Crooked (7 page)

11

RENDEZVOUS

“Where's Mr. MacKenzie?” Clara asked in a sharp voice, stepping back and staring at Bruce Crookshank, who was standing at the hospital room door laughing his fool head off.

“Who?” Bruce asked when he'd regained a portion of his composure.

“Mr. MacKenzie,” Clara said. “Amos's father.” She felt as if she were surrounded by lunatics. “Amos's father said I should come and visit Amos.”

“I'm sure he'll be back directly. Our boy has a steady stream of visitors.”

“No, I don't,” Amos said weakly, but Clara ignored him because the second that Bruce said
our boy,
she knew that the reason Mr. MacKenzie's voice had sounded strange on the phone was that it hadn't been Mr. MacKenzie at all. It had been Bruce Crookshank.

“And you—” she began in an even sharper tone, turning to Amos. But then she broke off. He looked too pale and shocked and uncertain to be yelled at right now. He had two black eyes and a partly shaved head. And the thin nightgown he was wearing made him look about ten. In a miserable, confused-sounding voice, he said, “I don't know how what happened happened.”

“Yeah, right.”

“No, I mean it.”

But she didn't believe it. He had to have been a part of this embarrassing prank, had possibly even been the brains behind it, and just so they could make her the butt of their awful joke. She stepped toward the door and stared hard at Bruce until he stepped aside. Before leaving, she turned back for a moment. “Just so you'll know. I don't think any of this was even the tiniest bit funny.”

Clara walked down the corridor on legs that hardly felt her own. Cool beads of sweat coursed along her rib cage. She thought of Amos playing this joke on her and her mother leaving home, and suddenly Clara's face was gathering around her mouth in the way it did when she felt like she might cry against her will. She heard tennis shoes squeaking behind her and glanced back. It was Bruce.

Clara kept walking, but he caught up to her by the elevator, where a trembling man in pajamas stood braced by a walker. The walls were pink and lavender, like the floor. Clara looked at the man's red corduroy slippers while Bruce's words streamed past her. “Hey,” he said, “what happened wasn't Amos's fault. That wasn't our Amos. Listen to me. He wasn't trying to do that.”

Clara ignored him. The elevator opened, and the trembling man started to move uncertainly forward behind his walker. To Clara's surprise, Bruce held the elevator open for him. The trembling man inched his way inside and nodded at Bruce, and Clara stepped in, but Bruce still kept his hand on the door.

“It wasn't Amos's fault,” he said. “It musta been the drugs that made him do that. Or maybe the anesthetic.”

“Oh, piddle!” Clara said, stealing a phrase from her mother, then flushed to hear how silly it sounded, which annoyed her even more. She slapped Bruce's hands from the door and pushed the first-floor button. The doors closed like a curtain, and Bruce was gone.

The trembling man in the elevator didn't say anything. Breathing took his attention instead, and the glow of the lighted numbers as the car went downward. A smell of disinfectant filled up the elevator car, and when the doors finally slid open, Clara gasped for air before turning back to help the man to a bench in the lobby. It was he who smelled of Lysol. That was one surprise. Another was the sight of Eddie Tripp sitting in the lobby with a magazine open on his lap, his face turned up toward the television screen.

When he glanced her way, his expression jumped from boredom to real interest. “What are you doing here?” he asked after what felt like a full ten seconds of staring, during which time Clara became keenly aware of her nose. (
She stared crookedly,
she thought.
She smiled lamely but crookedly.
)

“Nothing,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

Eddie's grin had a sneering aspect to it. “They get more cable channels here,” he said, pointing toward the TV.

Clara understood this was a joke, but she was too uncomfortable to laugh. In the next moment, Eddie was standing up and putting his hands in his pockets. “Hey, you want a Philly cheese steak?” he asked. “I know a place where they make a great Philly cheese steak, and I got a car.”

“You drive?”

Eddie grinned. “Yeah, I'm sixteen, remember? The oldest kid at Melville.” His grin stretched wider. “I flunked kindergarten a couple times.” A pause. “So how about it? Can I talk you into a Philly cheese steak?”

“I'm not that hungry,” Clara said, uneasy with his asking and yet weirdly flattered, as she had been the first time Eddie Tripp took the seat in front of her on the bus and fixed his light blue eyes on her face. “I can't,” Clara said.

Eddie smiled. “‘I can't' is what a girl who doesn't want to start living her life would say, but the truth is, you can. It's as simple as saying, ‘Sure. Why not?'”

Clara ignored this. Eddie kept walking beside her as she went past the emergency room. It seemed funny, walking with somebody and not saying anything, so Clara said, “How come you're at the hospital?”

Eddie's eyes shifted slightly. “To see my grandma.”

“Your grandma,” Clara said doubtfully.

“Yeah, she's got Wilkinson disease, but don't ask me what it is.”

“And that's why you're here?”

Eddie's grin turned somehow cockier. “That's my story and I'm sticking to it.” They walked a few more paces. “How about you? Why're you here?”

“I came to see a friend. Who got a concussion.”

Eddie's pace slowed so slightly that it was almost unnoticeable, but not quite. Clara noticed it. “A friend?” Eddie said.

“Maybe an ex-friend,” Clara said. “Or maybe never a friend to begin with.”

“What's his name?” Eddie said.

Clara stopped short. “I just said a friend. How did you know it was a boy?”

Again the slight shift in Eddie's blue eyes. “Guess it was the way you said it.”

Clara didn't believe this. She continued walking. “His name's Amos MacKenzie,” she said.

Eddie took this in without any visible change in expression. “How'd he get the concussion?”

Bruce, impersonating Amos's father, had told her a vandal had hit Amos with a baseball bat, but that might or might not be true, so Clara said, “I don't know.”

“You don't know? He didn't tell you?”

“No, he didn't. We hardly talked.” Clara didn't like having to answer Eddie's prying questions. And why was he so interested in Amos anyhow? She decided to turn the tables. “So where's your big brother? How come he's not visiting this grandma, too?”

“Charles never comes.” A pause. “He makes me come instead.”

“How does he make you come?”

Eddie actually snorted. “Charles? Charles could write a book on making people do things.”

“Well,” Clara said, “why doesn't your dad make Charles visit this grandma?”

“My dad's long gone.” An odd, awkward pause. “In a way it's good, though, because my mom's tired of us and next week we're going to move into a place of our own. Charles and me.”

All of this was interesting and even sad, if it could be believed. But that was the hitch—if it could be believed. “So how was your grandmother?” Clara asked, and at that moment, over Eddie's shoulder, she saw Bruce Crookshank appear at the far end of a long corridor, look around, and head her way.

“Haven't seen her yet,” Eddie Tripp said. He flashed his grin. “They told me they were dressing her wounds.”

“You have to dress wounds for Atkinson's disease?”

Eddie kept his cocky grin. “
Wilkinson
disease,” he said. His grin softened to what looked like a genuine smile. “I was serious about the Philly cheese steak, you know. I'd buy you one if you want. All you have to do is say yes.”

“I have to get home,” Clara said, just as Bruce Crookshank caught up with them. He kept a certain respectful distance from Eddie, but when he made eye contact with Clara, he said, “I kind of need to talk to you.”

Clara glanced toward Eddie. A tight scowl had come into his face, and when he spoke, it was with the hard edge he'd used long ago on the school bus. “Looks like you're already dating one of the mental patients,” he said. “So let's just forget I asked.” He turned around and walked off toward the waiting room.

“Asked what?” Bruce said to Clara.

“Nothing,” she said, and they walked down the hospital steps toward the bus stop. It was a windy, bitter day, and the gray plastic sides of the bus stop, marked with spray paint and penknives, bubbled out like full sails.

“You're taking the bus?” Bruce said.

Clara turned toward him. “You're a regular Sherlock Holmes.” She gave him the chilliest look she could make. She wasn't going to say anything more, but couldn't help herself. “My father doesn't like me riding the city bus. But I rode it down here, and now I'm riding it back. You know why? Because I thought my coming here was
important
.”

Bruce looked slightly embarrassed. “I'll ride with you—you mind if I ride with you?”

“I do, very much,” Clara said without looking at him.

The bus door squealed open, and the driver sat in the humming bus, waiting for her to climb in. “Bye,” Clara said firmly, but Bruce stepped in behind her.

Clara dropped her coins into the chute and sat down in the nearest empty seat. Up front, only a few yards away, Bruce was frantically going through his pockets, looking for money, muttering, going through his pockets again. He unzipped an interior pocket of his coat and, drawing his hand out, inadvertently pulled out a plastic bag with it. The bag flipped to the floor of the bus and lay there for just an instant. There were photographs inside it, Clara saw—but of what? somebody? somebody naked?— before Bruce snatched them back up.

The passengers in the bus were so annoyed with the delay that Clara could feel them pulsing with impatience. The bus driver said, “I have to get on with the route, pal. Pay up or step off.”

Clara came forward and dropped in enough change for Bruce, then sat back down. He sat directly across the aisle. The bus hummed along, and its warmth worked slowly into Clara. She looked out at the dirty snow piled along the street, the long icy teeth hanging from eaves. She wondered what her mother was doing right now, whether she was warm, whether she was sad, whether she missed being home.

“Thanks.”

Clara turned around.

“Thanks,” Bruce said again. “I owe you one.” He had a sheepish look, but Clara reminded herself how good he was at acting.

“Those pictures that fell out,” she said sharply. “Who are those pictures of?”

The question seemed actually to catch Bruce off guard. His face pinkened. “Nobody,” he said.

“How can you have naked pictures of nobody?”

The shade of Bruce's face moved toward red. “Who said they were naked pictures?”

“I do. Because I saw.”

A moment passed. “Well, if you saw, then you don't have to ask who.”

Something flashed in Clara. “I don't know why I thought I could talk to you.”

Bruce opened his mouth to speak.

“Don't say anything else,” Clara said. She stood up and moved five rows back and sat next to a window, but a few seconds later, she felt the heavy depression of the seat as he sat down next to her.

“Here,” he said. His breath was surprisingly sweet. He was offering her a cherry candy from a little round tin. She took one and popped it in her mouth. The top of the tin said
Rendezvous,
and all at once it put Clara in mind of her mother's crazy plan to go to France.

“I know you don't like me,” Bruce said, “but I have to say three things to you.”

Clara stared fixedly out the window.

Bruce pressed on. “The first thing I need to say is that I'm the one who called and said I was the naked Amos. It wasn't Amos. And I was wearing all my clothes, just so you'll know. The second thing is that I saw the note you put in the paper that day for Amos and grabbed it before he could. Or maybe that's the first bad thing, and the other one came second. Third, I only pretended to be Mr. MacKenzie because you wouldn't listen to me when I said I was Bruce. He
had
said your name in his sleep, but he didn't try to get you to his sickbed to make a pass at you. Amos wasn't in on it.” Clara glanced at Bruce, who shrugged. “That's not Amos's style.” He slouched back in his seat. “That's it,” he said, “that's all I wanted to say.”

Clara was surprised at how much she wanted to believe what Bruce was saying, and the moment she realized that in her heart she
did
believe him, she was struck by the fear that he was duping her again.

The bus was rolling north on Genesee toward her stop. She reached up and pulled the cord so the driver would pull over, and then she peered through the grainy veil of salt and snow that had dried on the windows. Her house was visible, but it was dark; the porch light was the only one on, which meant her father hadn't come home yet. Or her mother.

The bus eased to a stop. The driver pulled a lever, and the back door jerked open with an enormous hydraulic breath, illuminating the curb, the sidewalk, and some shards of black snow. “I'm getting off here,” she said to Bruce.

“But what are you going to do?” Bruce asked, following her off. “Will you give Amos a call?”

Clara wheeled around and looked at him. She wasn't mad anymore. She was just tired. The bus pulled away, billowing diesel fumes. Clara waited for the noise to pass, then said, “You and your friend Amos made a fool of me once, but that's all you get. Find somebody else to make fun of.”

When she walked away from him this time, Bruce didn't follow and he didn't call after her. The red taillights of the bus receded, and all Clara could hear was her own footsteps as she crunched through the ice to her house.