LITMIR.BIZ

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      Blake and Mason had dismantled the woman’s overflowing garbage heap of house in Denmark, Maine, after she died. She had been a hoarder, hoarding even herself in the end. She kept eating and sitting, eating and sitting, and soon she got so big that she couldn’t move off her couch, and she just kept eating and eating and eating, using the couch not just as a bed and a dining table, but also as a toilet, and, eventually, as a grave.

      It was winter when she died, and everyone had been snowed in for days. The local market couldn’t deliver Darlene’s groceries. When the roads were finally plowed, Barry the delivery boy brought Darlene her customary two boxes of Pringles and pretzels. Barry found her. Barry did not recover from this. He had been a shy clumsy kid in Chloe’s homeroom, but now he was on major meds, in therapy six days a week and home-schooled by Social Services.

      The townies talked about nothing else. What was Darlene’s life like before she and the couch became one? What drama in her life had led her to the upholstered end? Was the end a consequence, an answer to a why? Or was it a catalyst? If everything you did led to everything else that would eventually happen, the question was: was Darlene Duranceau the beginning or the end?

      After the coroner pronounced her dead, and it was time to remove her from the premises, the EMT workers discovered that she was stuck. From lack of movement, she had developed sores that festered, causing open wounds that oozed into the sofa, which then closed up around Darlene’s flesh like lichen to a rock. She had liquefied and then mummified into her furniture. The town cremated her with the couch. No one but the boys out in the schoolyard ever discussed how the funeral home fit Darlene and her Davenport into the relatively narrow opening of the cremation pyre.

      How could Chloe add to Hannah’s chaos by confessing about California?

      She wants to tell her, but she can’t.

      She can’t.

      And she doesn’t want to.

      Hannah will feel betrayed.

      What kind of a terrible friend would Chloe be to betray her friend and then tell her about it?

      So she doesn’t tell her.

      She thinks she justifies it beautifully.

      Only a guilty mouthful of what feels like open safety pins alerts Chloe to the falseness of her excuses.

      “I know the answer,” Hannah said. “You know what happened next for Darlene? Nothing.”

      “Yes. That was the end of Darlene’s story. But yours is just beginning, Hannah. That’s what I’m trying to say. Take heart.”

      “Did you see how upset Martyn was?”

      “I saw.”

      “Do you think he’s going to be okay?”

      “I don’t know.”

      “What do you think is going to happen?”

      “It’ll be something. Martyn is not Darlene.”

      “But what if what happens next is you and your sacred striped sofa become one?” said Hannah. “What if when God said flesh of my flesh, he meant flesh of my sofa? The Chesterfield of my flesh? What if Martyn is a Darlene?”

      “You can’t possibly believe that.”

      There was silence for a while. It was black out. There were no lights on the road except for the car’s headlights.

      “Blake is the sweetest lover,” Hannah said in a small sad voice. “You don’t expect that from someone like him, because he’s so rough and tumble, but he is super gentle and super considerate. He’s always caressing me, kissing my back. He’s always trying to make me happy.”

      “You’re lucky,” Chloe said, settling into the wheel, stepping on the gas pedal. She didn’t think Blake was so rough. For months, when his dad couldn’t walk, on account of nearly dying, oh and having a back broken in three places, Blake carried his father to the reclining chair by the sandy shore and set him down into it so Burt could watch the lake and the sky and Blake and Chloe fishing in the boat and skating on the ice. His dad liked to watch the kids having fun, Blake said.

       9

       Red Vineyard

      “TEACH ME, HAIKU. TELL ME HOW TO BEGIN. TUTOR ME IN beginnings.”

      Blake plopped down across from her in the nearly empty learning center, scruffy, smiling, slapping his notebooks onto the heavy wooden table between them. His pens rolled toward the window. Chloe watched them, and he watched her watching them. Without breaking eye contact with her, he stopped them from falling to the floor and then he spoke. “What’s been the matter with you today?” When she didn’t reply, he went on. “Is it because of Barcelona? Don’t worry. They’ll say yes. They’ve been talking to my mom. Asking her if she thinks we’re trustworthy.” Blake laughed. “I told her, lie, Ma, say yes!”

      She smiled half-heartedly but couldn’t look at him. She pretended she was super distracted by Very Important Thoughts. About pi and Ovid and Pearl Buck. The tutoring center at the Academy was a large first-floor classroom with twenty-foot windows and long wooden tables behind which girls like herself sat and waited for students who needed help in math, hard sciences, English, you name it.

      Although final exams were getting close, the place was nearly empty. She’d had just one student all afternoon, an apathetic freshman from Delaware named Kerwin, whom she schooled in irrational numbers like pi. “You can’t have an infinite string of zeroes in a pi exponent,” Chloe told Kerwin, “because then the fraction would end. And what do we know about pi? It’s transcendental. It cannot end.” Her mother had once taught her about pi. Something about divinity and infinity. The soul is divine, her mother had told an anguished Chloe. Don’t worry. The soul has no end. Like pi. An infinite thing cannot end.

      Kerwin wasn’t getting it. And Chloe wasn’t at her best. Her mind kept wandering. To distant beaches, imposing cathedrals, white stucco resorts in the hills, Hannah walking arm in arm with Blake through the halls, cozy as all that, as if Martyn had not happened, as if the last eight months of tawdry Tuesdays and Saturdays at the Silver Pines had not happened, Hannah making out with Blake between Health and Gym, discussing the prom with him between English and Science, fretting about her mango dress matching his peach cummerbund at the prom, and all the while Blake going on and on about Barcelona, and all the while sadness seeping on and on into Chloe’s heart. How could Hannah pull off such nonchalance? Chloe couldn’t tell why this bothered her as it did. Usually she tried not to ask herself too many why questions.

      Now, pretending she hadn’t heard Blake ask about beginnings, Chloe turned to the window, to continue to daydream about Iberian dragons rampaging through the streets. Across the field she could almost make out Mason’s breathless shape on the baseball diamond. He was just a panting dot in golden dirt. It was the only time she saw him panting, perspiring, on fire. When he was out in the field.

      “Yoo-hoo, Haiku …”

      She blinked and dragging herself back to reality turned to a quizzical, smiling Blake. He was clad as usual in plaid and flannel and cotton and denim, his stubble four days old, his wild hair three days unbrushed and two months streaked by the spring sun. “I just need to know what’s in my suitcase,” he said.

      “In our play we reveal what kind of people we are,” Chloe told Blake, quoting Ovid. “So first figure that part out.”

      He looked wholly unimpressed. “You’re putting the cart before the horse.”

      “No …”

      “You are. Believe me. First I write. Then I figure out what it all means. Which, by the way, is the opposite of the insane horse crowd. They put portents on paper first and then use a mallet to

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