Libby on Wednesday (20 page)

They stood close together at the beginning of the curving path that led to the front door, as if waiting for a signal, or for someone to make the first move.

“Neat house,” Tierney said finally. “Kind of run-down, though. You been here before, Alex?”

Alex nodded. “Yes, once or twice. A long time ago. When the Greenes first came to town. Gary—G.G., that is—and I were both at Lincoln Primary then, and for a little while we were kind of halfway friends, believe it or not. That was in the second grade. His dad is Tony Greene. Used to be a famous football player. My dad remembers seeing him play. But that was a long time ago. When he quit playing, he came back here to take over the family business, or something.”

Libby had already heard about Alex and G.G. being friends in the second grade, but apparently the others hadn’t. They stared at Alex, nodding eagerly, as if encouraging him to go on. As if standing there in a windblown
clump, listening to Alex talk, was just exactly what they’d come all the way across town to do. But Alex didn’t have anything more to say, so they just went on standing there, looking at each other and then at the silent, dark-windowed house.

The wind was at their backs now, and they all seemed to be leaning against it, as if to keep it from shoving them forward down the curving path. When they finally began to move, it was all at once, as if caught and carried forward by a sudden, stronger gust.

They were already moving when Tierney said, “Forward march, troops. The FFW riot squad to the rescue.” Her voice sounded normal, amused, and scornful, but the sarcastic grin that usually went with it was missing, and her face looked tense and stiff. Alex looked grim, too, pale and solemn and even more nervous than usual.

Only Wendy seemed herself, not smiling but calm and confident, and for just a moment Libby felt comforted—until she realized why Wendy didn’t seem to be as frightened as the rest of them. It was just, as Libby had decided before, that Wendy was too used to a world where everything had always been safe and easy. But this wasn’t Wendy’s world, and this time there might not be anything to be calm and confident about. That thought was anything but comforting, and for just a second Libby wanted to grab Wendy’s arm and pull her back. “Look out,” she wanted to say. “Look out, Wendy.” But she didn’t say or do anything—so it was Wendy who marched right across the porch and rang the doorbell.

“Well, let’s get this over with,” she said in a businesslike
tone of voice as she pressed firmly on the button and then moved quickly back into line with the others.

Alex laughed nervously and said, “Trick or treat,” and the others laughed, too, weakly, and then went silent, listening and waiting. Nothing happened.

“Maybe it isn’t working,” Wendy said.

“No, it’s working, all right. I heard it—I think,” Tierney said. “Here. I’ll do it.”

So Tierney tried the bell, and they all came closer to listen, and sure enough, you could hear it chiming faintly somewhere deep inside the house. But nothing happened and no one came to the door.

“Well, I guess no one’s home,” Wendy said. “I guess we might as well go.” The others nodded, looking relieved, and began to move away toward the steps and the path beyond. Libby was moving away, too, thinking, Yes, we might as well go, when she heard it echoing again inside her head—the words she had heard on the telephone. Turning back, she grabbed the heavy bronze door latch with both hands and pushed hard, and the door swung open.

The hallway was wide, with a domed ceiling and a floor of handmade Mexican tiles. In the dim light it was just possible to make out a narrow table against one wall and a hand-carved antique bench against another. To the left was a closed double door, but to the right an open archway let in a pale column of light. As Libby stepped forward into the hall, she heard footsteps behind her and felt someone brush against her arm. The others were coming too.

The double doors led to a living room, full of heavy Spanish-style furniture. There was a round-topped fireplace in one corner, and two large wagon-wheel chandeliers hung
from the beamed ceiling. There was a heavy, musty smell of tobacco, and the room was littered with papers, magazines, glasses, and overflowing ashtrays. Shutters were closed over most of the windows, and nothing stirred in the dim light.

Retreating backward into the hall, Libby bumped into Wendy, who grabbed her by the back of her coat and pulled her toward the front door. “Come on,” she whispered. “We shouldn’t be in here. Let’s go.” But Libby pulled away and went on down the hall. She didn’t look back, but she could tell by the soft shuffle of footsteps that they were still behind her. As she opened the door at the end of the hall, they pressed in around her, and when she caught her breath in a sharp gasp, the others gasped too—a sharp, frightened, breathy chorus.

Someone was seated at the kitchen table. An enormous man with great, heavy shoulders was leaning forward across the table, his head resting on his outstretched arms. His blotched and bloated face was turned toward them, and for an awful minute Libby was sure that he was dead. But then she realized that the other sound she was hearing, a deep rasping noise, was the man’s heavy, labored breathing. Her own lungs, which seemed to have stopped working, began again with a hungry gasp, but her mind and body were still frozen when Wendy pushed her aside and stepped around her.

“Hello, Mr. Greene,” Wendy said. “Please excuse us for coming in this way and bothering you, but we rang the doorbell several times and no one …”

The man’s eyes didn’t open, and his heavy breathing continued. Wendy’s voice was already dwindling away when Tierney interrupted her. “Forget it, Wendy. The dude is
locoed out. Smashed. Look.” She pointed to the glass near the man’s right hand and an empty bottle that lay on its side near his feet.

“Drunk?” Wendy whispered.

Tierney nodded. “Can’t you smell it?” she said.

Libby noticed the smell then, too, a strong odor, sharp and at the same time sickly sweet. For a crazy moment something, perhaps the relief of knowing he wasn’t dead or dying after all, made her want to laugh, but then she remembered.

“G.G.?” she said to Alex. “What about G.G.?”

Alex shook his head slowly and then suddenly nodded and almost ran from the room. Moving as fast as he could, Alex led the way down the hall and up the stairs to the second floor and then to a room at the back of the house.

It was obviously a boy’s bedroom, cluttered and messy and decorated with pennants and pictures of sports stars. At first Libby thought the room was empty, but then someone gasped and pointed. G.G. was there all right, in the corner behind the bed, slumped forward against the wall like a limp rag doll. There was blood on the side of his face, and when they talked to him, he didn’t answer.

   19

That night, and then all through Thursday and Friday as well, Libby found it hard to concentrate. Even when she was busy with other things, talking to the family about entirely different matters, or sitting in class at school, parts of what had happened that afternoon kept flooding out again—and for brief moments, drowning out everything else. Whether the memories came in a slow, spreading trickle or a rushing tide, she would barely stop one leak when another would come oozing through.

At first, of course, it was only to be expected. In fact it had been necessary to remember everything in detail, for the police at first and then later, back at home, when she had gone over it all again for the family. And then at school on Friday after the whole story came out in the paper, people kept asking questions. But what Libby hadn’t expected was how it would all keep coming back when she wasn’t trying to remember—and didn’t want to.

At one moment it might be just the interior of the house—the Greenes’ Spanish hacienda—the look and feel of the
dim hallway; the musty, cluttered rooms; and the deep, threatening silence. Or, more often, the sound of G.G.’s voice on the telephone, or a sudden visual image of him slumped against the wall in his room, or as he had looked later on the stretcher that carried him down the hall and out to the ambulance. Before bedtime on that Wednesday night some of those memories had already repeated themselves at least a hundred times, and Libby went to bed feeling tense and anxious and tired of remembering. Too tired, it seemed, even to write in her journal, although she tried.

Of course it had been fairly late at the time. After dinner the whole family sat in the library talking for a long time. They talked about G.G. and his father and what had happened that afternoon, and what might be going to happen next. Then for a while they had discussed alcoholism in general, and both Gillian and Cordelia told about people they had known who were alcoholics and what it sometimes did to their personalities, changing them from perfectly normal people to cruel and violent strangers. Three times during the evening Gillian called the hospital, and at last, on the third call, there was some news. G.G. was conscious and probably out of danger. Not long after that, Libby went to bed, but when she tried to write about what had happened, she was too tired. There was nothing too surprising about that, but it
was
surprising that she still wasn’t able to the next day—and the next.

She didn’t know why. She was still remembering it in bits and pieces all during the day, and sometimes at night in frightening nightmares, but when she sat down—sometimes in the Treehouse and sometimes in bed at night—and tried to write about it, she was unable to get past the first sentence.
She supposed it was like writer’s block, but she couldn’t understand why it was happening now.

It was on Friday evening that she told Christopher about it. “I can’t write about what happened to G.G.,” she told him. “I don’t know why. Mizzo says that it’s very important to be able to write about feelings and that we should always try to write about things that we feel strongly about. But when I try to write about what happened that day, I get this tight, nervous feeling and my brain just starts spinning around and nothing comes out.”

Christopher put down his newspaper, clear down on the coffee table instead of just on his lap, which meant that he was ready to talk for a long time if Libby wanted to. “Yes,” he said. “It is very important to be able to write clearly and vividly about emotions. But there are times that feelings are too violent or too close to us to be put into words. When that’s the case, one just has to wait.”

“How long?” Libby asked. “How long do you think it will be before I can write about it?” She could hear the jittery tension in her voice, and Christopher must have heard it, too, because he reached out and pulled her into his lap and wrapped his arms around her. Cuddled down with her head against her father’s chest, she felt herself relaxing.

“Not long,” Christopher said in his soft, poetic voice. “Not long at all.”

So Libby put the green notebook back in its hiding place in the Treehouse settee and went on trying to think about something else. But on Sunday morning she went up to her room right after breakfast and climbed out the window. In the Treehouse she got out the notebook and put it on the drum table. She even picked up her pen—and doodled some
birds and flowers up and down the margins. But, at last, she shook her head and climbed on up to the triangular room and checked to see if the bird feeders needed filling before she went on up the ladder to the lookout.

It was a bright, clear spring morning. Looking out toward the river, she could see Christopher coming and going with the lawn mower, and Cordelia in her gardening dress and floppy sunhat, cutting irises and lilies. It was a familiar scene, the moving, sparkling river, the bright colors of flowers, and the widening, velvety swath of mowed lawn. She had seen it many times before, all of it—the lawn and flowers, and Christopher and Cordelia doing exactly the same kinds of things. But suddenly she was seeing it in a different way.

It was a mysterious feeling, deep and strong and comforting. A kind of steady, solid knowing that it was all there, around her and inside of her, and that all of it—the family and the house and the Treehouse, and everything she had ever learned or read or done—would always be there inside her, no matter what else happened. Christopher had mowed almost to the riverbank before Libby left the lookout room and went back down to the drum table and her journal.

It began with a phone call and G.G.’s voice calling—screaming—for help. And so we went there, the four of us, Alex and Tierney and Wendy and I. It was a large Spanish-style house, but inside it was dark and dirty, and in the kitchen we found his father lying across the kitchen table. He seemed to be asleep or maybe sick, but it turned out he was just extremely drunk. And then Alex remembered where
G.G.’s room was, and we went there and found him, only he was unconscious, and at first we thought he was dead
.

She wrote the first page slowly and calmly, but after that her heart began to thud so hard it made her hands shake, and she wrote faster, with her handwriting getting more and more rough and scrawly.

He looked dead. I felt frozen, like nothing was working except my heart, which was pounding so hard and fast I could barely breathe. We were all frozen at first, I think, but then I put a blanket over G.G., and Wendy helped me. I didn’t know whether to put the blanket over his head. He looked so dead, and I didn’t want to look at him anymore and see his swollen face and the blood coming down out of his hair and across his forehead. But then, without either of us saying anything, we just didn’t. I don’t know why. We just didn’t cover up his face, and I am glad we didn’t, because he was alive after all, and somehow it seems that—if we’d covered up his head, it would have all been over, and he would have been dead. So Wendy and I covered him up all except his face, and then we stayed there with him while Alex and Tierney went to call the police
.