Homecoming (16 page)

“This is Route One,” Dicey said.

“You know it?”

“We’ve been on it most of the time.”

“That’s too bad.”

Stewart stopped at a gas station and came back with a map. He pulled into the nearby
McDonald’s and they all ordered lunch. He carried their tray to a big table back in
a corner. Dicey handed out the wrapped hamburgers and the parcels of
french fries. She jammed straws into the Cokes.

Stewart had ordered two Big Macs. He ate them as if he were starving. When Dicey told
him this, he said he felt like he was starving, most of the time. “But I’ll outgrow
it,” he said. “It used to be worse. I used to eat much more—a whole large pizza—and
still not be full. Now I’m sometimes full. When I was in high school, I felt like
I could eat all day long and never fill up.”

James nodded at him, chewing.

After they had cleared the table and thrown out the wrapping papers, Stewart unfolded
his map. Dicey told him the address and he found the street easily. It was one of
many little streets running across the map of the city.

“But it’s not near the water,” Dicey said.

“Why should it be?”

“It’s called Ocean Drive. I thought it would be near the water. A big white house.”

“Ocean Drive runs through the heart of town, a few blocks from the downtown section.
But the street goes down to a main street that ends up at the harbor,” Stewart pointed
out. Dicey was unreasonably disappointed. “Maybe it was a joke,” he suggested.

“Some joke.”

“You like being near the water.”

“In Provincetown, we were right next to it. Behind the dunes, but next to it. I’m
used to it. Yeah, I like it. I don’t feel right unless I’m near the ocean.”

“You feel that way and you’re going to Bridgeport? You’re in trouble,” Stewart said.
“Listen, are you in a big hurry? Do you want to go to a beach for a while before you
go to your aunt’s?”

“Yes,” James and Dicey said.

“No,” Sammy said. “I want to see Momma. Right away.”

“We don’t even know whether she’s there, Sammy,” James argued. “You can wait an hour,
can’t you?”

“I don’t want to wait anymore,” Sammy said. “Dicey?”

“Just for an hour, Sammy. Please?” she said. His face grew stubborn. “I’ve decided,”
Dicey said. “For an hour. No more.”

Once they got off Route 1 in Fairfield, everything was clean and neat. The houses
all looked freshly painted. The lawns all looked freshly mown. The cars all looked
just washed. It was the kind of place where all the door handles shone with polishing.

They drove through a little village and then down by some big houses around some curves—and
then Dicey could see the water. At first she only glimpsed it in the spaces between
the large trees that grew around the houses; then she could see a long narrow beach
ahead, with marshlands on the other side of the road.

Sammy wanted to stay in the car, but Dicey insisted that he come out with them at
least to begin with. “Then you can go back and wait in the car if you want,” she said.
“That’s fair, isn’t it?”

They spent an hour at the beach, no more. Sammy kept track of the time on Stewart’s
watch. They waded and dug. The children wandered up and down while Stewart and Dicey
sat watching the little waves that meandered up onto the smooth sand. Dicey stared
out over the quiet blue water, knowing that although the surface was calm, the great
tides were moving underneath. She listened to the rippling waves mingled with the
voices of the other people at the beach. They didn’t talk much. Stewart didn’t seem
to be a talkative person, and Dicey didn’t mind. He only asked her one question:

“What’ll you do if things don’t work out at your aunt’s?”

He could have been reading Dicey’s mind. She turned quickly to look at his face, but
he was looking out over the water, his gray-blue eyes glinting in its reflections.

“I don’t expect Momma to be there, you know,” she said. He
nodded. “Aunt Cilla must be pretty old now. She’s really Momma’s aunt, not ours. So
she might not want a mess of kids. Is that what you mean?” He nodded. “I don’t know
what I’ll do. Or if she’s not even there. I guess I’ll have to go to the police then,
won’t I? Or somebody. For help.” He nodded. “What do you think I should do if—”

His eyes turned to her. “I honestly don’t know. Except stick together, all of you.
That’s the most important thing.”

Dicey agreed.

“If you can,” he said. “If you are able to. You might not be able to.”

“You and Windy—you were a big help to us,” Dicey said.

“That’s okay,” Stewart said.

“Especially Windy.”

“Windy had a good time. You brightened up his life.”

“Especially you, too.”

“I didn’t do anything. Sang you a couple of songs. Got you some bad hamburgers.”

“And took us to the beach, don’t forget that.”

They found 1724 Ocean Drive without any trouble. It was one of a long row of houses
that stretched down treeless streets. It was a small house, shingled with gray asphalt.
Three concrete steps led up to the plain front door. On one side of the door, two
windows faced the street. There were thin curtains on the windows and you couldn’t
see in. The house looked flat-faced and empty. Dicey sat in the car and studied it
before she got out. Was this going to be their home?

They clambered out of the car and said good-bye to Stewart. He left the motor running
while he climbed out himself to shake hands with each one of them, James last, and
wish them good luck.

Then he drove off, down the street, away, the little black car
clattering busily. Dicey waved to him, but he must not have seen her because he didn’t
wave back. She turned to the closed door. She was nervous, but not in any way she
had been nervous before. She looked at James and Maybeth and Sammy standing in a silent
row and tried to smile at them. Then she went up the steps, hoping she looked more
confident than she felt. At least they were all freshly washed. Dicey knocked on the
door.

N
obody answered Dicey’s knock. She could hear the echoes of her knockings inside, so
she knew that she would have heard footsteps if someone had been hurrying to answer
the door.

She knocked again, louder. While she waited, to be sure no one was at home, she studied
the brown paint on the door. It was a thick reddish-brown color and in the inset panels
you could see brush strokes.

Nobody was there. Dicey swallowed, as much in relief as in disappointment, and turned
to face her family. “I guess we wait,” she said. She sat on the bottom step. They
sat behind her and beside her.

They had nothing other than what they wore. Even Dicey’s map, rain-soaked and ripped,
had been lost. Stewart had taken his with him.

“I thought Aunt Cilla was rich,” James said. “This isn’t a rich person’s house.”

“I must have been wrong about that,” Dicey said.

“Momma said she was,” James insisted.

“Then Momma was wrong.”

“Do you think Momma’s here?” Sammy asked. “If she’s here why isn’t she here?”

“I dunno,” Dicey said. “It’s Thursday, a working day, isn’t it? So if she’s got a
job she’d be there, wouldn’t she?”

“What about Aunt Cilla? Is she too old to work?” James asked.

“I don’t know anything about her except what she wrote in her letters—and that wasn’t
true.”

“Why would she lie?” James asked.

“I dunno,” Dicey said.

“Dicey?”

“Yeah, Maybeth.”

“Why did Momma go?”

Dicey looked at Maybeth’s round and worried face. She looked down the quiet street,
where no cars were parked, where all the houses were the same and had the same closed
and empty faces.

“I don’t know, Maybeth, but I can tell you what I think.”

Maybeth waited.

“I think she got so worried about so many things, about money and us, about what she
could do to take care of us, about not being able to do anything to make things better—I
think it all piled up inside her so that she just quit. She felt so sad and sorry
then, and lost—remember how she’d go out and not come back for hours? I think she
got lost outside those times, the way she was lost inside.”

“Amnesia,” James suggested.

“Maybe. So she decided that she’d ask Aunt Cilla to help us, because she couldn’t
help us anymore. And maybe, when she went off into the Mall, maybe she’d run out of
money and she couldn’t take us any farther and all the things that had piled up inside
her head sort of exploded there. And she just forgot us. Like amnesia, where you forget
everything, even who you are. She couldn’t stand to think and worry anymore. Everything
she thought of, every place she went to, it all looked so sad and hopeless and she
couldn’t do anything about it—so it all exploded and left her brain empty.” Empty.
That was the way
Momma had looked those last months. As if she were far away from them.

“Will she be better now?” Sammy asked. “Do you think?”

“Maybe she’s not even here,” James said.

“She has to be,” Sammy said.

“Why?” James asked. Dicey thought of stopping the conversation, but decided not to.

“Because,” Sammy said.

“Because is no reason,” James said.

“Because, if she isn’t here, then I don’t know where she is. And she doesn’t know
where I am. And how can she find me?”

“Maybe she doesn’t want to find you, or any of us,” James said. “That’s what Dicey
said, that she had to get away from us.”

“Momma loves me,” Sammy said. His chin stuck out in the stubborn way.

“Yes, she does,” Dicey said. “And so do I.”

Because she did, she loved all of them. That had kind of sneaked up on her over their
journey.

“See?” Sammy said to James. “I told you.”

“But that doesn’t prove anything,” James protested.

Sammy didn’t pay any attention to him.

The sun moved slowly across a white sky. At the end of the long summer afternoon,
or at the beginning of the long summer evening, the street gradually filled up with
traffic, and the sidewalk became crowded with people. One after another, buses stopped
at the corner and a short parade of men and women climbed off. Some carried briefcases,
some grocery bags. They walked on, down the street or up the street. Some went up
the stoops of the gray houses, pulled out keys, unlocked doors and went in. Others
walked on, around corners, out of sight. No children lived on these streets.

The Tillermans silently watched the people move to and fro
past them. Nobody looked at them. Most of the men and women walked with their eyes
toward the ground, or fixed blankly ahead. Sammy moved closer to Dicey and held on
to her forearm with his small, tense hand. He did not say a word, but his eyes flicked
back and forth. He was looking for Momma.

Dicey just watched the people, with no particular thought in her mind. She could not
do any more. From now on, things would happen to them.

She saw men in workshirts with tired shoulders, carrying plain black lunchboxes. She
saw women in brightly flowered summer dresses, the dresses wilted by the heat as if
they were real flowers, the women’s faces sagging after the work-day.

A short round woman wearing high-heeled shoes walked toward the steps where they sat.
She actually looked at them and seemed surprised, but she walked on past them. A man
in a green khaki suit, carrying a scuffed briefcase, stared at them for a minute before
he let himself into the house next door.

A few minutes later, a woman of the same age as the man, about fifty Dicey guessed,
struggled up the steps to the next-door house, carrying two huge bags of groceries.
She noticed the Tillermans just as she pulled the door closed behind her and her eyes
widened.

The little round woman in high heels walked past again, from the opposite direction
and on the opposite side of the street. She stared at them. She was wearing a plain
black cotton dress and had short gray hair that was permanented into sausagelike curls
that bounced and jiggled on her round head. She walked as if her feet hurt her, as
if she had been standing and walking in the high-heeled shoes all day long. Dicey
wondered where she was going.

The people coming home from work had filled the street for a while; now they thinned
out, melted away into houses, out of
sight. All the sounds were faint ones from distant traffic or from the humming of
air-conditioners up and down the block. A solitary man wearing shorts and sneakers
walked his dog on the opposite side of the street.

The round woman came toward them again. This time, as at first, she was on their side
of the street and looking at the ground. She held her purse in both hands, protectively
close against her side. Dicey thought she must be old.

She stopped about three feet away and looked at them. At first only Dicey was looking
back at her, into pale blue eyes that blinked behind plastic-framed glasses sitting
high up on her nose. She wasn’t that old after all, close up.

“What do you want?” the woman asked. “What are you doing here? What do you want here?”
Her voice was high and a little scared. Her lips pursed.

Dicey stood up. “We’re the Tillermans,” she said. She named them all. The woman’s
expression did not change.

Dicey knew then that Momma was not here.

Dicey kept on talking. “I’m hoping you’re our aunt, our great-aunt, Mrs. Cilla Logan.”

Then the woman’s expression did change. A little half-smile, a silly helpless smile,
fluttered her mouth. “That is Mother,” she said. “Not me. I’m her daughter. That is,
I was her daughter.” She fumbled around in her purse and took out keys. “Mother passed
on this last March,” she said. Dicey had a sinking feeling in her stomach. “But do
come in. There’s no need to stand talking on the front stoop.”

The woman unlocked the door and stepped inside. The Tillermans followed. It was dark
and stuffy after the summer evening sunlight. They entered a narrow hallway that led
to the rear of the house, passed a room with thin curtains, passed a narrow dark staircase
going up and went into a kitchen.