by Una Mannion
I could hear voices and laughter on the far side of the lot, most likely some of the Phoenixville kids who hung around getting stoned and drinking beer. Red lights blinked from the top of both towers, a warning to aircraft or a beacon to other alien beings.
The winter before, Thomas and I had come up here with Jack Griffith, Thomas’s oldest friend on the mountain. We hadn’t seen him much since Dad’s funeral; Thomas had stopped going out or returning phone calls. It was dusk, a day or two after New Year’s; we were still off school for Christmas, and it was snowing. Marie, Thomas, and I had been outside, trying to shovel the driveway, when Jack rumbled up in a little Datsun. He was driving now, he said, and thought he and Thomas could look around, that the snowplows hadn’t been out yet. Marie told Thomas to go. As they were getting in the car, Jack turned to me and asked if I wanted to come, and without thinking, I said yes and climbed into the back.
We drove through thick snow. The roads were empty, and there were no car tracks; only the trees defined the path of the road. It was dark, and we drove around the mountain cocooned in Jack’s Datsun as it snowed all around us. Supertramp’s “The Logical Song” came on the radio as we were trying to get up Horseshoe Trail Road, the car spinning wheels and sliding back. Jack couldn’t get the car up any farther, so he stopped and we got out and walked up to the water tower lot to see what it would look like up there at the top of the mountain, all white. The three of us stood in that quiet of snow at night, our faces cold, the thick flakes falling and lights blinking, and I felt happy. I remember looking over at Jack, and he had become beautiful, his dark hair and red cheeks. I could see he was happy, too, just being there with us. Ever since, I’d had a kind of crush on him, something I didn’t even admit to Sage. I hardly ever saw him, anyway. Neither did Thomas.
As I passed the tower, there was more laughter and the shattering of glass, and I broke into a run before any of them saw me. But I hadn’t reached the woods on the other side of the clearing when shadows moved ahead of me in the dark. I slowed to a walk. Five or six teenagers were standing in a haphazard circle, the smell of pot hovering around them. Abbey Quinn stepped out onto the trail.
“Hey, Gallagher. That you? Where you headed?”
I stopped. I liked Abbey, but the others she was with made me uncomfortable. “Hi, Abbey. Babysitting.”
“The beautiful Mrs. Boucher?” Abbey giggled. She was stoned.
I looked over at the others, trying to make out their faces. “Yeah.”
“I heard there’s someone who thinks Mrs. Boucher is beautiful,” she said, and started laughing again.
I didn’t know what she meant, and shrugged. Abbey put her arm around my shoulders. She’d been drinking, too.
“You should come out more often. It’d be good for you. With Sage.”
“I’ll try,” I said. “Better get going. See ya.” I kept walking down the trail.
The path ended on the road where the Bouchers lived, and I turned left to head down the hill. Beyond their house was a Nike missile site, owned by the US government. Because Philadelphia was a major American city, it was surrounded by these sites, which were supposed to detect incoming missiles and launch antimissile missiles that would hit them and bring them down. Some sites had radar and some sites had missiles. I didn’t know which one we were. Either way, it meant that nuclear war was close to us, that we could be a target and that missiles were buried in our ground. I worried about nuclear arms and radiation. A couple years earlier, when the Three Mile Island meltdown happened, people needed to evacuate. We’d listened to the radio in Dad’s truck on the way to school. Harrisburg was only an hour and a half away, even less as the crow flies. I’d imagined the people fleeing on foot, looking behind them in terror at something invisible carried on the air, how everything could be obliterated by a contamination you couldn’t even see. People said the sites hadn’t even been used since the 1960s. Did that mean they took out the surface-to-air missiles, or were they still here in the ground? No one knew.
Mrs. Boucher’s house sat several hundred yards from the road, at a steep drop and barely visible from the top of the driveway. As I walked down, I could see the lights of the house in slices through the trees. I decided then that I would tell her what had happened with Ellen. Maybe she would take me and the boys in the car and go down the mountain to look for Ellen along the road. Or I could stay in the house with the boys, and she could go. I knew she would help us. But when I got to the front door, Mrs. Boucher opened it before I’d even knocked. She had a light scarf wrapped around her shoulders and was holding her pocketbook and keys. She moved back to let me in, keeping her hand on the open door.
“Hi, Libby. Sorry, I’m rushing tonight. The boys are in their pajamas. There’s ice cream in the freezer. I got mint chocolate chip for you.” I hesitated before stepping inside. Mrs. Boucher looked at me. “Is everything okay?”
“Oh, yeah, fine. Thank you. And for the ice cream. I finished school for the summer today,” I added, as if this explained something. I stepped past her into the hallway.
“Ah, the paradox of freedom,” said Mrs. Boucher, like she understood. “I’ll see you when I get back,” and she shut the front door.
Why hadn’t I told her? I put my hand on the door to open it and call her back, to say we needed help. But I hated asking people for things. Maybe she would pass Ellen on her way down the mountain. I began to think of all the people that might pass Ellen on their way home. Surely one of them would stop. In her uniform she would be easily recognized.
I played games with the boys and put them into bed. I read Goodnight Moon to Bruce, who was two, and Peter Rabbit to Peter, who was five. Bruce sucked his thumb and snuggled into me. He had a moon lamp in his room and was asleep by the time I’d gotten to the “Goodnight, room” part. Peter liked to take his book after I’d read it and look at all the pictures in detail. I pretended that he was a rabbit, so we rubbed noses goodnight and I reminded him to clean his fur and to put down his ears to sleep.
I left him and went upstairs to the living room. The whole time I listened in case the phone rang. At ten I picked it up and made sure the dial tone was working, then placed it carefully back on the cradle. I wanted to call home, but my mother would answer the extension in her bedroom. I called Sage, who was the one person in the world other than Marie or Thomas who would instantly understand.
“Hi, it’s me.”
“Why are you whispering?”
“I don’t know. I’m at the Bouchers’. My mom kicked Ellen out of the car tonight when it was dark. On the bridge over the turnpike. She’s walking home, but I don’t think she got there yet.”
“By the turnpike? Poor Ellen. That road’s so lonely.”
“Yeah. I don’t know what to do.”
“I’ll get Charlotte to go out in the car,” Sage said. “You know she would.”
“No. Please don’t. It would make things worse. My mom could get in trouble.”
“So. What if she does?”
“Don’t say anything to your mom. I’ll call you when I hear that she’s home.” I went back to the couch and tried to watch television, but I couldn’t concentrate. If I had just told Mrs. Boucher, maybe we would have found Ellen and all this would be over.
At ten thirty the phone rang. It was Marie. “She hasn’t come home yet.”
“Oh God. I feel sick.”
“She’s not on the road. She must have tried to go through the woods.”
“How do you know?”
“Wilson McVay went out and drove the whole route on his motorcycle, and he didn’t see her.”
“You called Wilson McVay?”
“Yeah. Who else could I call?”
“Anybody but him. He’s crazy, Marie.”
“People who say that don’t know him.”
“People say it for a reason. It’s because he’s done stuff that’s crazy.”
“He helped us, Libby. Grow up.”
I could think of plenty of things wro
ng with Wilson McVay. Our dead cat, Mr. Franklin, for one. Thomas had named him after Benjamin Franklin, who according to legend once spent a night lost on the mountain. We’d found Mr. Franklin as a kitten in the woods. We believed Wilson had killed him. People said he killed neighbors’ pets with his BB gun, and when we found Mr. Franklin dead he had circular wounds in his side.
I had seen firsthand how crazy Wilson was, and so had Marie. Years earlier, when I was eleven or twelve, we were sitting on the swings at the Sun Bowl and Wilson was circling around on a dirt bike, making attempts to go up the rock hill at the far end. He’d try a few times and then come up toward the swings and rev the bike, kicking up the dust on the ground in front of us. A group of older guys had shown up and were hanging around on the basketball court. I didn’t like the look of them either. When Wilson passed them on the bike, one of them, a guy with no shirt, called something after him, like “Psycho.” Wilson circled back around. When he passed, the same guy commented, “Even the lunatics came out to play,” and the others laughed. Wilson turned again and drove straight at him. He never hesitated or veered, only missing the shirtless guy because he jumped out of the way. The guy picked himself up and shouted, “Who let you out of the asylum, asshole?” Wilson dropped the bike, ran straight at him, and jumped, smashing his own head against the guy’s forehead. He stood stunned for a second, and then just folded to the ground at Wilson’s feet. “He’s knocked him out,” someone shouted. Wilson walked past where we were on the swings, and I saw how he looked.
I knew why the guy had called him crazy—everyone did. Maybe six months before that, the police had been called after Wilson punched out his neighbors’ windows. Three houses in a row. He smashed panes of glass over and over with his bare fists, shouting in the middle of the night. When it stopped, Mr. Pascall, who lived next door, went outside. He found Wilson stark naked on the road, crying, his hands and arms bleeding. Wilson had looked up and said, “You should call the cops now.” Not long after the Sun Bowl, we heard he’d been involved in a holdup that went wrong, where a gas station attendant was tied up. Some people said Wilson had been the getaway driver. He must have done something, because after that he was gone for a few years, no one was sure where. When he came back, he started showing up at parties, hanging around teenagers not much older than me, just there on the edge of things.
“Maybe Ellen hid when she heard the motorcycle because she was scared it was Wilson.”
“You don’t even know him. I’ll call you when she gets here.”
I watched the television with the sound turned down low. Fantasy Island came on. It all looked so ridiculous, the little man shouting “De plane! De plane!” and the guy in the tuxedo who was supposed to have godlike powers telling all the staff to smile for the rich clients. I switched to The Rockford Files. I couldn’t sit still. It was almost eleven, over three hours since Ellen got out of the car.
Mrs. Boucher had subscriptions to magazines and newspapers and walls lined with books. The Philadelphia Inquirer and the New York Times were on the coffee table. The main story on both covers was still the Atlanta child murders. I tried reading the story but couldn’t concentrate on the words. I had heard it on KYW News that morning when we drove to school. The police had been keeping all of Atlanta’s bridges under surveillance, and the week before they had observed a car stop on one of the Chattahoochee River crossings, and then heard a splash below in the water. They pulled the driver over, and two days later, downriver, a body washed up. They thought they finally had the murderer. I prayed it was him. Over twenty Black children were missing or dead. I felt scared in the Bouchers’ house alone. It was all glass, and at the back the ground sloped, so that in the living room I felt as if I were floating in the trees. I could see why Mrs. Boucher called it her tree house. There were no curtains, and windows everywhere.
I decided to call Sage back and get her to ask her parents for help, even if it meant they had to call the police. As I walked toward the kitchen phone, a shadow flickered at one of the windows at the front of the house. For a split second, I saw something white. I stopped, held my breath. I heard rustling, then tapping against the glass. I looked down at my white T-shirt and wondered if I had seen my own reflection. More tapping. There was definitely someone at the window. I walked to the door, casually, as if I weren’t scared, and hid behind it and waited. I reached to flick on the porch light, turned to look out, then screamed. I opened the door, and Ellen stumbled in across the threshold.
“Oh God, Ellen.”
There was dirt and blood smeared across her face. Below her right eye was a cut, still bleeding. There were cuts down her right arm and leg, and her whole side seemed to be studded with parts of the road. Her uniform and white polo shirt were spattered with mud.
“I jumped out of a car.”
“What? What do you mean?” I shut the front door. I could feel the blood rushing into my head, making a sound like the ocean in my ears. “Are you okay? Are you hurt somewhere?” My voice seemed too loud.
“I don’t think so. I don’t know. I walked here. I couldn’t go home.”
I have to clean her cuts. That’s what has to be done. “Come on.” I brought her down to the bathroom Mrs. Boucher used for herself and visitors. Ellen’s pinafore and knee socks were caked in dried mud. I tried to ease her down on the white porcelain tiles, her back against the cabinets under the sink. She was shaking. Everything in Mrs. Boucher’s bathroom was white and monogrammed.
“Hold on a minute.”
I ran to the linen closet, grabbed a set of brown towels, and came back. In Mrs. Boucher’s bathroom Ellen looked like a ghost, her face blue-white, paler than the sink and cabinets behind her. The veins on her temples and forehead stood out, and the threads of darker veins beneath her eyes and at the sides of her cheeks looked black, as if her skin were see-through. I put the white floor mat into the bath and spread the towel across the tiles.
“Scooch up.”
Ellen raised herself, and I slid the towel under her, then wrapped another around her shoulders. I turned on the water, adjusted it to warm, and ran the brown washcloth under it.
“I’ll be careful, I promise,” I said. I squeezed the excess water from the cloth and touched it to Ellen’s face, just under her eye, where the cut was still oozing. Ellen winced and pulled back, banging her head on the cabinet.
“Ow.”
“Just let me clean it.” I dabbed at scratches on her face and wiped the dirt from her chin. My hand was shaking. She jumped out of a car. I opened the towel and looked again at Ellen’s right arm and leg. They were both torn raw. The cuts weren’t deep, but they stretched across the skin and were dotted black with dirt and grit. I opened Mrs. Boucher’s medicine cabinet above the sink and found a bottle of hydrogen peroxide.
“Don’t look,” I said.
Ellen turned her face away, and I poured a capful and tipped it down her right arm, flushing the cuts.
“We have to take off your shirt.” I undid the shoulder buttons on the pinafore and folded it down to her waist. Ellen pulled her shirt over her head and winced as she raised her right arm. She tugged the towel toward her chest, caving in on herself. She looked so small in her white training bra, the one that we teased her about, that she didn’t need. There was grit all the way up her forearm and elbow to her shoulder. I kept thinking she might have hit her head and didn’t know it, or there could be internal injuries. Her face was sickly white. She began talking.
“After you guys drove off, I started walking toward home, but I knew I was going to end up in the pitch-black because it was so dark already. I know it was stupid, but I decided I’d hitchhike.”
“Oh, shit. Ellen, no.”
“I walked a few yards and just turned to face the traffic and put out my thumb. I was scared, but I just thought it would be better to hitch than try to walk in the dark. And my thumb wasn’t out even thirty seconds when a car pulled up.”
I sat back from her and kneeled up to rinse the was
hcloth in Mrs. Boucher’s sink. Bits of cinder washed out along with swirls of blood.
“A car stopped. Then what?”
“It came up right beside me. It was black, low to the ground. I didn’t even look to see who the driver was. I just opened the door and sat down inside, thinking I was lucky to get a ride so fast.” She began fiddling with the ends of her hair. “I didn’t see the driver until we started moving. I turned to say thank you, and I saw him then. I knew I’d made a mistake.” Her right leg started to shake. “He was so creepy looking. He had long white-blond hair, so long he was sitting on it.”
“Oh my God.”
“His hair was like a Barbie doll’s, except on a man, and whiter.”
“How old?”
“I don’t know. Maybe thirty? Older? He looked like Gregg Allman, except ugly. Even his eyebrows were white.”
“Like albino?”
“No.” Ellen shook her head. “Not like that boy in Bea’s class. His hair was shiny, almost fake, like a doll’s. He asked, ‘Where you headed?’ and I told him that I needed to get to Valley Forge Mountain, so could he drop me off near the covered bridge. He said yeah, but we had hardly driven at all when he put his hand on my leg, sort of on my knee, and was, you know, rubbing it.”
She paused.
“I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t say anything. He kept driving with his hand on my leg, and then he moved his hand up. All the way up my leg. I couldn’t move my hands to push his hand away, even though his hand was as far as it could go.”
