The Unseen (21 page)

But that was as far as she got before Belinda shook her head and whispered, “No. No, I can't tell you any more. I don't know anything.” She was moving away when Xandra grabbed her arm and held on.

“Yes, you do. You and your grandfather. He knows about all sorts of supernatural stuff, doesn't he? He could tell me all about it if he wanted to. Couldn't he?”

When Belinda turned back, her face was tense, tight-mouthed and narrow-eyed. “Hush,” she said. “Don't talk about my grandfather. Don't you say anything about him. Do you hear me?” Then she turned away and, walking so
fast Xandra had no chance to catch up, disappeared into a passing crowd of students.

Left alone in the hall, Xandra stared after Belinda before she swung around clumsily and clumped back to her class.

She didn't see Belinda again, even though she watched for her in the hall and later out in front of the school while she waited for Clara to arrive. She was facing away from the street, checking every group of kids as they poured out down the steps to the sidewalk, when suddenly something grabbed her arm, almost making her lose her balance. It was Gussie.

“Hi,” Gussie shrieked. “Hi, Xandra. Clara and me came to pick you up.”

“Well, take it easy,” Xandra said. “You almost knocked me over.” She looked around. “Where is she? I don't see her car.”

“I'm sorry,” Gussie said, bouncing up and down on her toes the way she always did when she was excited. “I didn't mean to bump you. Clara's way down there.” She pointed to the end of a line of waiting cars. “She came to get you and she let me come too. I wanted to help you. I wanted to help carry your books. May I? Please may I carry your books?”

So Xandra had to stop and balance on one leg while she got out of her backpack before they could get started down the sidewalk to Clara's car. Once there, Gussie went on making a nuisance of herself. After holding Xandra's crutches while she got in, Gussie shoved them into the car with so much enthusiasm she whacked Xandra on the leg, and then she dropped the backpack into the gutter while
she was trying to put it on the seat. When they were both safely inside, Xandra breathed a sigh of relief.

As Clara pulled away from the curb, Xandra turned to the window, still checking for Belinda, but mostly looking away from Gussie. Looking away but still very much aware of Gussie's big eyes and eager baby-toothed smile and also aware of the high-pitched kid-on-television voice that kept asking questions like “How is your broken leg, Xandra? Does it hurt? Does it hurt all the way up or just down there where the bandage is?”

At last Xandra turned back toward Gussie, sighed again, and said, “It's okay. It doesn't hurt at all anymore. Mostly it just itches under the bandage.”

“Itches?” Gussie started to unfasten her seat belt. “I could scratch it for you. I'm a good scratcher.”

“No. No. Not now. Fasten your seat belt.”

Clara yelled the same thing. “Fasten your seat belt, Gussie. Right now!”

Gussie did. Looking startled and then dramatically tragic, she struggled to get the clip to snap and went on struggling until Xandra reached over and did it for her. When it was done, she looked up at Xandra through her insanely long eyelashes and did a quivery smile, and without planning to, Xandra reached over and gave her a hug.

That night after dinner Xandra went to her room early, very tired from clumping around on crutches all day. Tired or not, she went directly to the window, but although she waited and watched for several minutes, the garden was its old self, neatly dull and uninteresting. Getting into her pajamas, she threw herself down on her bed and was just lying there among all her animals when something began
to happen. She smelled it first, that same old interesting slightly skunky odor, and then a whiff of the soft milky smell of a very young kitten. There were sounds too, a soft, quickly fading purr, and a distant clatter that might have been the beginning of a baby barn owl's call. Sitting up quickly, she looked around the room, but there was nothing to see. Only the packed full bookshelves and above them the pictures and posters. It wasn't until she squinted and glanced quickly from side to side that she saw, or almost saw, something small and fuzzy skittering along the baseboards and disappearing from sight around the open closet door. That was all, but it was enough to remind her of what she had been told about the Unseen. That they were everywhere, all the time.

Very soon afterward she went to sleep and woke up feeling, well, not great, perhaps, but a lot better than sometimes. By getting out of bed immediately she managed to be the first one, the first sibling at least, at breakfast. Only Helen, the lawyer/mother, was there, having her coffee while she leafed through a stack of papers. When Xandra came in, she marked her place carefully before she said. “Well, hello, dear. What a surprise.” And some other things about how pleased she was about Xandra's “very real” recent improvements like being places on time. “And,” she said, smiling and raising her famous eyebrows, “no more intrafamily altercations, at least none that I've been privy to.”

Xandra didn't appreciate the stuff about “very real improvements,” as if she'd only made phony ones before, but she didn't let it spoil her good mood. Instead she even dropped a hint or two about how she might have changed her mind about having her teeth straightened. And later
on the way to school she brought up the subject with the father, who said it was fine with him and he'd ask Clara to arrange it right away.

But school was a terrible letdown. Belinda wasn't there. At home sick, maybe, Xandra thought. Lots of people had been out that month with some kind of stomach flu. The kind that hit hard but usually didn't last very long. Most people were only out for two or three days, but on Friday Belinda still wasn't there. It was Friday afternoon that Xandra went to talk to the school secretary and found out that it wasn't the flu at all. It was a lot worse.

“Oh no,” Mrs. Green, the secretary, said. “Belinda is leaving. She came in yesterday morning to ask how to go about getting her records sent to another school.”

“Another school? What school?” Xandra was dismayed. “Where is she going?”

“She didn't say.” Mrs. Green seemed to be very busy. As she started to pick up the phone, she said, “Perhaps she'll let you know.” While Xandra was still standing there staring, Mrs. Green dialed a number and began to talk. Xandra went out to meet Clara and Gussie in a state of shock. She was quiet on the way home and Gussie, for once in her life, was quiet too, as if she understood.

But it was that night at dinner that another “intrafamily altercation” happened and this time it definitely wasn't Xandra's fault. At least it didn't start out that way. Henry, the stockbroker, was home in time for dinner that night but not Helen, the lawyer. But right there at the dinner table in front of everybody, Henry started asking Clara to call Dr. Baldwin, the family orthodontist, to arrange some appointments for Alexandra. Xandra cringed, expecting
the worst, and it happened. One of the twins grinned at her and said something sarcastic about how a certain party must have changed her mind about refusing to run for Miss America. Not everyone at the table heard him, but the ones who did, the other twin and Quincy, had been a part of an old argument about Miss America contests. An argument in which Xandra always said beauty contests were stupid and insulting and the rest of them usually made remarks about how she was just jealous of good-looking girls.

The other twin and Quincy laughed and said things like “As if,” and “Good luck, kid, you'll need it.” And then all three of them just sat there grinning at her until she jumped up, picked up her glass and threw the water at the nearest twin, who happened to be the one who had started it. And then, forgetting all about her crutches, she ran out of the room and up the stairs.

It wasn't until later that she remembered about the crutches and decided it didn't matter. She was supposed to quit using them tomorrow anyway. And if her ankle had hurt at all on her way up the stairs, she'd been too angry to notice it.

Back on the window seat in her own room, it wasn't her leg that was hurting. But a hurting was there, all right, so strong and fierce that she could smell it. A smoky smell she remembered well, bitter and biting in her nose and throat. Before she even turned to the window and looked down, she knew she would see them, and she did, oozing out of the darkest shadows and glancing up at her with fiery eyes. Shuddering, she turned quickly away and got ready for bed.

She was hiding under the covers and armloads of animals, but still very much aware of frightening smells and sounds, when she suddenly heard something quite different. The loud, only too real rattle of a doorknob, and a familiar voice whispering her name. Sitting up, she looked toward the door in time to see something sliding under it. Something small and white and flat.

The note said, “Hey, I'm sorry. Anyway I didn't mean it the way you took it. You'd be a red-hot Miss America candidate. And when you get crowned, instead of crying, you could say you think the whole thing is stupid.”

It was signed “Nicholas” and there were two PS's. The first one said, “Good shot with the water. Got me right in the eye.” And the second one, in print, said, “Yeah. Good shot. And he deserved it.” It was signed “Nelson.”

The note was still in her hand when she went to sleep, and when she woke up a few hours later, sniffing cautiously before she sat up, the only smells were of clean sheets, furniture polish and dusty stuffed animals. However, she couldn't get back to sleep right away, and before she did, she'd made up her mind. On Saturday she would go back to the commune to look for Belinda.

I
T WAS A
dark, sunless day. The bus ride was long and slow and would have been boring if Xandra hadn't had worse things than boredom to worry about. Things like whether she would get to the commune only to find that Belinda and the grandfather were already gone. And if they were still there, how they would react to her uninvited visit? What was the first thing she should say to them, and what might their answers be? She had plenty of time to go over all of it again and again before the bus finally pulled up to the lonely bus stop where Belinda had been waiting for her when she came before. But today no one was waiting, and no one else got off the bus at the run-down service station. In fact, Xandra had a distinct feeling that the other people on the bus were all staring at her as she rang the buzzer and then went down the steps, as if they
couldn't imagine why anyone would want to get off at a place like that.

She didn't blame them. If she'd still been sitting in the warm, well-lit bus, she'd probably have been feeling the same way. As the bus pulled away, she couldn't help staring after it enviously for a minute before she started to look around. To look first at the shabby service station and then up the lonely dirt road that led to Ezra's farm and the deserted commune.

The sky was gray and getting grayer. No rain as yet, but lots of low-hanging clouds and not a hint of sunlight anywhere. Under the dull, heavy sky the service station looked as lonely and forsaken as a scene from a science fiction movie about a world where everyone had died many years before. However, when Xandra looked more closely, she noticed a bit of light coming through the dirty windows, so someone might be in there after all. Remembering what Belinda had said about using the service station's pay phone, Xandra was suddenly overtaken by an urge to do exactly that. To go into the station and use the phone to call a taxi to take her back home. For a few moments she seriously considered it, but then she squared her shoulders, took a deep breath and started off up the dirt road.

The car dump came first. A place where people must have been dumping the crumpled and rusted bodies of their very dead cars for a great many years. Soon after the car dump was the first of three small tumbledown houses. And then nothing more for a long way except weed-grown fields. Just as before, all that empty space gave Xandra an uneasy, no-place-to-hide feeling, which she tried to ignore without much success. Turning up the collar of her coat against the
bitter cold, she went on walking determinedly, one foot before the other, until she came at last to the driveway that led up the hill to Ezra's farmhouse.

After dragging open the heavy gate, Xandra made her way up the driveway that led to the shabby old farmhouse. With its dangling shutters and rust-stained walls, it needed only a bat or two to look exactly like an advertisement for Halloween. With her mind flitting between haunted houses and Ezra's angry stare, Xandra walked as quietly and as fast as possible. She finally arrived at the crest of the hill, from which it was possible to look down into the deserted valley where one hundred people had once lived in a commune called Ezra's Eden. A few steps farther on she was able to see the larger of the rough, unpainted shacks, and then the one that had been Belinda's special living space.

There was no sign of life in either cabin. No light in the windows and no smoke rising from the chimney of the larger one, as there had been when she was there before. Xandra stopped and stared, hesitant to go any farther and yet determined to be absolutely certain they were gone before she gave up and went away. She continued on down the hill slowly and watchfully. On reaching Belinda's cabin, she again hesitated before she climbed the rickety stairs, almost sure that she would find the interior completely empty and deserted. But maybe not. Maybe not yet. Hastily, she opened the door and stepped inside.