Outside In (16 page)

There was a scuffle of laughing and pebbles in the driveway, and voices, and Joanie and Nathan came running up beside us. “Let’s hide and scare people,” Joanie said.

I shook my head at her, hoping she wouldn’t upset Aimée.

“Chérie,”
Dave said into my ear, “I don’t want to move.”

“What does he want to go
there
for?”

“It’s where he’s from. I don’t want to, Chérie.”

“Well, why would you?” I couldn’t imagine Aunt Bonnie not living across the road, not yelling and playing the radio and making things for the elves and wearing her fancy clothes.

“What does your mom think?” I was trying to talk softly
so the others wouldn’t hear. They were making a racket, flirting and giggling and pushing each other around.

“What’s the holdup?” asked Nathan. “Let’s go.”

“We’re going this way,” said Dave, pointing up Marvin Road, the other way from Joanie and Nathan’s neighborhood. His voice caught.

“Cher-EE.” Aimée pulled on my arm. “I want to go home.”

“We
are,”
I told her.

Nathan began rattling and rustling though his treat bag. “I got six doughnuts,” he boasted.

“In your
bag?”
Joanie put her head close to Nathan’s to look.

Dave said, “Mom’s not involved.”

“Not involved in what? Moving?”

“Shut up!” he said, almost desperately.

Aimée stood nearly in the middle of Marvin Road, trying to get me to follow her out there.

“We have to do something.” Dave talked as if he had all night.

I grabbed Aimée, with the flashlight in her fist, and pulled her back.

“Let go, Chérie,” she said.

“No,” I said angrily. “It’s dark. You’re in the road.”

She gave a loud sniff. Uh-oh.

In the driveway Joanie was begging Nathan for a doughnut as though she hadn’t just eaten a ton inside.

Dave said, “Pete wants to drop out and join the army.”

“He’s too young,” I said. Nobody heard Dave’s news but me.

“Chérie,” said Aimée. She shone the flashlight into my eyes. “If you don’t come, I’m going to go without you.”

“Gosh, just shut up,” I said. “Wait a minute.”

“Chérie, don’t say shut up, say
fermez la
—” she said.

“Hush!” I thought I heard a car somewhere along Marvin Road.

“Why would your dad go with just you?” I whispered to Dave. Maybe we could move, too. Somewhere else. Out of the county. Out of the state.

A car came fast around the bend. I snatched Aimée out of the road by her princess cape, almost knocking Dave down.

“Hey!” he said.

For a moment we were caught in the headlights. My heart nearly stopped. The car completely stopped. We watched its taillights go white. It backed up. It was a station wagon. In the dark it had no color.

Suddenly there was wild yelling. Small, hard things flew through the air into our faces and smashed into us. Aimée cried out, hurt. I pulled her toward me and tried to block both our faces, but not in time to avoid the sharp crack and splat of what could only be eggs. Slime dripped down our faces and hair and the fronts of our costumes. The driver stepped on the gas. Now gravel sprayed into our faces, too. When the car had gotten a few yards ahead, heads stuck out the windows, and someone yelled,
“Suckers
!”

Pete Asconti.

“I’ll kill you!” I screeched after the car.

Aimée cried out, holding her head.

“It was just eggs, Aimée,” Joanie said. She grabbed the pillowcase from me and used it to wipe Aimée’s face. “You’re okay.”

Aimée howled, “A rock hit me! Am I bleeding? It hurts!” If only there were a house nearby, but there was
only the millhouse, back down that long, dark driveway. Nathan felt around on the ground and leaped up with something in his hand.

“It’s an apple,” he said.

I grabbed Dave by the shoulders and shook him. “Your brother!” I yelled. “Driving around in cars throwing apples at little girls’ heads!”

“I didn’t—” Dave sputtered.

I threw the apple like a fastball at the ground at his feet, where it splattered. “And you, keeping us here at the end of the driveway, right? Great plan!”

“No!” he said, stepping toward me. “It’s not my fault!”

“Then whose fault
is
it?” I asked. How could Pete Asconti throw an apple at Aimée’s head? Whom had he been trying to hit?

Dave held me off him. “Chérie, it was
Pete,
not me.”

“Keep away from me!” I gave Joanie the pillowcase of candy and squatted down with my back to Aimée. Still sobbing, Aimée threw her arms around my neck and climbed onto my back. I tucked my arms under her legs and piggybacked her up the hill toward home.

They let us go. Nobody followed. Thanks, Joanie. I heard no more cars, so I hiked right up the middle of Marvin Road. Aimée’s arms choked me. But she suddenly stopped crying. “What about Dave?” she asked.

“What
about him?”
I said.

“He’s just standing there, Chérie.”

“So let him!” I said. I couldn’t turn to look.

“He’s still there, Chérie,” said Aimée.

We were at the top of the hill, at the end of Onion Lane. I stopped to get my breath and look back. I couldn’t see Dave. I said, “There isn’t anything I can do about the Ass-contis, Em.”

I almost started blubbering myself. Right then would have been the crying moment, looking down the dark hill toward the Rangers’ driveway, toward Dave in his Dracula suit. But I didn’t start crying. I didn’t wait for Dave. And I didn’t go back.

“I was doing the best I possibly could,” I told my parents later. “She was right with me every second.” But Aimée was going to have a black eye from that apple. How could I have gone back?

T
UESDAY WAS
E
LECTION
D
AY,
and no school. Richard Nixon won, and nobody seemed really happy about it, not the way they would have been if Bobby Kennedy had won. It was safe news to watch at least.

Dave came over and sat on the porch while I was folding papers—pictures of Nixon making peace signs as if he thought he was some kind of hippie—and said he thought a hide-and-seek game would be a good idea.

“You’ll do anything to get out of your house,” I said. His face showed just how right I was.

I hadn’t talked to Dave since Halloween. He had been over a few times with Aunt Bonnie, who was helping Mom handwash a zillion tiny baby clothes and hang them on the line “in the sunshine.” The way they said it, it sounded as if sunshine had been invented to dry babies’ clothes. I’d avoided him, and he’d gone back home.

Later he found me on the porch trying to make a Thanksgiving cornucopia out of dried grass for the elves. It kept falling apart, not like the basket Joanie had made in the summer, when the grass was fresh.

“You should hear him,” Dave said. I braced myself for some dumb comment from Pete, something to explain why Dave and Sandy went on doing whatever Pete said, no matter whom it hurt.

“I’ve heard all that
he
has to say,” I said.

“I mean Dad.”

“Oh. Well, I
can
hear
him
,” I said. Uncle Joe was in a very loud mood. I’d already heard him holding forth about raking while Pete stood red-faced, furious, rake in hand. Now his voice rose as the front door of the lemon yellow house opened and Aunt Bonnie came tip-tapping, her salmon pink cardigan buttoned tight. Her eyes looked round, anxious. She hurried past us, tousling both our heads, and into my house. Now what?

There were too many secrets lately. I had even made Aimée promise not to tell what Pete did on Halloween. If she told, I said, I’d tell Dad she wanted him to teach her to ride her bike but was too embarrassed to ask him.

Hate Pete though I did, I didn’t want Uncle Joe to have anything else to hold against him. If Uncle Joe knew it was Pete who’d given Aimée that black eye … I didn’t know what would happen. And if something did happen, it would be my fault for telling on Pete. That was the trouble. So I made her say she’d bumped into a tree branch in the dark. Everyone was too busy thinking about other things to question it.

I’d never asked Dave to explain what he’d said that night on the road. What did I care if he moved? When he asked to come along when I rode my route, I said, “What would you want to do that for?” He sat on our porch watching as I rode away.

I dreamed we were driving out of Washington, trying to find the way to the thruway so we could go home to Connecticut.
But Dad couldn’t find the way, and Mom kept getting lost on her map. Or maybe the streets kept changing, I don’t know. Instead of the thruway entrance we kept driving into that neighborhood with the kids playing on the sidewalks. Now people were rioting there. People were yelling, things were banging, and glass was breaking. The ground rumbled and quaked in Arlington Cemetery, where we suddenly found ourselves. Up the hill at Kennedy’s grave it looked as though people were fighting. Bombs were going off, and Dad was yelling, “Mitchie, what does the map say?” Mom cried, “I don’t know! Everything keeps changing!”

Somehow Aimée was the most real thing in the dream. Just as when we drove through for real, she was crying. When I woke up, Aimée was in my bed with me, and she really was crying, sitting up and watching me sleep and crying.

“What is it?” I said.

“Mommy’s gone,” she said.

“Gone?” I sat up fast.

“To have the baby,” she said.

A smile burst over my face bright as light. Aimée fell over on my pillow and cried.

“What are you crying about?”

“Why shouldn’t I?” she said. “Mommy’s
gone.”

“Well, she’s coming back, jerko.
With
our new baby.”

Aimée just stared at me, as if to say, “And?”

“It’s going to be really good, that’s all,” I said. I lay down and put my arm around her.

As she fell asleep, I realized that we were alone in the house. My stomach was still quaking from my dream. Big help the Ascontis across the road would be if someone
crept in the window over the roof or, worse yet, came in from downstairs and sneaked up the steps to where Aimée and I were.

I slipped out of bed and dialed the telephone in Mom and Dad’s room. Uncle Joe answered the phone. “Aunt Bonnie?” I said. “Can I talk to Aunt Bonnie?”

“It’s all right, Cher,” he said gently, in the familiar voice I’d been hearing all my life. Maybe I could still trust Uncle Joe after all. “She’s right downstairs.”

I went down and found her dozing on the couch. “Chérie? How about some TV, hon?”

She put on the late movie, and we sat together on the couch, drinking hot chocolate. “We would have been okay,” I lied. “You didn’t have to come over.”

“I didn’t want you to wake up to an empty house,” Aunt Bonnie said. “Not the way you’ve been feeling.” She had bunny fur slippers with a little heel over pale blue thin socks. I don’t remember what she had on the rest of her. I remember only her feet—and her arm around me.

“Thank you,” I said. What did she mean about what I’d been feeling? We watched Cary Grant driving somewhere in a convertible. “Is Mom—”

She didn’t let me finish. “Your mommy knows what she’s doing, mademoiselle. You’ll see.”

Some actress was with Cary, but I didn’t know her name, and I didn’t feel like asking. Too cozy, too sleepy …

“Mademoiselle, you and David are still friends, aren’t you?”

I opened my eyes and looked at Aunt Bonnie. Her eyes close to mine had that round look again. I couldn’t let her look so anxious for me. “Yeah,” I said. I tried to sound sure, but I wasn’t.

“Oh, good. I wasn’t sure, lately.”

“Mm-hmm,” I said, feeling like a fibber.

“He needs a friend now, Chérie. His best friend, y’know?”

In the morning when we woke up, Dad was there to tell us that our baby brother had been born. “Guillaume,” he said. “Can you believe it?”

Guillaume is French for William. It sounded good. It would have
been
good if all we’d done was hear it. But when Mom sent home notes to Aimée and me, she drew little pictures of a round-headed baby and labeled them “Guy.” They sent out telegrams with “Guy” on them, too. People started calling up congratulating us on baby Guy. Only they didn’t say it the way Mom and Dad said it, “ghee.” They said it the American way, as if they were saying “wise guy.”

The Ascontis came over, all of them, as soon as Guy came home, and that was odd, because everyone was smiling. Pete got to hold the baby almost as soon as I did, and I swear they all smiled at him more than they did at me.

“Well, which is it, Ghee or Guy?” said Pete. “You ought to just call him Guy. That’s what everybody’s going to call him anyway.”

Dave said, “The kids are going to call him Wise Guy.”

“Only if they’re morons,” said Aunt Bonnie.

“Well, they are,” I said.

“Why don’t you call him Guillaume and forget the nickname?” said Uncle Joe.

Aimée said it best: “It feels weird to call him Ghee when you know it’s spelled Guy.”

“It’s Guy!” said Mom. “It’s spelled Guy, and it is Guy!” Except that she said it Ghee.

“This is America, not France!” roared Dad. “We should have called him Fred Flintstone!”