Tim Wynne-Jones

I

It was Tiny Rathbone who found Bella. He was in the auditorium, alone, he thought. He was working up a skit for the end-of-the-year talent show. Maury Kittel was going to play a fantasia for trombone; Tiffany Voltemand and Melissa Wong were doing interpretive dance. There were three comedy acts, four singer-songwriters, and five thrash bands. A bunch of jocks in drag were going to lip-synch to “Oops! . . . I Did It Again.” Tiny wanted to do something a little different.

He was sitting on the lip of the stage, wearing a lime green bathing cap, a bright orange flotation device, a shiny blue swimsuit, and red water skis. The towline hung limply between his legs and snaked off into the front row, a yellow umbilical cord connecting him to the shadows.

He was making it up as he went along. The stage would be empty. The houselights would go to black. A hot special would come up directly overhead, and there he would be, watching the towline unwind.

“To be, or not to be, that is the question . . .”

Tiny’s voice filled the auditorium. It was a high and mighty voice for such a diminutive creature, and he listened to it with pleasure until the darkness and the empty seats soaked up every last decibel. Then he heard a sound that was not his voice, a faint groaning sound. He looked around. The stage behind him was set for My Fair Lady. He was sitting in Professor Henry Higgins’s book-lined study. The professor wasn’t home.

He turned back toward the auditorium, straightened his arms, and slightly arched his back. He remembered to keep his tips up. Then he cleared his throat.

“Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles . . .”

He paused, let the towline fall. You couldn’t start with Hamlet. Where did you go from there? He listened to the stillness, the distant hum of emptying halls. And then he heard it again, unmistakably a low groan.

“Hello?”

Nothing. He dropped the towline and worked his way out of the skis. He stood up, rubbing the circulation back into his ankles.

“Come out, come out, wherever you are!” he shouted. No one came out. Nothing stirred. A groan, he thought. A lightbulb went on under the lime green cap. The skit could start with a groan. Yes.

He would rise from the primordial ooze. He would borrow some reptilian costume from Tiffany Voltemand. There would be low, eerie lights and a murky reptilian sound track, and he would materialize somehow . . . from where?

The trapdoor. Perfect!

He marched upstage and heaved back Professor Higgins’s threadbare carpet. There it was. Tiny had emerged from that very hole as Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This time, however, he would emerge as some much-earlier life-form, something just learning how to breathe. He would slither out of the hole and crawl into his spotlight, blinking furiously. He would stand and strip—always a showstopper—and underneath his snakeskin he would be in his brave blue trunks. He would sit on the stage edge and put on his skis, and as he recited Hamlet’s soliloquy, the music track would change from monks singing a Gregorian chant to Mozart to Beethoven and then jazz and Hitler and the atomic bomb going off and rock ’n’ roll and Martin Luther King and Eminem and a Burger King commercial. He would water-ski across history—as much as he could squeeze into about four minutes.

What did it mean? Who knew? Who cared!

The tape would end with a CNN report from some war. No, better: The tape would end with the moment toward which all of history had been leading, Mr. Scales coming on over the loudspeaker to remind everyone about the new dress code.

The crowd would go wild. He could already feel the warmth of their laughter. For one bright moment he wouldn’t be tiny at all. Triumphantly, he hoisted open the trapdoor. And that’s when he found Bella.

She was curled up like a fetus on a ratty mattress at the bottom of the hole. She groaned, and her arm tried unsuccessfully to reach up toward him but instead fell limply across her eyes.

Tiny jumped down and knelt at her side. Her beautiful face was deathly white and lying in a pool of vomit. An empty prescription drug container was stuck in the sick; a half-empty bottle of Evian water stood beyond the tangle of her golden hair. He grabbed the bottle and splashed her face. She startled and her eyes opened. Wide. Such wide, staring eyes.

I have seen that expression before, thought Tiny. Then her eyes closed and she stopped breathing. He doused her lips with the last of the Evian, and then, with a hand pressing lightly on her stomach, he bent down to give her the kiss of life.

“Hey, what’s going on down there?”

Tiny glanced up. It was Horace, the custodian. “Call 911!” Tiny shouted, and returned heroically to his task. He was still at it when the ambulance arrived.

II

Tiny visited Bella in the hospital. He thought a lot about what to wear, deciding, finally, on the rabbit suit. The dog had chewed up one of the ears, and the fluffy tail was hanging by a thread, but otherwise it looked good.

Wendell Swain was sitting on a chair pulled up to Bella’s bedside. They were holding hands, or at least Wendell was. Tiny observed them silently from the doorway. They looked as if they had been having words. This was an expression Tiny liked, as if words, like doughnuts, left telltale dust on your lips.

“Am I interrupting something?” he said.

Wendell stood up, quickly. “Uh, no,” he said. Then he did a double take, the way you do when a rabbit is standing at the door, holding a dozen helium-filled balloons. “Oh, it’s you,” he said. He chuckled. It was one of his charms. Wendell was the handsomest boy at H. P. Lovecraft High: school president, captain of everything, scholar, saint, and master of the sociable chuckle. He was not on his game today, however, Tiny noted. It was a hollow kind of chuckle that fizzled out pretty quickly. Wendell looked drained and slightly dazed. “I was just leaving,” he said.

“Good,” said Tiny, stepping decisively into the room. “Bella and I need to talk.” He stared at her. Her dark eyes gathered him in, drew him toward her. It was an uncomfortable sensation, as if she were a black hole and he were a dense little planet that had gotten too close.

Wendell sighed. This was highly uncharacteristic. Sighing had not gotten Wendell where he was today. He turned to kiss Bella good-bye. She inclined a pale cheek toward him, but her eyes stayed fixed on Tiny. As Wendell left the room, he bent to whisper in Tiny’s floppy ear. “Thanks,” he said. “For what you did.”

Tiny watched him walk away down the busy corridor, his head down, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his chinos. Then Tiny turned to Bella. “Wendell looks a little betrayed,” he said.

She closed her eyes and let her head sink slowly into her pillow. She appeared to Tiny as if she had been holding her face together with some effort, the way you might hold the shards of a precious porcelain teacup together so that your mother didn’t notice you had broken it. She opened her eyes again and seemed dismayed to see Tiny still there. “Why are you dressed like a rabbit?” she asked.

“Because my cowboy costume was at the cleaners,” he said.

Bella didn’t smile, didn’t even pretend. If anything, the gravity in her eyes grew stronger, pulling him closer. “Is my father behind this?” she said. “Did he pay you to come here and cheer me up?”

Tiny shook his head. “No,” he said. “Well, unless you count the family château in France he wants me to have.” Bella was clearly beyond amusement. Tiny busied himself tying the balloons to her bedpost.

“I’m not a child,” she said, glancing disdainfully at the balloons.

“I know,” said Tiny. “But I figured there would be loads of flowers.”

There were. They were everywhere. “Welcome to my funeral,” she said.

Again she closed her eyes, tightly this time, as if by concentrating she might be able to will him away. She folded her arms across her chest, a pale-faced genie, prone and powerless. When she peeked at last, he was at her side. She relented and downgraded her scowl to a petulant grimace. She unfolded her arms, crossed her hands on her bedclothes, and stared resolutely at her fingernails. They were painted a dusky rose. “I know I should be grateful for what you did,” she said. “I’m sure you’re a big hero at school.”

“Correction,” said Tiny. “A very small hero. But I hear what you’re saying, and I didn’t come here looking for gratitude.”

She glanced at him and away and back again. Her brow furrowed with alarm and then cleared, and her eyes grew large, but she wasn’t seeing him anymore, at least, not in his rabbit suit. There was that expression again, thought Tiny. Where had he seen it before? Was it hope or fear?

“You were wearing a lime green bathing cap,” she said.

“That must have come as a shock,” he said. She nodded, and for a whole long moment she did not look away. Then whatever it was that had seemed to interest her about him vanished.

“Why are you here?” she asked.

“I’ve taken you on,” he said. “The psychiatric team is worried about your recovery. They’ve decided on radical therapy. Me.”

Without looking his way, she arched an eyebrow. “Just my luck,” she said. “So what does that mean, exactly?”

Tiny pulled up the chair in which Wendell had been seated only moments earlier. “It means, Bella, I’m your new boyfriend.” He held up both hands against the protest that blazed in her eyes. “I know, I know,” he said quickly. “It is an extreme measure. Frankly, I was surprised when Dr. Gupta approached me. But there seemed no other way. I assure you, I will not take advantage of my position.”

This elicited a wry smile. But a wry smile was better than nothing, thought Tiny. It was good to see her lips twist upward. Such full lips, and so deathly pallid.

“I’m glad you won’t take advantage,” she said. “So we’ll just talk?” She laughed, a stunted and cynical little laugh. “Because, it’s the talkers that are worst, you know. ‘I just want to talk,’ they plead. ‘Really,’ they insist. But all their words have hands in them, and the sentences they compose tend to lean against you whenever they get a chance.”

Tiny stood up and freed one of the balloons from the pack, a yellow one.

“Actually,” said Bella, “even worse than the talkers are the guys who want to put you on a pedestal. Their eyes honor you with every glance, but you’re a freak to them. You might as well be something in a museum with two heads.”

With nimble fingers Tiny untied the knot in the balloon and held the bladder to his lips. He sucked in three quick breaths of helium. Gently he touched her arm to make her look at him.

“To be, or not to be, that is the question,” he said. He sounded just like a Smurf. She smiled despite herself.

III

When the call came, Tiny was watching a video of Monty Python, the “Upper-Class Twit of the Year” sketch. He paused it just as one of the twits raised a gun to his head.

“He didn’t look betrayed,” said Bella without a word of introduction. “He looked offended. He can’t understand how anyone who had him for a boyfriend would want to kill herself.”

“Isn’t ‘offended’ kind of the same thing as ‘betrayed’?” said Tiny.

“No,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about this all day. I insulted him. ‘Betrayed’ kind of means you were on the same side, had the same goals. You have to be a team before you can be betrayed. That wasn’t Wendell and me. Our goals were Wendell’s goals. Our future was Wendell’s future.”

“Ahhh,” said Tiny. “That explains why you tried to kill yourself.” He clicked the Off button and watched the twit on the TV screen implode into blackness.

“If we’re going to go out together, Tiny, you can’t be smug and patronizing,” she said. “I hate that. The ones who want to transform you. ‘You’re so beautiful,’ they say. ‘All you need is a personality—my personality!’ ”

“Like Henry Higgins,” said Tiny.

“Who?”

“It’s not important. What about just being you?”

“Look who’s talking,” she said.

There was nothing Tiny could say. Nothing Bella could say, either.

There was a long silence on the line. Tiny could hear hospital sounds, the echoing voice of someone paging Dr. Someone. Then Bella spoke again, her voice thin and tired. “I thought being with Wendell would make me a someone,” she said. “I was wrong.”

Tiny waited a respectful moment. “Being a someone is overrated,” he said.

She chuckled—something she’d obviously picked up from Wendell. “I can’t believe a rabbit just told me being a someone is overrated.”

“I meant now,” said Tiny. “Being a someone now and having to be a teenager at the same time—forget it. And, I’ll have you know, I’m not dressed as a rabbit tonight.”

“No? What are you wearing?”

“What is this, some kind of 900 service?” he said. “Are you billing me by the minute?”

She laughed. It occurred to Tiny that she didn’t seem to have much practice. It was a wobbly laugh; training wheels held it upright. But it came from inside her; it wasn’t something she had borrowed, and for that Tiny was pleased. Progress, he thought.

“So?” she said at last, her voice all husky and kittenish. “What are you wearing, Mr. Rathbone?”

“Something with a lot of chiffon,” he said. “Something Grace Kelly might have worn in Rear Window.”

She laughed again. “You and your costumes,” she said. “What’s that about, anyway?”

“It’s about pretending,” said Tiny. “Like those butterflies that have big evil-looking eyes on their wings to scare off predators.”

“Sort of reverse camouflage,” she said.

“Exactly.”

IV

Tiny picked up Bella in a blue convertible, the kind of blue you only saw in fifties movies. She had been released. She was home now, but not back at school yet, and he was the only person she was allowed to see. Doctor’s orders. Her parents smiled at him, their arms entwined. He was dressed like Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief. A very small Cary Grant.

“You kids have a good time,” said her father.

“I hope you’ll stay for dinner, Tiny,” said her mother.

Bella was wearing flat sandals, which was thoughtful of her. She was in a breezy summer dress with no sleeves. “You can drive?” she asked as he opened the door for her.

“Sure,” he said, and pointed to a pile of books on the driver’s seat. “I find art books are the most comfortable. I used a booster seat for a while, but it ruined my image.”

It was a beautiful day, late May. The lilacs were in bloom. He drove her to his cottage on Shallow Lake. They talked the whole way. At one point she looked at him with concern on her face. “Your sunglasses,” she said. She took them, gently, from his nose. She breathed on each dark lens and then buffed them with the hem of her dress until they were spotless. She put them lightly back in place, her hand brushing his cheek as she did.

“Thank you, darling. I don’t know what I’d do without you,” he said. He had Cary Grant down pat.

He was going to teach her how to water-ski. It was part of her therapy. “Trust me,” he said. He had brought along a wet suit for her. The air was hot but the lake was still cold. She changed in the cottage while he got the boat ready. By the time she arrived on the dock, there was low thunder over the distant hills.

“It’s a long way off,” he said. “You’ll be all right.”

She was nervous. She sat on the lip of the dock, fumbling with the skis. One of them fell into the water and drifted off. Tiny had to wade out to recover it. Summer lightning flashed.

“I don’t know about this,” she said.

“It’s safe,” said Tiny. “As long as you’re with me.”

There should have been a third person with them, someone to mind the skier, but Tiny, selfishly, wanted her all to himself. And besides, it was a weekday; there weren’t many people out. He skippered the boat with ease, and, more important, he knew this lake like the back of his hand.

“Keep your arms straight,” he coached her. “Your back just a little arched. Not too much. Don’t fight the towline.”

Lightning flashed. Thunder rolled, closer now, though the sky above the lake was still achingly blue.

“Won’t I get electrocuted?” she asked.

“Not if you stay up,” he said.

“Why do I have to do this, again?” she said.

Tiny was in the boat now, drifting away from her, letting the towline play out. “Keep your tips up!” he shouted over his shoulder.

It took her seven tries. She wanted to quit after three. By the fifth time she was shuddering terribly, but by then she refused to give up. The sky had darkened. It started to rain, lightly. “We’ll start from the water,” she said. Her lips were blue. “I don’t want to go back to the dock. It’s colder out of the water than in it.”

She almost got it that time. And then, on her seventh attempt, she did. He thought she was going to fall, but she righted herself, found her balance, leaned back. Relaxed.

They went for miles. Out of the bay, out onto the wide, wide lake. Then the rain picked up and the lightning drew nearer and Tiny circled back toward the cottage. He had forgotten to explain to her about how to land, but she figured it out, landing brilliantly, letting go of the towline, instinctively, at the exact right moment, and gliding into the dock.

By the time he had moored the boat and thrown a tarp over it, she had changed into some old cottage clothes and found the makings for hot chocolate. Tiny built a roaring fire in the fireplace and changed. The storm crashed around outside, angry about something, bending the trees and bushes as if looking for someone.

“I was good, wasn’t I,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

“You were great,” he said.

“I mean, it took so long, but when I got it, I got it. Right?”

“Right.”

Thunder crashed directly overhead. The cottage shook. Rain lashed the window. Bella cuddled close to him. Then she pulled away, all of a sudden, so that she could look him square in the face. Her color was back. Her skin was like moonlight on a sandy beach. Her eyes were like bright brown pebbles in a stream. Her hair caught some of the fire and some of the storm and looked like tarnished gold coins. Suddenly he knew where he had seen her before.

“You wanted me to know I could do it,” she said. “Stand up on my own two feet. That was the therapy, right?”

He nodded. “It’s called Shallow Lake,” he said. “But I call it High Lake.” He was talking too loudly. He didn’t know why. “Because it’s like high school,” he said. He turned away from the fire and pointed over the back of the couch, through the picture window. “Over there, across the lake, that’s Graduation Beach.”

She nodded. “I get it,” she said, smiling. “It’s a metaphor.”

“Correction,” he said. “It’s a lake. There are shoals and deadheads and other boaters and lone, long-distance swimmers.”

“You don’t need to yell,” she said, although she did not seem really perturbed.

“You have to keep your tips up,” said Tiny.

“I get it, I get it,” she said, laughing aloud, a stable laugh, an unswerving laugh, a laugh that did not need supports of any kind.

V

Tiny changed his end-of-the-year skit. It started in front of closed curtains. He stood on the edge of the stage, wearing a dark suit, a white shirt, and a crisp blue tie. He carried a briefcase and, from time to time, looked anxiously to stage left and checked his watch, a commuter waiting for his train. But the train never came. Skis came, instead, down from the flies, like manna from heaven, accompanied by the boom, boom, boom, boom Strauss theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the briefcase, he discovered a lime green bathing cap and an orange flotation device, which he put on over the suit. Then he took his place on the lip of the stage, with his feet dangling over the edge, dead center, under a hot special, alone, or so it seemed. Loud music came up—live music!—and with it the curtains rose, and there were all five of the thrash bands, and they were all dressed in suits and flotation devices. Then Maury joined in on the trombone, Tiffany and Melissa danced, and all the comics and folkies and jocks crowded onto the stage to sing along. Tiny had written a song that Rupert Blitzstein set to music. It was about not sinking. It had a simple chorus—“On the high school lake, keep your tips up”—and everyone at H. P. Lovecraft High joined in.

Bella came to see him backstage. Everyone was gone by then. She lifted him up and placed him on a riser and hugged him and told him he was brilliant. That’s when he showed her the book. They sat together on the edge of the empty stage in the empty house.

“I feel so stupid,” he said. “I knew your face reminded me of someone, and I was sitting on it the whole time.”

It was one of the art books Tiny kept on the driver’s seat to make him tall enough to see where he was going. It was a book about Michelangelo’s paintings in the Sistine Chapel.

“Here,” he said. And there she was. Bella. It was a detail, a close-up. There was a crack in the paint across her right eyelid and trailing across her forehead to her hairline.

“It is me,” she said, in wonder. “But who am I?” So he flipped back a page and she gasped. “I know this painting,” she said.

“Everyone knows this painting,” said Tiny.

It was The Creation of Adam, where God reaches out his incredibly muscular right arm and Adam reaches out his incredibly muscular left arm and their fingers almost touch. And across the space between their fingers, the spark of life is about to jump, the way a thought jumps the space between neurons. Adam reclined on a little green chunk of Eden. God hung suspended in a pink cloth cloud, surrounded by angels. But under his left arm, close to his heart, was the woman with the beautiful face. She was staring down at Adam, her eyes full of fascination and trepidation.

Bella laughed, shocked. “I’ve seen this painting a hundred times and I never saw her.”

“That’s because Michelangelo is such a genius,” said Tiny, a little sadly. “All anyone ever sees is those two fingers. It’s what Michelangelo wants us to see. It kind of blinds a person. All you can see after that is Adam, because he’s so big and so incredibly nude, and God, because he’s so . . . well, Godlike.”

By now, Bella had taken the book onto her own lap and was staring at the picture, staring, Tiny could tell, at her likeness. “But who am I supposed to be?” she asked, so quietly he barely heard her.

“Eve,” said Tiny. “Just before she was created but as she already existed in the mind of God.”

“Oh,” said Bella. She stared a bit longer before she could remove her eyes from the image on the page. Then, reluctantly, Tiny took the book away from her. Because it was time. “Well, there you go,” she said.

Tiny closed the book. And held it tightly in his arms. He closed his eyes and rocked back and forth, back and forth. He could feel her beside him pondering the picture in her heart. So close. So close.

“Tiny?”

It was Horace, the custodian. He was standing right where Mr. Hurd stood when he was conducting the school band. Tiny hadn’t heard him coming. “You OK?” said Horace.

Tiny shook his head. Horace hoisted himself up onto the stage beside him. He didn’t say anything.

“She was calling out,” said Tiny. “She heard me thumping around up here, working on my skit, and she was calling out for help.”

Horace patted him gently on the knee. “You can’t blame yourself,” he said. “That poor girl had her mind made up.”

“No,” said Tiny. “That’s the problem. Her mind wasn’t made up at all.”