“If the flea beetles start getting at the ones on the porch,” she said slowly, “dust them with Celite.” Hallie worked for the Extension Service and answered the Garden Hotline, 626-BUGS. For a period of years ending on that day, garden pests were her life.
I hugged her with all the strength in my arms. “Hallie,” I said, “could you please just change your mind now and not go?”
“You really love me, so you want me to stay here and keep the suburbs safe for geraniums.”
“I know how I ought to feel,” I said. “I just don’t.”
Her breath expanded her chest against my arms, and I thought of the way a tree will keep on growing after a fence is wired around its trunk. The unbelievable force of that expansion. And I let her go.
She started up her truck and waved from the corner, not a mournful gone-forever wave but a chin-up wave like you see in the World War II movies, where everybody is brave because they all believe in the same thing. I told myself because I had no other choice that Hallie would do all right. That we were both going to live.
I walked the six blocks home under dripping trees and a sun that was already too hot. Across the street I heard a woman say to her companion in an odd accent, “It’s the Desert Museum. I had understood him to say the ‘dessert museum,’ and obviously I was expecting something quite different.” I thought: this is how life is, ridiculous beyond comprehension. What I felt wasn’t pain but a hollowness, like a drum with the skin stretched tight. It took me five minutes to get our front door open, because everything in Tucson with moving parts gets cantankerous in the rainy season. Hallie had meant to put graphite in the lock before she left.
A white balloon left over from her going-away party followed me from the living room into the kitchen. It was the size of a head, and had lost some helium so it hung at eye level, trailing its string along the floor like a tired old ghost. Static electricity drew it along behind me. I swatted it away from my head while I plundered the refrigerator. I found some red bell peppers that had been absurdly expensive at the health-food market, and washed one and ate it standing up in the kitchen. After that I found a paring knife and went to work on a cucumber. I didn’t feel like cooking breakfast just for myself. Carlo was at the hospital and I had no idea when he was due back.
The phone rang and I jumped, I suppose because I felt guilty for standing in the kitchen eating costly vegetables. I was afraid it was going to be somebody with garden pests, but they’d already turned off the Garden Hotline. It was Hallie calling from a pay phone this side of the border to tell me she’d forgotten to graphite the lock.
“I knew you’d call about that.” I was filled with a strange joy because she felt the same way I did: that we couldn’t survive apart. I just stood still for a minute, giving Hallie’s and my thoughts their last chance to run quietly over the wires, touching each other in secret signal as they passed, like a column of ants. You couldn’t do that kind of thing at international rates.
“There’s a library book, too,” she said. “Those Baron Münchhausen stories. I found it in with my books when I was cleaning out my room.”
“I know. I saw it. I’ll take it back today.”
“That book’s got to be overdue, Codi. You were reading it in the car a month ago when we drove to Bisbee.”
I took a bite out of the cucumber and chewed before answering. I wanted this phone call to last forever. I wanted to recall every book we’d ever read aloud together while driving. “You’re right. It’s overdue.”
“Take it back and pay the fine, okay? Libraries are the one American institution you shouldn’t rip off.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “Miss Patty Hearst the Second.” I heard her trying not to laugh. Hallie was intellectually subversive and actually owned a copy of Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book, but by nature she was perversely honest. I’d seen her tape dimes to a broken parking meter.
“Apart from moral reasons, they’ll cancel your card.”
“I don’t know why you think I’m such a library outlaw. I’m all paid up over there.” I munched on the cucumber. It wasn’t that different from eating an outsize apple, say, or a peeled peach, and yet anyone looking in the window would judge me insane. “Don’t worry about me, Hallie,” I said finally. “Just worry about yourself.”
“I’m not worried about myself. I’m the luckiest person alive.”
It was an old joke, or an old truth, grown out of all the close shaves she’d walked away from. Bike wrecks, car wrecks, that kind of thing. I’d always been more or less a tragedy magnet, but Hallie was the opposite. One time she started out the door of the old science library at the university, and then turned around and went back in because she’d left her sunglasses by the microfiche machine, and two seconds later the marble façade fell off the front of the building. Just slid straight down and smashed, it looked like Beirut.
Hallie didn’t believe she was invulnerable. She was never one of those daredevil types; she knew she could get hurt. What I think she meant was that she was lucky to be on her way to Nicaragua. It was the slowest thing to sink into my head, how happy she was. Happy to be leaving.
We’d had one time of perfect togetherness in our adult lives, the year when we were both in college in Tucson-her first year, my last-and living together for the first time away from Doc Homer.
