Christine (24 page)

You lied to her. That's the truth, isn't it?

No,
he answered himself uneasily.
No, I don't think you could say I really
lied
to her . . .

No? Then just what do you call it?

For the first and only time since he had taken her to the football game at Hidden Hills, he had told her a big fat lie. Because the truth was, he spent more time with Christine, and he hated having her parked in the thirty-day section of the airport parking lot, out in the wind and rain, soon to be snow—

He had lied to her.

He spent more time with Christine.

And that was—

Was—

“Wrong,” he croaked, and the word was almost lost in the slick, mysterious sound of the falling sleet.

He stood on the walk, looking at his stalled car, marvellously resurrected time traveller from the era of Buddy Holly and Khrushchev and Laika the Space Dog, and suddenly he hated it. It had done something to him, he wasn't sure what. Something.

The idiot lights, blurred into football-shaped red eyes by the moisture on the window, seemed to mock him and reproach him at the same time.

He opened the driver's side door, slipped behind the wheel, and pulled the door shut again. He closed his eyes. Peace flowed over him and things seemed to come back together. He had lied to her, yes, but it was a little lie. A mostly unimportant lie. No—a
completely
unimportant lie.

He reached out without opening his eyes and touched the leather rectangle the keys were attached to—old and scuffed, the initials r.d.l. burned into it. He had seen no need to get a new keyring, or a piece of leather with his own initials on it.

But there was something peculiar about the leather tab the keys were attached to, wasn't there? Yes. Quite peculiar indeed.

When he had counted out the cash on LeBay's kitchen table and LeBay had skittered the keys across the red-and-white-checked oilcloth to him, the rectangle of leather had been scuffed and nicked and darkened by age, the initials almost obliterated by time and the constant friction of rubbing against the change in the old man's pocket and the material of the pocket itself.

Now the initials stood out fresh and clear again. They had been renewed.

But, like the lie, that was really unimportant. Sitting inside the metal shell of Christine's body, he felt very strongly that that was true.

He
knew
it. Quite unimportant, all of it.

He turned the key. The starter whined, but for a long time the engine wouldn't catch. Wet wires. Of course that was what it was.

“Please,” he whispered. “It's all right, don't worry, everything is the same.”

The engine fired, missed. The starter whined on and on. Sleet ticked coldly on the glass. It was safe in here; it was dry and warm. If the engine would start.

“Come on,” Arnie whispered. “Come on, Christine. Come on, hon.”

The engine fired again, caught. The idiot lights
flickered and went out. The
GEN
light pulsed weakly again as the motor stuttered,
then went out for good as the beat of the engine smoothed out into a clean
hum.

The heater blew warm air gently around his legs, negating the winter chill outside.

It seemed to him that there were things Leigh could not understand, things she could never understand. Because she hadn't been around. The pimples. The cries of
Hey Pizza-Face!
The wanting to speak, the wanting to reach out to other people, and the inability. The impotence. It seemed to him that she couldn't understand the simple fact that, had it not been for Christine, he never would have had the courage to call her on the phone even if she had gone around with
I WANT TO DATE ARNIE CUNNINGHAM
tattooed on her forehead. She couldn't understand that he sometimes felt thirty years older than his age—no! more like fifty!—and not a boy at all but some terribly hurt veteran back from an undeclared war.

He caressed the steering wheel. The green cats' eyes on the dash instruments glowed back at him comfortingly.

“Okay,” he said. Almost sighed.

He dropped the gearshift into big D and flicked on the radio. Dee Dee Sharp singing “Mashed Potato Time”; mystic nonsense on the radio waves coming out of the dark.

He pulled out, planning to head for the airport, where he would park his car and catch the bus that ran back to town on the hour. And he did that, but not in time to take the 11:00 p.m. bus as he intended. He took the midnight bus instead, and it was not until he was in bed that night, recalling Leigh's warm kisses instead of the way Christine wouldn't fire up, that it occurred to him that somewhere that evening, after leaving the Cabot house and before arriving at the airport, he had lost an hour. It was so obvious that he felt like a man who has turned the house upside down looking for a vital bit of correspondence, only to discover that he has been holding it in his other hand all along. Obvious . . . and a little scary.

Where had he been?

He had a blurry memory of drawing away from the curb in front of Leigh's and then just . . .

. . . just cruising.

Yeah. Cruising. That was all. No big deal.

Cruising through the thickening sleet, cruising empty streets that were plated with the stuff, cruising without snow tires (and yet Christine, incredibly surefooted, never missed her way or skidded around a corner, Christine seemed to find the safe and secure way as if by magic, the ride as solid as it would have been if the car had been on trolley-tracks), cruising with the radio on, spilling out a constant stream of oldies that seemed to consist solely of girls' names: Peggy Sue, Carol, Barbara-Ann, Susie Darlin'.

It seemed to him that at some point he had gotten a little frightened and had punched one of the chrome buttons on the converter he'd installed, but instead of FM-104 and the Block Party Weekend he got WDIL all over again, only now the disc jockey sounded crazily like Alan Freed, and the voice that followed was that of Screamin' Jay Hawkins, hoarse and chanting:
“I put a spell on youuu . . . because you're rniiiiiine . .
.”

And then at last there had been the airport with its foul-weather lights pulsing sequentially like a visible heartbeat. Whatever had been on the radio faded to a meaningless jumble of static and he had turned it off. Getting out of the car he had felt a sweaty, incomprehensible sort of relief.

• • •

Now he lay in bed, needing to sleep but unable. The sleet had thickened and curdled into fat white splats of snow.

It wasn't right.

Something had been started, something was wrong. He couldn't even lie to himself and say that he didn't know about it. The car—Christine—several people had commented on how beautifully he had restored her. He had driven it to school and the kids from auto shop were all over it; they were underneath it on crawlers to look at the new exhaust system, the new shocks, the bodywork. They were waist-deep in the engine compartment, checking out the belts and the radiator, which was miraculously free of the corrosion and the green gunk that is the residue of years of antifreeze, checking out the generator and the tight, gleaming pistons socketed in their valves. Even the air cleaner was new, with the numbers 318 painted across the top, raked backward to indicate speed.

Yes, he had become something of a hero to his fellow shoppies, and he had taken all the comments and the compliments with just the right deprecatory grin. But even then, hadn't the confusion been there, somewhere deep inside? Sure.

Because he couldn't remember what he had done to Christine and what he hadn't.

The time spent working on her at Darnell's was nothing but a blur now, like his ride out to the airport earlier this evening had been. He could remember starting the bodywork on the dented rear end, but he couldn't remember finishing it. He could remember painting the hood—covering the windshield and mudguards with masking tape and donning the white mask in the paint-shop out back—but exactly when he had replaced the springs he couldn't remember. Nor could he remember where he had gotten them. All he could remember for sure was sitting behind the wheel for long periods, stupefied with happiness . . . feeling the way he had felt when Leigh whispered “I love you” before slipping in her front door. Sitting there after most of the guys who worked on their cars at Darnell's had gone home to get their suppers. Sitting there and sometimes turning on the radio to listen to the oldies on WDIL.

Maybe the windshield was the worst.

He hadn't bought a new windshield for Christine, he was sure of that. His bankbook would be dented a lot more than it was if he'd bought one of those fancy wrap jobs. And wouldn't he have a receipt? He had even hunted for such a receipt once in the desk-file marked
CAR STUFF
that he kept in his room. But he hadn't found one, and the truth was, he had hunted rather half-heartedly.

Dennis had said something—that the snarl of cracks had looked smaller, less serious. Then, that day at Hidden Hills, it had just been . . . well, gone. The windshield had been clear and unflawed.

But
when
had it happened?
How
had it happened?

He didn't know.

He finally fell asleep and dreamed unpleasantly, twisting the covers into a ball as the scud of clouds blew away and the autumnal stars shone coldly down.

24

Seen in the Night

It was a dream—she was sure, almost until the very end, that it must be a dream.

In the dream she awoke from a dream of Arnie, making love to Arnie not in the car but in a very cool blue room that was unfurnished except for a deep blue shag rug and a scatter of throw-pillows covered in a lighter blue satin . . . she awoke from this dream to her room in the small hours of Sunday morning.

She could hear a car outside. She went to the window and looked out and down.

Christine was standing at the curb. She was running—Leigh could see exhaust raftering up from the straight-pipes—but was empty. In the dream she thought that Arnie must be at the door, although there was no knock as yet. She ought to go down, and quickly. If her father woke up and found Arnie here at four in the morning, he would be furious.

But she didn't move. She looked down at the car and thought how much she hated it—and feared it. And it hated her, too.

Rivals,
she thought, and the thought—in this dream—was not grim and hotly jealous but rather despairing and afraid. There it sat at the curb, there it was—there
she
was—parked outside her house in the dead trench of morning, waiting for her. Waiting for Leigh.
Come on down, honey. Come on. We'll cruise, and we'll talk about who needs him more, who cares for him more, and who will be better for him in the long run. Come on .. . you're not scared, are you?

She was terrified.

It's not fair, she's older, she knows the tricks, she'll beguile him—

“Get out,” Leigh whispered fiercely in the dream, and rapped softly on the glass with her knuckles. The glass felt cold to her touch; she could see the small, crescent-shaped marks her knuckles left in the frost. It was amazing how real some dreams could be.

But it
had
to be a dream. It had to be because the car heard her. The words were no more than out of her mouth when the wipers suddenly started up, flicking wet snow off the windshield in somehow contemptuous swipes. And then it—or she—drew smoothly away from the curb and was gone up the street—

With no one driving it.

She was sure of that. . . as sure as one can be of anything in a dream. The passenger window had been dusted with snow but was not opaque with it. She had been able to see inside, and there was no one behind the wheel. So of course it had to be a dream.

She drifted back to her bed (into which she had never brought a lover; like Arnie, she had never had a lover at all) thinking of a Christmas quite long ago—twelve, maybe even fourteen years ago. Surely she could have been no more than four at the time. She and her mother had been in one of the big department stores in Boston, Filene's, maybe . . .

She put her head down on her pillow and fell asleep (in her dream) with her eyes open, looking at the faint gleam of early light in the window, and then—in dreams anything could happen—she saw the Filene's toy department on the other side of the window: tinsel, glitter, lights.

They were looking for something for Bruce, Mother and Dad's only nephew. Somewhere a department-store Santa Claus was ho-ho-ho-ing into a PA system, and the amplified sound was not jolly but somehow ominous, the laughter of a maniac who had come in the night not with presents but with a meat cleaver.

She had held out her hand toward one of the displays, had pointed and told her mother that she wanted Santa Claus to bring her
that.

No, honey, Santa can't bring you that. That's a boy-toy.

But I want it!

Santa will bring you a nice doll, maybe even a Barbie
—

Want that—!

Only boy elves make those, Lee-Lee my love-love. For boys. The nice girl elves make nice dolls—

I don't want a DOLL! I don't want a BARBIE! I . . . want. . . THAT!

If you're going to throw a tantrum, I'll have to take you home, Leigh. I mean it, now.

So she had submitted, and Christmas had brought her not only Malibu Barbie but also Malibu Ken, and she had enjoyed them (she supposed), but still she remembered the red Remco racing car on its green surface of painted hills, running without a cord along a painted road so perfect that there were even tiny metal guardrails—a road whose essential illusion was given away only by its pointless circularity. Ah, but it ran fast, that car, and was it bright red magic in her eye and her mind? It was. And the car's essential illusion was also magic. That illusion was somehow so captivating that it stole her heart. The illusion, of course, was that the car was driving itself. She knew that a store employee was really controlling it from a booth to the right, pushing buttons on a square wireless device. Her mother told her that was how it was happening, and so it must be so, but her eyes denied it.

Her heart denied it.

She stood fascinated, her small gloved hands on the rail of the display area, watching it race around and around, moving fast, driving itself, until her mother pulled her gently away.

And over everything, seeming to cause the very tinsel strung along the ceiling to vibrate, the ominous laughter of the department-store Santa.

• • •

Leigh slept more deeply, dreams and memories slowly
fading, and outside daylight came creeping in like cold milk,
illuminating a street that was Sunday-morning empty and Sunday-morning silent. The
season's first fall of snow was unmarred except
for the tire tracks that swerved to the curb in front
of the Cabot house and then moved smoothly away again, toward
the intersection at the end of this suburban block.

She didn't rise until nearly ten o'clock (her mother, who didn't believe in slugabeds, finally called for her to come down and have breakfast before lunch), and by then the day had already warmed up to nearly sixty degrees—in western Pennsylvania, early November is apt to be every bit as capricious as early April. So by ten o'clock the snow had melted. And the tracks were gone.