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already lived twice as long as Van Houten’s daughter. What he wouldn’t have given to have a kid die at sixteen.
Suddenly Mom was standing between the TV and me, her hands folded behind her back. “Hazel,” she said. Her voice was so serious I
thought something might be wrong.
“Yes?”
“Do you know what today is?”
“It’s not my birthday, is it?”
She laughed. “Not just yet. It’s July fourteenth, Hazel.”
“Is it your birthday?”
“No . . .”
“Is it Harry Houdini’s birthday?”
“No . . .”
“I am really tired of guessing.”
“IT IS BA STILLE DA Y!” She pulled her arms from behind her back, producing two small plastic French flags and waving them
enthusiastically.
“That sounds like a fake thing. Like Cholera A wareness Day.”
“I assure you, Hazel, that there is nothing fake about Bastille Day. Did you know that two hundred and twenty-three years ago today, the
people of France stormed the Bastille prison to arm themselves to fight for their freedom?”
“Wow,” I said. “We should celebrate this momentous a
“It so happens that I have just now scheduled a picnic with your father in Holliday Park.”
She never stopped trying, my mom. I pushed against the couch and stood up. Together, we cobbled together some sandwich makings
and found a dusty picnic basket in the hallway utility closet.
It was kind of a beautiful day, finally real summer in Indianapolis, warm and humid—the kind of weather that reminds you after a long winter that while the world wasn’t built for humans, we were built for the world. Dad was waiting for us, wearing a tan suit, standing in a
handicapped parking spot typing away on his handheld. He waved as we parked and then hugged me. “What a day,” he said. “If we lived in
California, they’d all be like this.”
“Yeah, but then you wouldn’t enjoy them,” my mom said. She was wrong, but I didn’t correct her.
We ended up putting our blanket down by the Ruins, this weird rectangle of Roman ruins plopped down in the middle of a field in
Indianapolis. But they aren’t real ruins: They’re like a sculptural re-creation of ruins built eighty years ago, but the fake Ruins have been neglected pretty badly, so they have kind of become actual ruins by accident. Van Houten would like the Ruins. Gus, too.
So we sat in the shadow of the Ruins and ate a little lunch. “Do you need sunscreen?” Mom asked.
“I’m okay,” I said.
You could hear the wind in the leaves, and on that wind traveled the screams of the kids on the playground in the distance, the little kids figuring out how to be alive, how to navigate a world that was not built for them by navigating a playground that was. Dad saw me watching
the kids and said, “You miss ru
“Sometimes, I guess.” But that wasn’t what I was thinking. I was just trying to notice everything: the light on the ruined Ruins, this little kid who could barely walk discovering a stick at the corner of the playground, my indefatigable mother zigzagging mustard across her turkey sandwich, my dad patting his handheld in his pocket and resisting the urge to check it, a guy throwing a Frisbee that his dog kept ru
under and catching and returning to him.
Who am I to say that these things might not be forever? Who is Peter Van Houten to assert as fact the conjecture that our labor is
temporary? A ll I know of heaven and all I know of death is in this park: an elegant universe in ceaseless motion, teeming with ruined ruins and screaming children.
My dad was waving his hand in front of my face. “Tune in, Hazel. A re you there?”
“Sorry, yeah, what?”
“Mom suggested we go see Gus?”
“Oh. Yeah,” I said.
So after lunch, we drove down to Crown Hill Cemetery, the last and final resting place of three vice presidents, one president, and A ugustus Waters. We drove up the hill and parked. Cars roared by behind us on Thiry-eighth Street. It was easy to find his grave: It was the newest.
The earth was still mounded above his coffin. No headstone yet.
I didn’t feel like he was there or anything, but I still took one of Mom’s dumb little French flags and stuck it in the ground at the foot of his grave. Maybe passersby would think he was a member of the French Foreign Legion or some heroic mercenary.
* * *
Lidewij finally wrote back just after six P.M. while I was on the couch watching both TV and videos on my laptop. I saw immediately there
were four attachments to the email and I wanted to open them first, but I resisted temptation and read the email.
Dear Hazel,
Peter was very intoxicated when we arrived at his house this morning, but this made our job somewhat easier. Bas (my boyfriend)
distracted him while I searched through the garbage bag Peter keeps with the fan mail in it, but then I realized that A ugustus knew
Peter’s address. There was a large pile of mail on his dining room table, where I found the letter very quickly. I opened it and saw that it was addressed to Peter, so I asked him to read it.
He refused.
A t this point, I became very angry, Hazel, but I did not yell at him. Instead, I told him that he owed it to his dead daughter to read
this letter from a dead boy, and I gave him the letter and he read the entire thing and said—I quote him directly—“Send it to the girl and
tell her I have nothing to add.”
I have not read the letter, although my eyes did fall on some phrases while sca
will mail them to you at your home; your address is the same?
May God bless and keep you, Hazel.
Your friend,
Lidewij Vliegenthart
I clicked open the four attachments. His handwriting was messy, slanting across the page, the size of the letters varying, the color of the pen changing. He’d written it over many days in varying degrees of consciousness.
Van Houten,
I’m a good person but a shitty writer. You’re a shitty person but a good writer. We’d make a good team. I don’t want to ask you any
favors, but if you have time—and from what I saw, you have plenty—I was wondering if you could write a eulogy for Hazel. I’ve got
notes and everything, but if you could just make it into a coherent whole or whatever? Or even just tell me what I should say differently.
Here’s the thing about Hazel: A lmost everyone is obsessed with leaving a mark upon the world. Bequeathing a legacy. Outlasting death.
We all want to be remembered. I do, too. That’s what bothers me most, is being another unremembered casualty in the ancient and
inglorious war against disease.
I want to leave a mark.
But Van Houten: The marks humans leave are too often scars. You build a hideous minimall or start a coup or try to become a rock star
and you think, “They’ll remember me now,” but (a) they don’t remember you, and (b) all you leave behind are more scars. Your coup
becomes a dictatorship. Your minimall becomes a lesion.
(Okay, maybe I’m not such a shitty writer. But I can’t pull my ideas together, Van Houten. My thoughts are stars I can’t fathom into
constellations.)
We are like a bunch of dogs squirting on fire hydrants. We poison the groundwater with our toxic piss, marking everything MINE in a
ridiculous attempt to survive our deaths. I can’t stop pissing on fire hydrants. I know it’s silly and useless—epically useless in my current state—but I am an animal like any other.