Three Quarters Dead (5 page)

There wasn’t much to the front yards. I was already on a concrete step, up to a front door. The storm door was loose, shuddering in the wind. I held it open with an elbow while I found the lock with the key. There was just enough light.

And I thought, just for a moment:
I’m on my own here. I can still back out. I can make this not happen.
But the moment passed, and the key slid right in. I turned it, and I was ready to run—poised—in case of a burglar alarm. But no bells rang except maybe in my head. I had to go on, and now I was inside, closing the door behind me. It was two or three shades of dark in here. The furniture was just one shape after another. For a moment I couldn’t tell up from down. Then I saw an opening into blackness, a door on the left that went to the bedrooms and the bathroom. I went that way like a sleepwalker, careful not to run into anything or touch anything. Maybe I wasn’t there at all.

Now I was in this little hallway area that closed in on me. I needed to turn left again. I couldn’t see my feet, so it was like walking through leaves, but quieter. The door to Alyssa’s bedroom was open, and there was some light from outside. Pale silvery light fell across the bedspread.

I was in this girl’s bedroom, and I didn’t really know who she was. I didn’t know her. But there was this jumble of little things on a chest of drawers. And shapes. All these shapes. I fumbled in my pocket for the doll. Then I fumbled in the other pocket where the doll really was, shifting the key from hand to hand.

I had the doll now. The baby. All I had to do was leave it on the pillow. Right where she’d see it. My hand tingled to get rid of it.

I put it there, not touching the pillow, and turned.

And then: “Alyssa?” someone said.

My feet froze to the floor. Light flooded the room. The ceiling light was on, and this woman was standing in the door to the dark hall. A woman in a bathrobe, clutching the collar of it at her throat.

“You’re not Alyssa.” She stepped back. She’d been asleep, and now she wasn’t.

Somewhere outside a car started up and gunned away over the mashed leaves.

“Who are you?” she said. Alyssa’s mother said. “What are you doing here? Why are you in this house?”

Good question.

“I said, who are you?”

I was terminally terrified. I could hear my heart. It was about to jump out of Tanya’s sweater.

“Kerry Williamson,” I said. I’d have told anything. I’d have shown her ID if I had any. And how could I run? She was standing there in the only door.

She’d heard me come in the house. She was somebody’s mother, so she woke up the instant she heard the key in the door. It was a wonder I hadn’t walked right into her in the little dark hall.

“I’m in tenth grade,” I said.

It was an insane thing to say. What did I mean? Was I trying to say that I was only in tenth grade, so I wasn’t responsible for anything? That it wasn’t like I was a senior? I don’t know why I said that. I was crazy and too scared to cry.

“Why?” Alyssa’s mother said. She’d put on her glasses, and her hair was a mess, and her nose was red and runny. Suddenly I knew. She had a cold, so she’d called in sick, and that’s why she wasn’t at work. I could figure all that out. I just couldn’t figure out why I was here.

“What’s that on the pillow?”

“A doll,” I heard myself saying. “I’ve brought it for Alyssa.” That almost sounded like a reason, or so I thought after I’d said it. An excuse.

She wasn’t scared of me now. Anyway, she’d heard the car drive away just as I had, the Audi. The minute the ceiling light went on, the car cut out. She knew I was alone.

“Give it to me.” She put out her hand. She was this mother, so I had to do it. If I behaved, maybe she’d just let me go or something. Maybe we could just make this be—not happening. I picked up the doll and handed it over.

It rocked in the palm of her hand under the glaring light. The little bag had fallen off, so it was this fairly nasty small slick pink thing in her hand. She’d have seen the fake blood on the slit neck.

“What is this supposed to mean?” The light glinted off her glasses. She looked so tired, and I was so tired.

“I don’t know what it means,” I said. Mumbled.

“Then why did you bring it here?”

“It’s Halloween,” I said, remembering that it was. “It’s just like a Halloween type thing.”

“And how did you get in here?”

I held out the key.

She was so surprised she didn’t even take it. Then she took it. “How in the world did you get this? Did Alyssa give you a key? Do you know her?”

I thought about saying yes, but Alyssa could walk in the door this minute. She was always out till all hours, and it was all hours.

“I don’t even know who she is,” I said, “exactly.”

Mrs. Stark stared at me, trying to make some sense out of this.

“She’s a senior,” I said, but then, her mother would know that.

“Did you steal this key?” Mrs. Stark said. “Somebody did.”

“No. Tanya gave it to me.” I blurted that out before I thought. Still, they’d left me here. They’d dropped me in this. Didn’t they care? No, they didn’t.

Now Mrs. Stark was wide awake. “Tanya Spangler?” she said. “That could explain almost anything.”

Could it?

She was stepping aside, though it was too late to run for it. She knew my name.

“I’m just going to tell you one thing,” she said. “And you’re not going to understand it.”

We were close, there in that little room. But I waited and listened and almost looked at her. If I did everything she wanted me to, maybe she’d let—

“You’re being used,” she said. Whatever that meant.

And was that it?

No. No. She walked me out through the living room and flipped on a light. The room came alive with colors.

A picture hung by the door. I caught one glimpse of it, a framed photograph of a girl. Not as pretty as Natalie. Not as great-looking as Tanya, but dramatic. Maybe a little older. Alyssa? I didn’t recognize her. I didn’t recognize a lot of people. It was a big school, and you couldn’t know everybody, and it was important not to get involved with people you wouldn’t want to know later.

My head was spinning out of control, but the door was right here, a reach away. Mrs. Stark was behind me. I could feel her there, all the way down my spine. But she didn’t touch me, hold me back. She was leaning around me to open the door, and I was
this close
to freedom, to blending with the night.

Then she said, close to my ear, “You’re Carolyn Williamson’s daughter, aren’t you?”

And that broke me. Into pieces. It broke me apart. She knew my mother.

I RAN, KICKING through the leaves, up one street after another. It was like running in a nightmare. Running and running, and are you even moving?

For a crazy moment I thought about going to my dad’s instead. I was with him part of the time, once in a while. I was back and forth, so why not now? He had an apartment in White Plains, and I could double back to the station and take the next train. Be there for breakfast.

But I didn’t have any money, so I just kept running, numb all the way home. A car turned ahead of me under a streetlight. In case it was a police cruiser I jumped into a bush with branches like claws.

I was on Linden Street before I knew it. We lived in the Groveland, a big old apartment building that had gone condo. It was on the edge of the Old English Village part of town.

Now I was walking, breathing in heaves, almost home. I’d brought my keys. I was well supplied with keys that night. So I could get into the lobby downstairs. The front door snapped shut behind me. On the long table a big bowl still held some Halloween candy. The usual fake fire glowed in the lobby fireplace.

I took the elevator up, and my door key was in my hand. The morning paper was already on our mat. I left it there. I didn’t even look down. I didn’t want to see some headline reading:

LOCAL TENTH GRADER NABBED IN . . . I didn’t know what . . . NABBED IN DISTRIBUTING DOLLS TO PEOPLE’S BEDROOMS.

Besides, if I left the paper on the mat, it would mean I’d come home earlier, before it was delivered. I turned the key in the lock, quiet as a mouse.

Inside, I could see my bedroom door from here. At the end of the hall. But this was the trickiest part. I had to walk past my mother’s bedroom door.

And a line of light was under it. A bright fan of light across the dark hall floor. My flesh crept.

Her light was on, but I wasn’t about to knock and turn myself in. It had to be nearly daylight. Why wasn’t it? She shouldn’t see my face. Who knew what she’d be able to read in it?

I kept walking on little mouse feet, past her door. Then I was in my room, on the safe side of the door.

I nearly lost it then. But I was home free, maybe, and maybe my mother had gone to sleep, waiting for me. She must have. The most important part was that Mrs. Stark hadn’t called her. And Mrs. Stark knew her. How? But she did.

I don’t remember any more about that night. I must have tried to stay awake as long as I could, so I’d be ready for my mother if she barged in. But then I slept, hard and fast and friendless. Then it was the next day, a school day. About an hour later.

And I don’t think my mother had come into my room. But had I folded up Tanya’s sweater that neatly? And left it on the chair to remember to take it back to her?

I WASN’T EVEN late for school, though still numb. But I remembered to stuff Tanya’s sweater into my backpack. I meant to throw it at her and walk away. She’d walked away from me. Worse.

Then all morning I kept looking around at these people in my tenth-grade classes. Geometry and whatever. They weren’t real, and lunch was. Were these the people I was stuck with now? Now that Tanya and Natalie and Makenzie had dropped me in it? And probably dropped
me
? And didn’t care?

Kimberly Cook was tenth-grade class president. There she was in second period, though I didn’t particularly know her. And the guys were all so immature. There were some very recent voice changes in some of them. And a Mets sweatshirt on one of them. It was whole classrooms full of the clueless. Whole bunches of wannabes who didn’t even know who they wanted to be. I knew.

I dreaded lunch. I wanted to stop all the classroom clocks, which was a new feeling. Then I thought about not going to lunch at all. I could throw Tanya’s sweater at her some other time. Why hadn’t I brought an energy bar or something? But my feet took me to the food court. I went through the salad bar and dropped down at the far end of the usual table, the end where I used to sit alone, before.

Nothing tasted like anything, and I was invisible, and it was September again: that thundering buzz of everybody knowing everybody else. Everybody locked in.

I decided that if they came to lunch, they’d find me on my phone. It would be like an IM had just popped up on my screen. Maybe from Abby Davis, though I hadn’t heard from her in a month. I decided how to act. Then they were there, and my phone wasn’t even in my hand.

They swept up and dropped down around me like birds. Chattering birds on a branch here at this end of the table. With their designer water and low-carb salads. And Tanya and Natalie were wearing pajamas.

Pajamas? I was mad at them, and they were wearing pajamas? As usual, I was way behind, and they were way ahead.

The pajamas were a senior thing, a cross between some fund raiser and a protest against first period. Natalie was in shortie pajamas with a body stocking underneath and heels, black patent leather. She looked sensational. Like a French movie or something. Tanya was wearing her father’s pajamas, rolled up: maroon stripes, and over that a floaty dressing gown you could see through. It was perfect. She’d tied up her blond hair in hanks with flannel strips and cold-creamed her face. A hoot.

The floaty gown settled around her as she settled next to me. “Do you love it?” Tanya said, holding out a see-through sleeve. “It’s Joanne’s. Her sleepwear and undies are very Victoria’s Secret. She has
garter belts
. Did you get home all right?”

Did I get home all right?
I couldn’t believe my ears.

“Don’t sulk,” she said. “It makes you even younger.”

“It really does,” Natalie said. “I’m thinking training bra and braces.”

Tanya couldn’t get the lid off her water and handed it to Natalie to unscrew. “Honestly, when the light went on in Alyssa’s bedroom, we had to leave,” Natalie said, nearly looking at me. “You were so busted, Kerry. I mean, you walked right into it. And it was bound to be Mrs. Stark, so how did we know she wouldn’t go psycho and dial 911? Police?
Please.
”

They all three looked at me. I was the center of attention.

“It was Mrs. Stark all right,” I mumbled. “She had a cold or something. And she knows my mother.”