The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [2]
Kyle’s eyes lingered on Phoebe. Smoke hung on the air in folds, dissolving slowly like cream into coffee. “What about you?” he said. “How’ve you been?”
“Fine, thanks,” she said guardedly.
By the time they finished the joint, the room seemed to pulsate directly against Phoebe’s eyeballs. Her heartbeat echoed. The pillows exhaled a cinnamon smell when she leaned back.
Kyle stretched out flat, hands cradling his head, legs crossed at the ankles. “I want to talk about it,” he said, his eyes closed, “but I don’t know how to.”
“Me too,” Phoebe said. “I never do.”
Kyle opened one eye. “Not even with your mom? Your brother?”
“I don’t know why,” Phoebe said. “We used to.”
“Plastic Fantastic Lover” came on, meandering and druggy, invading Phoebe’s mind with fluorescent splashes of color. They listened in silence.
“So … did you ever find out what happened?” Kyle said at last.
“You mean, how she died?”
“Yeah. How it happened exactly.”
As always when the subject turned to Faith, some pressure inside Phoebe relaxed. She took long, peaceful breaths. “Well, everyone says she jumped.”
Kyle sighed. “In Italy, right?”
Phoebe nodded. After a pause she asked, “Do you believe it?”
“I don’t know,” Kyle said. “I mean, the way I heard it—you’d know better than me—it would’ve been pretty hard to fall there by accident.”
“Except no one saw.”
Kyle raised himself on his elbows and looked at Phoebe. She gazed back at him, very stoned, trying to pinpoint what exactly had changed about Kyle since the old days.
“But I mean, why?” he said. “You know—why?”
He looked so earnest, as if he were the first person ever to pose the question in quite this way. It made Phoebe laugh, softly at first, then convulsively, tears running from her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said, wiping them on her sleeve. Her nose was running. “Sorry.”
Kyle touched her arm. “I just wondered what the story was,” he said.
“Yeah,” Phoebe said, sniffling. “Me too.” Laughing had relieved her, the way crying did.
“You think it was an accident,” Kyle said.
“I’m not sure.”
He nodded. The subject was closed, somehow. Phoebe felt as if she’d lost a chance. It was her own fault, she thought, for laughing.
They drifted into silence. Phoebe’s thumb and middle finger were sticky with resin. Kyle relit the roach, and when he handed it over, she smoked without hesitation. Finally Kyle let the nub of roach drop to the floor and sat cross-legged, the fingers of one hand pressed to the other. “You look like her,” he said. “I guess you hear that a lot.”
“I don’t hear it,” Phoebe said, confused as to why. “Because”—she laughed, realizing—“well, I mean, no one sees us together.”
Kyle smacked his forehead, clearly mortified.
“But I wish they did,” Phoebe said. “Say that.”
He left her, crossing the room to the window. Phoebe stretched, reaching toward the ceiling in her painter’s pants and desert boots so the muscles pulled at her ribs. She was very stoned, but today it seemed all right. She even felt a loopy sort of confidence as she lay on her side, watching Kyle squint through his prism. A nylon thread attached it to the window. He twisted it, scattering smudges of rainbow light. King Crimson’s song “Moon-child” came on.
“I just had a weird feeling,” Kyle said.
“What?”
“I thought, if you told me right now you were Faith, I bet I’d believe you.”
Phoebe turned her face away to hide her pleasure. She still wore Faith’s clothing sometimes, frayed jeans and lacy flea-market blouses, a crushed velvet jacket with star-shaped buttons. Nothing quite fit. Her sister had been thinner, or taller, her black hair longer—something. Try as Phoebe might to bridge the gap between herself and Faith, some difference always remained. But one day that difference would vanish, she believed, part of a larger transformation Phoebe was constantly awaiting. She had thought it would come by graduation.
“I’m leaving for Europe pretty soon,” she lied, seized by a desire to impress and dazzle Kyle. “A long trip.”
“Oh yeah?” he said from the window. “Where to?”
“I’m not sure. I thought