“I RESIGN!” Lidewij shouted. There were tears in her eyes. But I wasn’t angry. He was
looking for the most hurtful way to
tell
the truth, but of course I already knew the truth. I’d had
years of staring at ceilings from my bedroom to the ICU, and so I’d long ago found the most
hurtful ways to imagine my own illness. I stepped toward him. “Listen, douchepants,” I said,
“you’re
not going to tell me anything about disease I don’t already know. I need one and only
one thing from you before I walk out of your life forever: WHAT HAPPENS TO ANNA’S
MOTHER?”
He raised his flabby chins vaguely toward me and shrugged his shoulders. “I ca
n no more
tell you what happens to her than I can tell you what becomes of Proust’s Narrator or Holden
Caulfield’s sister or Huckleberry Finn after he lights out for the territories.”
“BULLSHIT! That’s bullshit. Just tell me! Make something up!”
“No, and I’ll thank you not to curse in my house. It isn’t becoming of a lady.”
I still wasn’t angry, exactly, but I was very focused on getting the thing I’d been
promised. Something inside me welled up and I reached down and smacked the swollen hand
that held the glass of Scotch. What remained of the Scotch splashed
across the vast expanse of
his face, the glass bouncing off his nose and then spinning balletically through the air, landing
with a shattering crash on the ancient hardwood floors.
“Lidewij,” Van Houten
said calmly, “I’ll have a martini, if you please. Just a whisper of
vermouth.”
“I have resigned,” Lidewij said after a moment.
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
I didn’t know what to do. Being nice hadn’t worked. Being mean hadn’t worked. I needed
an answer. I’d come all this way, hijacked Augustus’s Wish. I needed to know.
“Have
you ever stopped to wonder,” he said, his words slurring now, “why you care so
much a
bout your silly questions?”
“YOU PROMISED!” I shouted, hearing Isaac’s impotent wailing echoing from the night
of the broken trophies. Van Houten didn’t reply.
I was still standing over him, waiting for him to say something to me when I felt
Augustus’s han
d on my arm. He pulled me away toward the door, and I followed him while
Van Houten ranted to Lidewij about the ingratitude of contemporary teenagers
and the death of
polite society, and Lidewij, somewhat hysterical, shouted back at him in rapid-fire Dutch.
“You’ll have to forgive my former assistant,” he said. “Dutch is not so much a language
as an ailment of the throat.”
Augustus pulled me out of the room and through the door to the late spring morning and
the falling confetti of the elms.
* * *
For me there was no such thing as a quick getaway, but we made our way down the stairs,
Augustus holding my cart, and then started to walk back toward the Filosoof on a bumpy
sidewalk of interwoven rectangular bricks. For the first
time since the swing set, I started
crying.
“Hey,” he said, touching my waist. “Hey. It’s okay.” I nodded and wiped my face with
the back of my hand. “He sucks.” I nodded again. “I’ll write you an epilogue,” Gus said. That
made me cry harder. “I will,” he said. “I will. Better than any
shit that drunk could write. His
brain is Swiss cheese. He doesn’t even remember writing the book. I can write ten times the
story that guy can. There will be blood and guts and sacrifice.
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