with that plastic wand. It seemed hardly credible that I couldn’t follow these moments back to a world where she wasn’t dead.

“Sorry.” People I knew said it, and people who had never spoken to me in my life. Other people—laughing and talking in the hallways—fell silent when I walked by, throwing grave or quizzical looks my way. Others still ignored me completely, as playful dogs will ignore an ill or injured dog in their midst: by refusing to look at me, by romping and frolicking around me in the hallways as if I weren’t there.

Tom Cable, in particular, avoided me as assiduously as if I were a girl he’d dumped. At lunch, he was nowhere to be found. In Spanish (he sauntered in well after class started, missing the awkward scene where everyone crowded somberly around my desk to say they were sorry) he didn’t sit by me as usual but up front, slouched down with his legs thrown out to the side. Rain drummed on the windowpanes as we translated our way through a series of bizarre sentences, sentences that would have done Salvador Dalí proud: about lobsters and beach umbrellas, and Marisol with the long eyelashes taking the lime-green taxi to school.

After class, on the way out, I made a point of going up and saying hi as he was getting his books.

“Oh, hey, how’s it going,” he said—distanced, leaning back with a smart-ass arch to the brow. “I heard an’ all.”

“Yeah.” This was our routine: too cool for everyone else, always in on the same joke.

“Tough luck. That really bites.”

“Thanks.”

“Hey—shoulda played sick. Told you! My mom blew up over all that shit too. Hit the fucking ceiling! Well, er,” he said, half-shrugging in the stunned moment that followed this, looking up, down, around, with a who, me? look, like he’d thrown a snowball with a rock in it.

“Anyway. So,” he said in a moving-right-along voice. “What’s with the costume?”

“What?”

“Well”—ironic little back-step, eyeing the plaid duffel coat—“first place, definitely, in the Platt Barbour Look-Alike Contest.”

And despite myself—it was a shock, after days of horror and numbness, an eruptive Tourette’s-like spasm—I laughed.