A Summer to Die (5 page)

Molly's nose had finally stopped bleeding at the beginning of March, which is about the same time that the sun came out after a month of gray cold; Dr. Putnam in the village said that proved what he had thought, that the bad weather was causing her nosebleeds. Molly said she didn't care
what
caused them, she was just glad they were over, glad she could go back to school. Dad said he was sorry he hadn't bought stock in the Kleenex company.

I've hardly seen the sun at all because I've been in my darkroom. My darkroom! It's finished; it's all finished, and perfect. My father did it, just the way he said he would, and everything is just the way I dreamed of it. There is
nothing
that my father can't do.

The first pictures I developed were the ones of Will Banks. I'd had that roll of film tucked away in a drawer under my knee socks for almost two months. I was scared stiff when I developed it—scared that I had forgotten how, that I would do something wrong. But when I took the strip of negatives out of the tank and held it to the light, there were two pictures of the old house across the field, and then thirty-four pictures of Will, looking
at me in thirty-four different ways. I felt like a genius, like an artist.

When the negatives were dry, I printed them all on one sheet. It's hard to see, from the negatives, exactly how a print will look, so I crossed my fingers again when I developed the contact sheet that would show me the real pictures for the first time. I stood there over the tray of developer and watched in the dim red light as the sheet changed from white to gray, and then saw the grays change to blacks and the shades become the faces of Will; after two minutes, there he was, looking up at me from the tray, thirty-four of him, still tiny, but complete.

When it was ready I took it, still dripping wet, into the kitchen and laid it on the counter beside the sink. Mom was there, peeling potatoes, and she looked over, first curiously, and then as if she were really surprised.

"That's Will Banks!" she said.

"Of
course
it's Will Banks," I told her, grinning. "Isn't he beautiful?"

She and I looked for a long time at all the tiny prints on the paper. There he was, lighting his pipe, and then smoking it, looking at me, half laughing. Then he leaned back in his chair—I had blown the focus on that one a little, when he leaned back, out of the range of focus. I should have realized that. But then there he was, sitting up straight, back in
sharp focus again, looking at me with his eyes bright with interest; I remembered that he had been asking me questions about the camera, how I determined what settings to use. Toward the end of the roll, his eyes were looking past me and far off, as if he were thinking about something in the distance. He had been telling me about a camera that he had once, that he still had, if he could find it in the attic of the little house. He had bought it in Germany, he said, after the Second World War, when he was stationed there with the army. That surprised me.

"You were in the
army?
" I had asked him. The only people I knew who were in the army were boys who had flunked out of the university and didn't know what to do with themselves. Sometimes they would come back to see Dad in the house in town, with funny haircuts.

Will had laughed. "I was an officer," he said. "Would you believe it? People
saluted me!
" He put a stern look on his face and made a rigid salute. It was there, in the pictures.

Then he had laughed again, and puffed on his pipe. "In those days we all joined the army. It seemed important, then. For me, the best part was coming home. It was in summer, when I came home, and Margaret had made ten blueberry pies, to celebrate. We ate blueberry pie for three days and then we were sick of blueberry pie and there were
still six left over. I think she gave them away."

He had closed his eyes, remembering, still smiling. It was the last picture on the sheet. His eyes were closed, and the smoke from his pipe was a thin white line beside his head and circling across the top of the photograph.

I marked six of the tiny prints with a marking pen: my six favorites, each one a little different. Then I went back into the darkroom and spent the rest of the day enlarging those. I made two sets of them, so that I could give one of each to Will. I wondered if he'd be pleased. They were good pictures; I knew that, and both my parents had said so, too, and they never he to me. But it must be a funny feeling, I think, to see your own face like that, caught by someone else, with all your feelings showing in it.

I took my own set of Will's pictures up to my room and taped them to the wall very neatly, with three above and three below. I've been trying to keep my half of the room neater ever since Molly drew the chalk line; every time my things start piling up and getting messy, Molly draws it over again, just to let me know it's still there.

She was on her bed, drawing pictures in her school notebook, when I went in and put the pictures on the wall.

"Mom'll kill you if you tear the wallpaper," she said, glancing over at me.

"I know it." We both knew it wasn't true. My mother hardly ever gets mad. She scolds us sometimes, but the thought of Mom killing somebody is ridiculous. She doesn't even step on ants.

"Hey," said Molly suddenly, sitting up and looking over at the wall. "Those ate really
good.
"

I looked over to see if she was joking, and she wasn't. She was looking at Will's pictures with interest, and I could tell that she meant it, that she thought they were good.

"I like that one there, where he's looking off in the distance and smiling," she decided, pointing to one in the bottom row.

"He was talking about his wife," I remembered, looking at the photograph with her.

Molly sat there for a minute, thinking. She looked pretty again, now that she was feeling better. Her hair had gotten its curl back. "Wouldn't it be great," she said slowly, "to be married to someone who felt that way about you, so that he smiled like that whenever he thought of you?"

I hadn't ever really thought about it in such personal terms. To be honest, I find the whole idea of marriage intensely boring. But right at that moment I knew what Molly meant, and I could feel
how important it was to her. "Tierney looks that way at you all the time," I told her.

"Really?"

"Sure. Sometimes when you don't even know he's looking at you. I saw him in assembly last Friday, looking over at you. Remember, you were sitting with the cheerleaders? He was watching you, and that's the way he looked, almost like Will is looking in the picture."

"
Really?
" Molly curled up on her bed and grinned. "I'm glad you told me that, Meg. Sometimes I don't know what's going on in Tierney's head at all. Sometimes it seems as if basketball is all he cares about."

"Well, he's only sixteen, Molly." All of a sudden I realized that I sounded like Mom, and I giggled. So did Molly.

"Hey, look, Meg," she said, handing her notebook to me. "You're such a good artist, and I can't draw at all. Can you help me make these look better?"

She'd been drawing brides. Good old Molly. She's been drawing brides since she was five. Her drawing ability hadn't improved much in ten years, either, to tell the truth. But suddenly the idea of her drawing brides was kind of scary.

I took the ball-point pen. "Look," I told her. "Your proportions are all off. The arms are too short, even though you've tried to hide it with all
those big bouquets of flowers. Just keep in mind that a woman's arms reach down to the middle of her thighs when she's standing up. Her elbows should reach her waist—look, your drawings all have elbows up by the bosom; that's why they look wrong. The necks are too long, too, but that's probably all right, because it makes them look glamorous. Fashion designers usually draw necks too long. If you look at the ads in Sunday's
New York Times,
you'll see—Molly?"

"What?"

"You're not thinking about getting
married?
"

Molly got huffy and took back her drawings. "Of course I'm thinking about getting married. Not now, stupid. But someday. Don't you think about it?"

I shook my head. "No, I guess I don't. I think about being a writer, or an artist, or a photographer. But I always think about myself alone, not with someone else. Do you think there's something wrong with me?" I meant the question seriously, but it was a hard question to ask, so I crossed my eyes and made a face when I asked it, and laughed.

"No," she said thoughtfully, ignoring my facemaking, which was nice of her. "We're just different, I guess." She tucked the drawings into her notebook and put them on her desk very neatly, in line with her schoolbooks.

"Like you're pretty, and I'm not," I pointed out. What a dumb thing to say.

But I'll give Molly credit. She didn't try to pretend that it wasn't true. "You'll be pretty, Meg, when you get a little older," she said. "And I'm not sure it makes that much difference anyway, especially for you. Look at all the talent you have. And brains. I'm so
stupid.
What do I have, really, except curls and long eyelashes?"

I ruin everything. I should have known that she meant it sincerely. Molly is never intentionally snide. But she doesn't realize how it feels, for someone with stringy hair and astigmatism to hear something like that. How could she? I can't imagine how it would feel to be beautiful; how could Molly know how it feels
not
to be?

And I blew up, as usual. I struck a phony model's pose in front of the mirror and said sarcastically, "Oh, poor me, what do I have except curls and long eyelashes?"

She looked surprised, and hurt. Then embarrassed, and angry. Finally, because she didn't know what else to do, she picked up a pile of her school papers and threw them at me: a typical Molly gesture; even in anger, she does things that can't possibly hurt. The papers flew all over, and landed on my bed and the floor. She stood there a moment looking at the mess, and then said, "There, now you 52
should feel right at home, with stuff all over so it looks like a pigpen." And she stormed out of the room, slamming the door, which was useless, because it fell open again.

I left the papers where they were, and Molly and I didn't talk to each other when we went to bed that night. Neither of us is very good at apologizing. Molly just waits a while after a fight, and then she smiles. Me, I wait until the other person smiles first. I always seem to be the first one in and the last one out of an argument. But that night neither of us was ready to call it quits, and Molly didn't even smile when 1 climbed into bed very carefully so that all her exercises in past participles stayed where she'd thrown them, and 1 went to sleep underneath the pile.

I don't know what time it was when something woke me up. I wasn't sure what it was, but something was happening that made me afraid; I had that feeling along the edge of my back, that cold feeling you get when things aren't right. And it wasn't a dream. I sat up in bed and looked around in the dark, shaking off whatever was left of sleep, and the feeling was still there, that something was very wrong. The French papers slid to the floor; I could hear the sound of them fluttering off the bed.

Quietly I got up and went to the window. The first day of spring wasn't very far away, but dates
like that don't mean much in New England; it was still very cold, and there was snow, still, in the fields. I could see the whiteness of it as I looked out the window. Beyond the corner of the barn, far across, beyond the pine trees, there was a light in the window of the empty house. I looked up to find the moon, to see if it could be reflecting in one window, but there was no moon. The sky was cloudy and dark. But the light was there, a bright rectangle in one corner of the old house, and it was reflected in another rectangle on the snow.

"Molly," I whispered. Stupid to whisper, if you want to wake someone up.

But she answered, as if she were already awake. Her voice was strange. Frightened, and puzzled. "Meg," she said, in an odd voice, as if she were captured by something, as if she couldn't move. "Call Mom and Dad quick."

Ordinarily I argue with Molly if she tells me to do something, just on general principles. But everything felt wrong. She wasn't just telling me; she was ordering me, and she was very scared. I ran from the room, through the darkness, through the shadows in the hall, and woke my parents.

"Something's wrong," I told them. "Something's wrong with Molly."

Usually, when you turn a light on in the night, everything that you're afraid of goes away. At least
that's what I thought once, when I was younger. Now I know it isn't true. When my father turned on the light in my bedroom, everything was there, it was so much there, and so bright, so horrible, that I turned and hid my face against the wall. And in the corner of the wall, with my face buried, my eyes closed tight and tears starting, I could still see it.

Molly was covered with blood. Her pillow, her hair, her face were all wet with it. Her eyes were open, frightened, and her hands were at her face, trying to stop it, trying to hold it back, but it was still coming, pouring from her nose onto the sheet and blanket in moving streams, and spattering on the wall behind her bed.

I could hear my parents moving very fast. I heard my mother go to the hall linen closet, and I knew she was getting towels. I could hear my father's low voice, talking to Molly very, calmly, telling her everything was all right. My mother went to the phone in their bedroom, and I could hear her dial and talk. Then she moved down the stairs, and outside I heard the car start. "It's okay, it's okay," I heard my father say again and again, reassuring Molly in his steady voice. I could hear Molly choke and whimper.

Mom came back in the house and up the stairs, and came to where I was still standing with my back to the room. "Meg," she said, and I turned around. My father was in the doorway of the bedroom, with Molly in his arms like a small child. There were towels, already drenched with blood, around her face and head; they had wrapped her in the blanket from her bed, and the blood was moving on it slowly. My father was still talking to her, telling her it was all right, it was all right, it was all right.