Michael Chabon

There were seven brown doors, three down the corridor to my left, four down the corridor to my right, all of them closed. Cleveland’s, the doctor’s, a bathroom, a closet, his mother’s? Anna’s, two closets? two bathrooms? I went left and stopped before the door at the end of the hall. It was slightly ajar. I put my ear to the gap and listened for the breathing of a sleeper, heard nothing, put my eye to the gap and looked for the glow of a clock face or radio dial, saw nothing. I leaned a little against the door and it swung open, noiselessly.

I’d been looking into a part of the room where there was nothing to see, a blank wall. At the other side of the room, a large, milky window threw light across an empty white bed, a girl’s bed, a girl’s room, soft pale draperies and cushions, girlish posters on the walls. I stepped into Anna’s abandoned room and closed the door behind me. My heart pounded, and I did nothing but draw heavy breath for several moments. I felt safer and protected and yet still at risk, alone in a forbidden place. I felt ridiculous, also, as I panted and swallowed like a fugitive in a room lined with satin and photographs of infant cats, and unicorns. I laughed softly at her taste, and relaxed a little.

Anna’s bed gave enormously under my weight. I leaned over to smell her pillows. I’d been expecting some kind of a girl smell, but the pillows merely smelled laundered, even faintly dusty, very cool to the tip of my nose.

When Anna was twelve and Cleveland fifteen, the family, at the brink of disaster, took their yearly trip to the summer house that Cleveland’s father would buy a few months after Mrs. Arning’s death.

The brother and sister pulled on their striped swimsuits and ran out into the lake, Cleveland yards ahead of Anna and heedless of her. The three years that separated them made a greater difference than they ever had before, and the quiet, angry boy wanted nothing to do with his rope-skipping sister, who adored him. He plunged into the green water and swam as fast as he could, leaving Anna to scream “Cleveland!” at the gravelly hem of the lake and to wipe the tears and snot from her face with her small hand. He surfaced some twenty yards away and trod water, the sun heating his shoulders and drops of water from his long hair cooling them. He watched his sister dance in disappointment and rage for a moment, feeling terrible guilt, before the feeling became too much and he grew angry instead, furious with her for not allowing him to be alone, for being a pest and a girl and the only person in the world who really liked him.

In his anger he swam back to the shore and, without surfacing, grabbed Anna by her skinny knees and with a leap lifted her out of the water. At first Anna laughed and began to say “Whee,” but she caught sight of the look in his eye. The next moment she was underwater, his hand pressing down on her head hard. He had dunked her in the past and it always frightened her, but this time it was real and she panicked, thinking she was about to die. When he finally withdrew his murderous pushing hand she surfaced in a fury, screaming, crying, confused. She called him “fucker,” took up two small handfuls of silt, and threw them. They splattered across his chest in thin gray streaks. “Shit,” he said, and filled his own bigger fists with dirt and pebbles and hurled them at her outraged little face, where the smallest of small stones entered her eyes and blinded her. She fell over shrieking into the water, slapping wildly at her face and the air around her, while Cleveland, shouting, “Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!” stood in water up to his knees and in three seconds thought about the awfulness of his betrayal of his sister, and how much he hated her for having been there to accept his rage.

Fortunately—so much more fortunately than I had any right to expect—I woke up on Anna’s bed at six-thirty the next morning and crept downstairs, taking an early inventory of my already full-blown hangover, and back onto the yellow sofa. At ten-thirty, Cleveland placed an icy Pepsi against my cheek and I woke up for the second time that day. As we walked shakily and in great thirst down to Oakland, where I had to start work at one o’clock, I asked a few innocent questions about the sister whose bed I’d slept in the night before, and he recounted the above story, albeit differently. Arthur later embellished it for me. Since Anna had recovered her sight completely after emergency surgery, Cleveland could now concentrate on the small details of being a lonely fifteen-year-old, and he made it, by dint of his genius for telling a story, a very funny story, and I laughed despite the pain in my head.

That night I took Phlox to dinner at the Elbow Room, but my stomach still felt frail and I ate only spinach leaves while I watched her put away a bowl of chowder, a heap of tortellini, and a pretty little dish of ice cream.