The Goldfinch

“Right,” I said, aware how lame I sounded. We were heading into the clumsy territory of my mother’s funeral, stretched-out silences, wrong smiles, the place where words didn’t work.

“He was a lovely man. Not many like him. Gentle, charming. People always felt sorry for him because of his back, though I’ve never met anyone so naturally gifted with a happy disposition, and of course the customers loved him… outgoing fellow, very sociable, always was… ‘the world won’t come to me,’ he used to say, ‘so I must go to it’—”

Quite suddenly, Andy’s iPhone chimed: text message coming in.

Hobie—glass halfway to his mouth—started, violently. “What was that?”

“Wait a second,” I said, digging in my pocket. The text was from Phil Lefkow, one of the kids in Andy’s Japanese class: Hi Theo, Andy here, are you ok? Hastily, I switched the phone off and stuck it back in my pocket.

“Sorry?” I said. “What were you saying?”

“I forget.” He stared into space for a moment or two, then shook his head. “I never thought I’d see this again,” he said, looking down at the ring. “So like him to ask you to bring it here—to put it in my hand. I—well, I didn’t say anything but I thought for sure someone had pocketed it at the morgue—”

Again the phone chimed its a

Just making sure your not being killed!!!!

“Sorry,” I said—holding the button down, just to make sure—“it really is off this time.”

But he only smiled, and looked into his glass. Rain tapped and dripped at the skylight, casting watery shadows that streamed down the wall. Too shy to say anything, I waited for him to pick up the thread again—and when he didn’t, we sat there peacefully, while I sipped my cooling tea (Lapsang Souchong, smoky and peculiar) and felt the strangeness of my life, and where I was.

I pushed my plate aside. “Thank you,” I said dutifully, eyes wandering round the room, “that was really good”—speaking (as had become my habit) for my mother’s benefit, in case she was listening.

“Oh, how polite!” he said—laughing at me but not unkindly, in a way that felt friendly. “Do you like it?”

“What?”

“My Noah’s Ark.” He nodded at the shelf. “You were looking at it over there, I thought.” The worn wooden animals (elephants, tigers, oxen, zebras, all the way down to a tiny pair of mice) stood patiently in line, waiting to board.

“Is it hers?” I asked, after a fascinated silence; for the animals were so lovingly positioned (the big cats ignoring each other; the male peacock turned away from his hen to admire his reflection in the toaster) I could imagine her spending hours arranging them and trying to get them exactly right.

“No—” his hands came together on the table—“it was one of the first antiques I ever bought, thirty years ago. In an American Folk sale. I’m not a great one for the folk art, never have been—this piece, not of the first quality, doesn’t fit with anything else I own, and yet isn’t it always the inappropriate thing, the thing that doesn’t quite work, that’s oddly the dearest?”

I pushed back in my chair, unable to keep my feet still. “Can I see her now?” I said.

“If she’s awake—” he pursed his lips—“well, don’t see the harm. But only for a minute, mind.” When he stood, his bulky, stoop-shouldered height took me by surprise all over again. “I warn you, though—she’s a bit muddled. Oh—” he turned in the doorway—“and best not to bring up Welty if you can help it.”

“She doesn’t know?”

“Oh yes—” his voice was brisk—“she knows, but sometimes when she hears it she gets upset all over again. Asks when it happened and why nobody told her.”

ii.

WHEN HE OPENED THE door, the shades were down, and it took my eyes a moment to adjust to the dark, which was aromatic and perfume-smelling, with an undertone of sickness and medicine. Over the bed hung a framed poster from the movie The Wizard of Oz. A scented candle guttered in a red glass, among trinkets and rosaries, sheet music, tissue-paper flowers and old valentines—along with what looked like hundreds of get-well cards strung up on ribbons, and a bunch of silver balloons hovering ominously at the ceiling, metallic strings hanging down like jellyfish stingers.

“Someone here to see you, Pip,” said Hobie, in a loud and cheerful tone.

I saw the coverlet stir. An elbow went up. “Umn?” said a sleepy voice.

“It’s so dark, my dear. Won’t you let me open the curtains?”

“No, please don’t, the light hurts my eyes.”

She was smaller than I remembered, and her face—a blur in the gloom—was very white. Head shaven, all but a single lock in front. As I drew closer, a bit fearfully, I saw a glint of metal at her temple—a barrette or hairpin, I thought, before I made out the steel medical staples in a vicious coil above one ear.

“I heard you in the hallway,” she said, in a small, raspy voice, looking from me to Hobie.

“Heard what, pigeon?” said Hobie.

“Heard you talking. Cosmo did too.”

At first I didn’t see the dog, and then I did—a gray terrier curled alongside her, amidst the pillows and stuffed toys. When he raised his head, I saw from his grizzled face and cataract-clouded eyes that he was very old.

“I thought you were asleep, pigeon,” Hobie was saying, reaching out to scratch the dog’s chin.

“You always say that, but I’m always awake. Hi,” she said, looking up at me.

“Hi.”

“Who are you?”

“My name’s Theo.”

“What’s your favorite piece of music?”

“I don’t know,” I said, and then, so as not to appear stupid: “Beethoven.”

“That’s great. You look like somebody who would like Beethoven.”

“I do?” I said, feeling overwhelmed.

“I meant that in a nice way. I can’t listen to music. Because of my head. It’s completely horrible. No,” she said to Hobie, who was clearing books and gauze and Kleenex packets out of the bedside chair so I could sit down in it, “let him sit here. You can sit here,” she said to me, shifting over slightly in the bed to make room.

After a glance back at Hobie to make sure it was okay, I sat down, gingerly, with one hip, careful not to disturb the dog, who raised his head and glared.

“Don’t worry, he won’t bite. Well, sometimes he bites.” She looked at me with drowsy eyes. “I know you.”

“You remember me?”

“Are we friends?”

“Yes,” I said without thinking, and then glanced back at Hobie, embarrassed I’d lied.

“I forgot your name, I’m sorry. I remember your face though.” Then—stroking the dog’s head—she said: “I didn’t remember my room when I came home. I remembered my bed, and all my stuff, but the room was different.”

Now that my eyes had adjusted to the dark, I saw the wheelchair in the corner, the bottles of medicine on the table by her bed.

“What Beethoven do you like?”

“Uh—” I was staring at her arm, resting atop the coverlet, the tender skin on the inside of her arm with a Band-Aid in the crook of the elbow.

She was pushing up in bed—looking past me, to Hobie, silhouetted in the bright doorway. “I’m not supposed to talk too much, am I?” she said.

“No, pigeon.”

“I don’t think I’m too tired. But I can’t tell. Do you get tired during the day?” she asked me.

“Sometimes.” After my mother’s death, I had developed a tendency to fall asleep in class and conk out in Andy’s room after school. “I never used to.”

“I do, too. I feel sleepy all the time now. I wonder why? I think it’s so boring.”

Hobie—I noticed, looking back at the lighted doorway—had stepped away for a moment. Although it was very unlike me, for some strange reason I had been itching to reach out and take her hand, and now that we were alone, I did.

“You don’t mind, do you?” I asked her. Everything seemed slow like I was moving through deep water. It was very strange to be holding somebody’s hand—a girl’s hand—and yet oddly normal. I had never done anything of the sort before.