The Whole World: A Novel - By Emily Winslow Page 0,5

and dinosaurs. And privacy, in his office upstairs. But there were weeks before we’d get there.

I mouthed to Liv, “Nick?” and she gave a thumbs-up.

“He says he’ll come meet us here in an hour or so,” I said after I hung up.

“Who?” Gretchen asked. I jumped. The house has plush rugs all over; I hadn’t heard her approach.

“Gretchen!” Liv chirped. “This is my friend Polly. She’s helping me with the photographs. I hope that’s all right. I know you want the work done quickly and, well, two heads and all that….”

“I certainly hope there’s been progress.”

“Oh, yes!”

“If you require assistance—”

“I don’t require it, it’s just helpful to bounce thoughts—”

“So long as she isn’t a distraction.”

“She won’t be.”

“I won’t be,” I echoed.

Gretchen turned to me. She knew where I was because of my voice. “Are you a student?”

I squeaked out, “Peterhouse. NatSci.” It’s an abbreviation for Natural Sciences, pronounced like it has a K instead of a C.

“You’re American,” she said, getting that from my few words. “My mother attended a boarding school in Virginia.”

I couldn’t take my eyes off the box in her hands. It was a dirty, decrepit shoe box nestled in a plastic grocery bag.

“Can you tell me what this is?” she asked.

We stepped close and looked in. Small bones and plastic jewelry. Altogether it was shaped like a little dog. The plastic necklaces had been wound around the rib cage. The beads were bright, like tiny beach balls.

Liv jumped back. “Uh, that was a dog, I think.” Her hand went over her mouth, like she might throw up.

“I found it in the garden,” Gretchen said. “Someone must have buried it a long time ago. What are those plastic nodules …?”

“They look like a kid’s toy jewelry,” I said.

“Ah!” She smiled. “How Egyptian.”

She turned toward Liv, still holding the thing. Liv backed up a little. “I want to emphasize to you the importance of the photographs set in foreign countries. Linda’s travels are an essential aspect of her character. As foreigners yourselves, I’m sure you can appreciate that. I expect results won’t be compromised by socializing. You have responsibilities. You have obligations.” She was really serious. The box quivered in her hands. The bones and beads in it rattled lightly.

She turned and headed back outside.

“Oh my God!” said Liv. “What was that?”

We held hands like little girls.

Later, at the Whipple, Liv reveled in the children’s activity corner, full of compasses and telescopes and other fun things for kids to try. She put on a felt vest and offered Nick the box of Velcro organs, teasing that he couldn’t put them all in the right place.

He wasn’t listening to her. He was looking at a telescope. He looked up and asked me if I knew the constellations. I don’t, really, besides Orion the obvious.

But I think about stars a lot. How, up close, they’d be fire and death; and just far enough away, like the sun, they’re life and warmth and daylight; and farther still, even so far away you’d think they wouldn’t be anything, they’re navigation and myth and poetry. Gretchen was like that about her family: Past the age when she needed a mother, and even past Linda’s death, Gretchen was still getting something out of her.

Gretchen’s mother, Linda Paul, had written a series of five books about a young woman, Susan Maud Madison, trying to make it as a writer in the fifties. Presumably this was all semiautobiographical. I saw the books in Gretchen’s library, on their own shelf, with dustcovers still well intact though aged. Her mother had inscribed each one to her—“To my darling daughter”—with what I calculated to be the year Gretchen would have finished the equivalent of high school. Next to them were braille versions, which Gretchen had commissioned. The covers showed a woman with short blond hair and an exaggerated expression apparently romping through comic adventures with her social set, who, the plot summaries informed us, didn’t approve of the heroine’s ambition.

Nick and Liv and I saw a pyramid of paperback versions in the window of Heffers bookstore downtown. Heffers used to be Cambridge’s indie bookstore, and even after being bought out by a chain it’s still got a local feel. Prompted by Linda Paul’s death, the store had made a special display.

We stopped in and I picked one up, reading aloud: “‘Susan Maud did her duty: She spread her towel out on the sand next to Margo. She slid off her wrap to create the illusion that she intended to