Outside In (18 page)

Tuesday I must have still looked green around the gills. Those were Aunt Bonnie’s words for it. She offered to pick up some books at the library for my oral report. We were doing heavenly bodies, and I had the moon. “Dave told me,” Aunt Bonnie said.

“How are things with you?” I asked. She looked so surprised that I wondered if I’d ever asked her such a question before.

Her eyes widened into that anxious look. “Fine,” she said quickly, brightly. Then she lowered her voice. “The painting’s almost done, Chérie.”

“Really?” It truly was something to be happy about.
When Mom saw how beautiful our house was, she’d have to give up the idea of moving.

“Shh!” Aunt Bonnie gave me a sly look. “Not a word.”

“Okay.” I smiled.

She sent Dave over later with the book, and when he offered to do the papers again, I said yes. I flipped through
The Moon and You
and noticed that it had been written long before any rocket got close to the moon. If I’d been a better reporter—and if Mom, worried about having the house on the market with a new baby on hand, hadn’t been so quick about throwing out the old papers—I could have gotten lots of information from the October papers about Apollo 7.

I didn’t want to read the paper ever again.

Wednesday my stomach hurt again. I groaned and looked as green as I felt, and Mom said, “Stay.” Aimée went into my room and told Mom I was a big faker, that I hadn’t been too sick yesterday to make an elf birthday cake out of clay and that she, Aimée, wasn’t staying home just because she didn’t like Sister Maria, even though she didn’t. I would have liked to yell at her, but I didn’t. The little weentzer.

Sick of my bed, I got up and shambled down to the kitchen. The radio was on—“Those Were the Days,” which Mom liked (I didn’t), and “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” which she didn’t (I did). And then the news. I should have stayed in bed but couldn’t move quick enough now to escape the radio voice.

“In Hanoi today … President-elect Nixon said … The police investigation continues in nearby Claybury—”

Mom switched the radio off. “I don’t want to hear any
more of that,” she snapped, and turned away. I stared at her back. Any more about Wendy Boland? Or was it just that the news, all the news, bugged her?

I asked carefully, “Any more of what?” Mom stayed busy at the sink, looking out the window. I was hoping, hoping, hoping that she knew how scared the news about Wendy Boland made me, hoping she knew so that she’d never expect Aimée or me to leave the house and go anywhere alone ever again.

“Oh, all the bad news of the world, that’s all. The war, the crimes, the ugly behavior.”

This was a conversation I was ready for. But Mom wasn’t.

“Some days I just put it out of my mind,” Mom said. “And you should, too, Chérie.”

Freddy woke up in the dining room, and Mom shooed me out of the way, back to my bed.

I heard them talking about me. “She hasn’t been to school all week,” Mom was saying. “She isn’t really sick, just—I don’t know. She seems worried.”

“Schoolitis?” Dad said.

“No, she really did have a virus at first,” Mom said. So I had fooled her a little. “But now she’s just dragging it out.”

“Well, what do you think it is?”

“Some kind of nervous thing,” said Mom. “Maybe something about going to school. Or moving. I don’t know.”

Moving? All I knew was that the house was for sale.

“If I went upstairs right now, Pat, I guarantee you, she’d be in there with the hall light on and the door wide open. I shut the door the way she likes, but she keeps getting up to open it.”

I slunk away then, couldn’t bring myself to shut my door, climbed into bed with the door open, so that I could
still hear their voices, see the light. I tried to stay awake but fell asleep, asleep although I was afraid to be.

Thursday morning my stomach hurt again. “What’s bothering you, Chérie?” Dad asked from the edge of my bed. “What’s got you afraid to have the door closed? Why can’t you go to school?”

In my mind a gray-faced man got out of a green station wagon and walked toward me. I couldn’t tell my father that. The illustration from the
Reader’s Digest
in the upstairs bathroom leaped into my mind. “What if our house caught fire?” I said.

Dad was so nice about it that I felt guilty. He borrowed my drawing pad and sketched a map of the house, both floors, overlapping, with all the doors and windows drawn in. Together, we came up with four routes for getting out of the house, plus getting Aimée out safely, and planned a meeting place across the road in the Ascontis’ front yard.

I lay in bed that night and envisioned it: the heat of the door with a fire on the other side, frantic Aimée made calm by my confidence, the trip down from the roof in my pajamas, my bare feet in the frosty grass. I’d gotten Aimée out but couldn’t throw the rocks high enough to reach the windows and save the others.

I woke up sweating, found my bedroom door closed again, with a light glowing underneath. Not caring if there was a fire, I pulled the door open and walked into the hall. “Mom? Mom? Why’d you close my door?”

Dad said gruffly, “You were asleep. We didn’t want anything to wake you up. You were sound asleep for once, snoring.”

I knelt there at the edge of my parents’ bed and cried. And got to stay home Friday.

Outside In

November 1968

S
ATURDAY
I
TURNED THIRTEEN.

It was my birthday dinner. Pete and Dave were in the living room with the rest of us. Even Joanie was there, watching football with Dad and Uncle Joe. Aimée and I walked around, passing out plates of birthday cake. It had to be a birthday for people to be allowed to eat off their laps in our living room.

When the football game ended, Dad opened a bottle of wine, poured glasses for Mom and Aunt Bonnie and Uncle Joe and himself. “We’ve got a teenager now,” he said, toasting me.

He offered a glass to Pete, but Pete shook his head. “I’m in training,” he said. The football team had made it to States, and Pete was being very serious about it, as if it were war, not just football.

“Mr. Good Conduct,” said Uncle Joe. He was praising Pete and mocking him, all at the same time. Pete’s pink cheeks turned a shade pinker. He ran his tongue across his top teeth as if he were holding his thoughts in. He
extremely carefully separated his icing from his very large slice of cake.

Baby Fred was asleep in Aunt Bonnie’s arms, and she was pacing around the room, rocking him. Now she walked away, humming to the baby, turning her back on the room. “I’ve got an idea,” she said softly. “Why don’t all you kids go outside and have one of your creepy games of hide-and-seek in the dark?”

Joanie said, “Oh, yes! I’ve heard about this!”

Nobody else was very enthusiastic, but there was something serious in the faces of the adults, as though they wanted time alone to talk. So we all trudged dutifully outside. I was surprised to see that Pete had come, too, but maybe he’d gotten the same message I had about our parents.

We stood in our front yard for a few moments. I didn’t like the dark look on Pete’s face. He actually had wrinkles on his forehead from thinking so hard. Dave looked as if he were having trouble swallowing. If it had just been the two of us, I would have said, “Dave,
what?”
but it wasn’t just the two of us. Aimée was hanging on Joanie’s arm, and Joanie was waiting to see what we all would do.

“See, it’s not so cold,” Joanie said. “How do we start?”

Pete sighed. “Let’s get Lucy at least.” Not Sandy?

But of course Sandy came, too. I felt better once we rang the DeLunas’ bell and got Sandy and Lucy to come out. They were surprised to see us all at their door on a dark November night. They’d been hanging around in their patched jeans and bedroom slippers, watching the
Million Dollar Movie,
but when they saw us, they grabbed their shoes and came on out, eyes glowing.

“Your birthday!” said Lucy, and gave me a big smooch on the cheek. “I thought you were getting your hair cut.”

Mom had said no. But now I said, “I am, first chance I get.”

All of a sudden I wasn’t even afraid of what Mom might say. It was what I wanted.

“Good,” said Lucy.

“What’s good?” asked Aimée.

“Nothing,” said Lucy and I. Even Joanie kept her mouth shut. And Aimée went to the Rankins’ and got Pammy to come out.

Indeed, it was a perfect hide-and-seek night. Dave was It first. Joanie and I went and hid in Elfland. Our elf furniture was safe at home, but the permanent stuff was familiar in the dark under our fingers: her slide, my elevators, the sink and the pump, the curtain that opened and closed with a rope, a tiny bell hung near a doorway, the stone paths, and the hallways. There were no elves, but we sat together and walked our fingers in and out of the rooms as though they were the elves. “Are you going to ask me to
Mame?”
asked Joanie. That had been my present from Grandma in Delaware: tickets for me and a friend to my first Broadway show. I had opened the envelope at dinner.

In a way I wanted to. I wished I could go twice. But I said, “My mother’s making me take Dave.” Joanie made a face but shrugged. She could see how it was.

On the next round I hid with Dave, and I asked him about
Mame.
“If I’m here,” he answered.

“You’re not really leaving.”

Aimée was It. She was going in the opposite direction from us, so I relaxed and leaned against the wall of the DeLunas’ house, Dave’s shoulder touching mine. He smelled like pine trees and chocolate cake.

“Yeah, we probably are,” he said.

“You and your dad?” I tried to see his eyes. I thought he was crying.

“Why do you think Mom wanted to talk to them alone?” he said.

“Leaving?”

“They’re telling your parents.”

I knew what it meant when people said their hearts sank. Mine had stones on it as heavy as the ones on the newspapers in the Little River. I remembered Dave’s arm around me when he’d told me about Wendy Boland. I slipped my hand under his arm and held his hand, and he let me.

“You’re going to Ohio?” I said.

“No.”

“Where, then?”

“She wants to be in Massachusetts at Grandpa’s for Christmas.”

“Who, your Mom?”

“She doesn’t have any money.”

“I’ll give you the paper route.” It figured I’d have to give it up now that the news was improving:
NIXON PUSHES FOR HALT TO NORTH VIETNAM BOMBING
.

I didn’t know what I was saying. How could Dave do the route from Massachusetts? And I didn’t know what Dave was saying, or I’d have asked why he was talking about only Aunt Bonnie. What had happened to Ohio?

He sat up and took his hand away. “It’s all decided. She’s asking them now.” He started kicking at the bushes with one foot.

“Asking them what?”

“I’m not supposed to say.” He shoved his foot into the roots and shook the bush violently.

I grabbed his jacket. “Say? To me?”

He gave in. “She wants to sell them the house.”

“Your
house?” Aimée was going to hear me. Already she was turning our way. “Us?
Why?”

“Because of
your mother
,” Dave said. “Because she sees her crying all the time about not having enough space, and now they all think you’re going crazy.”

I was stunned, speechless. I shifted my rear, making sure my shoulder didn’t touch Dave’s. “Why?”

“Well, you are, aren’t you? My mom says you’re not sleeping. She says you’re scared of things: fires, and walking home from school. Look how you acted in that oral report.”

Oral reports. Kidnapping and murder and assassinations and riots and oral reports. And now—“Quit messing with that bush!” I said. “You’re hurting it.”

He didn’t stop. “And I know you ditched those newspapers, Chérie. You didn’t fool me.”

Had he told Aunt Bonnie that?

“I’m not the only one who’s crazy,” I said. “Your brother belongs in the monkey house. Throwing things at little kids out car windows. And look what he did to Joanie.”

“Joanie had it coming,” Dave said, sounding like Pete.

I stood up and yelled, “She did not! If you think that, you’re as stupid as Pete is!”

“I call Chérie in the Rankins’ bushes with Day-ave!” yodeled Aimée across the night.

I crossed my arms over my stomach to hold my tears in and bent over the bush to say, “I used to think you were my brother. I hope you
do
leave. The sooner the better.” Now Dave was standing up, too. He stood staring at me, didn’t run off and hide. Aimée came running to me to tag us out, unable to see what was going on over here in the dark. Dave gripped my elf house by its branches and rocked it, rattled it, cracked it.

“Stop it!” I screeched. But he yanked it up out of the earth. It made a creaking, ripping sound. Then he threw it right at me, and the dirt from the roots showered down over my jeans and sneakers.

Aimée got to me just in time to see the elf house roll like a tumbleweed at my feet. She stared at it and at Dave and me. I waited for the explosion of tears and sobbing that both Dave and I knew would come. But Aimée’s eyes stayed wide like Aunt Bonnie’s, round and anxious.