SHE WOKE FROM a long nap on top of the velvet bedspread, one foot touching the purple T. Anthony suitcase that was still open and unpacked and spilling with clothes from her earlier rummaging. The ceiling of the room was painted with tiny gold starlike shapes and she blinked up at them as if she’d landed on the moon. The towel had unwound from her body into a twisted, discarded bandage and her naked limbs splayed out on the bed as if she had fallen from a great height to land here.
She barely remembers what happened at the pool, has dreamed it away. What she remembers she writes off as dysfunctional family dynamics, a phrase she had learned by the time she was ten. She is still half dreaming, half happy, half alive.
Her head felt tight around her skull and the muscles behind her eyes pulled taut in knots. She sat up and looked around. She’d stashed some pills in the suitcase—the reason she hadn’t wanted anyone else to carry it—and she sat up and dug her hands into the inner side pocket of the bag and retrieved a bottle. She unscrewed the top, fished out a pale peach-colored pellet with her finger and put it in her mouth. She sat up a little straighter and closed her eyes and made some spit and swallowed. Then she opened her eyes and swallowed the last powdery bitter spit. The tiny stars on the ceiling retreated into their distant galaxy and spun away into a painted heaven. After a while she rose and dressed and went out to look for the rest of her family.
Her family. She always tells people that her family is like the House of Agamemnon or something out of Faulkner because everyone in it can be so mean. She has no idea how appropriate the references are, or how much more there really is to tragedy. She does not realize the wide discrepancies between what she thinks of these people, how she feels about them, and the images she has of them in her mind. She carries with her an image of Steve that is benevolent, magnanimous, and generous, although she also knows him to be controlling, manipulative, and cruel, and her feelings, her feelings about him are entirely different from her thoughts and images. Her feelings for him are radical and gigantic and too much for one brain or heart to bear. They dwarf her. Next to them she is the smallest blade of grass. They walk all over her. They trample her. It is only possible to see these feelings as enormous masked figures enacting a drama in an amphitheater. The moonlight casting long shadows so that the people in the audience are alternately lit up and obscured. And she, she is that blade of grass, watching the play from between two stones where the slightest growth of green has been bestowed by a fortunate accident of sun.
They were nowhere in sight. The house was quietly bustling with staff. There were maids making beds and men filling vases with flowers and assistants of one sort or another placing bottled water in every room. Some of the headset men were moving pieces of furniture around. In the portrait gallery on the second floor, which ran practically the entire length of the house, long tables were being arranged and set for the rehearsal dinner tonight. It was the first event of the wedding weekend at which real guests, nonfamily members, would be in attendance. Miranda and Jonathan had invited at least a hundred and fifty people to the intimate affair and three hundred were expected tomorrow for the ceremony. A tent was being set up outside, not for the wedding but for the babysitters and young children. Inside, it housed a trampoline, video games, many televisions, sports equipment, a refrigerator, and several playpens filled with baby toys. Poppy wandered around, drifting unreal through a circus of childhood, a museum of distraction. Eventually she left the tent out an opening on the far side and found herself in a small garden with a wrought-iron bench. She fished out a second pill from her pocket and let the acrid fire burn its way down the length of her throat.
There was a fountain in the middle of the garden with a bronze fish jumping and drooling and the stone basin had been occupied by the debris of visiting tourists trying their luck, pennies and other foreign coins lay drowned at the bottom of the gray water with bits of lichen and oxidized green upon the surface of the metals. Huge trees hung around the perimeter of the garden and threw a cool darkness over the fountain and on closer inspection the fish held several rusty coins in its mouth, diverting the flow of water and creating a drool as opposed to a spout. Poppy stood blinking in the very early evening stillness. Then she saw the outline of a boy. It was just a subtle disturbance in the distance and it led her toward a path that branched off of the garden. She swiped a cold nickel from the fountain and set out after Felix.
She took the path down toward a fork and realized at the fork that one of the paths led to the pool. She was still following a hint of boy way up ahead of her. She entered a stretch of the path which reminded her uncomfortably of her earlier escapade with Jonathan and then made her way up a rise in the road which swerved her mind around to more uplifting thoughts or perhaps it was the little pill kicking in now and here she was at the pool again. Her clothes had been fished out of the water and laid on the wooden table. The pile of towels had been set up on one of the lounge chairs. Next to the drying clothes some helpful groundskeeper had placed a neat array of all the dead pieces from Jonathan’s broken phone. Felix was picking them up one at a time, investigating, seeing if he could fit them back together.
He was fingering the dead bits when he looked up and saw Poppy. He stood there very still but for his radiant smile.
Poppy! he called out.
I see you found my mess.
Mess?
I believe I am responsible for this mess, she said. All that junk on the table.
Felix ran to her as she approached him and he clasped her around the waist. This isn’t a mess: these are specimens, he said into her T-shirt. The remains of a visit from aliens who came down and took a swim and left some of their robot parts behind. You could never make a mess, he said.
Poppy grabbed him close. She kissed the top of his head. You are a genius and my best friend and the only grown-up around here, she whispered into his hair.
Felix is her little mystic. When she is with him she feels understood and the world seems understandable. His compassionate expression, his sensitive remarks. His laugh is the chuckle of a philosopher. He has an X-ray vision that sees that she is a good person. She holds on to his vision of her, grasps it, whenever she can. Sometimes he puts his hand on her shoulder as if he is Aristotle pondering the secrets of the ages and she feels so much gratitude that she melts from his touch.
They sat down next to each other at the edge of the pool with their legs dangling in the water. Felix was wearing a bathing suit and an SPF long-sleeved shirt although by now it was approaching dusk. Long days in June that graze on time and fade never completely into night. After a while Felix slid into the pool and swam funny, short width-wise laps. He made his way back and forth and back and forth enjoying the simple pushing of his feet and touching of his fingers on the rough side of the structure. He liked knowing and feeling the boundaries of this domain. Then he propelled himself underwater and circled the perimeter like some baby shark of a thought testing the outer limits of a wholly wretchedly limited but endlessly shifting and renewable consciousness.