The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [4]
Now Phoebe looked at Kyle, miles away on the couch. It was always this way—something she needed to remember pulling her back, like an undertow. A white door sealing her off, reminding Phoebe that her present life was unreal and without significance. What mattered was hidden from sight. At times she hated remembering, wanted nothing in the world but to rush forward into something of her own, lose herself in it. But this wasn’t possible. The only way forward was through that door.
“Do you miss her?” Phoebe said into the silence.
Kyle groaned up from the couch and sprayed water on the leaves of several spindly marijuana plants leaning toward an ultraviolet bulb. Delicate threads tied them to stakes. “Sometimes I feel like she’s still back there,” he said. “In that time. I miss it like hell.”
“Me too,” Phoebe said, an ache in her chest. “Even if I wasn’t really there.”
“Sure you were there.”
“No. I was a kid.”
There was a long pause. “I wasn’t there, either,” Kyle said. “Not totally.”
“What do you mean?”
“I kept circling, circling, but I never quite hit it.”
This admission made Phoebe uneasy. “You were there, Kyle,” she assured him. “You were definitely there.”
He grinned, seeming heartened. He sprayed his mister into the air, granules of vapor catching the light as they fell. Phoebe heard the cannon, fired each day at five o’clock from the Presidio military base. “I better go,” she said, wobbling to her feet. One of her legs was asleep. It was 1978. Faith’s boyfriend Wolf lived in Europe now. Phoebe’s mother hadn’t heard from him in years.
Kyle waited, hands in his pockets. “I’ll give you a call.”
“Okay,” Phoebe said, knowing he wouldn’t.
She walked carefully down the macadam steps to the street, gripping the rail. Sunlight glittered in the trees. There was a distant cable car prattle, silence around it.
“Hey,” she heard overhead. Kyle was leaning out his window. “I forgot, I wanted to give you something in case you get to Munich. I’ve got a cousin over there.”
Phoebe shielded her eyes. She’d forgotten her Europe story, and was startled now to hear it repeated as fact.
“C’mon back,” Kyle said.
Phoebe retraced her steps. Kyle handed her a joint wrapped in fluorescent pink rolling paper. It felt dry and light in her hand.
“Tell him it’s the same stuff we smoked at Christmas,” he said, copying from an address book onto the back of a receipt. “Steven + Ingrid Lake,” Phoebe read, with an address. The telephone number seemed short on digits. She rolled the joint carefully inside the address and slipped it in her wallet.
“Tell Steve to stay clear of the anthills,” Kyle said, laughing in the doorway. “He’ll understand.”
Descending the stairs a second time, Phoebe felt a curious excitement. As far as Kyle knew, she was going to Europe—next week, tomorrow—and this thought amazed Phoebe, thrilled her with a sense that anything might happen.
On the street she looked up. Kyle was watching her from his window again, absently touching the prism. “When are you leaving?” he said.
“Soon,” she said, almost laughing. “Next week, maybe.” She turned to go.
“Send me a postcard,” he called.
Phoebe found herself smiling at the bony Victorian houses. Europe, she thought. Birds, white stone, long dark bridges. Going all the places Faith had gone—exactly, one by one. Her sister’s postcards still lay stacked in a shoebox underneath the bed. Phoebe recalled awaiting them feverishly, right from the day her sister and Wolf had first left, a summer day not unlike this one. They’d driven to the airport in Wolf’s truck, with a girl who’d already paid him for it. Phoebe had stood on the sidewalk a long time after they’d gone, wondering what would happen to them. She’d been wondering ever since.
Her sister died on November 21, 1970, on the rocks below Corniglia, a tiny village on the west coast of northern Italy. She was seventeen; Phoebe was ten. Traces of drugs were found in Faith’s body, speed, LSD, but not enough that she would have been high at the time.