Stranger Things Happen (14 page)

#

Hildy knocks on the door of her mother's study. When she opens
the door, she can see a cigarette, hastily stubbed out, still
smoldering in the ashtray. "It's only my second," the R.M. says
automatically.

Hildy shrugs. "I don't care what you do," she says. "I wanted to
know if you'd take me to the library. I already asked Jenny
Rose—she doesn't need to go."

The R.M.'s face is momentarily blank. Then she frowns and taps
another cigarette out of the pack.

"Three," she says. "I promise that's it, okay? She's so quiet,
it's easy to forget she's here. Except for the wet sheets. I must
be the worst guardian in the world—I got a call from one of Jenny
Rose's teachers yesterday, and when I put down the phone, it flew
straight out of my head. She hasn't turned in her assignments
recently, and they're worried that the work might be too much for
her. Does she seem unhappy to you?"

Hildy shrugs. "I don't know, I guess so. She never says
anything."

"I keep forgetting to write and ask your aunt and uncle if she
wet the bed before," the R.M. says. She waves her cigarette and a
piece of ash floats down onto her desk. "Has Jenny Rose made any
friends at school, besides you and Myron?"

Hildy shrugs again. She is mildly jealous, having to share her
absent-minded mother with Jenny Rose. "No, I mean I'm not sure she
wants any friends. Mostly she likes to be alone. Can you take me to
the library?"

"Sweetie," her mother says. "I would, but I have to finish the
sermon for tomorrow. Ask your dad when he gets home."

"OK," Hildy says. She turns to leave.

"Will you keep an eye on your cousin?" the R.M. says, "I mean,
on Jenny Rose? I'm a little concerned."

"OK," Hildy says again. "When is Dad coming home?"

"He should be here for dinner," her mother says. But Mr. Harmon
doesn't come home for dinner. He doesn't come home until Hildy is
already in bed, hours after the library has closed.

She lies in bed and listens to her mother shout at him. She
wonders if Jenny Rose is awake too.

So Hildy and Myron are watching Jenny Rose again, as she lies on
her bed. They scoot their bare feet along the warm, dusty plank
floor of the gazebo, taking turns peering through the
binoculars.

"She hasn't been turning in her homework?" Myron asks. "Then
what does she do all the time?"

"That's why we're watching her," Hildy says. "To find out."

Myron lifts the binoculars. "Well, she's lying on her bed. And
she's flipping the light switch on and off."

They sit in silence for a while.

"Give me the binoculars," Hildy demands. "How can she be turning
off the light if she's lying on the bed?"

But she is. The room is empty, except for Jenny Rose, who lies
like a stone upon her flowered bedspread, her arms straight at her
side. There are three oranges in the bowl beside the bed. The light
flashes on and off, on and off. Myron and Hildy sit in the gazebo,
the bared twigs of the oak tree scratching above their heads.

Myron stands up. "I have to go home," he says.

"You're afraid!" Hildy says. Her own arms are covered in goose
pimples, but she glares at him anyway.

He shivers. "Your cousin is creepy." Then he says, "At least I
don't have to share a room with her."

Hildy isn't afraid of Jenny Rose. She tells herself this over
and over again. How can she be afraid of someone who still wets the
bed?

#

It seems to Hildy that her parents fight more and more.

Their fights begin over James mostly, who refuses to apply to
college. The R.M. is afraid that he will pick a low lottery number,
or even volunteer, to spite his family. Mr. Harmon thinks that the
war will be over soon, and James himself is closemouthed and
noncommittal.

Hildy is watching the news down in the basement. The newscaster
is listing names, and dates, and places that Hildy has never heard
of. It seems to Hildy that the look on his face is familiar. He
holds his hands open and empty on the desk in front of him, and his
face is carefully blank, like Jenny Rose's face. The newscaster
looks as if he wishes he were somewhere else.

Hildy's mother sits on the couch beside her, smoking. When Mr.
Harmon comes downstairs, her nostrils flare but she doesn't say
anything.

"Do Jenny Rose's parents miss her?" Hildy asks.

Her father stands behind her, tweaks her ear. "What made you
think of that?"

She shrugs. "I don't know, I just wondered why they didn't take
her with them."

The R.M. expels a perfect smoke ring at the TV set. "I don't
know why they went back at all," she says shortly. "After what
happened, your uncle felt that Jenny Rose shouldn't go back. They
spent a week in a five-by-five jail cell with seven other
missionaries, and Jenny Rose woke up screaming every night for two
years afterwards. I don't know why he wanted to go back at all, but
then I guess in the long run, it wasn't his child or his wife he
was thinking about."

She looks over Hildy's head at her husband. "Was it?" she
says.

#

November 26, 1970

Darling Jenny,

We passed a pleasant Thanksgiving, thinking of you in
America, and making a pilgrimage ourselves. We are traveling across
the islands now, to Flores, where the villagers have rarely heard a
sermon, rarely even met people so pale and odd as
ourselves.

We took a ferry from Bali to Lombok, where the fishermen
hang glass lanterns from their boats at night. The lantern light
reflects off the water and the fish lose direction and swim upwards
towards the glow and the nets. It occurred to your father that
there is a sermon in this, what do you think?

From the shore you can see the fleet of boats, moving back
and forth like tiny needles sewing up the sea. We rode in one, the
water an impossible green beneath us. From Lombok we took the ferry
to Sumbawa, and your father was badly seasick. We made a friend on
the ferry, a student coming home from the university in
Java.

The three of us took the bus from one end of the island to
Sumbawa at the other end, and as we passed through the villages,
children would run alongside the bus, waving and calling out "Orang
bulan bulan!"

We arrived on Flores this morning, and are thinking of you,
so far away.

Love,

Mom and Dad

#

Hildy keeps an eye on Jenny Rose. She promised her mother she
would. It isn't spying anymore. It seems to her that Jenny Rose is
slowly disappearing. Even her presences, at dinners, in class, are
not truly 
presences
. The chair where she sits at the
dinner table is like the space at the back of the mouth, where a
tooth has been removed, where the feeling of possessing a tooth
still lingers. In class, the teachers never call on Jenny Rose.

Only when Hildy looks through the binoculars, watching her
cousin turn the bedroom light on and off without lifting a hand,
does Jenny Rose seem solid. She is training her eyes to see Jenny
Rose. Soon Hildy will be the only person who can see her.

No one else sees the way Jenny Rose's clothes have grown too
big, the way she is sealing up her eyes, her lips, her face, like a
person shutting the door of a house to which they will not return.
No one else seems to see Jenny Rose at all.

The R.M. worries about James, and Mr. Harmon worries about the
news; they fight busily in their spare time, and who knows what
James worries about? His bedroom door is always shut and his
clothes have the sweet-sour reek of marijuana, a smell that Hildy
recognizes from the far end of the school yard.

Jenny Rose doesn't wet the bed anymore. At nine-thirty, she goes
to the bathroom and then climbs into bed and waits for Hildy to
turn out the light. Which is pretty silly, Hildy thinks,
considering how Jenny Rose spends her afternoons. As she walks back
to her bed in the darkness, she thinks of Jenny Rose lying on her
bed, eyes open, mouth closed, like a dead person, and she thinks
she would scream if the lights came back on. She refuses to be
afraid of Jenny Rose. She wonders if her aunt and uncle are afraid
of Jenny Rose.

#

This is a trick that her father taught her in the blackness
of the prison cell, when she cried and cried and asked for light.
He said, close your eyes and think about something good. From
before. (What? she said.)

Are your eyes closed? (Yes.) Good. Now do you remember when
we spent the night on the Dieng Plateau? (Yes.) It was cold, and
when we walked outside, it was night and we were in the darkness,
and the stars were there. Think about the stars.

(Light.)

In this darkness, like that other darkness which was full of
the breathing of other people, she remembers the stars. There was
no moon, and in the utter darkness the stars were like windows,
hard bits of glass and glitter where the light poured through. What
she remembers is not how far away they seemed, but how different
they were from any other stars she had seen before, so
bright-burning and close.

(Darkness.)

Do you remember the Southern Cross? (Yes.) Do you remember
the birds? (Yes.) 
She had walked between her father
and mother, passing under the bo trees, looking always upward at
the stars. And the bo trees had risen upward, in a great beating of
wings, nested birds waking and rising as she walked past. The sound
of the breathing of the cell around her became the beautiful sound
of the wings.

(Light.)

Do you remember the four hundred stone Buddhas of Borobodur,
the seventy-two Buddhas that were calm within their bells, their
cages? (Yes.) Be calm, Jenny Rose, my darling, be calm.

(Darkness.)

Do you remember the guard that gave you bubur ayam? (Yes.)
Do you remember Nyoman? (Yes.) Do you remember us, Jenny Rose,
remember us.

(Light.)

#

"What are you doing?" James says, coming upon Hildy in the
gazebo.

She puts down the binoculars, and shrugs elaborately. "Just
looking at things."

James's eyes narrow. "You better not be spying on me, you little
brat." He twists the flesh of her arm above the elbow, hard enough
to leave a bruise.

"Why would I want to watch you?" Hildy yells at him. "You're the
most boring person I know! You're more boring
than 
she 
is."

She means Jenny Rose, but James doesn't understand. "You must be
the most hopeless spy in the world, you little bitch. You wouldn't
even notice the end of the world. She's going to kick him out of
the house soon, and you probably won't even notice that."

"What?" Hildy says, stunned, but James stalks off. She doesn't
understand what James just said, but she knows that marijuana
affects the brains of the people who use it. Poor James.

The lights in her bedroom flick on and off, on and off.

Light, darkness, light.

#

Myron and Hildy are in the basement. In between studying for
biology, and cutting out articles for current events, they play
desultory Ping-Pong. "Is your cousin a mutant?" Myron says. "Or is
she just a mute ant?"

Hildy serves. "She can talk fine, she just doesn't want to."

"Huh. Just like she doesn't bother to turn the lights on and off
the way normal people do." He misses again.

"She's not that bad," Hildy says.

"Yeah, sure. That's why we spy on her all the time. I bet she's
really a communist spy and that's why you have to keep an eye on
her, spying on a spy. I bet her parents are spies, too."

"She's not a spy!" Hildy yells, and hits the ball so hard that
it bounces off the wall. It's moving much faster than it should. It
whizzes straight for the back of Myron's head, veering off at the
last minute to smash into one of the spider plants.

The macrame plant holder swings faster and faster, loops up and
drops like a bomb on the carpet. Untouched, the other macram? plant
holders explode like tiny bombs, spilling dirt, spider plants, old
Ping-Pong balls all over the basement floor.

Hildy looks over and sees Jenny Rose standing on the bottom
step. She's come down the stairs as silently as a cat. Myron sees
her too. She's holding a postage stamp in her hand. "I'm sorry,"
Myron says, his eyes wide and scared. "I didn't mean it."

Jenny Rose turns and walks up the stairs, still clutching the
postage stamp. Her feet on the stairs make no sound and her legs
are as white and thin as two ghosts.

Hildy collects lipsticks. She has two that her mother gave her,
and a third that she found under the seat of her father's car. One
is a waxy red, so red that Hildy thinks it might taste like a candy
apple. One is pink, and the one that she found in the car is so
dark that when she puts it on, her mouth looks like a small fat
plum. She practices saying sexy words, studying her reflection in
the bathroom mirror, her mouth a glossy, bright O. 
Oh
darling
, she says. 
You're the handsomest, you're the
funniest, you're the smartest man I know. Give me a kiss, my
darling
.

She wants to tell Jenny Rose that if she—if Jenny Rose—wore
lipstick, maybe people would notice her. Maybe people would fall in
love with her, just as they will fall in love with Hildy. Hildy
kisses her reflection; the mirror is smooth and cool as water. She
keeps her eyes open, and she sees the mirror face, yearning and as
close to her own face as possible, the slick cheek pressed against
her own warm cheek.

In the mirror, she looks like Jenny Rose. Or maybe she has
watched Jenny Rose for too long, and now Jenny Rose is all she can
see. She leans her forehead against the mirror, suddenly dizzy.