“Mark.”
“I really am serious. I loved that Christmas. I loved the way we were with each other. Before that, you know, we were all kind of numbed out, because of Dad dying, and I’d been thinking that maybe we wouldn’t ever be really together again. And that Christmas came and we were us, together, not three separate people. That was the first time from when Dad first got sick that I knew I was going to be happy again and—you know, you can’t drive too well if you’re crying your eyes out, either.”
“I’m not crying my eyes out.”
“That’s Niagara Falls I see falling down the front of your face.”
“Is it really?” Geoff said. “Can I see it, too?”
“Sit down and keep your seat belt on,” Mark said.
They had reached another intersection—it was incredible how many small roads there were, crisscrossing each other back and forth under this thick cover of trees—and Liz turned automatically to the right. At the top of the road’s steep embankment, there was a long Cape Cod–style house that she had admired as a child. When she passed it on the bus going to sports games or “special events,” she found herself wishing she lived in it. Now it looked impossibly small, and worse than small, dated. She knew, even though she had never been in it, that the ceilings would be no more than eight feet high and the kitchen would be fitted with the kind of laminated cabinets that peeled in the corners after a year or two.
“You know,” Mark said, “I don’t think you’re being stupid, feeling the way you feel. I mean, from some of the stories I’ve heard—”
“From whom? Has Maris been telling you things?”
“Ms. Coleman barely speaks to me. She thinks I’m cow dung. Okay. I’ve been reading a few of those stories in those papers, you know the ones—”
“Where are you getting the National Enquirer?”
“At the drugstore. And don’t say it. Nobody cares what I read in the drugstore, and I’m not buying them. Except that I did buy the Weekly World News. You’re not ever in that one. To get into that one, you’ve got to meet with a space alien. George Bush did.”
“What?”
“Not this George Bush. The other one. George Herbert Walker Bush. The principal reason why I’m not applying to Andover.”
“Right. Mark, where the hell is this going?”
Mark picked up his copy of Metamorphosis and ruffled the edges of the pages with the pad of his thumb. This was why his books all disintegrated. He not only read them, he abused them. Liz had grown up treating books as icons, or maybe as incarnations of God. She was no more capable of dog-earring a book than she was of lighting one on fire. The two acts had some strange connection with each other in her mind.
“I don’t want to see you get hurt,” Mark said. “I’m not stupid. I know why we never came here to visit Grandmother when Dad was alive. I don’t need the tabloids or Jimmy Card to tell me that this place sucks for you, it leeches something out of you, and you get, I don’t know, odd. Not yourself. Not you the way I know you. So far, all the signs have been all bad, except the car—”
“Jesus Christ.”
“—and you can’t take credit for the car, because Jimmy nearly browbeat you into it, and you know it. If it had been up to you, we’d have come out here in the Volvo—”
“A Volvo is a prestige car.”
“Our Volvo looks like you’ve been using it to haul horse manure. Literally. I mean, I’m glad we bought the Mercedes. It’s neat as hell. I’ve always wanted cream leather seats, just to see how long it takes to get them dirty. But I can just see you sitting there feeling you don’t deserve it. Feeling guilty about it. Because that’s what this place does to you. It makes you feel guilty about everything good that’s ever happened to you.”
They were at Plumtrees School. Back in the days when Pennsylvania had still been a colony, and for years afterward, this had been Hollman’s one-room schoolhouse. Back in the early sixties, when the town had begun to bulge with the never-ending baby boom, this had been painted barn-red and used as a kindergarten for the children of the people who lived in Plumtrees and Stony Hill. Now, Liz checked the sign on its side, it was some kind of office for the Health Department.
“It’s so odd,” Liz said. “I can’t imagine Hollman having its own Health Department.”
“I give up,” Mark said. He opened Metamorphosis and flattened it out against his leg. That was another reason why all his books fell apart. He had no respect for spines. “Someday, you ought to sit down and figure out what it is you want to do when you grow up. Try to get that done before I leave for prep school, so I don’t have to worry about you stranded in the house on your own with nobody but Geoff to take care of you.”