A Sudden Silence (5 page)

"So what if he was. He can't even see what goes on under his nose. Just relax, Jesse, will you?"

I rubbed my hand across my eyes. "Listen, Sowbug." Such a reasonable, ordinary voice. "I'm sorry if I hurt you. But you have to talk to me or the police because I'm going to tell them."

"No. Don't do that, boy. They'll take me in again."

The morning after Bry was killed Sowbug had run toward me. Right here, on this beach. Maybe he'd just wanted somebody to blab to, or maybe he'd seen something and wanted to spill it. If only I'd stopped and listened. Now he'd had time to think it over and he'd decided to keep quiet. That way he'd stay out of trouble. Or maybe he had truly forgotten. I ought to understand about forgetting. Sowbug couldn't have that many brain cells left in one piece.

"I swear it on my mothers head. I didn't see anything." He inched away from me, and this time I didn't go after him. He'd be back.

I
WALKED TO
Chloe's, staying well into the grass on the side of the highway, Alexander's drawing tucked inside my shirt.

I recognized Chloe's mother from the funeral when she opened the door. Mrs. Eichler is a typical-looking, well-to-do Laguna mother, unlike mine who has short gray-and-black hair and wears T-shirts that say
SAVE THE WHALES
. Chloe's mother has stiff golden hair and a face as pretty and smooth as a candy egg. She was wearing spiky high heels with dark gray slacks and a dark gray, silky sort of shirt. I noticed she even had a chain with a diamond in it around one ankle. An ankle chain!

"You're poor Bry's brother." Her smile was tight and careful. "We were so sorry to hear about the accident. Please come in."

"Thanks." There was a nervous wariness about her. She probably wasn't sure of how I'd be after what had happened. I couldn't blame her. Minute to minute I wasn't sure myself.

The hallway and living room were certainly different today. No kids on the couches or making out in the corners. No empty glasses on the piano. No smells of beer and burning joints.

"Chloe told me what the two of you are doing. It sounds like a practical idea." She waved toward the stairs. "Her room is the second on the right."

I vaulted the steps two at a time, wondering if Chloe hadn't heard the bell. I'd thought she'd be the one to open ... Part way up, I stopped. What did I think this was? A date for the prom? An ordinary boy-girl visit?

Her door had a silly-looking little ceramic plate with the words
CHLOE'S ROOM
and a border of blue flowers. At least I knew I was in the right place. I knocked, ran my hands through my hair, and waited till she called, "Come in."

I tried not to stare. Wouldn't you think a girl would have a tidy room? This place was worse than mine. Two surfboards lay in a corner. A wet suit was draped across the dresser mirror. I guess that was a dresser underneath, though it was so jumbled with stuff that it was hard to tell. There were fins and rubber boots and a surfleash and a weight set with weights stacked any old way. The room had a pink carpet, pink frilly curtains, and a bed with a pink canopy that had clothes tossed on top of it and the end of a fishing pole sticking out like an antenna. Probably it was a really nice room, stunning, as the decorating commercials on TV would say. This one was stunning, all right. But in the wrong way. There were more things hanging on the wall than would hang in any junk shop—even an old Halloween skeleton. I thought of Bry's clock. Where would it go?

Chloe lay on her stomach on the pink rug. She was surrounded by marker pens and discarded sheets of white paper.

"Hi!" She looked up. "I think I've finally gotten it right-"

"Hi," I said. "You shouldn't have bothered picking the place up just because I was coming."

"You noticed. My mom notices, too. She's given up. When I was little she used to tell me that a lady lays out at night what she'll wear in the morning. She's sorry she ever said that. I lay out a year ahead. And a year behind. If there's one thing I don't want to be, it's perfect. Perfect is suspect. Anyway, Jesse, tell me what you think of this."

I squatted down beside her, pulling out the picture and setting it on the floor between us. She held up the poster. I read:

DID YOU SEE WHAT HAPPENED ON COAST HIGHWAY
AT APPROXIMATELY 11:30 PM ON JUNE 20?
A SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD BOY WAS HIT AND KILLED
BY A CAR THAT DIDN'T STOP.

The blunt, no-nonsense words made me feel suddenly sick and I closed my eyes.

"Oh, Jesse! I'm sorry." Chloe scrambled up. "How awful to push it at you like that! I'm such a clod." She ran her hands through her hair. "Its just ... if we do this ... it won't make his death unhappen, but..."

"I know." I cleared my throat and stood, too. "Maybe we could be more specific, though. Coast Highway covers a lot of territory. Could we say across from Del Mar Beach'? And don't forget the phone number." I was trying to be logical and practical and all those good things.

"Sure. Perfect idea." I sensed her relief that I wasn't going to throw a conniption fit.

She lay down again on her stomach, her legs scissoring behind her. Her shorts were khaki-colored and her shirt matched. She looked as if she were going on a jungle trip to shoot lions. I took a deep breath and realized that the room smelled better than mine. It smelled of girl.

I knelt beside her as she penciled in the extra words. "You don't think a picture of Bry...?" she asked.

"No. I don't think a picture would help anyone. Either someone saw, or no one did." Immediately Sowbug popped into my head.

Chloe slanted me a blue, anxious glance. "You'd
think
anybody who saw would call the police. But then, why are we bothering to make posters? We've got to believe that someone saw, but didn't know
what
they saw. They didn't know how serious."

I'd been there. I'd seen and forgotten. All I'd kept was something round and white....

Something
round
and
white
? A circle? I jumped up, walked toward the window, and stared into the branches of a tree, grasping at the white circle that was already slipping away.

"Are you OK, Jesse?"

"Yeah."
Don't go, damn it! Don't go, white circle!

I sat on the edge of a chair that was piled with a mountain of stuff and put my head in my hands.

Chloe touched my shoulder. "Would you like to just give this up for now, Jesse? We can do it another day."

"No. I'm OK." I stood shakily, got the drawing, and unrolled it. The guy stared out at me, the paper curling top and bottom. "Do you know him, Chloe?"

She shook her head. "No, but he looks familiar. Could be I've seen him around. I don't remember where. Why?"

"He was at Bry's funeral."

"So were a lot of people."

"I know." I rolled the paper up again.

"We could ask Wilson when he gets back next week," Chloe suggested. "He knows everyone. Right now he's camping up in Washington with Lugar and some other guys. 'Course, he may not get back next week. Wilson isn't exactly into hanging around home."

I batted the sketch against my leg. "Let's make more posters."

Chloe worked on the floor, and I cleared a space for myself on her desk. The radio played softly, and outside, birds called to each other in the trees. I could hear skateboard wheels on the sidewalk and kids' voices. "Hey, I can do a gorilla jump." "Cannot. That's not a gorilla jump." "Is too."

We'd each finished six posters when her mother came in with a tray of lemonade and chocolate-chip cookies. I couldn't help thinking how innocent parents are. Lemonade and cookies! Mrs. Eichler would have freaked if she'd seen what was being consumed here last Saturday night. Chloe sat yoga fashion on the floor, bare brown legs folded like petals.

"Did you know my brother was making you a clock?" I asked abruptly.

"A clock for me? Bry?"

"Yes. A wall-hanging one. Of paper."

Chloe put the cookie she was eating back on the plate.

"I guess you admired a clock once, when you were with him."

"I remember."

A fly had gotten into the room somehow and buzzed around her glass.

"And he was making one for me? God, he was such a nice guy!"

I thought I'd never seen anything as gentle as her face. She looked like an angel. The way she looked made my throat hurt.

"How complicated, though, to make a clock," she said at last.

"I think he liked doing it. I think he would have liked doing anything for you."

"Oh." She gave me a hard-to-interpret glance and picked up a marker. "I suppose we'd better finish these posters."
Not to change the subject or anything
I thought.

We did twenty before we stopped again.

"Should we go right away and put them up?" Chloe asked. "We could take my car."

Of course she'd have a car, like all rich high-school girls.

"Great," I said. "The sooner the better."

Their two-space carport was empty. Her dad's and Wilsons wheels were gone, I decided. The garage held a white Ford Galaxie and a white Mustang. Not anything black or dark. There was no way I could help checking Chloe and her mother along with everyone else.

"I guess the Mustang's yours," I said.

"Yes. Dad bought it for my birthday. I wanted a Bronco. I can't get my boards to fit in this, but Dad says Broncos are unfeminine. He and Mom are very into me being feminine."

"I don't think they need worry too much," I said.

She leaned across from the drivers side to open the passenger door for me. "You don't think they need to worry about what? Not getting my boards to fit?"

"No, about you not being feminine." The minute I'd said the words I wanted them back. They seemed too flip for someone whose brother had just been killed, especially since this was his brother's girl. "Did you and Bry go driving a lot?" I wished those words back, too. What was my problem here? And why did I sound so damned surly?

She edged the little car out into the sunshine. "Not much." Her voice was as cool as mine.

We drove toward Laguna, the ocean on our right, sparkling blue at the ends of the streets that spiraled down to it. On our left the houses perched like white gulls on the dry brown hills.

"I think Bry and I went driving twice, though I'm not sure why you want to know. Once I took him to the surf shop at Dana Point, and once I drove him to an appointment with his speech therapist. Your mom was supposed to drive him but something went wrong with your car. Bry asked me. And I said OK."

"Oh. Well, thanks for taking him."

"You don't have to thank me. Bry did that a long time ago." We were stopped at a red light and her fingers drummed on the wheel. She didn't once look in my direction.

We pinned the first poster up in the
U-DO-IT
Laundromat in the mini-mall. It was a dank, tacky place, empty of everything except chipped machines and abandoned socks and fluff balls that scurried like mice across the concrete floor. The poster looked so new and clean in the muddle of old carnival notices and ads for pizza to go. That poster was one of the saddest things I'd ever seen. I wanted to tear it off. But that would be stupid. There was no one in there to show the picture to, but I tried every place else we stopped. No one knew the guy in the black Windbreaker.

At the Razzle-Dazzle Video Arcade the manager came out from behind his glass door as soon as we appeared. "Would it be OK if we put this up?" I asked, showing him the poster.

He read it once, then again, his lips moving, before he handed it back. "Sorry, man. No way. I don't want no notices like that in here. Too big of a bummer. This is a happy place. A fun place." He scissored his arms back and forth across his chest to show me no way, nohow, never.

"Thanks," I said. "I can see that kids' welfare means a whole lot to you. You get them in here every day and..." I stopped. He wasn't looking at me; he was looking at Chloe, swaying back and forth, his hands in the pockets of his red blazer.

"Hey! You're the looker who was in here that time with the deaf kid. The one who racked up all the numbers? Man, was that bozo a whiz, or what? I never saw a more coordinated kid, and him as deaf as a dish."

Chloe fluttered one of the posters. "This
was
the deaf kid. He's the one that got killed."

"Oh, wow! Hey, I'm sorry about that." The guy rubbed his chin. "That's this kid here? Look, I'll find a place for a poster, you can count on it."

Chloe handed him one, but I plucked it back from his hand. "Don't bother. We don't need one in here."

I could hear Chloe saying something to him as I walked away, then I heard her running to catch up with me. "Don't be so pigheaded, Jesse. Jillions of people come in and out of here."

I slowed and looked over my shoulder. The manager was still staring after us.

"It's for Bry, Jesse."

I turned. "I'd appreciate it if you would put this up," I said. And then, "I'm sorry I blew my stack. He was my brother, OK?"

He took the poster I held out. "OK, man. No sweat."

Chloe and I were back in the car. "It was the way he called him the deaf kid," I said, rolling down the window, letting air at my hot face. "As if he were some kind of freak."

"He was a deaf kid," Chloe said. "A really smart, nice, good-at-everything deaf kid. Look..." She had the key in the ignition but she didn't turn it. "I know everything's real rough for you right now, Jesse. But are you always this difficult? I mean, even with me. I was a friend of Bry's. I hurt, too. But sometimes you act as if you hate me, or resent me, or don't want me around. If you don't want me butting in, just say so."

"No. I want you."

She started the car. "I'll take you straight home, OK?"

"That will be fine. And thanks a lot for everything you did. I appreciate it. The posters, the driving, everything."

"You're welcome. I did it for Bry."

She let me off at the park gates and I watched as she swung the little car around and eased it out into the flow of traffic. Across the highway the night sea glimmered like silver. Headlights came up and over the hill in a steady double stream, turning into a double stream of scarlet taillights as they passed. Chloe had gone. I'd probably never see her again. And probably that was best.