Outside In (17 page)

“Fred
is
easier,” said Pete, and patted the baby on the back.

“Little Fred,” said Uncle Joe.

“You’re kidding,” said Mom, looking from one of us to the other.

“We’ll all know he’s really Guillaume, Mommy,” Aimée said.

“Fred Witkowski,” I said.

“I like it,” said Dave. “It’s tough.”

“Get serious!” Mom said.

But Fred stuck. If only the good mood had, too.

Everything that you’re waiting for is different when it finally arrives. Once our baby was here and once he was Freddy the idea of sharing my bedroom changed drastically. I begged to have him in my room. And when I came home from school in the afternoon (on my bike, whether it was raining or not, and Mom hardly seemed to notice) and found him snuffling gently in his tiny bassinet in the dining room, I’d sit right down at the table next to him and do my homework, so happy to have him there.

“Let him get a little older,” Mom said at last. “Then I’ll put him down in your room in the afternoons.”

Dad smiled a “See? What did I tell you?” smile at Mom.

She said, “It can’t last forever. He’ll be a toddler before you know it, and then what?” The moving battle was still on.

Two weeks after Fred was born, a load of bricks was delivered to our house. It was Dad’s present to Mom for having Fred. “Other women get diamonds,” Mom said. “I get bricks.”

Some present: a brick path to lead from the back door to the little fountain. “You won’t be able to think of moving once you see this path winding through your yard,” said Dad.

It was the wrong thing to say. “It’ll sure make the house easier to sell,” Mom said dryly.

“What
did you say?” Dad roared.

Aimée and I headed for the circle.

“You know,” said Aimée. “I can think of good things to do with those bricks.”

“I’ll bet,” I said.

O
N
S
UNDAY MORNINGS THE
B
ELL
was fat with extra sections and ads and comics. You just slid the whole thing into a flat bag because it was too thick to fold and band. It was a big job, with twenty-nine papers. People wanted their papers when they got up on Sunday morning. So the paper girl had to be the first one up. I was.

That November Sunday morning Aimée got up with me and came downstairs for cereal. Mom and Dad murmured softly in their room, and I couldn’t hear Freddy. The possibility that they’d all had a good night’s sleep was the only good news of the day.

I turned on the lights and hustled out to the porch for the papers. The Sunday paper came in sections, not in one piece like the weekdays’. You had to fold the sections in a particular order: the magazine and circulars inside the entertainment section, the news outside that, and the funny papers on the very outside, so they would be the colorful first thing that the customer saw.

I usually laid them down in piles and went along like an assembly line, picking up one section at a time.

Not this morning. Thoughtless, drowsy, I turned over the stack of news sections and dropped them, the whole pile, as though stung, in pain. I wanted to scream, but instead I went silent.

CLAYBURY GIRL DEAD
.

I ran into the kitchen, gave Aimée a wave good-bye. She had her cereal bowl in her hand and was drinking out of it. She looked at me with one eye and waved one hand. Her pajamas were halfway down her bottom, like a littler kid than she was.

I hauled Reshna out of the garage and stuffed her baskets with the papers, stack by stack, with no regard for order, no funny papers neatly on the outside.

I took the fastest way out of the neighborhood, down the hill of Marvin Road and around the corner to the Little River. I rode over the bridge to the other side where it was somebody else’s route and no one would know me.

I rode Reshna right down to the edge of the river and laid her on her side. I kicked off my shoes and stuffed my socks inside them and left them on the bank. I rolled my jeans above my knees.

I dragged the papers out of the baskets in neat piles, hauled them under the bridge and into the water. The grass was spiky with frost that melted under my feet, wetting them in ice water.

Already frozen, I waded into the river. In stacks I drowned the newspapers. I weighted them down with stones and covered them with river sand.

I dried my feet on my socks, pulled my sneakers over the sogginess, climbed shakily onto Reshna. I went home.

•  •  •

Mom and Dad’s bedroom door was still closed. When Dad finally got up at about eleven, he asked, “Where’s the paper, Cher?”

“Let’s see it,” Mom said. “Our House for Sale ad is in it.”

I acted as if they both were crazy. It wasn’t difficult. “It didn’t come,” I said. I followed Dad as he went out to look up and down Marvin Road, as if I thought he really might find a paper.

“Nobody got one?” he asked.

“It didn’t come,” I said again. Aimée was already outside on her little bike with its training wheels, riding between the lanes of bricks she’d lined up on the driveway. Dad had built nothing with the bricks yet, and now our house was in the paper. When Aimée toppled a little and stopped herself by putting her foot down, she looked up and saw us all there looking around.

“It really didn’t come?” Mom asked.

I shook my head, grasping the handlebars to steady the bike.

“Leave me alone!” Aimée said fiercely.

“Well, isn’t that strange?” said Dad.

“Very,” said Mom.

I asked myself what I’d been expecting. A funeral without a body? A girl who disappeared and was never seen again? The shock of hearing that Wendy was dead was worse than anything else I’d ever imagined happening to her.

I couldn’t stay in the house. I didn’t want to leave the yard. “Let’s make a castle,” I said to Aimée.

“Brickland,” said Aimée. “Brickville. Brickarama.” She started piling up the bricks as though they were Legos. It
wasn’t long before Pammy came to see why we were outside but not in the circle and joined in the building.

When Joanie came into the backyard, I was being a big, nasty bird I’d seen in a movie in Mr. Stone’s class, a fearsome eagle on my nest, squatting on top of the brick pile with a brick clutched in each hand-claw. Aimée and Pammy were coming up to me one by one to beg and plead for bricks. Aimée said, “Please, sire, I crave a boon,” a phrase she’d read in one of Dave’s books.

I snarled, “What will you give in return?”

“My firstborn child!” Aimée said, weeping, and shoved Pammy forward. She didn’t care, as long as she got some bricks out of it. They dragged the bricks away in Pammy’s wagon.

Joanie climbed onto the brick pile beside me.

Aimée wept, “Please, sire, I beg of you, have mercy!”

Joanie sneered at me. “I advise you to consider carefully, Your Highness. Are you certain this peasant can be trusted?”

I raised a claw and scraped it at Aimée, and Pammy snatched away the brick I’d dropped. Joanie and I snarled. The little kids ran away, their arms full of bricks.

To me, Joanie looked like an egg still incubating, scrunched down on top of the brick pile in the middle of the driveway. I raised my claw again at Aimée and Pammy, busy by the garage with their bricks.

When I turned, Dave was standing right next to my pile. His appearance was so sudden, and he looked so tall standing over me, that I jumped. He didn’t seem to notice.

“What?” I said.

“Where did you come from?” asked Joanie in her flirty way.

“Chérie?” Dave took a breath, and then another one.
“You know that girl?” His voice shook. “The one who was missing from Claybury Junior High?”

“Who?” I asked. “Wendy Boland?”

It was the only time I ever said her name.

“They found her dead,” said Dave. He continued so low that I could barely hear him, yet every word came through perfectly and distinctly. “She was in a cave.”

I wrapped my arms around my knees. Terror made me rock as if waves were pushing me over. It was as if I hadn’t known, as if I’d somehow made it not true by drowning the newspapers.

I looked at Joanie’s tight black curls, at her cherry black eyes and pink cheeks. Around Joanie’s eyes the skin was white. Joanie poked her fingertips out from the sleeves of her red sweater and held her eyelids closed, but tears spurted out from underneath. I don’t know why I didn’t cry, too, except that I didn’t like the way Joanie’s crying looked, as if she were going a little crazy, as if she was afraid that someday she might be found dead, too, it was just a matter of when.

I couldn’t cry. I wanted to crawl under the garage and hide forever. My shoulders wouldn’t stop rocking me back and forth. Dave put his arm around me to stop my shoulders, but they rattled hard against him. I put out my arm and hugged Joanie.

Joanie said, “She was thirteen, just like me.”

“And me,” Dave said. “She was going to go to my father’s school.”

I whispered back, “I’ll be thirteen in six days.” Joanie nodded, understanding: The danger she was in, I would soon be in.

We sat there together on the cold, hard bricks. When Aimée and Pammy used up their bricks and came back to
the pile for more, Joanie jumped to her feet and rubbed her bottom. “Ooh, my butt,” she said rudely, and the little kids laughed and forgot they’d seen us hugging.

“How do you know?” I whispered to Dave.

“What do you think?” he asked. “They called Dad.”

“I didn’t know,” I said. “We didn’t get our papers.”

Dave looked down into my eyes, and his own looked deep and black and sorrowful. “Well, neither did we, Chérie.”

That night Mom and Dad got me on my own when I came in for dinner. They said they knew I would be hearing at school about the death of the little girl in Claybury and they wanted me to hear it from them first.

Nobody knew what had happened to her, they said. But she had been alone near the woods, and now she was dead.

Freddy was asleep in his bassinet in the dining room, and Aimée was upstairs in the tub. They had planned this, planned telling me, and now they were sitting there, looking at me to see what I would say or do. I said, “Wasn’t there a car?”

Dad shook his head and scratched inside his ear. Late-afternoon light picked up the reddest parts of his hair and made it glow from behind. “They’re discounting that now,” he said. “They think she might have gotten lost in the woods.”

Mom’s face was still kind of puffy and pinkish-pale the way it had been since she’d had Freddy. “Poor little kid,” Mom said. She shook her head, too.

I jumped up and ran away from the table, up the stairs.

“Chérie?” Mom called after me.

“Let her go,” I heard Dad say. Or maybe he just didn’t want to wake Freddy.

•  •  •

When you’re little, your mother tells you scary stories to keep you safe. Just the other day I had heard Mom telling Aimée the one about the kid who hid in a pile of leaves at the edge of the street and got run over by a car that drove too close to the curb. I don’t know, maybe that story was for real. Maybe in twenty years mothers would tell their kids not to go anywhere by themselves because they could wind up dead in the woods.

Right now Wendy Boland was more than a scary story. Hers was a scary, real, true story. Hearing about her wasn’t making me safer; it was putting me in danger. Or maybe I’d been in danger all along and never known it, like Aimée hiding in the leaves, until I heard the story about what had happened to Wendy. I decided my parents were making up a story just to keep us kids from worrying. Stay out of the woods, and you’ll be safe. Stay close to home, and you won’t get hurt.

I lay in the bathtub, covered shoulders to thighs with water, my knees sticking up, and let myself sink, let myself think of those woods where they’d found Wendy. I saw the birch leaves, the yellow-pink (not a color that came in pastels) leaves like the trees next to the garage. But this time all I saw was leaves. I made Wendy not be there among them anymore. I saw only leaves, drier, blowing over the spot where Wendy had been.

I sat up and let my knees go under, warming them even though it meant catching a chilly breeze on my wet shoulders. It was a trade-off, I thought. Wendy gone from the woods meant Wendy in the cemetery, and thinking that took me back to Arlington again.

It wasn’t until I was out of the tub and dry and in bed in my pajamas that I let myself see the image I’d been holding back from my imagination: the gravestone with
Wendy’s dates on it, same as mine at the beginning, but not—I hoped, with forty-five days left in the year—at the end: 1955–1968. My whole life so far was just that for Wendy: her whole life, period.

Monday I stayed home. I said I had a sore throat, but the thought of going out in the world was the real source of the pain I was feeling. Any number of things could happen if you went outside. A gun could shoot you; a bike could slip off a bridge; a station wagon could pull up beside you; a scary headline could hit you in the eye.

I faked. I think Aimée knew but didn’t bother telling. Mom stayed away from me so she wouldn’t carry germs to Freddy. She left me a thermos of orange juice. I drank from it and slept all day, safe in the sunlight falling through the pines onto my bed. In the afternoon Dave came over to do my route. I saw him coming across Marvin Road and guessed what he wanted. When Mom came to the door, I told her to let him. “Just today,” I said.