Stalker Girl (11 page)

 

Despite all the getting-to-know-you talk, Carly still wasn’t sure what, if anything, was going on between her and Brian until the night he invited her back to Ernestine’s.

“It might be boring, listening to us record. But hey, if you like archaeology, the shed’s got stuff going back to before Ernestine’s was Ernestine’s. You could poke around there if you get bored.”

“Okay.” Carly didn’t think she was going to get bored, but she liked that Brian was thinking about what might make her happy. It had been a while since anyone had done that.

Later that evening she was sitting in a dusty old armchair crammed between an amp and a cobwebbed window in the shed behind Ernestine’s. Brian and Avery and Liam were busy plugging guitars into amps, amps into extension cords, extension cords into extension cords. Testing connections, running scales.

As much as she liked Brian by then, she wasn’t expecting much. She figured they were just another trio of wannabe rock-star boys, one of thousands of bands messing around in garages, basements, and sheds all over the country.

Then she heard that first song and she knew they were good.

Really good.

They made her think if Nick, who, whenever he talked about music would go on about “clean and tight rock ’n’ roll you got with just a guitar, bass, and drums” like his favorites, The Ramones. Not that their music was anything like the Ramones’. Quinn’s was lighter, more playful and melodic. But raw, somehow, too.

Avery had the chops and the looks and the stage presence of a sexy front man. He sang into the microphone like it was a lover, even when there was no one but his brother and cousin and this girl who scooped pudding in a camp kitchen there to see him.

Liam wailed on drums.

But Brian was the one to watch. The only one Carly wanted to watch. Head down, eyes closed, fingers dancing over the long neck of his bass, giving the music its pulse.

The songs were his, too. He wrote all the originals. Some of them were funny/sweet tributes to everyday people, like “Mailman”:

And “Lunch Lady”:

Others, like “Everybody Does It,” which was about a girl who gets caught shoplifting a shirt she thinks will make her beautiful, told whole stories. In addition to these originals, they played an eclectic mix of covers from the seventies and eighties. Everything from Bruce Springsteen to Queen to R.E.M. to Talking Heads, Blondie, the Clash, and assorted disco favorites in quirky arrangements. They’d slow fast songs down, speed the slow ones up, add a reggae beat here, a rap riff there, and three-part harmonies where you’d never expect to find them.

After practice Brian took Carly on a tour. Ernestine’s had lots of small, weirdly shaped rooms, some with numbers on the doors because, he explained, it had originally been a boardinghouse for workers building the aqueduct, the huge underground tunnel system that carries water from the mountains to the city.

Brian’s room was number nine. The only one up on the third floor. It was small, with sloped walls. Carly wasn’t a neat freak, and she wouldn’t have held it against him if it had been a mess, but she was relieved to see that the futon on the floor was made, with two pillows side-by-side. No stray underwear to avert her eyes from. No socks in strange places.

“You gotta see my view.” He walked to the window, gesturing for her to follow. He slid the screen up, sat on the windowsill, swung his legs around and over it, and scrambled out onto the roof. He sat down and patted the spot next to him. “Come on out.”

“Uh—” Carly sat on the sill with her feet firmly on the floor, and looked down three stories to the weathered picnic table below. “That’s okay.”

It was the end of dusk. The trees made a thick, leafy silhouette against the orange-pink sky.

“It’s perfectly safe. I wouldn’t let you if it wasn’t.”

“I believe you.” She did. The roof’s slant wasn’t steep. It looked like it would actually be hard to fall off. But she couldn’t talk her heart out of pounding, or her head out of imagining herself splayed out on the table below. She would have liked nothing more than to be sitting on the spot where his hand was. But “I just can’t,” she said. “At least not right now.”

He scooted back toward the window, and she thought he was going to try to talk her into it, but he didn’t. Instead he leaned against the window frame and pointed.

“See the clearing over there?”

She followed his pointing hand to the woods across the road.

“Not really. All I see are trees.”

“Ah. That’s ’cause you’re looking through city eyes.”

“City eyes?”

“Yeah. I had city eyes before we moved up here full-time. Used to all be one big green blur.”

“That’s pretty much what I’m seeing. A big green blur.”

“Seeing in the woods is like seeing in the dark. Takes a while. But once your eyes get adjusted, you see so much more. Like I bet right now you can’t see those deer across the road.”

She looked where he was pointing but still saw nothing but trees. She shook her head.

“Just past that first row of trees, see? How the green blur opens up a bit?”

“Nope. Still a blur.”

It was true. It wasn’t a ploy to get Brian to move closer. But he did move closer. Close enough that he could put his hand on the underside of her cheek and direct her gaze. His fingertips were rough. Dried out from washing dishes and calloused from the strings of his bass. Carly liked the feeling of his scratchy skin on hers.

“See?”

“Yeah.” Now she saw the break in the trees. It ran parallel to the road and disappeared over a small hill.

“That’s the footpath that runs over the aqueduct. Now look down, just to the right of that—” Gently he pulled her face downward, and she saw something moving under the trees. She squinted and three small deer came into focus. They were feeding on the grass and brush.

“I see them!”

It was getting darker. Fireflies sparkled among the trees.

“Let’s go over there.”

 

Ernestine’s living room had an incredibly low ceiling. Brian’s hair brushed against it as they made their way toward the kitchen, where his mother stood at the sink, her long red hair clipped in a haphazard twist. Between the sound of running water and the radio blaring a baseball game, she didn’t hear them until Brian half-yelled, “Hey, Ma. What’s the score?”

Without turning around, she said, “It’s 4-2 Chicago. A-Rod dropped a pop fly that should have been a double play.”

Brian scowled, shook his head. “That guy better start earning his salary.”

She turned around, a huge head of dark green and purple lettuce in her hand. She was pretty. Younger than Carly’s mother. Or maybe just better rested. Freckly and blue-eyed. Brian and Avery must get the dark from their father’s side.

“Tell me about it.”

She held the lettuce over the sink and shook out the water before placing it next to two smaller heads on a blue-checked kitchen towel spread on the counter. On the other side of the sink there was a handbasket full of tomatoes, cucumbers, and various leafy, stalky things. Next to that, a colander of dark red cherries. She reached over and turned the game down to where the crowd’s roar sounded like static.

“So?” She smiled at Carly. It was the same broad smile as her sons’, but with some sadness visible in her eyes. “You going to introduce us? Or do I have to do it myself?”

“Oh, sorry. Ma, this is Carly. Carly, this is my ma, Sheryl Quinn.”

“Hey, Carly,” she said, offering her cool, slightly damp hand.

“Hi, Sheryl.”

“Carly works at the camp with us.” He stepped over to the counter and grabbed a handful of cherries. “Wow,” he said, tipping his head toward the basket of vegetables. “Did you pick all this?”

“Yup,” Sheryl said, smiling. “I think we finally foiled the rabbits.”

“
We
did, huh? ”

“Yup. Thanks to the brilliant fence building of my sons, of course.” Sheryl reached a hand up to Brian’s shoulder. Brian put an arm around his mother’s waist and squeezed her close.

Carly found herself blushing at this display of mother-son affection, and she looked down so they could have their private moment. But when she looked up, Sheryl and Brian were leaning back against the counter together, each still with an arm around the other. Each smiling at her.

“So, Carly, you from around here?”

Carly shook her head. “The city.”

Brian reached out and dangled a cherry in front of Carly’s mouth by its stem. She was too embarrassed to bite standing there talking to his mother and instead took it with her hand.

“What part?”

Carly put the cherry in her mouth, letting the cool, smooth skin rest on her tongue for a second before biting. It was juicier and sweeter than any she’d had all summer. Possibly her whole life.

“We’re kind of between parts right now.” She took the pit from her mouth and looked around for somewhere to put it. Seeing none, she slipped it into the little pocket-inside-the-pocket at the front of her cutoffs. “We used to live downtown, on the West Side.”

Sheryl nodded and looked down at her bare feet. Her toenails were painted a deep, purply red, and she wore a silver toe ring on her right foot.

“So what brings you to Snotty Hollow?”

Carly gave her the short version, making it sound like her mother was there to do her friends a favor, without mentioning the part about their needing the money, or her mother and Nick breaking up.

Sheryl and Brian explained that “Snotty Hollow” was a Quinn family joke. Something Ernestine came up with back when her kids worked summer jobs there.

“She grew up in Ireland, where no one went to sleep-away camp,” Brian said.

“She couldn’t believe parents would send their kids away for four or eight weeks at a time and pay outrageous money for them to have the privilege of running around in the woods and swimming in the lake,” said Sheryl. “Her kids did that for free every day.”

“Yeah, well, you’re forgetting about archery,” Carly offered. “You want your kid to get somewhere in this world, she’s gotta know her bows from her arrows, and for that, you gotta cough up the cash.”

Brian and Sheryl both laughed. Sheryl tilted her head toward Carly and said to her son, “Ernestine would like this one.”

He smiled and looked at Carly. “Yeah. Ernestine would’ve liked Carly.”

Sheryl turned the radio back up. The crowd was roaring.

“Whoa. What’d I miss?”

“And strrrrrike three brings us to the bottom of the eighth here in Chicago. The score is 5-4 New York.”

“See ya, Ma.” Brian started toward the door at the back of the kitchen.

“Wait,” Sheryl said, reaching for the colander. “You guys take these.” She pulled a few paper towels off a roll on the counter, dumped the cherries into it, and handed the bundle to Carly.

 

There was nothing remarkable about the footpath, no way to tell from above that just a few hundred feet below was a tunnel through which the New York City water supply flowed on its way downstate from the Catskill Mountains.

“Really?” Carly pointed to the path, well worn with footprints and bicycle-tire treads. “Right here?”

“Yup,” Brian said. “Pretty cool, huh? I used to stand out here when I was little and imagine I could feel the water swishing past on its way to Brooklyn. And then when I was back there, sometimes, when I was drinking from the water fountain at school, or taking a shower, or washing my dad’s car, I’d picture this exact spot and wonder what was happening here at that moment. What birds were here, hunting what bugs. If the rabbits were out, or the deer.”

He stared at the ground, as if he could see the water moving below it, the trace of a smile on his face.

“How did he die?”

Brian didn’t look up. “World Trade Center.”

Carly knew Brian’s father had been a fireman and that he’d died when the boys were little. But she’d somehow gotten the impression that he’d been sick.

She couldn’t think of anything to say except “I’m sorry.”

Brian put his hands in his pockets. “Yeah.”

“That must’ve been—must be—”

“It’s okay. I mean—it’s not okay—what happened. Obviously. I mean, it’s okay, you don’t have to try to find the right thing to say. There is no right thing to say.”

Carly nodded, relieved.

They walked along the path awhile longer, neither saying anything. Fireflies blinked, crickets chirped while the sky went from a blue-pink glow to dark blue to just dark.

Carly thought back to that day. How school just stopped when the news came. She was in Ms. Wilson’s language arts class discussing
Little Women
. The question was why Laurie (the boy next door) would want to marry Amy after being in love with Jo, and people were getting upset. Most of the girls in the class identified with Jo, but there was a faction, led by Piper Peterson, who thought Jo was “a little over-the-top and probably a lesbian” and claimed they’d rather be Amy any day.

In the middle of the debate Ms. Goldhaber, the head of the middle school, knocked on the door and asked to speak with Ms. Wilson out in the hall. After a few minutes Ms. Wilson came back ashen faced and told the girls in a trembling voice to gather their things and head for the cafeteria. No one knew what was happening, but somehow they all knew it was serious, and no one uttered a word as they made their way down the echoing hallway.

Carly looked at Brian, who kept his eyes on the path beneath them. “I can’t imagine—”

“I’ll tell you about it sometime.”

“Okay.”

“But not now.” Brian looked up, reached for her hand, and pulled her to the side of the path next to a huge tree.

“Okay.”