smoke?” he says. “You’re allowed to smoke?”
“Oh yeah,” I say, “just not in the house.”
Kevin nods his head, maybe he’s underestimated me.
“What did you do to your hair?” I say.
“I’m not gonna keep it,” he says.
I tell him I like it.
“I don’t know,” he says. He turns away from me and looks at the destruction again. He starts to play with the chain around his neck.
“I have to get going,” he says.
I ask him does he want to go up and hang out in the gazebo. I fake puff on my cigarette. He just stares at me.
“Come on,” I say, “like the old days.”
“I can’t,” he says, “I have homework.”
Homework? I think. A boy with blue hair should not have to do homework.
“How’s your brother?” I say.
Kevin nods his head and then looks at his boots. I wonder is he afraid of me. A lot of people are funny around us, Ma and Da and me. They don’t want to get too close to the curse of the Savitches.
I have a letter from Kevin’s brother under my bed, an e-mail he sent to my sister.
“Does he have a new girlfriend?” I say.
“You shouldn’t smoke,” Kevin says.
I fake puff on the cigarette and blow the invisible smoke in Kevin’s face.
“See you Mathilda,” he says, and then he walks away like a cowboy.
I want to fuck you, is one of the things in the letter.
Also, I am in love with you.
Isn’t language amazing? I can’t get over it. Sometimes you can just say things and it’s like a bomb that blows all your clothes off and suddenly there you are naked. I don’t know if it’s disgusting or beautiful.
The bulldozer comes back to life and when I look up at it I see there’s a man inside. I didn’t even notice him before. He’s in a little cage, like a rat or an astronaut. When I look at him he winks at me.
I turn away but I can feel his eyes still on me. Probably because I’m wearing a skirt. I throw the cigarette on the ground and crush it with my foot. I swoosh my foot back and forth three times. It’s the classic way to put out cigarettes. Watch people if you don’t believe me.
A lot of Helene’s boyfriends looked the same. They had dark hair. They were skinny but they had shoulders. Mostly tall, pale skin. They never carried books. They swaggered. You would have to say they were good-looking.
Helene wasn’t a saint. Have I given you that impression? She definitely had a body. It’s weird to think a dead person is the same person who once had a lot of desire. It’s weird because you don’t want to think too much about the bodies of dead people.
The last few months before the train she was always back from school later than usual and at night she pretty much always came home past her curfew. She had ways of sneaking in and out. She was clever. She knew how to get into bars just from wearing the right shirt and from the way she moved. The funny thing is, she still got all her homework done and passed every test at school. I think that’s why Ma and Da couldn’t say much about what she did at night, they couldn’t really prove it was hurting her. Besides, no one could ever say no to Helene. Imagine the beauty of Anna and add to that a brain.
Sexy and brainy, that’s the best combination. That was Helene for sure, and I bet Ma was like that once too. The librarian who takes off her glasses and lets down her hair. She wears a white blouse buttoned to the neck but suddenly she undoes it a little and it’s devastating. You see her in a whole new light as she makes herself comfortable on the bed. Even her voice goes deeper.
Ma and Da used to be great sleepers and so it was always me who woke up if there was a creak when Helene snuck out. One night around three in the morning she climbed into my bed. When I clicked on the lamp, I saw she was still in her dress and her face looked blurry like someone had tried to erase it. And her mouth was like the mouth of a little kid when they eat too much jelly. I asked her what was the matter and she said, nothing, go back to sleep. I kept looking at her though because I was pretty sure she wanted to tell me something. She kept staring right back at me and finally she sort of smiled and said, salagadoola mechika boola, bibbidi-bobbidi-boo, which is the magic song from Cinderella. The lyrics don’t make a whole lot of sense but for a long time it was my favorite song in the world. Helene was hugging me so tight that I didn’t think I’d be able to fall back asleep, but I did. I think the words of that song do something to you, especially late at night when you’re in bed with your sister and suddenly she loves you. Which wasn’t always the case.
Sometimes Helene seemed mad at all of us and we hadn’t even done anything. Other times it was fits of crying. She was very emotional. Her and Ma used to get into some big fights. For some reason Ma didn’t like it when Helene fell in love, which she did quite often. I guess Ma didn’t want Helene running off and ruining her life. “I’m not you,” Helene yelled at her once, and Ma yelled right back, “Yes you are!” The fighting used to scare me, but when I think of it now I’d give them both Academy Awards. In my mind the fights are like a beautiful movie I wish I could watch again. Sometimes Helene would end up crying in Ma’s arms. And every once in a while I’d catch them on the couch downstairs, whispering to each other and laughing. Half the time they’d go mute when I walked into the room. It used to drive me crazy. What did they think I was, a spy trying to get at their secrets? “Come here,” Ma would say, “sit with us,” and of course I would, but it always felt like a test. I used to try to come up with something really funny just to impress them.
When I have a fit now, Ma just walks away. She won’t fight back like she did with Helene. Sometimes my fits are real, sometimes I make them up, but I don’t think Ma can tell the difference. The nightmares were real, the first few months, but it was always Da that came into my room. I still have bad dreams every once in a while, but my parents don’t know because I don’t cry out for them anymore. The Tree taught me how to breathe when I wake up from a bad dream, and how to train my thoughts. When you learn things like this, you can pretty much get along by yourself. You don’t need other people waiting on you hand and foot.
I spend a lot of time in H’s room. Sometimes I picture myself sleeping in there and Ma comes to the door and sees me under the covers and for a second she doesn’t know it’s me. She thinks it’s you-know-who. If that ever really happened, I wouldn’t say boo or anything, I wouldn’t want to give her a heart attack. I’d just lie there and keep the covers over my head and let Ma sort it out for herself.
A few weeks after Helene died, there was a night Ma and Da and I were having dinner and the phone rang. Except it didn’t come from the kitchen, it came from upstairs. It was the phone in Helene’s bedroom. Her princess line, as Ma called it. It rang like twenty times but nobody moved. The next day Ma had it disconnected. Did you ever see the movie where that grown woman goes back in time to the house she grew up in and the telephone rings and it’s the woman’s grandmother calling? And the two of them talk about nothing special but you can see the woman is crying because in the future where she came from the grandmother is dead. Movies can do stuff like that, that’s why they’re so important. Movies don’t have a problem with time and space. They’re not as restrictive as real life.
Even H’s cell phone is dead because it was crushed by the train. Apparently it was given to Ma and Da in a plastic bag. At least I have the love letters, if you can call them that. Based on my calculations there were about ten boys Helene was involved with. Not all at the same time of course, but in the last few years. Most of them I can picture because they’ve been to the house. But the most interesting one is a boy I’ve never seen, the boy of the last six months. He writes in full sentences and they’re good sentences too in my opinion. Louis is his name. [email protected].