Dark Water (25 page)

“Anyway, Robby left, or I thought he left, and Mr. Wallace walked me to my car. When we get there, he goes, ‘Well,
that
was a lot of trouble to prevent the appearance of something that couldn’t possibly happen.’ ”

Mary Beth paused for an unnaturally long time, and she looked into the distance where the other team sat and pressed her thumbnail against her lip.

“This is really hard to explain,” she said at last. “I don’t know if I should even try.”

I didn’t want to hear anything bad about my uncle, and that’s how the story was starting to sound. I just waited.

“Okay,” Mary Beth said. “You’re probably not going to believe me, but this really is the truth. I said to Mr. Wallace, ‘
What
couldn’t possibly happen?’ and he said, ‘Who would believe that a beautiful girl like you would be running around with an old muttonchop like me?’ He looked kind of sad, you know, and I said, ‘It’s not
that
impossible,’ and I went to hug him, which I guess was the wrong move. He thought I was going to kiss him, so our lips met, but it was not a passionate kiss at all, more like one of those greetings or farewells where you’re just planning to shake hands or hug but the other
person is doing some French thing, first one cheek and then the other.”

I listened to all this while players were smacking and darting across the football field and the cheerleaders were shouting, “Let’s go, Warriors, let’s go!” Mary Beth watched the football players for a second after she finished the story.

“Do you believe me?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said, relieved that what she’d brought to me was a better version of my uncle, the one he’d always seemed to be. “I do.”

“Thanks,” she said.

“You should tell Robby,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said, staring at the field for a while. Then she shook her head. “I don’t think I could after all that’s happened. After the funeral, which like I said, he told me not to attend, I just decided Rob was a psycho, that he was one of those weird people who want something until they’ve got it, and then they don’t want it anymore. He really, really hurt me.”

I just sat there.

“Maybe
you
could tell him,” she said. “He’d believe you.”

“Me? He doesn’t talk to me anymore. I’m the last person he would believe.”

She gave me a look of genuine surprise. “Why not?”

“Don’t you know?” I said. “Because it was my fault that Hoyt was—that he died.”

Except for the therapist my mother made me see, no one ever knows what to say to this, and Mary Beth didn’t, either. Dr. Daggett says I went down into the burning riverbed to get
my father’s attention. Therefore, according to Dr. Daggett’s line of reasoning, it was my father’s fault that my uncle died. I never believe this.

Mary Beth watched the final play of the game in the unseeing way that I observed all sports—and most other things—and then the game was over and we lost. She touched my hand, putting pressure on it in a way that let me know she was trying to say she was sorry but couldn’t think how. “Take care,” she said, and walked down the bleachers to the friendly-looking guy who was waving to her from the sidelines, and I never saw her again.

A month or so later, I wrote two letters—the real thing, handwritten, pen and paper. The first was to Robby and repeated Mary Beth’s story. The second was to my aunt Agnès and said that I knew she could never forgive me, that I didn’t forgive myself, but I wanted to tell her that I knew it was my fault that my uncle died in the fire.

Six weeks or so went by and we received a postcard with a picture of the Tuileries on the front. The postcard was addressed to my mother, not me, and it said,
Dear Aunt Sharon, Please thank your daughter for the informative letter. R
.

I looked at the postcard several times before it occurred to me that in addition to pretending I didn’t exist, he must have decided never to say or write my name.

A little while after that, one of my aunt Agnès’s monogrammed envelopes, cream-colored and heavy and smooth, appeared in the mailbox. When I opened it, her perfume wafted out like a ghost.

Dear Pearl
, it said.
Faute avouée est à moitié pardonnée
.

She didn’t translate, but I managed to look it up and be comforted a little by her belief that a fault acknowledged is halfway forgiven. I might write to her sometime and tell her that I’ve pinned lines from the Victor Hugo poem above my desk and that they have helped me plan the future:

I
t’s spring again, two months from graduation. I take night classes in botany and Spanish and work for an hourly wage that goes directly to the bank. By September, it will be enough for a Spanish immersion program at an institute two hours from a town that has a bus to San Ygnacio, Guanajuato. I’ll go from San Miguel to Silao and from there to the dirt road a former employee of my uncle’s has described to me as
muy, muy larga
and lined on one side with
guayaba
trees. When I see the church of San Ygnacio, I’ll get out and begin to ask, “Do you know Amiel de la Cruz Guerrero?” If the men and women shake their heads, I’ll find a tree with wide branches and take my place in the shade until the children creep forward. Then I’ll point to my eyes and say that I see into this world and the next, and I’m looking for one
who has passed over
la frontera
and returned home. He speaks little and works in the fields. He lives in a house on the hill. Sometimes at night you will see him on his porch painted turquoise, looking out, sitting alone with two empty chairs. Do you know him?

W
ith particular thanks to John Hayek, Todd and Bia Jackson, Josh Krimston, Kathy Lambert, Jeff Lucia, Candido Rocha, and Diane and Bailey Wilson. What you knew, you shared with me. I am also indebted to Joan Slattery, Allison Wortche, George Nicholson, and, from beginning to end, to Tom.

L
aura Rhoton McNeal holds a master’s degree in fiction writing from Syracuse University. She taught middle school and high school English before becoming a novelist and journalist.

Together, Laura and her husband, Tom McNeal, are the authors of
Crooked
, winner of the California Book Award for Juvenile Literature and an ALA Top Ten Best Book for Young Adults;
Zipped
, winner of the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Children’s Literature;
Crushed
(called “compelling” by
Publishers Weekly);
and
The Decoding of Lana Morris
, a
Kirkus Reviews
Best Young Adult Book of the Year.

The McNeals live in Southern California with their two sons, Sam and Hank. To learn more, please visit the authors’ Web site at
www.mcnealbooks.com
.