[29]

Double, double, toil and trouble, 1987, 1990

The Belle Tara Gallery sits back from Washington Street.

In front of the building there’s a small seasonal garden. Today there are daffodils, hyacinths, and tulips. The smell of hyacinth sticks to his clothes. It’s 1987. Colin Atwell is eighteen. He didn’t go to college in the fall like the rest of them. Instead, he’s helping his dad build a tree house for their neighbor’s six-year-old son. He’s helping his dad clean out the basement. He’s reading Gardner’s Art Through the Ages and researching the children’s drawings saved from the Nazi camp and ghetto Terezín in Czechoslovakia. His heart breaks again and again at the hope the children kept.

To date, he’s written twenty-seven letters to his mother: it’s his own little bit of hope. He doesn’t know where she is, so he hasn’t sent one letter. He keeps them in his underwear drawer beside Becca Burke’s butterfly brooch. If he ever has a girlfriend, maybe he’ll give the brooch to her.

His dad is teaching him economics and civics by letting him play the stock market. He’s bought shares in Trojan, the condom maker. He’s taking a cooking class at the community college and teaching one of his cousins to skateboard.

Last year, after working at Big John’s Burger for four years, he hired a private detective to locate his mom. The dick, Nathan Lantree, part-time cabbie, part-time private eye, said, “I tried. I just can’t find her.” Still, he charged Colin for expenses.

Colin has no future plans, only immediate ones: He’s going to see Rowan Burke’s photographs at the gallery. There’s also an artist, Kate Mammet, he wants to see. He’s getting a haircut. He’s going to take a walk around the university. He’s going to read “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” by Dylan Thomas for the fourteenth time in two days—to learn it by heart—a practice he has. On his way into Belle Tara, he recites, “Though wise men at their end know dark is right/Because their words had forked no lightning they/Do not go gentle into that good night.” He thinks about the children in Terezín and how they raged through their art. Do not go gentle. Never.

If Paddy John knew Colin Atwell, he’d describe him as “a bleeding heart.” As was Abigail—all the better still. The world has too many soldiers and too few peacekeepers.

Colin Atwell is adept at playing the stock market. Investing in safe sex was a good idea. Within three years, he makes his first million.

At twenty-one, he married Brittany Smith. She wore her hair in ringlets. She wore low-cut blouses. Sometimes skirts with jingling bells, like a Dead Head, except she didn’t listen to the Grateful Dead. She bubbled. She sucked on Ecstasy like hard candy. She told Colin, “I’m almost always happy or I’m out of my mind.” Wearing brown tights, her legs were made of chocolate. When she wore yellow, she tasted like lemon or sunshine. She said, “I smell like the beach.”

Colin’s dad said, “When I said all women were crazy, I didn’t mean that crazy.”

Colin insisted, “I love her. She’s a free spirit.”

“A little too free, if you ask me.”

They bought a house on the shore. She wanted her own studio. “If that’s all right?” She wanted nine hours a day to herself. “If that’s okay? For meditation and work.” Twice he found her naked, laced with red seaweed, lying on the sand.

He said, “Get up. Come on.” She bubbled like fluorescent froth. He said, “I’m worried about you.”

She snapped, “Get off my back!”

Colin was lonely.

They had a grand house. He had an expensive car and a big boat and he wanted a partner for life. He wanted to know what happened to his mother. His millions of dollars failed to buy him either of those things. He still thought about Becca Burke. Holding her brooch in his palm, he noticed that the pin was slightly loose. He’d fix it. He wondered how Becca was doing.

It was pathetic: thinking about a girl from middle school. Depressed, he telephoned his father, asking him to come for an indefinite visit. Colin and Brittany had already toured Eu rope. They’d been to Mexico, and Colin knew there was no place in the world that could heal him. He couldn’t keep babysitting Brittany alone. Sometimes he imagined kicking her in the nose.

Last week, she’d seen him with Becca’s brooch and commented, “That’s pretty. I really like it.”

He said, “It belonged to this girl I knew a long time ago.”

“It’s beautiful. I bet it’s antique.”

“It is.”

“I like it.”

What did Brittany think? That he’d give it to her? Colin would never let Brittany touch, let alone wear, Becca Burke’s brooch.