A Place Apart (18 page)

I kept imagining Tom, alone in that car, half dead in the morning silence on the mountain slope. Whose fault had it been? If Hugh hadn't been late getting to the Mill, Tom wouldn't have come with us. Why was being afraid such a terrible, disgusting thing? Wasn't everybody afraid sometimes? But why had Hugh turned his back on Tom and walked away from him because Tom had been with us? Did Hugh make anyone he paid attention to into a tightrope walker? Hadn't I been one, too, with Hugh?

One morning that week, all classes went to the auditorium to see a movie about condors and to hear a talk about them by a Boston ornithologist. Each class filed in and sat down in designated rows. The last to come in were the seniors. Hugh led one line of students into a row and sat down. Instead of sitting next to him, the next boy in line left an empty seat between himself and Hugh. The teacher pointed to the empty seat but the boy refused to take it. Hugh sat as unmoving as a statue. I could see a flush begin at his neck and flood upward like something he was drowning in. Finally, the teacher took the empty seat herself. People had been mad at Hugh for years, mad at him for the kind of person he was. Now they thought they had something on him—something they could really blame him for.

Ma and I went to Boston the next weekend. Lawrence had finally found an apartment and we were to go and look at it. It was the top floor of a big, old stone house. Ma said I could have the room with the fireplace. It didn't work, but it looked pretty. There were light areas on the dirty blue walls where the former tenants must have hung their pictures. Where had they gone? I felt sad and droopy, and I could see that Ma and Lawrence were disappointed. I suppose they'd hoped I would be enthusiastic. I couldn't even pretend.

On Saturday, I went with Uncle Philip to his store, where I hung around for a while. Then I told him I was going for a walk. The sky was gray, the snow in Boston dirty and crusted with garbage. I walked very slowly until I came to the hospital where Tom was. I almost turned back. I hated hospitals. Suddenly I just flung myself through the doors.

At the information desk, they told me visiting hours didn't begin for another hour and that I could stay only fifteen minutes with the patient I'd come to see. I sat in the lobby watching people come and go, thinking about what was behind the rubber-edged doors that swung back and forth silently as nurses and orderlies went through them. I saw a woman step out of an elevator carrying a new baby wrapped up in a yellow blanket. A man was holding her elbow and clutching a bouquet of faded flowers. The woman's skin was rosy and she looked eager, as if she were going to a party. I was glad that not everyone was sick in the hospital.

It was time. When I got to Tom's floor, I nearly turned back again to the elevator. There was something about those waxed gray floors that frightened me even more than the half-opened doors of the rooms.

I paused outside Tom's room. I could see a television set suspended from the ceiling. I walked in. Tom was next to the window. The other bed was disordered but empty. One of Tom's legs hung in traction, and one of his arms was held rigid between two boards. Tubes snaked out from under the white coverlet and connected up with a machine near the head of the bed. On the little bedside table was a glass with a glass straw in it that curved at the top. A small radio next to it was playing softly.

Tom's face and head were not bandaged, but everything else I could see was. He was staring at the window.

“Tom?” I whispered from the foot of his bed.

He turned his head slowly. His face looked very small, as though it had shrunk, and his sideburns were gone. I saw his eyes widen.

“Tory,” he said in a low hoarse voice like a radio full of static.

I knew it was a ridiculous question, but I asked it. “How are you?”

“Great,” he croaked.

A nurse came in at that moment carrying a small tray. I saw Tom flinch. All that was on the tray was a tiny fluted cup. There must have been other trays—with awful things on them.

“A little pill for a little pill,” said the nurse gaily, and she pushed back his hair from his forehead. “Let's see you swallow this.” He opened his mouth the way a bird opens its beak. She held the glass with the curved straw to his lips. When she left, Tom looked at a chair in the corner near the window. “Sit down,” he said, “if you want to.”

I kept my hands on the iron frame of the bed and just stood there. He didn't ask me to sit down again.

“My leg is going to be okay,” he said. “But they have to do another operation on my arm.” He closed his eyes for a minute. “You're the only person from school who's come to see me,” he said. “The sophomore class sent me a card.” He smiled slightly. “It told me to get well soon.”

“Will you?” I asked.

“I don't know,” he replied.

I went and sat down in the chair, and he followed me with his eyes. “Pop comes and has lunch with me,” he said. “And my sisters.”

“I didn't know you had sisters,” I said, surprised.

“They're much older than me. One is married.”

“In my family, there's only me and Ma, and my Uncle Philip and his son,” I said.

He didn't say anything for a bit. He seemed asleep. Then he opened his eyes and said, “Some people know how to drive right off. People like Frank Wilson. It's like they were born in a car.” It took him a long time to say that. He seemed to have trouble breathing. “They thought I was dead when they found me. I could hear them saying I was dead.”

“They were wrong!” I exclaimed, my voice shooting up. An old man shuffled into the room, glanced over at us, and then went to sit on the other bed with his back to us. He began to fuss with a box of Kleenex.

“Why did you go back up there?” I asked.

“
You
know …” Tom said.

“But we were all so scared that night.”

“Not the way I was.”

There was a long silence then. Finally, he spoke again.

“I may be able to get up in a few weeks.”

I had the feeling I'd stayed as long as I should. I went to the side of Tom's bed.

“I'm sorry you had the accident,” I said.

“Me, too,” he answered.

Then I touched his cheek with a finger. I had never touched a boy's cheek before, and when I had imagined doing it, as I had, it had not been Tom's cheek.

“Thank you for coming to see me,” he said.

I didn't tell anyone I had gone to see Tom, not Ma, not Elizabeth. It was my secret, and I kept it to myself.

In February, Hugh resigned from the Drama Club, and a week later he left school for good. No one knew where he had gone, and they didn't seem interested enough to try and guess. I felt a kind of last desperation about him and so I asked Mr. Tate. He'd heard that Hugh was being tutored in Boston and would take some kind of equivalency test to graduate, and that was all. Mrs. O'Connor, our neighbor, told Ma the Todds had sold their house on the Matcha River, but old Mr. Thames said the Todds never let go of anything permanently and they had probably only rented it.

We heard Tom Kyle was walking, but his left arm had not healed and he had to have more operations on it.

In April, a young couple with a baby put down a deposit on our house. We were to move to the new apartment in June, right after Ma and Lawrence were married. Lawrence was already living in the apartment, having everything painted and nailed up and tacked down.

Spring came early. I walked out of school one day into the damp sweetness of the air and I suddenly felt like yelling at the top of my lungs, yelling that the snow was gone—the cold, gray days gone. I sang silently to myself as I walked toward the crest of the hill, where the road divided into two roads, one going down Main Street, the other in the direction of Hugh's house. I wanted to see it suddenly. Suddenly I had to go there.

I passed the long driveways that led to the homes hidden by evergreens. The Matcha was in full flood and roaring like lions. Everything else was silent, and as I neared his house, the silence crept into me.

There was a car parked in front of it, the trunk open. I looked up at the windows. I was about to turn away when I realized someone was looking down at me. It was Mrs. Howarth, Hugh's mother. She was wearing a fur hat, and she waved a gloved hand at me. I waved back, then started back down the drive. I heard the window open, then her voice calling, “Wait!”

In a minute, she had opened the front door and was standing there in a long tweed coat of many colors.

“Come in,” she said. “You're Victoria, aren't you? Hugh's friend who plays the oboe?”

I stepped inside. There was no furniture in the hall, no rugs, and none in the rooms I could see through half-opened doors. There were only two boxes on the floor, piled high with papers.

“We've sold the house,” she said. “I had to come back to check on things. Broom-clean, they say in the bill of sale. So I've just been gathering up a few bits of things we forgot.”

She spoke quickly as though she were on the steps of a train about to leave, and she smiled at me all the time.

“How is Hugh?” I asked.

“Wonderful,” she said. “He's wonderful.” She began to fiddle with her gloves, pulling them half off, then putting them back on. “He's very gifted, you know, very imaginative. But then you must know. You were his friend, weren't you?”

I said yes and looked down at the box near my feet. In it, there were several books, a few objects wrapped in newspaper, and loose papers. One of the papers had a drawing on it. I leaned over to see it better, aware of Mrs. Howarth's stare. It was a drawing of a small boy wearing a peaked hat. He was holding a curling string that was attached to a red kite in the sky.

I looked at her. “Well—goodbye,” I said.

She nodded. I'd almost turned away when I said, “Can I help you put the boxes in your car?”

“No, no …” she answered. “Mr. Howarth is upstairs taking a final look around. He will do that. But, thank you, Victoria.”

“I don't really play the oboe,” I said.

“Oh?” she said politely. “Hugh was mistaken, then.”

I walked back to Main Street. Hugh must not even have remembered that the story his father had drawn for him that rainy night was about a little boy and a kite. Yet even though he'd forgotten, the memory had come back in another way. Perhaps there was no forgetting—memory just returned in new shapes. Perhaps, years from now, I'd try on an old tweed hat and I'd feel something mysterious, and I'd laugh at myself and not even know I was thinking about my father.

How would Tom Kyle remember Hugh? What had they talked about together? Or had Tom just listened, wanting to learn a different way to be, the way I had, and letting Hugh fill up the space around him the way he had filled it up for me? And, perhaps, filling up the empty space in himself. Why had she had to say he was wonderful and gifted? Did he
have
to be?

Something, a branch stirring in the breeze, or a bird flying past, made me look up as I was passing the hill on Autumn Street where I'd first seen Hugh.

He had stood there on the top of the hill, holding on to a great scarlet kite in the sky. Later, I'd tied up my hair with a piece of the kite string. All the people on the street, Mrs. O'Connor and her children, the postman and old Mr. Thames, had been smiling. I had walked up the hill, and he'd come to me and started talking, and we'd had a conversation that had gone on for many months.

That morning, last year, even before I had waked up, Hugh was alone in his room, making the kite. Then he'd come to Autumn Street to fly it so that if it fell it wouldn't fall into the river. He hadn't known about me, Victoria Finch, or that I was going to write an assignment in English class he'd want to turn into a play, or that I was going to be his friend. He hadn't known Tom Kyle was going to move to New Oxford.

It had been chance. But what we had made of it, he and Tom and I, hadn't been chance.

I felt a great swoop of regret as though my heart, like the kite that morning, had fallen through space to the ground. I didn't want to feel that way any more. I hurried on toward home. But I looked back. Just once.

About the Author

Paula Fox is a notable figure in contemporary American literature. She has earned wide acclaim for her children's books, as well as for her novels and memoirs for adults. Born in New York City on April 22, 1923, her early years were turbulent. She moved from upstate New York to Cuba to California, and from one school to another. An avid reader at a young age, her love of literature sustained her through the difficulties of an unsettled childhood. At first, Fox taught high school, writing only when occasion permitted. Soon, however, she was able to devote herself to writing full-time, but kept a foot in the classroom by teaching creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania, New York University, and the State University of New York.

In her novels for young readers, Fox fearlessly tackles difficult topics such as death, race, and illness. She has received many distinguished literary awards including a Newbery Medal for
The Slave Dancer
(1974), a National Book Award for
A Place Apart
(1983), and a Newbery Honor for
One-Eyed Cat
(1984). Worldwide recognition for Fox's contribution to literature for children came with the presentation of the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1978.

Fox's novels for adults have also been highly praised. Her 2002 memoir,
Borrowed Finery
, received the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir, and in 2013 the
Paris Review
presented her with the Hadada Award, honoring her contribution to literature and the writing community. In 2011, Fox was inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame.

Fox lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband, the writer Martin Greenberg.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.