can reach her.
‘Don’t you understand, Tully?’ Jennifer said. ‘I love him, I love him.’
‘You do?’ said Tully distastefully. ‘So, okay. So, un-love him.’
‘Tully, you don’t – you just can’t – just stop loving the people you love.’
‘You can’t? Why the hell not?’
‘I don’t know, I can’t,’ said Jennifer brokenly. ‘He is my first love. My very first. And I will never stop loving him.’
Tully sighed and tried to reason with her. ‘Jen, I know, but everyone says that. Everyone feels that way, that we will never stop loving someone, that we will never love anyone else, that we can never feel more than we do right now, but yet…we do, somehow, stop loving. We do get over it. Don’t we? We have to. We must. Otherwise, how could we go on?’
‘Tully, I know you, of all people, are skeptical. I don’t expect you to understand. I just know the way I feel about him and have felt about him for a long time. I will never love anyone else for the rest of my life.’
Tully patted Jennifer’s head. ‘And it may be a very short life indeed, Mandolini, because if you don’t stop crying, I’m going to have to kill you.’
Jennifer laughed a little and wiped her face with her arm.
‘I love when you do that,’ said Tully, handing her a tissue. ‘You look soooo attractive.’
The girls settled back into bed. Jennifer faced the wall and Tully lay down beside her.
‘I’m hot, Tully, I’m very hot. Can you blow on my forehead?’ Jen said, turning around. And Tully did, while Jennifer whispered with closed eyes that trickled tears. ‘Why do I love him, Tully, why? For what good and damned reason do I love him?’
‘Because he is beautiful and he moves well?’ said Tully.
‘You think he is beautiful?’ exclaimed Jennifer.
‘No,’ said Tully quickly. ‘You think he is beautiful.’
Jennifer closed her eyes again. ‘I shut my eyes and I see his face,’ she whispered. ‘I see his face as it talks and laughs, I see only his face and nothing else. Not even you, Makker, not even you. You know? I don’t even see Palo Alto anymore. Just him. My God, Tully, what’s happening?’
‘You’ve taken complete leave of your senses,’ Tully said gently.
Jennifer continued to cry, but softer and slower, and Tully continued to wipe her face and blow on her forehead, but softer and slower. Finally Jennifer fell asleep, but Tully did not.
She lay perched on her elbow, tenderly blowing on Jennifer’s face for a long time, remembering the first time she had met her. Julie had introduced them. And Julie had met Tully by finding her wandering on the street not far from Lowman’s Hill Elementary School, where Tully attended kindergarten. Tully had gotten lost again – accidentally on purpose – and Angela Martinez brought the five-year-old girl home. Tully played with Julie while Angela called the police. ‘Oh, it’s that Makker kid again,’ the cops said when they arrived. ‘She’s always getting lost, once a week, about. One day she’ll wander out onto the turnpike and that will be the last we’ll see of her. She’ll just keep going. She’s a spunky little kid. We’ll drive her home now.’
Oh, no, Julie and her mother had objected. Let her play. We’ll take her home. They fed Tully dinner: burritos and tacos. Tully had never eaten such delicious food.
Angela was worried that Tully’s parents might be going out of their minds looking for her. Tully wanted to tell the nice woman that was not a problem, but Angela found out soon enough when she brought Tully home and Hedda said, ‘Have you been out again? What did we tell you? Stay in the yard.’
From then on, Mrs Martinez tried to pick Tully up from kindergarten and bring her to the house. Tully remembered that several weeks later during the summer, Lynn Mandolini brought Jennifer over. Jennifer! So plump, so bossy! She came into Julie’s house and immediately told the two girls to give her the bike. The three of them played together all summer, and every summer after that. When Jennifer was young, she lost her temper frequently when she did not get her way. Screaming, she would throw toys that weren’t hers, throw sand, throw herself on the ground, spit. When Tully was younger, she found Julie a little easier to get along with; Jennifer’s tantrums upset her.
Jennifer improved as she got older, and it was only when Tully was older herself that she discovered Jennifer was moderately autistic at the age of two and three, and Jennifer spent years overcoming the remnants of the illness as an adult. Minor vestiges of withdrawal remained: the compulsive neatness and slight detachment from physical closeness were the most obvious. But there were other things, too. Every day, Jennifer counted the number of cracks in the pavement from her house on Sunset Court to the corner of 17th Street and Wayne. She always verbalized the discovery of a new crack and showed it to Tully and Julie. She counted the number of lockers on each floor of Topeka High. She kept careful track of the gross national products of the twenty-five most developed countries, and of the broken streetlights from 17th Street to Gage Park. Also Jennifer got 800 on her math SATs she took last October. Tully pressed her lips to Jennifer’s damp forehead.
Before Tully knew Jen was sick, she thought that Jennifer was the luckiest girl on earth. Out of the three of them, she seemed to Tully the one destined to live in perpetual sunshine, having lived a sunshine childhood. After all, Jennifer had the fortune to be born to two people whose sole mission in life was Jennifer’s happiness.
While Tully played barefoot and alone in a dirty yard with chickens and stray cats. Dusty and unwashed, Tully spent her summers and afternoons in that yard of the house on the Grove, looking out onto the turnpike and the railroad. Who put suntan lotion on her? Who kissed her boo-boos and washed her face and gave her toys? The early years swam together for Tully. Somewhere in there, there were two brothers and even a father, but then Hedda and Tully were alone, and Aunt Lena and Uncle Charlie came to live with them to help Hedda with the mortgage. When Uncle Charlie died, it became easier to pay the bills with his insurance. Hedda worked as she always had, while Aunt Lena stayed home, having never worked a day in her life. Aunt Lena was gray and heavy, though she had been only forty when she became a widow. She kept mostly to herself in her rooms: she took a bedroom and a dining room after Uncle Charlie died. She said she was entitled to the space since the house now technically belonged to her.
Tully breathed on Jennifer’s face. Jenny, so many things you have at God’s grace. But I don’t care. I don’t care, and I mean it. I don’t give a shit. I can’t believe I’m thinking this, but I swear to you, Jennifer, I would relive my whole life exactly the same if somehow God, by again denying me, could bring you happiness, bring you what you really want, want with all your heart, the only thing you want. Dear Jennifer. It’ll be all right.
The next morning, her eyes red and swollen, Jennifer lay in bed and said, ‘Tull, tell me your story of the turtle and scorpion.’
‘Jen, get the hell out of here. I am dead tired. The sun is out, isn’t it? I’m like a bush baby. Now I go to sleep. You slept all night.’
‘Tell me, Tully, tell me, and please rub my back while you do it.’
‘God, Mandolini, you’re fucking demanding. Oh, all right.’ Tully sighed, sat on top of Jennifer’s rear end, and began to rub Jen’s shoulders. ‘Once upon a time,’ began Tully, ‘a scorpion swam all the way to the middle of a big lake. And when he got there, he realized he did not know how to swim and started to drown.’
‘Not so hard, Tully, not so hard!’ exclaimed Jennifer.
Tully sighed and continued, ‘“Help! Help!” the scorpion yelled. But no one came to help him. A turtle was swimming by, and the scorpion saw her and said, “Turtle, please help me. Can’t you see I’m drowning?” And the turtle said,