The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [131]
“She could hardly leave the apartment,” Wolf said. “The minute she was outside, she’d start thinking she’d left the oven turned on or a window open and something awful was going to happen. She felt cursed, a danger to everyone around her. We’d get on the bus and suddenly she couldn’t find her change purse—she’d turn to me practically in tears, ransacking her pockets while everyone waited, and of course it would be right there, somewhere obvious …” He shook his head. “She was constantly bringing up stuff from the past, how she’d pushed some kid in a river and he cut his eye, or hitting your mom on her tricycle—her trike, for God’s sake—how she’d ripped your mom’s stocking and cut the back of her leg. In Faith’s mind her whole life had boiled down to that. Hurting innocent people.”
At night she would jerk awake and lie rigid with fear. “I don’t know what to do, but I have to do something,” she’d say, peering at the ceiling. Wolf would lean over her, putting his hand on her chest, trying to still the violent kicking of her heart. “I have to do something,” she’d say.
But no, he told her, that was exactly wrong. There was nothing she had to do except find a way of living with what she’d done. “Look, awful stuff happens,” he said. “People live with it, Faith, that’s how life works.”
“He has four children,” Faith said. “One’s only three years old.”
“That’s what I’m talking about!” Wolf cried, seizing on it. “You lived with that—you lost your father, and look, you survived it.”
He knew instantly that it was the wrong thing. “Right,” Faith said bitterly. “And look at me now.”
There were long silences as Wolf spoke, but Phoebe just waited. She felt no more urgency, because now she knew—the missing piece was in her hands. She was almost afraid to have the story end, of what she would do when Wolf stopped talking for good.
With time Faith had calmed down, as Wolf had known she would. Even panic and despair could be gotten used to, and gradually she began meeting people, hanging out a little. At times you might not have known her from her old self, but Wolf saw a difference: she’d grown careless. That hope, the near-evangelical purpose that had fired even her wildest schemes, was gone. She went parachuting with some U.S. soldiers kicking around Munich on a day leave, something she’d never done in her life, but it left her cold. “Her taste for danger resurfaced, little by little,” Wolf remembered. “But not as a road to anything else, she just wanted the feeling. The distraction of it. That scared the shit out of me.”
While he was at work one day Faith met up with a group of kids drifting south in a van. When Wolf got home that night, she mentioned the possibility of joining them. Wolf said, sure, he’d come along, too, but Faith seemed leery of this. “You wouldn’t like them,” she said.
“Do you?”
“Not really.”
“So, why go?”
Faith looked at her hands. “Maybe you should go home,” she said fearfully. “To San Francisco.”
“What the fuck does that have to do with it?”
“We should go our separate ways.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m bringing you down. I can see it,” she said. “I’m bringing you down, you need to get away from me.”
Wolf wrapped her in his arms. Faith was sobbing. “Baby,” he said. “Baby, this has to stop. You have to let it stop.”
Faith spoke into his shirt. “What?” Wolf said, pulling back so he could hear. She was trembling, her eyes closed. “Baby, what did you say?”
“I killed a man,” Faith whispered.
Wolf ditched his factory job and got in the van with the rest of these kids. “They were dull,” he recalled, “but there was an edge of desperation that kept things pretty lively. I’ve wondered sometimes if I’m the only one in that group that’s still alive.”
Their ostensible goal was a Jethro Tuli concert in Rome, but really it was killing time at sixty miles an hour, everyone tumbling around in the carpeted back of the van, hitchhikers hopping in and out, a jam jar full of liquid LSD sloshing around in someone’s lap. They’d lost the eyedropper,