“Okay, Paul, what is it? You said this was very important.”
“It is. Important and educational.”
“Educational in which regard, Paul?”
“Well, Eddy, you know, when two people spend a lot of time together they sort of build a language together. Each person picks up a bit of the other. And in our case, I’ve picked up a lot of you.”
“How so?”
Paulie slips behind the keyboard and hammers out the beginning of the alphabet song, teasing a little, then starts again, singing this time.
Cock smith, tool belt, fucknut tree,
These are the words you’ve given to me.
Jizz doctor, fecal cream,
You are just an enema fiend.
Now you know your dick has fleas,
Rectum’s got a bad disease.
The frame shakes until it loses Paulie entirely and settles on the open window. Edward’s laughter rises and wheezes.
Edward searched her face in his periphery without turning towards it. “I swear, he just comes up with this. Came up with it.”
Propped up by the roughly starched pillows, Claudia gaped.
“How much of this do you have,” she asked.
“I think there’s maybe thirty-seven, thirty-eight hours. But most of it is like, Paulie discusses soup. Paulie inspects a dead bug. Paul ruins several commuters’ subway rides, armed with only a mood ring.”
Claudia nodded, the joy gone from her face as she calculated how few days she could fill with what was left. In the breezeway outside their room, two men bickered with low energy about routes, bleating the numbers of interstates, calling out the names of towns like they were items for sale at auction. Her skin itched from not having showered, her muscles felt fatigued from not having used them.
For the first moment in her life, time multiplied in front of her, unimagined, unimaginable.
~ ~ ~
THE RESTING PLACE YELLOW. Just wide and long enough. Near it another where the quiet woman slept. At the beginning chickens. The nothing of forest. Men with blue eyes came with things to put in her mouth. Soft and warm as what she had given her baby. They all walked to where the land stopped and they moved into the cold green and they kept her hand while everything watered around them. Back in the room the woman shaking down her silver head nest. She brought in the arms of some trees and lit them. Through the glass hole birds. Cheep cheep cheep then dark. Staying near the heat until the wet was gone. The men again with things to swallow. Fingers on her neck. They changed her hair and the woman’s hair until they were ropes. Different shapes for wearing. Big forms of white for sleeping in. One more time outside. All their faces up to see the big sky fruit. Then the woman’s eyes on her and a long look. A hand low to guide her. Was there a missing. Something gone. A man with her in the mornings. Black circles that played music. Boxes full of bodies that zipped under the earth. A building at night golding onto the street. Had this always been her life. Had she always known the woman. No. Yes. Always.
~ ~ ~
THE NEIGHBORS HAD WATCHED with some curiosity as he rehabilitated the house, floor by floor, room by room, over the course of the year, and sometimes waved when they saw him, through an exposed frame, working in his uneven way. He hadn’t hired any help, and often continued after midnight with his work, lit by bare bulbs clamped to paint-splattered ladders and fed by dried apricots and cashews he kept in his corduroy pocket. A careful preservationist, he matched the original colors of the doors precisely, fingering each swatch on a great fan of color samples, and restored the gilded leaves of the stairway wallpaper himself.
Vestiges of the other tenants, diligently dusted and bubble-wrapped, stood in man-sized towers in the foyer. Edward had called to say they’d be arriving in a day or so, and Thomas had busied himself with the last of the cleaning. He got down under the tubs and scrubbed the claw-foot detail, pushed cloth across window glass in even lines, braced himself on the mop as he moved it through the bright spaces.
They had driven for ten months, Edward and Claudia, stopping every few days to sleep off their grief in some nameless small town. On the top floor Thomas dozed in an armchair, both his arms slack, a book tented on his chest. All the rooms were empty, all the windows open. After the car pulled up, battered but polished, it idled a while.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Writing about a syndrome so unique as Williams was a challenge that kept me up nights, and I will forever be grateful to Jessica Vecchia of the Williams Syndrome Association, who answered my questions and connected me with a family brave enough to tell me their story: Frank, Josephine, and Sara Catalonatto. The insight and anecdotes they shared, and the frankness with which Sara spoke about her condition, were truly invaluable in my creation and understanding of Paulie.
I drew inspiration for the paintings described as Thomas’s from the art of Casey Cripe, whose enormous talent astounds.
Jonathon Atkinson, Victoria Marini, and Eli Horowitz were early readers of what became this novel, and their honesty at that stage was crucial in my perception of the project.
J.B. lent me an important piece, and for that I’m deeply appreciative.
Alexandra Kleeman, skilled writer and reader, provided soul-mending encouragement.
Jin Auh, Megan Lynch, and Laura Perciasepe all served as mothers of this book at different stages in its path away from my anxious grip, and they deserve many thanks for helping it to walk.
John Wray, who is sometimes called John Henderson, put on an impressive series of hats in the service of this novel and its author. For his tireless line notes, afternoon serenades, long dinners, alacrity as hospice nurse, infectious curiosity, willingness to drive five hundred miles last minute to see some fireflies, and perhaps most importantly for giving me a room of my own, I am beholden (and more than a little blessed).