She's Not There (35 page)

“Sure. Jake did a job, I'll tell ya.”

My hair blew into my eyes. The bracken was whipping from side to side. Carol said, “We'll be able to keep these kids in tonight, Poppy, for sure. And any drug dealers will stay inside too.”

That was, in fact, the first thing I told the girls when we got inside. They looked at one another. Drug dealing was a story they weren't buying anymore. I knew that, but I couldn't bring myself to say
picnic man
and I certainly wasn't going to say
Chinese water torturer
. Then there came a great crack and a brilliant flash. Accompanying the timpani that followed came wide sheets of rain. The noise of the bombardment on the tin-patched roof was ferocious.

The girls had gone back to their tables, and while they ate they watched the rain crashing against the windows. Willa brought Carol and me a couple of plates of lasagna. I had a bite. “Wonderful.” It was. I could eat a horse. A moose. I thought of Kate. I ate. So did everyone else, all of us mopping up sauce with huge chunks of bread. The level of chatter expanded and rose, drowning out the storm until the door was thrown open by a great gust of wind and the rain blew in on us. Carol and I had to put all our weight against the door to shut it. Then we sat down and the girls were silent again. The storm that had distracted them now scared them.

We played board games the rest of the afternoon. The girls were competitive.

They put on music after that. We sang. We danced. And we laughed. Carol had brought a record player and a stack of vinyls. She taught us all the dance James Brown had named after himself, and we spun around the floor, dancing and singing all those feeling fine, feeling good lines. I love oldies. I knew the words to all Carol's songs and most of the girls knew the words to a lot of them, but they all knew one particular Frankie Valli hit. They played and sang “Big Girls Don't Cry” three times in honor of Jake. In honor of themselves, I thought.

Carol picked up an album, slid it to the bottom of the pile, and chose another. I caught a glimpse of the one she'd hid.
The Zombies
. They'd had a big hit in 1964: “She's Not There.”

The sky outside the windows, already dim with the storm, grew darker still as the late summer dusk set in. The bare lightbulbs gave off an eerie yellow glow, creating shadowy hulks on the walls. Willa announced we'd have a little supper. She turned us all into an assembly line. She had long loaves of Italian bread, which she spread with mustard and mayonnaise and sprinkled with oil and vinegar. She had us placing six varieties of cold cuts and three kinds of cheese, lettuce, and tomatoes across the open loaves.

The girls were mesmerized by the operation.

“What's that?”

“Mortadella.”

“What's mortadella?”

“Fancy bologna.”

“What's that?”

“Chopped pimento.” She talked while she sprinkled.

“Are those anchovies?” was followed by moans. “Please hold the anchovies.”

“Hey, I like anchovies.”

“Willa, how about anchovies just on half?” I said.

“Sure.” She looked up at me. “I've always loved kids.”

“I've never known any until fairly recently.”

She cut the heroes into one-foot lengths. The girls helped themselves. Carol and I split one. I said to Willa, “Where's yours?”

“Not that hungry.”

Willa looked a little worn. Much more jumpy. Weren't we all?

One of the girls said, “Now
this
is a fat farm!”

They were content because they were all in the same boat, being bad. Eating was always the worst kind of bad for them, and now no one cared. Comfort in numbers. Christen wasn't taking comfort, though. She sat by a window, alone, nibbling the edge of her sandwich. She'd retreated back to wherever she'd been before. The girls had surrounded Sam. They let Christen be, Samantha told them to. “It's what she wants. She'll come around if we give her some space.”

Ernie arrived. He was wearing oilskin, head to toe, and had on a hat with a long brim all but covering his face. An ancient mariner come to make sure the girls knew they were being taken care of, watched over. He would leave in his wake gallons of ice cream, containers of hot fudge, packages of nuts, cans of whipped cream, even jars of maraschino cherries. He had large plastic bowls, spoons, napkins.

The girls began scooping. I said to him, “Ernie, this is perfect. They need to keep their minds off of Kate. They can't stop blaming themselves.”

“That was the idea. Wish I could get
my
mind off her, though. Her and her Drake's Cakes. Wish I could stop blaming
myself
.”

He went to the door and the girls all sang out, “Thank you!”

He turned and smiled. He looked like some kind of apparition in the pale yellow light. A ghost of a fisherman off a sword boat. A diabolical serial killer? I couldn't think it possible.

He said to me, “I'm going to drive the camp van out onto the road and park it there in case you need to get anything. In case you need to get me. This place is a swamp. The water is collecting and the track to the road is filling up. I'll leave the keys in it for you. We won't have phones back for a long time.”

“If I need anything, I can take the jeep.”

He said, “That's one antique vehicle, Poppy. All in all, best not to go anywhere.” And he was gone. The wind slammed the door behind him.

The rain seemed to let up a little, or maybe we just hoped it would. We decided it was time to make our way back to the bunkhouses. We splashed across the grounds, and minutes after we were inside again the timpani resumed. We sat on the bunks listening to it. Then one after the other, the girls had to use the Porta-Potties so I watched as they'd run out into the storm, come back drenched, and have to change their clothes. Getting soaked to the skin made them laugh. Each girl would give a report on another girl from another house who she'd met up with going to the bathroom. They began gossiping and giggling and then took out books and journals and postcards. Christen lay in her bunk, her back to the rest of us. I knew she could not stop thinking of Kate, could not stop beating up on herself. She would take comfort from no one. Tomorrow, I would force some comfort on her. Tonight she needed to come to terms.

By the time they settled in to sleep, it was almost eleven o'clock. They'd played music and eaten vast quantities of junk food they kept pulling out of suitcases, from their backpacks, and from under their beds. I finally understood now that children could have addictions just the way adults could and how breaking a food addiction was probably as hard as breaking a craving for gambling—for alcohol, tobacco, or firearms. Joe had told me that acquiring and owning an arsenal of guns was an addiction too.

The storm had calmed, but once the girls were all in their bunks, it stirred up yet again. A few new cells.

It was another half hour before all of us fell asleep to the distant pounding surf far below us, at the base of Mohegan Bluffs where the girl Cass had run from Jake. She hadn't had any trouble getting her parents to come for her. That we could hear the surf above the sound of the rain on the tin roof was incredible. The seas were fierce. I thought of Esther's paintings and wondered what would become of them. Then I drifted off; the rain was as heavy as before, but with just a rare lightning bolt and clap of thunder. More of a typical hard summer thunderstorm.

I woke a short time later. I looked at my watch. It was midnight. I'd awoken from a dream. The dream of a sound. The sound of a motor. Maybe it was just another roll of thunder. There'd been an image of a boat—the dream came back to me—an old schooner tipping over, people aboard screaming though I couldn't hear them. Not infrasound though. The rain and the thunder were what drowned out their cries before the sea would swallow them in a grand finale.

I sat up. I tried to sort out what was a dream and what was not. The thunder and the motor were not.

I got out of my bunk and walked down the aisle between the two rows. At the end of the row, Christen's bunk was empty.

I ran outside. By the time I got to the Porta-Potties, I was soaked. I didn't bother to knock, I just opened each door. I knew she wouldn't be inside.

I went back into the barracks. They were all asleep except Samantha, who was sitting up staring at Christen's empty bunk. She looked at me. She whispered, “Oh my God, Poppy.”

I sat on the bed beside her.

“Where did she go?”

“I don't know.”

“What did she say?”

“Well, she didn't say she'd look for him
tonight
.”

“Look for who?”

Her face crumbled. “I don't
know
.”

The other girls were awake, sitting up too. One of them said, “Poppy, she told us she was pretty sure who did it. She said tomorrow she was going to grab a baseball bat and get him.”

I stood up. While I changed into a T-shirt and jeans I told them, “Girls, I dreamt I heard the sound of a motor. Christen's taken the van. You all run over to King Arthur and stay with Willa. I'll go after Christen in the jeep.” They climbed out of the cots and began pulling slickers out from underneath. They gave me one. It was enormous. It would keep me dry if it didn't just blow right off me.

We went out. The girls ran across the grounds toward the light at Willa's. I got into the ragtop and it started right up. I pressed down on the accelerator, and the jeep went forward two feet before it sank, into the muck that was already clinging to my sneakers, a combination of saturated peat and decomposing foliage and clumped clay. I tried rocking my way out but the jeep sank deeper. And then everyone was out around me, a circle of flapping slickers, Carol, Willa, all the girls. They could have lifted me out of the hole I was in but I still wouldn't make any forward progress.

Carol shouted through the downpour, “Even a jeep won't drive in a swamp!”

I got out. “Are there bikes at the camp?”

They looked at each other. Samantha pointed toward a shed. “Maybe if we look hard enough there'll be one with tires that aren't flat. You better forget about brakes.”

They all wanted to go to the shed to help me look. I said, “No, go back to your houses. I'll get a bike myself. You don't want to catch colds. You're going home soon.”

There was a soft whisper:
Home
.

Carol said to me, “You can't look for Christen in this storm. You can't
see
anything. You can't hear.”

“I'll see her headlights.”

Samantha stood in front of me. “Poppy, she probably won't put them on. She's sneaking up on someone, remember?”

Willa said, “She's sneaking up on who?” But the girls didn't know. Then Willa said, “Poppy, how could you have let her out of your sight?”

We all stopped, stood there and let the rain pour down our faces. Samantha said, “Poppy's doing all she can.”

Willa looked down. “I'm sorry.” Maybe she remembered how she'd let Kate out of her sight.

One of the girls said, “The bikes don't have lights.”

I felt around the floor for the flashlight and came up with it.

Carol said, “A flashlight is not going to help in a storm like this one. You have to wait, Poppy.”

“Listen, I'll only bike as far as Tommy's. Have him get everyone together again. Hopefully, she's run off the road. I'll find her before she gets to wherever she thinks she's going.”

Willa and Carol glanced at each other but they didn't argue further. I climbed out of the jeep. I said to them, “Go inside now. All of you. You're soaked.”

I ran across the ground to the shed. My sneakers, squishing, filled with water. I shone the flash inside the door. Bikes were piled in a heap. I did find one with tires intact. I put the flash under my arm and I squeezed the brake handles. There was no resistance at all. I wheeled the bike out to the track and got on. The girls were all at the windows again, Willa and Carol too.

I held the flash against the handlebar with one hand, but just as I wheeled into Lakeside Drive it dimmed and went out. I threw it on the road. Lakeside was uphill. I wouldn't need brakes. When I reached the intersection of Coonymus and Center Street, I could see lights coming from every window of the Pleasant View Inn. Aggie's trapped guests were partying. I passed by the Indian cemetery, past the graves of Dutchy Kitten and Orange, and onto Center Street toward Old Town Road.

The night was a wall of black except when the lightning flashed. Great bolts, longer and more zigzagged than earlier, seemed to be in competition against one another: Which one could be brightest, which could travel the longest route across the sky, which would drive into the ground the deepest. Their glow kept me to the road. I watched a bolt plunge down from directly above me and split a fence post just yards away. The post burst into flames and the sizzling that erupted as the rain put the fire out sounded like static on an old radio.

I pedaled faster. By the time I neared Tommy's house, I'd fallen off the bike three times, the first time because I couldn't avoid the potholes—craters taking up half the road—and the second time because I was flying downhill and could only stop myself by crashing into the roadside shrubbery. I picked myself up, got back on the bike, and kept going. Then I hit something in the road, debris or a rock, and went flying over the handlebars. I kept my chin up. I was a ball player sliding into second on his stomach. I came to a stop. I didn't move for a short moment and then I did what I had to do. I lifted my right arm, bent it, did the same with my left, then I bent my right leg, bent the other leg. Nothing was broken. I stood up. My knees and elbows were bloody, but I was all right. The bike was right next to me. Its front wheel was bent, more an oval than a circle.

I started running down Old Town Road and when I was ten yards from Tommy's house I saw the camp van under a shrub where it had run off the road. Christen must have skidded. The engine was warm. I could only hope she hadn't gotten hurt.