A Sense of the Infinite

“Trust a fake nutritionist,” Noe said as we trudged out.

“I thought it was weird that he had so many,” I said.

I told myself I was doing okay. I went skating at the rink and Christmas shopping at the mall and even to a party at Lindsay Harris’s house. I pulled the craft supply box out of the closet and made Noe a jeweled box for the talcum powder she put on her hands for uneven bars, and Steven a sparkly headband that said PEE SISTERS in purple sequins.

One day when I was cleaning my room, I found the postcards I’d bought at the Wilda McClure house. I took them downstairs and gave them to Mom.

“These are for you,” I said.

“Oh,” she said. She stuck them to the fridge with magnets. A forest, a lake, a beaver dam, a pair of snowshoes. They looked small and dumb on the fridge, doing nothing to conjure the wilderness I’d glimpsed from the bus window.

We had been careful with each other since Maple Bay. Overly polite. She took me to see a doctor to “check things out,” and on the way home we hardly spoke. I wanted to tell her about the journal I had found, but I knew it would only make her sad. Instead, I carried around the image of Scott’s face like a stone lodged in my throat.

I looked up his address on the internet. It wasn’t very hard, since I had his full name and the town.

It was strange to think of him having a house and a car and a whole normal life. It made me angry. It creeped me out.

I fantasized that I was on the canoe trip with Mom and Pauline and I came to Mom’s rescue. In some versions, I whacked him over the head with a paddle. In other versions I came ru

Sometimes in my dreams, I killed him over and over again, but he kept on getting up like a zombie and there was no way to make him die.

75

THAT CHRISTMAS, THE WATERFALL FROZE for the first time in two hundred years. The whole town came out to peer at it: a palace of ice, intricate and spired and still, so terribly still, where we had only ever seen it tumble and churn. I went with Mom and Nan and Aunt Monique to huddle by the iron railing and take turns saying how we’d never, ever, ever, seen a thing like that before.

At Nan’s house, presents. We ate the gingerbread my cousin Max had baked, and Uncle Dylan plunked out “We Three Kings” on the old piano. Ava had stayed in Maple Bay to volunteer at a women’s shelter over Christmas. She called, and Uncle Dylan passed the phone around, but it was hard to talk with everybody there. Then Aunt Monique’s parents came over, Max and Ava’s other grandparents, the ones who were horrified that Mom didn’t give me up for adoption, and still acted stiff and uncomfortable around me, although they tried to be nice. They said hello and asked me about school, but I could tell I made them nervous, and we all excused ourselves from the conversation as fast as we could.

I wondered what Scott was doing, and what my other grandparents were doing, the ones I’d never met. I sat on the edge of Nan’s plaid couch and fussed with the fireplace, adding logs and blowing on the coals and moving things around.

“A

The card I pulled was Star Wars. Star: a finger pointing at the sky. Wars: an imaginary gun firing willy-nilly.

“Sky shooter!” everyone shouted. “Battle sky!”

I was glad when the whole thing was over.

76

A COUPLE OF DAYS LATER I packed my backpack, told Mom I was going to Noe’s, and walked two miles to the station to catch a bus to a suburb of a suburb of a suburb of a big city an hour and a half east. I didn’t trust myself to drive, and what if the Honda broke down along the way? My hands trembled in my lap. The highway flashed past outside the window, miles and miles of dreary asphalt, the warehouses and factory stores a

When I got off the bus, it was twilight. I walked another two miles, following the directions I’d written on a piece of paper. The house was at the end of a wide, curving street with lots of landscaping. As I approached, my breath got ragged and short. I gripped the rock in my pocket—somehow, the sword of my fantasies had failed to materialize—and felt its coldness and hardness rise through my skin to surround me like a shield.

Hey, I would shout. Do you know who I am?

Smash! Blood and brains! Moaning pleas for forgiveness!

A car pulled into the driveway of the house as I was walking past it. A man got out. Tall, thin. Handsome. As he walked to his front door, he gave me a neighborly wave.

“Beautiful night,” he said.

Finish him. “Yeah,” I said, and kept walking.

He went into his house. I walked faster. The trees on his street were covered in frost. It made them shimmer in the moonlight like something out of a dream.

When I came to the end of the block I stopped on the sidewalk. Cold air knifed into my lungs with every breath. There were frozen candy bar wrappers in the gutter that reminded me of the first day of school. Frozen ghosts with nowhere left to go. A truck drove past that reminded me of Mom’s: rusty tailpipe, rattly bed. I hesitated a moment longer, the rock damp and jagged against my palm, then turned around and walked quickly and deliberately back to Scott’s house. His curtains were closed. The car in his driveway was new, glossy. A nice suburban car. A nice suburban house. There were strings of Christmas lights wrapped around his front bushes, the bulbs glowing greenly through the snow.

I could have stared at the house all night: wondering, watching, gathering anger like fistfuls of cotton fluff. But then a light turned on upstairs. It startled me. Reminded me where I was.

I threw the rock at his front window and heard it shatter.

I wished I could have saved a piece of the glass, but I was ru

77

I CAUGHT THE NEXT BUS BACK to my town and hugged my backpack against me the whole way. My ears were ringing. Adrenaline made my arms and legs both rigid and loose, like I was either going to harden into a statue or melt into a puddle.

I didn’t know why I had gone there. I didn’t know why I had thrown the rock.

The December moon was cold and brittle.

The heater vents blew stale breath at my head.

The bus was half an hour from my town when I reached into my pocket and realized the letter had fallen out.

78

WHEN THE BUS PULLED INTO THE station there was a scurrying thing in my stomach like a hamster was trapped inside there. What if he found the letter? What if he called the police?

That would be rich. Scott calling the police.

My hands were sweaty and slick inside my mittens. I crouched in the parking lot and dug a handful of gravel out from under the snow and put it in my mouth. It tasted like exhaust. In How to Survive in the Woods, Wilda McClure says that sucking on stones can stave off hunger and thirst, but only for a little while. I should have walked to Scott’s house, I thought to myself. I should have trekked for days with only stones to suck on, ground them in my teeth until they were sharp as daggers, then walked right up to him and spat them in his face.