Ivan didn’t appear to be paying much attention, but then he said, “There might be angels. We don’t know everything. Maybe people believe in angels so they aren’t scared, and dying doesn’t seem so bad.” He put the ring in his pocket.
“Maybe God is punishing us for…our sins.” Beatriz’s lower lip trembled. “Like the Heist.”
“But why would God punish her?” I asked, still not able to say Elena.
“Maybe God is a moron,” Max said, shocking Beatriz, who cried, “Don’t say that, Max!”
“Everybody gets to think what they want, okay?” I said, putting an end to it.
Then the grown-ups left all at once, saying comforting things to Ivan. Josef cursorily said, “Be good, son,” and patted Ivan’s shoulder, but Ivan shrugged his father away. The irony of Josef telling anyone to be good was not lost on us—our bitterness was palpable, as if steam were coming off our heads. But what could we say?
Beatriz’s parents came to take her away, and she said, “See you later. I love you guys.” She blew us a kiss.
Brickie came out. “Everybody okay?”
I said, “Uh-huh. We’re just out here being stoic.”
“Is this a good time to talk about things? Ivan?”
“I don’t care,” he replied.
Sitting down with us, Brickie began, “I think you all need to know what’s going on.” He sounded so official. “The authorities have interviewed all the…persons of interest, and have concluded that Elena died from a severe asthma attack. She had her pills, but not her inhaler, apparently. She’d had a lot to drink, and there were traces of other injurious and unusual substances in her system that they couldn’t identify—possibly other drugs. But it doesn’t appear to have been…homicide.”
Confused, Max asked, “What do you mean, ‘unusual substances’? They thought she might have been poisoned?”
Brickie paused. Then he explained, “Elena consorted—kept company—with some individuals who didn’t have her best interests at heart.”
“I still don’t get it,” I said. “Like who?”
For a minute, Brickie looked away. “I do not know,” he said stiffly, adding, “but, as I say, homicide has been ruled out. And they don’t believe it was suicide, either. Maybe you boys have been worrying about that.”
“Suicide?” I asked. “You mean, like she killed herself?” Why would Elena have done such a thing? I couldn’t imagine anyone thinking Elena, so full of life, would have done that.
“Correct. The prescription bottle in the bag she was carrying still had pills, and if she’d intended to do away with herself, she likely would have taken all of those. She also had a spider bite, and there were traces of a spider-borne toxin in her system.”
At this, my heart began banging in my chest. Brickie was waiting for us to say something, but I knew we were all too afraid to speak.
Brickie continued. “But Josef said she wasn’t allergic to any insects, and the pathologist said that right now, of course, they’re seeing many people with traces of spider toxins in their blood. A bite from a regular spider wouldn’t kill anybody. It just seems to have been a combination of things, and bad luck. If she’d had her inhaler, it might not have happened. I’m truly sorry to tell you all this, Ivan. But I want you to understand. It was just a tragic accident.” I could hear us each exhaling.
I badly wanted Brickie to shut up and go away, but he had more to say. “And I might as well give you all the bad news. Your friend Gellert and his family have to leave the country. Someone determined that they were undesirable aliens, possibly Communist sympathizers posing as refugees, but I’m not convinced of that myself. I think someone had it in for them. But Elena tried her best to make things better for them. I’m sorry about everything, boys.” He rose, brushing off his pants, and patted each of our sweating heads before going inside.
Max and I looked at each other, baffled and amazed. Ivan said softly, “So did I do it?”
Max cried, “You didn’t! You heard him, Ivan! That’s great!”
“She’s still dead, Max.”
Realizing his insensitivity, Max apologized. “I’m an idiot.”
“But, Ivan, you don’t have to feel guilty anymore! You should feel better about that,” I said.
“I guess,” he said dully. “But what about the spider toxins?”
“He said everybody had them!” I practically shouted. “Forget about it, Ivan!”
Brickie’s remark regarding Gellert’s family struck me as summing everything up: Elena tried her best to make things better. Weird for this to be coming from Brickie, who had had reservations about Elena all along, but then I remembered them happily dancing together at the Fiesta. Elena had certainly made things better for Ivan and me. I grieved for myself, but how Ivan was going to get along without her in the world I could not imagine.
15
But get along we had to. In the weeks following Elena’s death, we’d returned to school and resumed those rituals: trudging back and forth to Rosemary, learning long division and practicing multiplication tables and cursive writing in our despised Palmer Method handbooks, eating the thirty-five-cent lunches served up in our smelly cafeteria, playing kickball at recess (and losing without Gellert), doing or pretending to do our homework, and hanging out together before bedtime, which, with fall, had become a very short respite. Ivan was not the same—woebegone and more quiet even than he’d been before.
I received a letter from my mother, condolences about Elena for me, Max, and Ivan but also with the wonderful news that she’d be coming home “for good” very soon. She and my dad seemed to have settled their legal issue, and Dad took me and the boys to a movie. Max and I wanted to see Plan 9 from Outer Space, but Dad thought we should see something funny, so we saw The Shaggy Dog. It was okay—a kid turns into a dog. Ivan said he wished it were him. Liz came home from Holton-Arms one weekend and helped us paint Elena’s swing a shiny, vibrant red, a shade approximating Sports Car. Beatriz painted an angel on the back. We didn’t ask Josef for permission; we just did it.
The Fabulous Family Fiesta had been a success, insofar as Kees and Piet did invite us—Max included—to swim in their pool. We enjoyed a few weeks of fun until it got too cold, and they drained it for the winter. Then Mr. Chappaqua took us, packed like sardines, for a spin in the Messerschmitt. We didn’t give a damn about being traitors. Josephine hired us to rake the leaves in the Pond Lady’s yard, but our enthusiasm for the pond and spiders had cooled, to say the least. Miss Braddock died, and we thought about breaking in to see the dollhouse while it was still there, but our enthusiasm for breaking in had cooled as well.
The world continued being the weirdest place on earth, and the Cold War kept getting hotter. We learned in our Weekly Readers that Khrushchev was visiting the United States and had gotten mad because he wasn’t allowed to go to Disneyland. Brickie told us that Khrushchev said that the mayor of Los Angeles had “tried to let out a little fart, and instead he shit his pants,” which naturally amused us. Eisenhower was going to try to smooth things over by entertaining Khrushchev at Camp David, out in the Catoctin hills, not too far from us.
On an Indian summer afternoon, Ivan and I were riding with Dimma in her Cadillac to the Mann Farm for the annual Democratic picnic. Dimma was going to support John F. Kennedy for president in the upcoming election, because he “has class, and is smart, and he’s wealthy, so he won’t be using the presidency to make money,” but I thought that she really liked him because he was young and handsome and had a glamorous wife who wore French clothes. I didn’t blame her.