The Dance (19 page)

Pulling her Mercedes onto her street, Polly spotted Clark swinging a leg over his motorcycle parked at the foot of her driveway. Before she could reach the house, however, he had gunned the engine and roared off in the opposite direction. For a moment she contemplated going after him. But even if she had been in a Ferrari, she knew she would never have caught him. He was like a witch on a broom.

Heading up her driveway, she noticed that the front door was wide open. The house was black, and she never left for the evening without turning on at least a couple of lamps.

“Aunty,” she whispered to herself, leaping out of her car. Inside, she couldn’t get a light to go on. Either Clark had fiddled with the circuit breakers or else he had broken every bulb in the house. She stumbled into the kitchen, found a candle in a drawer, and lit it on the pilot light of the stove. Creeping down the hall toward her aunt’s bedroom, shadows following her along both walls, she started to cry.

Her aunt was lying on her back and staring at the ceiling. Staring without blinking. Polly set the candle down on the nearby bed stand and sat on the bed. Aunty’s pupils had clouded over, like cheap marbles that had been left too long in the bright sun. Polly couldn’t even tell what color her eyes had been, and this disturbed her a great deal, that she couldn’t remember.

Polly picked up the old lady’s mottled hand. It was soft, softer than it had been in life, and it was still warm. She had not been dead long.

She was alive when Clark was here.

Polly glanced at the ceiling and didn’t see the blood dripping down that he had spoken of; nevertheless, she felt herself smothering, a black panic rising.

She fainted on top of the dead woman.

Jessica drifted in and out of reality trying to sleep on the hard brown vinyl couch in the deserted hospital waiting room. When she was awake, she watched Michael and Nick sitting in the hallway outside the room. Sometimes they would be talking quietly to each other. Other times Nick’s head would be slumped back on the wall and he would be snoring softly. But always Michael would be sitting upright, and always he looked as if he were thinking. Not once, however, did she catch him looking her way. And this simple fact filled her with a sadness that went beyond reason. It made her anguish about Maria almost unbearable. There was only pain in waking.

In being alive.

Then there were her dreams. They were mostly dark thundering things without shape or reason. But there was one that had sent a knife through her heart when she had awakened from it; for it had been beautiful and filled with a joyfulness that made her chest ache to recall it.

She was in the tunnel of her childhood. Only now Michael was with her, and they were both fully grown. Alice was there also, and another blond-haired girl Jessica did not recognize. But the two girls were younger, only three or four years old. Together, with Michael leading the way with the aid of an old-fashioned lantern, they were approaching what they knew to be the end of the tunnel.

A warm yellow light began to stream over them from up ahead, making their eyes shine and their hearts quicken. Then the walls of the tunnel started to dissolve, until they could see through them. Suddenly Michael smiled and extinguished the lantern. And they were standing on a sloping desert plain, with a sparkling clear sky overhead and a breeze, sweet with the fragrance of honey, wafting through their hair. In the distance were a cool green ocean and people, old friends of theirs they could hardly wait to meet again.

Behind them, Jessica caught the faint roar of a churning river and realized that the now-invisible tunnel had been a bridge over the icy water. It was, however, only a passing thought, of something that had once concerned her but which she now understood to be of no importance. Michael took her hand—Alice and her friend were dancing ahead of them—and they walked toward the place by the ocean where the day was only beginning.

She felt as if she had just been born.

A bright spot in a dreary night. Fits of reality and nightmares chased her from then on. Until she felt a hand on her arm, shaking her gently.

“Jessie, wake up. Time to get up.”

Jessica opened her eyes and discovered Sara sitting beside her on the couch. Sara had begun the vigil with Jessica outside the operating room at two in the morning, but had rushed home after receiving an emergency call from her mother. It hadn’t been clear exactly what the problem was.

“What time is it?” She yawned, pushing herself up with an effort, her neck stiff as a board.

“Eight-thirty,” a voice said at her back. It was Michael, standing in the hazy sunlight of the waiting-room window. “The doctors say Maria’s operation went well. Her parents are with her now.”

“But is she going to be all right?” Jessica asked anxiously. “What did they operate on?”

“Her back,” Michael said, coming over and sitting on the chair beside them. “It was broken.”

“Is she—paralyzed?” Jessica asked.

Michael shook his head, tired. “I don’t know. I don’t think the doctors like to use that word. One of us might be allowed in to see her in a few minutes. Nick’s gone to talk to the surgeon who performed the operation.”

“At least she’s alive,” Sara said.

“Yeah,” Michael said. “She was lucky.”

“What did your mom want?” Jessica asked Sara. Her old friend grimaced.

“Bad news. The police identified the ax you guys found as the ax taken from the store where Russ used to work. They found his fingerprints on the handle. They’ve arrested him!”

“You can’t be serious?” Jessica said.

“Can’t your parents verify where Russ was at one o’clock in the morning?” Michael asked.

“No,” Sara said. “He didn’t go straight home after the dance.”

“Where did he go?” Jessica asked.

Sara hesitated. “He says he went to a bar. But the idiot—he can’t remember which one.”

“That’s bad,” Michael said.

“You don’t think he chopped down the tree, do you?” Jessica asked.

“Of course he didn’t!” Sara snapped. “But while questioning him, the police learned that he’d stayed at Polly’s house for a few days. They called her, and she said that she’d had the ax in the trunk of her car until last week, when it disappeared.”

“What was Polly doing with the ax?” Jessica asked.

“She says she took it from Russ one night when he was drunk and trying to chop down the varsity tree.”

“They believed her?” Jessica asked, amazed.

“Russ agreed with her! Except he says
I
was the one who stopped him back then and took his ax. He’s incriminated himself left and right. They’re going to lock him up, I swear it.”

“No way,” Jessica said.

“They might,” Michael said. “When that tree fell, it caused a lot of damage.”

“He should have kept his mouth shut,” Sara said. “Polly should have kept her mouth shut.” She sighed, rubbing her head. “I guess we can’t blame her, though. Her night was as lousy as Maria’s. Her aunt passed away.”

Jessica groaned. “It never stops.”

Sara nodded. “And to top it off, an old-time employee of her parents’ company died yesterday from a work-related accident. She’s got two more funerals to go to. I hope they won’t be plugging her into the socket again.” Sara stood. “I have to get back to the police station. I’m trying to get Russ out on bail.”

“Will your parents lend you the money?” Jessica asked.

“No,” Sara said. “They’re being total jerks about the whole thing.” She patted Jessica on the shoulder. “I’ll be back later to check on Maria. I guess we should be glad things can’t get any worse. See you, Mike.”

When Sara was gone, Michael sat beside her on the couch. “Can I get you anything from the snack bar?” he asked.

“Thanks, I’m not hungry. Have you been up all night?”

“Yeah.”

“And you don’t think it was an accident?”

Her question surprised him. “It’s hard to tell from what’s left of the tower. Clearing a path to Maria, I messed up the evidence something awful. We may never know if someone tampered with the float.”

“But you think someone did, don’t you?”

He shrugged. “I’m not sure of anything these days.” He glanced at her. He needed a shave. She needed a hug. “What did Sara mean when she made that remark about plugging Polly into the socket again?”

“When we were twelve, Polly’s parents died. Alice must have told you. They drove off a road in the desert and their car burst into flames. Polly was with them, but was thrown free. She didn’t get so much as a scratch. But she suffered from severe depression afterward, and was in the hospital for a long time. The doctors treated her with electroshock.”

“What!” Michael exclaimed. “They used electro-shock on a twelve-year-old girl?”

“Is that unusual?” she asked uneasily. “She had the best doctors money could buy. It seemed to help.”

Michael shook his head angrily. “Electroshock has got to be the greatest evil modern psychiatry ever spawned. It alleviates people’s depression by causing irreversible brain damage. The patient is no longer unhappy because he can hardly remember what was making him unhappy.”

“Then why do they use it?”

“You said it: 'the best doctors money could buy.’ It costs the hospital a few cents in electricity, produces superficial improvement, and makes M.D.s tons of cash.” He nodded to himself. “‘The man with the electricity.’ Makes sense.”

“What?”

“Just something Polly said to me when I was at her house.”

“Why did you go to her house?”

He realized he’d made a slip. “You know why.”

“I suppose I do.” She touched his arm. “Michael, you’ve got to let it go.”

He looked away. “I can’t.”

“But it’s tearing you apart.”

“Not like it tore Maria apart,” he muttered.

“What?”

“Nothing.” He rested his head in his hands, his eyes on the floor. He was thinking again. “She was outside when the gun went off. We’re sure of that, aren’t we?”

“Who?”

“Polly. The night of the party.”

“Yes, she was outside,
alone
in the backyard. And Alice was upstairs,
alone
in her parents’ bedroom. Polly didn’t kill her. She loved Alice.”

Michael sat up. “But a crazy person could love someone and still kill her. She wouldn’t need a reason why.”

“You think Polly’s crazy?”

“I think she’s close enough not to make much difference.”

“You’re wrong. She may be a bit off, but she gets by. I’ve known her a lot longer than you.”

He softened his tone. “I appreciate that, Jessie—that she’s your friend. And I realize you knew her before they attached electrodes to her brain. But tell me honestly, was it the same Polly who came out of the hospital that went in?”

“Of course she wasn’t the same,” she said, wondering if she wasn’t trying to convince herself. “She was a young girl, and she’d lost both her parents.”

“I wonder if that’s all there was to it.”

“But you saw Polly go out to the backyard, same as me,” she said, her voice growing constricted with emotion. “And you saw her come running inside when the gun went off. Believe me, I know that house. There’s no way up to the master bedroom except the stairs we took. There are no trapdoors, no hidden stairways. It’s physically impossible that she shot Alice. It’s impossible anyone did.”

Michael looked unconvinced; nevertheless, he nodded. “I can’t argue with what you say. I’m sorry I brought it up. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

He was still feeling guilty, she knew, about the time he had yelled at her in Alice’s studio after the funeral. She smiled, squeezed his arm. “You never have to apologize to me, Michael.”

He blushed, or frowned, or both. “Yeah?”

“It’s true. And I’ll tell you why it’s true.”

Because you’re the only one I know who’s striving for perfection. Who’s completely noble and totally unselfish. The only one who’s always there when I need rescuing from myself.

The words did not come out, not right away, and not so much because she was embarrassed to say them, but because she was ashamed that she had stood him up on their date, that she had purposely started the rumor of Clair’s abortion and accepted his help on the SAT. That she was unworthy of him.

“Jessie?” he said, waiting for her.

I can still tell him, and let him decide. About me. Us.

“Because, Michael Olson, old locker buddy—”

“Jessie,” Nick called, striding into the waiting room, a different person from the guy who had led Tabb to victory the night before. He had huge bags under his eyes. He stuttered when he spoke. “The d-doctor said you can see M-Maria for a couple of minutes.”

“Have you seen her?” Jessica asked, jumping up with Michael.

“She wants to see you first,” Nick said, tense.

“But how is she?” Jessica asked. “Will she be able to walk again?”

“I don’t know,” Nick complained. “Nobody will tell me nothing. And her parents have left already.”

Jessica followed Nick’s directions and ended up in an aggressively green intensive-care ward. The medicine smell made her empty stomach uneasy. The patients’ rooms were tiny glass cubicles arranged around a nurses’ station packed with enough electronic equipment to pilot a Trident submarine. The RN on duty pointed out Maria’s box and reminded her that her visit was not to exceed three minutes.

A white sheet loosely covered Maria’s body; it wasn’t much whiter than the color of her skin. Quietly closing the door, Jessica noted through an opening in the sheet that a plastic and metal brace was locked over Maria’s bare hips. It reached all the way up her side, embracing her slim shoulders. It could not have looked more uncomfortable. Maria had her eyes open—one eye, rather; the other was swollen shut—and was staring at the ceiling.

Where else can she look?

“It’s me,” Jessica said.

Maria cleared her throat. “I know.”

Jessica moved closer to the bed. Bandage covered the right side of Maria’s face; out the bottom of it peeked a stitched cut. She would be scarred as well.

But did she sever her spinal cord?

Jessica walked over to take Maria’s hand and bumped into her IV. Wires led from beneath the sheet to monitors overhead. She had to fight to keep her voice calm. “How are you, Maria?”

Her single black eye turned toward Jessica. “How do I look?”

She forced a smile. “A little under the weather. But you’ll be better soon. This is a great hospital.”

“Is it?”

“Oh, yeah. I had my appendix out here when I was thirteen years old. They have the best doctors. Wonderful nurses.”

Maria closed her eye. “Since you love it here so much, it’s too bad it wasn’t you who broke her back.”

“Huh?” Jessica had to force air into her lungs in order to speak. “You don’t mean that.”

Maria smiled, and with her cuts and swollen face, it was truly gruesome. “I remember when you talked me into putting my name on the ballot for the homecoming court. You told me this was America, that anything could happen, that I might even be nominated queen. But you didn’t believe it. Had you thought I stood a chance in a million, you wouldn’t have let me get within a mile of that ballot.”

“You’ve been through a terrible ordeal,” Jessica said, struggling to keep her composure. “You need to rest, to heal. And you’re going to heal, Maria.”

Maria looked at her again, her one eye a single accusing finger. “It should have been you standing at the top of that float. You wanted to be homecoming queen more than anything. You schemed to go out with the popular boys so you’d be popular. You told lies about Clair. You told me lies.”

“Stop it. You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“It should be you lying here instead of me!”

The tears burst from Jessica then and she had to turn away. She went to the huge window by the door. Hanging from a white thread close to the glass was a silver angel—a Christmas decoration. With everything else going on, she had forgotten that Christmas was only a couple of weeks away. She had gotten so caught up in the fantasy of being the most desired girl on campus that she had almost overlooked what had always been for her the most precious time of the year, and the realization made her feel there must be some justice in what Maria said.