The Party (16 page)

All in all, Nick thought, it had been an eventful evening. He’d had an invigorating swim, been in a messy fight, and had received the first kiss of his life from a girl only a few minutes after he believed he had lost her forever. Sitting on the couch in the living room with Maria and Michael, listening to a Beatle album on the stereo, he was glad things had finally slowed down. He didn’t wish to disturb his present feeling of contentment—it had cost him too much to achieve.

“It’s lucky my parents think I’m asleep in bed at Jessie’s house right now,” Maria said, nodding toward the polished brass clock on the wall as it struck one o’clock. “At home, I have to be in bed by ten.”

“I haven’t been in bed before ten since I was ten.” Michael yawned, leaning back into the soft deep cushions. He’d dressed, but his hair was still wet from his swim. “I could go to sleep right here. Let’s head out in a few minutes, Nick.”

“We can leave now if you’d like.”

“A few minutes. Where’s Bubba?”

“I don’t know.” For the moment the three of them had the living room to themselves. They had, in fact, only the foggiest idea who was left in the house. Nick had seen Clair and Bill not long ago, heading up the stairs, and Kats wandering around the kitchen searching for a knife. That was it.

Even with the music on, the house
felt
oddly still. Despite Nick’s feeling of peace and contentment the sensation was not pleasant. Late at night on the streets, in the worst parts of town, it often felt quiet like this.

“I’m glad I won’t have to keep lying to my parents,” Maria said. His reaction to The Rock’s attack had terrified her as much as the attack itself. When they had gotten out of the pool, she wouldn’t even talk to him. He’d feared that she thought he might one day go off the deep end and throw her around. But then, after she had changed into her clothes, her viewpoint shifted completely. The initial shock must have worn off. She told him how brave he had been. Then she had kissed him, briefly, but on the lips.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“You’re going to meet them,” she said.

“Your parents? I thought that was out of the question?”

She wouldn’t explain. “You’re going to meet them,” she repeated, leaning closer toward him.

Sara and Jessica entered the living room from the direction of the game room. Michael sat up suddenly. None of them had seen Sara all night. Maybe she had only recently arrived.

“Why is the music so loud?” Sara demanded.

“Someone must have turned it up,” Jessica said. She sat in a chair at Michael’s end of the couch. “I was beginning to think you were going to stay in that pool all night,” she said.

Michael nodded. “I might have over done it. My eyes are sore from the chlorine.”

“They can’t be as bad as that jock’s in the garage,” Sara said, turning down the stereo volume. “That Polly had a lot of nerve.”

“The Rock’s here?” Michael asked, surprised. “Didn’t he go to the hospital?”

“He came back,” Jessica said.

Michael frowned. “Why?”

Jessica shrugged, looking tired. “Who knows?”

Wonderful
, Nick thought.

Polly came into the room at that instant. Like Jessica, she seemed worn out, only more so. She wandered over to the record player. “I’m turning this off,” she muttered. “My head hurts.”

“Polly, where’s Alice?” Michael asked.

Polly shook her head, trudged toward the back door. “I don’t know where no one is.” She pulled at the screen. “I’ve got to check on the chlorine level.”

“Leave it until tomorrow,” Jessica said.

Polly paid no attention to her, going outside, shutting both the screen and the thick sliding glass door behind her. Nick watched as she walked over to the water and picked up the small, blue chemical test box and pail of white powder she had used to stop The Rock. He had meant to thank her for coming to his rescue. Perhaps he’d do it when she returned—and when he came back from the bathroom. He had been scrupulously avoiding anything alcoholic. He didn’t want Maria knowing he had any bad habits. But he had been putting away the soft drinks. His bladder was full. He got up.

“Where’s the bathroom?” he asked.

“There’s one off the game room,” Sara said. “But I think someone’s in there right now throwing up.”

“Go upstairs,” Jessica said. “Polly won’t mind. There’s one halfway down the hallway before you come to the turn. If that’s being used, try one of the bathrooms in the bedrooms.”

And so Nick started a walk he would for the remainder of the school year replay again and again in his mind, searching for a clue, for a reason for the horror that came upon them all at the end of Alice’s party.

The stairway lay near the front door, close to the kitchen. Putting his foot on the first step, he heard a low moan off to his right. He paused, stretching his head around the tall potted plant that stood between him and the sound. It was Bill Skater, bent over the kitchen sink, his shirt rumpled, his face pale, as if he were about to be sick. Nick wondered if he should go to him, but then he remembered Bill beside The Rock in the pool. He continued on up the stairs.

He probably drank too much.

In the first stretch of the hall there were four doors, three on the left, one in the middle on the right. Jessica had specified the bathroom was in the middle, but had not said on which side. He didn’t want to barge in on someone sleeping. He decided to skip the first door on the left, but tried the second door, finding it locked. He thought he heard water running inside. Chances were this was the bathroom Jessica had referred to. Yet he couldn’t be sure. The sound could be coming from the last door on the left, or even from the one room on the right. It disturbed him that he couldn’t narrow it down more specifically. The harder he listened, the more the faint gurgling seemed to spring from all around him. Of course that often happened with a faint noise in a quiet place. He could not hear the others downstairs.

He tried the lone door on the right. It opened easily, silently; a whiff of night air brushed his bare arms and face. The door led to an elevated porch that overlooked the pool. A dark figure stood alone at the edge of the square space, staring up at the sky, his booted foot resting on the roof’s wooden shingles, which went right to the floor of the porch. A blue glow from the lighted waters below danced over his rough leather jacket.

Kats
.

Nick closed the door carefully, confident the quirky gas station attendant didn’t know he had been there. He moved to the third door on the left.

It was also locked, and had faint stirring going on within. Nick did not intend to be nosy, but he stood long enough and close enough to the door to pick up on the sounds of breathing, of shifting bedsprings. He heard a cough, a sigh, enough, he decided, to keep him from knocking. He walked on, making a right at the turn in the hall.

This part of the hallway presented him with a choice of two doors, both on the left. The first was locked. He almost knocked. There were people inside; he could hear them. What stopped him was a sound of soft groaning. He or she or they—Nick couldn’t be sure—seemed to be in pain. Nick thought of Bill downstairs. He wondered if there was a connection. Guilt pricked his conscience. What if someone was hurt, or being hurt?

Yet he walked on. He did not belong in a house this big, with its plush furniture and high beamed ceilings. He was an outsider still, though for the moment things were going well, with his job and school, with Maria. He didn’t want to mess up again. He didn’t want to walk in on another fight.

Reasons. Excuses.

His guilt chased him into the final room at the end of the hall. Its door lay wide open, an invitation into a dark place. Nick reached inside without actually stepping through the doorway, found the light switch turned up. He flicked it down, then up again. The darkness remained. He glanced back the way he had come, uncertain what to do. The last light in the hall was around the corner. At the moment it was of little help.

Come on, after what you’ve been through, you can’t be afraid of the dark.

Yet that was precisely the source of his hesitation. He did not trust the dark. It robbed him of his keenest sense, his first line of defense, and if The Rock really had returned to the party, as Sara suggested, maybe he was waiting inside this room with God knew how many of his buddies, waiting eagerly to pay Nick back for a near drowning and a pair of burned eyes.

At the last moment Nick almost turned and walked away. The reason he didn’t was purely physical. Testing every upstairs door had consumed time. Now he either had to get to a place to pee immediately or he was going to have to run outside and find a bush. The Rock was only a possibility—his discomfort, a certainty. He stepped into the room.

It appeared empty, although he couldn’t be sure. The illumination through the open windows—they faced east, away from the pool—couldn’t have been more meager. Yet the draft pouring in from the outside sent a chill through him. Polly and Alice must love the fresh air.

His eyes adjusted to the gloom. He noted the outline of another set of windows on the right wall, their shades down, and a second doorway off to the left, with a tiny room beyond. He felt his way forward. Inside the small room, his fingers found another light switch. Yet he chose to leave this one off. He had definitely reached a bathroom; he could see the outline of the sink and the toilet. If he put on the light he’d only startle his eyes, and then he’d have to exit into the dark room completely blind.

Nick moved inside, closed the door. He took care of business quickly, flushed the toilet, and reopened the door. He was still in the bedroom, heading for the hall, when he suddenly paused in midstride.

Tommy?

That ominous silence he had noticed downstairs struck him again, only stronger this time. His head felt strangely full. He wondered for a moment if he hadn’t accidentally drunk something alcoholic after all, even though he knew his uneasiness had nothing to do with booze.

My blood brother.

A seed of fear began to form deep in his mind. The feeling of
heaviness
, inside and out, was not entirely new to him. He had experienced it once before, two years earlier. But that had been in the middle of the night in a dark alleyway after a gang fight that had bought his best friend a switchblade through the heart. Later, he had come to understand he must have gone into shock lifting Tommy’s head with its blank and staring eyes off the ground, watching the lifeless blood form a dark pool on the dirty asphalt beneath them.

He had not thought of Tommy since he had moved to this new neighborhood. Why now? He did not know. He did not care. He just wanted to get out of the room, back to the others. The breeze coming in through the wide open windows was giving him the shakes.

Nick strode into and down the hallway. He didn’t pause at any of the doors along the way.

He had reached the top of the stairs when the shot exploded in his ears.

No. Lord, please, no.

He froze, the bang resounding throughout the house. For several incomprehensible seconds, he did not move an inch. Then he bolted blindly down the stairs, colliding with Maria on the landing between the two flights, knocking her down. Picking her up, he noticed her eyes were as wide as saucers.

What?” she gasped, trembling in his arms.

“A gunshot,” he said.

She nodded tensely, her eyes going past him, back the way he had come. “Up there,” she whispered.

“Stay here,” he ordered, turning away from her. She grabbed his arm roughly.

“I’m coming, Nick.”

At the sound of the gunshot, Michael did not jump up or let out a shout. Instead, he closed his eyes for a couple of seconds. He did not think of who had died, who it might be, only that someone had died. He knew it to be true with a certainty that went beyond reason. He felt
death
in the house. He felt sick.

When he did look up, Sara and Jessica were already on their feet, holding on to each other. A moment later the back sliding glass door flew open. Polly stood staring at the three of them for a second, her face as white and cold as fresh snow, then flashed by them toward the stairs. Yet Michael was the first to reach the top of the stairs. A gun that had fired once could fire twice. For a moment he tried to hold the girls back. He was wasting his time. They had to see, all of them, no matter how bad it was. They heard Nick’s voice around the hall corner. In a tight fearful knot, they stumbled down the first hallway and turned right. Maria and Nick stood outside the last door on the left, peering in at the dark. Michael came up beside Nick, felt for the bedroom light switch.

“It doesn’t work,” Nick said.

“Is anyone in there?” Sara asked them.

“There’s a lamp in the corner of the room,” Jessica said. She stepped forward. “I’ll turn it on.”

Michael grabbed her arm, stopped her. “No, all of you, stay here. I’ll get it.”

The room was big. He could feel its size although he could not clearly see. He could feel a cold breeze in his face, the blood in his heart. It was cold, too, the blood, and it felt as if it cracked—like ice—when his foot bumped into a soft heap on the floor. A body, a dead body. Michael could smell the blood.

Nick moved up behind him. Nick’s eyes were sharper in the dark than Michael’s. He noticed the body on the floor before walking into it. He knelt down beside it as Michael was stepping over it.

It. Not her. It. A nothing.

Michael knew who it was before he turned on the light. Why did he turn on the light? Why did he know who it was? The bulb drenched his eyes with harsh whiteness. He closed them again, for a moment, and counted to himself as he had while waiting for Alice to come up from her dive into the pool. He noticed that there was no carpet in the room. They had carpet in the garage, but not here. Nothing soft to land on, like the water. He turned and faced the others.

Statues. Tragic sculptures. Four girls: Maria, Sara, Polly, and Jessica—they all looked the same. Kats came up behind them. He looked different. Somehow uglier than usual. He was moving, that was it. All wired up and jittery. Michael did not want to move. He did not want to look down. But he did.

Alice
.

Lying flat on her back. Gun in her mouth. Her lips resting around the barrel. Nick took it out gently. Her lips closed, matching her closed eyes. She looked peaceful. Then a drop of blood appeared at the left corner of her mouth, trailed over the side of her face, plopping in her bright yellow hair. It was still wet, her hair. The drop of blood spread upward along the strand, trying, it seemed to Michael, to get back to her head, back inside.

There was something wrong.

Drop after drop began to trail out of the corner of her mouth. And each one splashed into her hair and spread upward, downward, wherever it found a path. Yet the hair at the back of her head was already soaked red. A thousand drops had already come and gone before they had entered the room. She lay in a pool of red. The reason was very simple.

She had a hole in the back of her head.

“She’s dead,” Nick said, looking up at him. The gun in his hand and the quiet anguish in his voice hurt Michael almost as much as the sight of the blood. He stepped around Alice and stood close to the girls. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Polly faint, Sara catch her. The others appeared: Bill, Bubba, Clair, and The Rock—in that order. And he felt Jessica holding on to him, her face buried in his shoulder, the warmth of her tears seeping through his shirt.

“
I hope everything will be all right.
”

Michael didn’t know these people. He didn’t care about these people. Suddenly he saw and felt nothing that had to do with any of them. There were only the stars that had shown above him while he had swum on his back in the pool, the surprise touch of Alice’s wet arms that had wrapped around his neck when he had begun to fear for her wellbeing.

“
I love you, Michael. You know that…
”

The yellow hair, the red blood, the repose of her sweet face—they all blurred into one ghostly form and began to move upward toward the stars, faster and faster. He chased after her, as best he could, but her arms began to slip away. The spirit began to fade, to fail. The stars went out.

She had put on the veil of his dream. She was gone.