Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear (17 page)

The Roses’ lawn ran alongside the Antlers’ driveway, and where the two met was the property line; a muddy tire track smudged this boundary, as neither of the Antlers was careful about honoring this border. Simon Rose was fond of pointing out (not that he cared about gardens or lawns) that they never drove on the grass on their own side of the driveway.

Mr. Antler sat behind the wheel after he had shut down the engine, staring straight ahead. Kids who had stopped astride their bicycles wheeled away, and there was a sudden quiet. Barbara, Debbie, and Rachel rose to their feet from the step on the Antlers’ stoop where they had been sitting importantly, expectantly, and cleanly, having been scrubbed and threatened by Octavia. Octavia herself now bustled out the front door, with Antler children and others scattering before her.

Looking official in her white, starchy uniform, Octavia came around to the passenger door and opened it for Mrs. Antler, who held the tiny bundle that was her new baby snug in her arms. (Harriet noticed how cozy this looked, then remembered her mother’s scorn for the Antlers’ perpetual carelessness and lack of concern about safety, about seat belts, about the need for car seats for any of their children.) Mrs. Antler looked older and tireder and much smaller than when Harriet had last seen her, which had been behind an overloaded shopping cart at the A&P the day before “her water broke” and she was rushed to the hospital.

Cooing in her songlike island way, Octavia scooped the baby away from Mrs. Antler and carried it straight back into the house where she could make it her own. Mrs. Antler sat slumped and still in the car, like someone who had just given a speech waiting for the applause to die down. Her door was still open. Neither of the Antlers spoke.

The neighborhood children had all drifted off. The Antler girls and Harriet remained standing on the lawn beside the car, and Harriet saw a sisterly “Now what?” look pass between Barbara and Debbie. It made her feel lonely. She tried to catch Rachel’s eye, but Rachel, who was not quite three, was busy retrieving her tricycle from a bush. Once she had wrestled it out onto level grass, she plonked herself down astride the seat and gaped at her mother, who had disappeared three days before.

Harriet caught her own eye instead, reflected in the car window just behind Mr. Antler’s head. She smiled and turned her head a little and dropped her chin down.

There was a girl in her class, a very fat girl named Mary Alice Balabar, who held her chin up very high whenever class pictures were taken. Harriet had noticed this for years and had only recently figured out that when Mary Alice (who wore matronly clothes unlike those of any other fourth-grader) tipped her head up like that, her double chin disappeared temporarily.

But Harriet was thin and liked the way her own face looked when her chin was dropped down, and she looked up from under her eyebrows, like someone with a secret. This was the way she liked to pretend she was being photographed. She tilted her head and turned a fraction, taking a small step back in order to fit more of herself into the frame of the car window.

“Harriet Rose!”

Mr. Antler’s bellow startled her and she leaped away from the car.

“Harriet Rose, get the hell off there!” he yelled, jerking open his car door. She looked around her and saw that her feet were no longer on grass, but were instead pressing down on the clods of soil and bark that surrounded Mr. Antler’s rose beds. She nearly lost her balance, but recovered and took a giant step back onto the lawn.

Mr. Antler rushed over and squatted down to pat the mulch and soil back into place. He straightened up then, squared his shoulders, shot his cuffs, and scanned first all of his roses and then the expectant faces of his children, before closing his car door with exaggerated care and striding around the car to offer his arm to his wife. At this moment, Rachel, having realized that her long-lost mother was not a mirage, rocketed straight into his legs with her tricycle as she headed for the object of her heart’s desire.

The impact knocked Mr. Antler into the side of the car door, and Harriet heard him hiss, “Shit,” as he sagged against Mrs. Antler, who sat down suddenly, banging her head against the window frame. Mrs. Antler burst into tears.

Rachel burst into louder tears. Debbie rammed her thumb into her mouth. Barbara glared at Harriet and said, “Look what you did, Harriet Rose. Why don’t you mind your own business and get off our lawn? This is
our
new baby, not yours.”

Mr. Antler helped Mrs. Antler from the car. She was sniffling and wiped her nose on the sleeve of her old beige coat, which was about a foot shorter than her maternity dress, which was printed with a sailboat design that made Harriet think of shower curtains. They hobbled toward the open front door together. Mrs. Antler could hardly walk because Rachel clung limpetlike to her leg and had to be lifted completely with each step. (Harriet’s mother called Rachel “Anita Antler’s potted ivy” and “Anita Antler’s personal mink stole” and had predicted trouble over this new baby since winter. “Anita Antler
should take up some vertical activities,” she had sniffed, whatever that meant.)

The two older Antler girls followed them into the house, and the front door shut with a bang. For a long time Harriet stood still on the grass, like someone in a game of Mother, May I? until she realized that it was beginning to get dark and the streetlights were flickering on. She could hear Mrs. Murphy over on Summer Street calling the Murphy children for dinner.

“Patty, Bobby, Billy, Jackie!” Mrs. Murphy called in a high, sweet voice. “Danny, Mary, William, Thomas, Annie!” Harriet chanted the Murphy names along with her. “Lorraine, Christine, Louise, Arthur, Donald!” they finished together. The Murphys’ pie slices would be infinitesimal.

Harriet liked the look of Mrs. Murphy, a freckled, red-haired woman whose first name was Mary, like the sixth-born Murphy. When Harriet was five, the one and only time she had gone to church with her grandmother, she had misheard the words of a psalm, and had thought she heard the minister say, “Surely good Mrs. Murphy shall follow me all the days of my life.” During the next hymn, when she asked Gay about this, Gay had laughed and offered her a Curiously Strong Peppermint and explained what he meant. When Harriet’s mother heard that Harriet had gone to church, she was furious with her own mother, who had been expressly forbidden to “drag Harriet off to church” during Harriet’s weekend stay with Gay in the city.

“It will only confuse her,” Ruth scolded when news of this escapade leaked out when Gay had delivered Harriet back to Rutland Close. Gay had told Ruth about Harriet’s confusion about Mrs. Murphy then and had succeeded in diverting Ruth’s anger as they laughed together. Harriet, sitting on the stairs eavesdropping with Tobermorey in her arms, had buried her reddening face in his fur. Ruth Rose’s nickname
for Mrs. Murphy, to Harriet’s agony, was from that point on Goodness-and-Mercy.

It was getting darker, and Harriet missed the sound of Mrs. Murphy’s voice. All the Murphys must have come home. Did they really eat mackerel for dinner every night? Mackerel snappers, Harriet’s father had called the Murphys long ago. Mrs. Antler’s little suitcase was still on the backseat of the Dart. Lights glowed in the windows of most of the houses on Rutland Close, with the exception of the Roses’, which looked completely dark, although Harriet knew that one light, her mother’s bedside reading light, was illuminating a little slice of what used to be her parents’ bedroom, though now it was just her mother’s.

It was time to put her bike away. Harriet wheeled it into the garage and parked it against the wall. In the pouch mounted behind the saddle of her bicycle there was a small tool kit that came with the bicycle. In addition to the beautiful little wrench and screwdriver, Harriet kept her Swiss army knife there at the ready. She unbuckled the pouch now and reached in for the knife.

It was supposed to have been a present from her father, and she liked the way it felt to say those words, to say, “My father gave me a Swiss army knife.” “My Swiss army knife? Oh, it was a present from my father.”

Apparently, Simon Rose had bought it at some airport a long, long time ago, when he had been married to Harriet’s mother for only two years and they didn’t have any children yet and lived in an apartment in the city and Ruth was just pregnant with Adam. The knife was put away for a long time, and then Adam was born but had things wrong with him, and then he wasn’t old enough to handle a knife, and then maybe he was but it wasn’t a good idea because of the way he was, and then he was dead, and Simon had never even thought to give the knife to his son, because he had never had the son he
had planned on having that day at the airport when he bought the knife.

One day, when Harriet said to her mother that she wished she had a pocketknife—because of a book she was reading in which one of the characters spent the entire winter whittling a chain out of a stick of wood—Ruth had simply handed it to Harriet. Her mother explained to her that it was something they had meant for Adam to have, and she might as well have it now that she was a responsible nine-year-old.

Harriet wondered if her father would have thought it was okay for her to have the knife. She didn’t dare ask her mother. She had overheard several telephone conversations, and she had pored over various letters hidden in her mother’s desk, and she knew her mother hadn’t heard from her father in more than two years, she knew that the Christmas-light business had been sold to someone else, and she knew that a lawyer sent them money to live on but wouldn’t say where Simon Rose was living.

Since Adam had died when he was nearly nine, Harriet thought her being past that age probably had something to do with her mother’s willingness to give her the knife. It was as if her mother had held her breath waiting for Harriet to grow up, the way Harriet held her breath and gripped a button at the same time when she passed a cemetery. Her cousin Nina had taught her that, along with a song about worms crawling in and out your eye once you were dead and buried.

Was Adam still eight now that he had been dead for three years, or was he eleven? Would he always be eight? Were there worms crawling in and out his eye? Harriet had been given a rose to put on his coffin before it was lowered into the ground, so fast, like the way the Ferris wheel drops away from the top where you can see the whole fair, down, down, down to nothing.

The Swiss army knife had a big blade, a little blade, a little
pair of scissors, a corkscrew, a screwdriver and can opener, a file and Phillips screwdriver, a little tweezers that fit into a slot, and a toothpick that Harriet planned never to use, not even in an emergency, because then no matter how much you cleaned it, it would still have germs on it and go back into its slot and it would be disgusting forever.

Harriet crept along the side of her house, brushing against the overgrown rhododendron bushes. She held the knife closed because she knew it was wrong to walk with any of the blades open. When she got to the Antlers’ car, she opened the small blade and, crouching low, scratched back and forth in one spot on the passenger door. The metal underneath the paint was surprisingly shiny. Harriet wiped the blade on grass to clean off the avocado green paint grit—eliminate incriminating evidence, she thought—and rubbed it on her jeans, before folding it into the handle. She turned her head to study her face in the side mirror, to look into the eyes of a criminal. Her face looked back at her as if from far away.

She scooted around the car to the nearest flowerbed, the one she had stepped into by mistake. The scissors, she quickly learned, weren’t strong enough to cut through the stems of the roses, but the big blade was, and laboriously she cut through every single stem, until nothing in the bed was more than six inches high. She left the stems and branches lying where they fell. Tightly budded roses and smaller, beginning buds that would never grow into flowers lay prettily on the brown background like an artful picture on the cover of a book her mother might read. The thorns were sharp, and Harriet’s thumb was nearly blistered from the sawing by the time she was finished.

Safe in her own backyard, Harriet sat on the edge of her old sandbox and rubbed and rubbed the big blade with her shirt until it was shiny clean. She polished it in the damp sand, wiped it off, and closed it. She dropped the knife into her pocket and wondered, scared, what she was going to do next.

An old headless mop handle leaned against the trash cans beside the garden gate. She picked it up and weighed it in her hands, then went out the gate carrying it over her shoulder like a soldier with his rifle.

The blind, dark windows of the Antlers’ living room looked out on the driveway. They must be eating dinner now, in the kitchen with a smell of frying onions and the television on and their new baby in the old baby carriage Rachel used to sleep in that always stood in the hallway.

Harriet aimed the mop handle up over her head like a spear and tapped against the black glass. Harder, and harder. Then the window broke with a startlingly loud crash, and then came the sound of glass falling and breaking on the pavement, which made it real. Harriet dropped the mop handle and ran into her own yard. She didn’t feel real, but she was breathing fast, almost panting as if she had run a long way.

“Hey, you!” she called out tentatively. “You! Where do you think you’re going? What are you doing?” She realized no one could hear her and repeated herself more authentically. “Hey! Stop!” she yelled as loud as she could. Lights were going on in her house, and the Antlers’ driveway floodlights blazed on. “Stop! I see you!” she screamed out again. Her breathing was ragged.

Harriet could almost see him now, a boy maybe eleven or twelve, running away, easily climbing up the high, trellised fence behind their house, straddling the top for a moment where he could see everything, and then dropping down, down to freedom on the other side.

Harriet Rose to the occasion, she told herself. Harriet crept out of bed and sidled noiselessly down the hall. Harriet the Spy. She ducked behind the bathroom door and waited.