Waiting for Christopher (2 page)

“No,” she said, when her father tried to pull her to her feet. She folded her arms, turned away from him
.

“No,” she insisted when her mother doubled back from the car and stooped beside her, patting her shoulder, smoothing her hair. “I’m not going.” Pine needles pricked her legs, and tears, warm as baby’s milk, worked their way to the corners of her mouth. “I’m waiting for Christopher,” she said. “I’m waiting right here till he wakes up.”

M
oving from Connecticut to Florida had sounded like a good idea last year. But last year, moving to Katmandu would have had its appeal. After skipping eighth grade and going straight to high school, after being catapulted from the few friends she’d made at Byrd Middle School into the relentless fashion-and-personality meat grinder of Edgemoor Senior High, Feena would have gone to the ends of the earth to escape another semester of humiliation and loneliness.

That, of course, was before she’d seen the house her mother had rented for them. “It’s a little out of the way,” Lenore Harvey had explained, slipping coffee mugs into blister packs, nesting them in one of the cardboard cartons they’d talked the A&P manager out of flattening. “But it’s got two bedrooms and it’s affordable and”—a rare half smile—“we’ll never be cold again!”

None of this had been a lie, Feena conceded now, studying the sliver of grass and the tiny box-shaped house with its arched door like the brick oven in a pizzeria. She had laughed when she’d christened their new home “the Pizza Hut,” but it was hard to look at it without wishing she were anywhere else, even back in Connecticut.

Inside, the house was mean and cramped, with three small rooms that were nearly identical: same shape, same color, same postage-stamp window half filled with an air conditioner that proved next to useless against Florida’s roiling, steamy heat.

And the outside was worse. Much worse. From the moment she’d seen it, Feena knew the Pizza Hut would seal her fate, confirm her role as social outcast. No matter how sophisticated or funny or charming she made herself, no matter how much mousse she used or how well she fitted in at her new school, she was bound to be a Loser with a capital
L
as soon as anyone found out where she lived.

The tiny house was squeezed between a large asphalt parking lot—where Feena now sat in their ‘89 Chevy, running the air and reading her favorite novel for the umpteenth time—and Ryder’s Fun Land, where six giant flying teacups were just slowing down, the one with the red handle, like always, finishing on top. In front of the house was a narrow strip of earth in which, before she knew better, Feena had tried to grow a garden, had spent weeks propping up seedlings, watering, weeding.

As Jane Eyre pondered the blackened remains of Thornfield Hall, Feena had only to raise her eyes a few inches to find a far less romantic ruin. It was an overstatement to call Ryder’s an amusement park. A ten-hole miniature golf course and three kiddie rides on a backwater highway were a joke, but nobody Feena knew was laughing: not Feena, when stragglers trooped across their yard, crushing the watercress shoots and baby lettuce as soon as they showed aboveground; not old Peter Milakowski, who’d bought the park when Route 56 was the only shore road out of Ocala, and who’d watched the new four-lane thruway make him a failure overnight; not even the handful of sticky, whiny toddlers whose mothers scooped them out of shopping carts and car seats and highchairs, only to plop them into fiberglass tugboats and fire engines and teacups.

As for the golf course, Feena had never seen anyone besides Mr. Milakowski set foot on it. Every morning, he swept the strip of green carpeting, then put out three rows of golf clubs, their silver shafts glinting from under the roof of the small ticket booth. Carefully, he arranged pencils and scorecards, enough for a dozen players.

Who never came. Each night, Mr. Milakowski turned off the machine that moved a plastic tiger’s tail back and forth, back and forth across the narrow opening to the tenth hole. He pulled all the clubs inside the booth, and locked the door. “Gulf,” he told Feena whenever she helped, matching the careful pace of his arthritic fingers, slipping the clubs one by one into the storage stand. “Where is a kid who really likes this gulf?”

“Only if I pay for fancy volcanoes that are shooting steam. Only if I buy talking robots and pirate ships does anyone care to play this game.”

Her mother would be furious if she were to come home early from work and find Feena running the engine like this. But it was such a relief to feel the rush from the vents, to read as the air conditioner hummed, to let the tragic story in her book overwhelm the comedy of living where she lived, being who she was.

And who was she, anyway? A fourteen-year-old misfit with too much red hair and skin so pale it looked as though she spent her days under a rock (which, if she wanted to avoid being blistered by the Florida sun, wouldn’t have been a bad idea). While other girls were confident and quick, with knowing, fluid bodies and an endless supply of MTV patter, Feena felt trapped by her chalky flesh, her cautious, unreliable brain that arrived at the perfect retort, the ideal comeback after it was too late and nobody else cared.

“How come you’re always alone, Feen?” Feena knew exactly what her mother would say if she found her here. “Aren’t kids your age supposed to run in packs? You never do anything but turn pages.”

Was that any worse than watching television every waking second?

How many times had Feena had to compete with
Days of Our Lives
or
As the World Turns
? How many confessions had she made, how many jokes had she told, to the back of her mother’s head?

“Can’t you see I’m tired?” Lenore would ask, her eyes velcroed to the big screen Sony. “Honest, Feen. Weekends are the only time I’ve got to relax. Can’t you just leave me be?”

Rochester and Jane. Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Angel. Heathcliff and Cathy in
Wuthering Heights
. Maxim de Winter, haunted by the mysterious Rebecca. Maybe, Feena admitted, the characters she adored were just as storm tossed, every bit as overblown as the soap opera stars her mother followed. But at least they were partly Feena’s creations, their faces and bodies and voices filled out by her imagination. She could even take them with her, read them into life in an idling car or a boring class. There was no limit to when or where or how much she could love them.

Love wasn’t too strong a word for it, either. Whether Edward Rochester was real or not seemed irrelevant in the face of how much he meant to her. While everything around her—her brother, her father, her home—had faded away, Rochester remained, fixed and bright. She couldn’t remember Christopher’s face anymore, could hardly reconstruct her father’s. But Brontë’s hero was easy to see, to call up whenever she needed him.

He was much older than she was, of course, but not as old as Mr. Milakowski. Probably her father’s age. Broad-chested, craggy, tortured. Even though the one photo her dad had sent in the eight years since he’d left showed a slender-bordering-on-skinny man with a sloppy smile that didn’t remotely suggest tragedy, Feena always pictured Rochester with her father’s storm-green eyes and uncombable copper-colored hair.

And if Tyler Harvey—tall and funny, with a laugh like deep water—could look at Feena the way he used to when she was little, could hold her to him, then push her away and lock on to her eyes as if what he saw there answered all the questions he’d ever had, why then, that explained how Rochester could fall in love with his plain Jane.

How strange to sit here, Feena thought, to glance up from the page where Rochester, blind and helpless as a wounded lion, stood once more beside his little Jane—to peer through the dust-specked window of the Chevy at the amusement park. She closed the book and watched the whirling tea cups slow, watched three mothers lift three cranky little girls from their perches.

Not three girls, actually, Feena realized. Distracted, she put down the book and studied the child climbing out of the red-handled cup. He was a boy, she saw now, with tumbled blond hair that would have done justice to a baby Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty. He seemed to be two, maybe three, not old enough yet to be embarrassed by the curls his mother had left uncut.

Feena couldn’t hear anything except the air conditioner’s breezy purr, but she wondered idly if the child were laughing or crying. His expression was hard to read—either torture or delight. Either exhilaration from the speedy blur of the ride, or fear at having been stranded, spun into orbit all alone.

As she led him away, the little boy’s mother talked, her mouth shaping large, exaggerated urgencies. Feena had no idea what she was saying. The woman’s expression was as hard to interpret as her son’s. She might have been angry, or just sad and serious. Sometimes Feena’s own mother got that very same look on her face when she was worried, trying to discuss something important with Feena. Other times, though, the look was a prelude, a cue that Lenore was working her way into a stiff drink or a good cry. Or a long, furious tirade—at her boss in the department of motor vehicles or at Feena, whom she accused of failing utterly to appreciate all the sacrifices and hard work Lenore had suffered on her account.

But now, as the two other children and their mothers headed toward the parking lot, Feena saw something she hadn’t expected at all. The woman hit her little boy. Then hit him again.

The boy’s mother raised her arm, lowered it, raised it. At a distance, from behind the car window, she had a certain grace. As if she were dancing or beating a drum. Keeping time, she struck him over and over. Feena watched, hypnotized.

The child’s response was to stiffen. Like Feena, he remained frozen, but unlike her, he turned away. He assumed the stance of a fighter in a clinch, his arms protecting his face, his knees slightly bent as if ready for flight. The flurry of blows couldn’t be as hard as they looked, Feena decided, or he would have fallen by now.

Coming out of her trance, she turned off the car’s engine and opened the door. At first, the only thing she heard was the jumble of recorded music and sound effects that came from the rides. The ten tugboats—yes, she had counted them; what else did she have to do all summer?—sailed around a ring of shallow greasy water to a tune that sounded like “Anchors Aweigh.” The teacups spun to a Muzak version of “It’s a Small World,” and the fire trucks’ endless circling was punctuated, not with actual music, but with a series of short, deep siren blasts like a stuck car horn.

When she’d reached the edge of the lot, though, Feena picked out another sound, a high-pitched angry voice. She was close enough now to see that the boy’s mother was young, with a pretty, round face that didn’t match her voice at all.

“One more time, mister.” The sweet-faced woman had stopped slapping, had folded her arms. “You cry one more time, and I’m leaving you right here.” She was heavy, her jeans shiny along the seams, her arms solid and flushed.

Either because he couldn’t stop or because he didn’t believe her, the child kept howling. His misery was unmistakable now, a wail of despair that rose above the canned music. His face was hidden by the flopping sleeves of his tee, by his muddy elbows and arms. Only the bright curls showed above his fighter’s crouch.

“What did I tell you, Christopher?” The woman screamed, raising her volume to match his. “What did I just tell you?” She glared at the child, daring him to continue crying. When he did, she turned, shrugged into her purse strap, and strode off without looking back.

Maybe it was the name his mother had called him, or maybe it was the sight of the boy’s small, sober face as he lowered his arms to watch her walk away. Feena didn’t stop to ask herself why. In an instant, she was moving toward him, streaking past the house, trampling the last of the watercress, and then scrambling up the chain-link fence between them.