A Crooked Tree

by Una Mannion

  “You should probably stay until the storm passes,” Marie said to Wilson.

  “Mom’s not home,” I said. I couldn’t believe Marie would let Wilson stay in the house after what he had just shown us. “He can’t be here.”

  Marie ignored me. “Libby, get towels so you can both dry off.”

  “Do you know how to play rummy five hundred?” asked Ellen, holding out a deck of cards.

  “I know how to play any card game you can think of,” Wilson said.

  Ellen sat on the couch and put the deck of cards on the coffee table. Wilson plopped on the floor opposite her, took the cards, and started shuffling.

  “Now, who’s the dealer?” he asked.

  10

  Climbing the stairs into Thomas’s room was like spiraling into space; planets and stars spun from the ceiling, where the Milky Way seemed to recede into the distance. Most of the astronomical stuff was constructed from styrofoam balls, erasers, paper clips, clay, and wire. We’d gone to see Kramer vs. Kramer the year before. The movie was soppy, he’d said, but he liked the kid’s bedroom walls painted with clouds. Thomas wanted a ceiling that was the solar system in a night sky. He’d spent months looking at National Geographic and encyclopedias, then drew the solar system across the expanse of the bedroom. It took several weeks of planning and sketching before he painted it in. I was allowed to do base colors on some of the planets, but Ellen helped him the most. She’d known how to render the planets so they looked textured and real, as if they had weight.

  I lay on Thomas’s bed beneath all the celestial bodies. It was so dark that some of the planets were barely visible. He’d drawn them at an angle so they looked like they were spinning, suspended at different levels around the sun in the center, a beautiful burning ball lit from within. Ellen had left some areas nearly white and daubed others in deep oranges, golds, yellows, and all the glowing colors on that gradient. Thomas’s room felt peaceful and ordered, and I cocooned myself under a blanket until I was warm again. I wished Thomas were home and could help get Wilson McVay out of our house. He was still downstairs, relaxed on our rec room floor, playing cards, acting like he was Ellen’s big brother, doing crazy things to dangerous people. I had let him into the house even after Mrs. Boucher’s warning. And down by the bottling factory I had just given in, knelt on the ground, done exactly what Wilson said. Ellen had jumped from a moving car to save herself, but I couldn’t even jump across a creek or say, “No, I’m not getting on that bike.”

  In biology we had learned about the sympathetic nervous system, how the body is mobilized for fight or flight when there is a threat. While Sister Benedict had talked at the chalkboard, drawing diagrams to illustrate the responses, I’d thought about my own sympathetic nervous system’s failure that night at Jessie Warren’s house, when I hadn’t been able to make my body move when I needed to the most. I hadn’t been able to summon either response. I’d never been to Jessie’s house before and we weren’t friends exactly. In the seventh grade we’d been paired up in a history class project where we had to act as the defense team in a mock trial of Marie Antoinette. Jessie was clever, and her father was some big-shot lawyer, so she was good at making arguments and counterarguments and knew how to object and redirect. We actually won the case, scapegoating the nobility. She invited me over to her house for a sleepover to celebrate. Her mother collected us from school in a convertible. She had a scarf tied under her chin and bright-red lipstick, and was glamorous in an old-fashioned way, as if she belonged in an Alfred Hitchcock movie, whipping around cliff edges. Jessie was blond, too, tomboyish and gangly compared to her mother.

  Jessie’s house had white columns on either side of the front door. She had a swimming pool that stayed covered until Memorial Day weekend. The garage had ski equipment and a boat, which we climbed into, and I sat at the wheel and pretended to steer.

  “You’re at the helm,” Jessie said, and I said, “Yes, I am.” I had no idea what the helm was, but I was happy to be there. We played until we were called in for dinner. Jessie’s parents were going out that night to a party, and they’d hired a babysitter, a college student at Penn, who read her book almost the entire time. Jessie’s dad sat with us for a few minutes, drinking his cocktail, while Jessie’s mom used a mirror in the kitchen to put in her earrings and apply her red lipstick. Mr. Warren had dark hair, slicked straight back, and wore round tortoiseshell glasses. He asked what my dad did, and I told him that we had customers in this neighborhood whose gardens and lawns we took care of. He said how cool it was that I worked with my dad and that I had been to Ireland.

  That night Jessie and I watched How the West Was Won in the Warrens’ TV room. When it was over, the Penn student said we should go to bed, and I asked if I could watch another show and sleep on the sofa. I wanted to keep watching TV; it was why I liked staying at other people’s houses. Jessie went up to bed, and the babysitter went back to the kitchen and talked on the phone. I switched channels, and the movie Rebecca was just starting. I had read the book. When the Warrens came home, the movie wasn’t over yet, and I could hear them talking to the babysitter in the kitchen, the car still running outside. I knew I should have been upstairs in the pink poster bed with Jessie and not in their TV room, and I wished then that I hadn’t asked to stay downstairs. I could hear the babysitter gathering her stuff and saying goodbye.

  Outside, I heard the car doors shut and the crunch of gravel under the tires. Someone was still in the kitchen, shuffling around, and now coming toward the TV room. It was Mr. Warren. He stood in the doorway and then went over to the TV and turned down the sound. I pretended to be asleep and kept my eyes shut. He walked toward me. I could hear the clink of ice in his drink and could smell him standing over me. I tried not to squeeze my eyes shut so tight that he would know I was pretending, but not so open that he would see me awake. Then he moved away. I thought he was leaving, but instead he sat down on the sofa where I was, down by my feet. I heard him put his drink on the table, and then he picked up my bare feet and put them in his lap. I tried to be absolutely still. He stayed like that for a few minutes, touching the skin on the soft underside of my foot with one of his fingers, then pressed my feet deeper into his lap and started to push against them. He shifted around under them, holding them with one hand suspended, and then another part of his flesh was touching me, between my feet, which he held together. And all the time that he moved against my feet and exhaled and squeezed, I was motionless. Then he let out painful sounds and was gripping my feet hard, and I felt my feet wet, and still I just lay there, saying nothing, trying not to breathe. Then he wiped my feet with something, maybe his shirttail, and stood up and lowered them gently, as if not to wake me, even though he had just been holding them so tight and pushing them down. He picked up his drink and left the room. I opened my eyes. On the screen, the housekeeper was standing behind the new wife at an open window. In the book, this is where she’s trying to convince her to commit suicide, to jump. Then the flare signals from where the boat has crashed on the rocks.

  When I think about that night at the Warrens’ house, I don’t think about what Mr. Warren did; I worry about what I didn’t do. Why I didn’t just pretend to wake up and walk up the stairs to Jessie’s room? Why I didn’t just pull my feet away or kick him? I think about how, before it even started, I already felt like I’d done something bad just by being there, by making myself at home in their house.

  The following morning I heard Dad’s truck come down their driveway and turn in the gravel. I already had my bag packed, and as I came down their curved staircase with the white carpet, Mr. Warren was opening the door and shaking my father’s hand. They stood at the front of the house, looking up. Mr. Warren had a question about the wisteria, which had started to look straggly.

  “Prune it this summer,” Dad said. “Cut it right back.”

  My father was slightly uncomfortable making small talk with people like Mr. Warren. He was more at home working for them and giving a bit of gard
en advice, and it was as if Mr. Warren knew that this was the best way to talk to him, something about plants. I looked at my dad standing there, his straight posture, his clean clothes, his truck tidied before coming to the big house to collect his daughter, and I wanted to shout at him that he was better than Mr. Warren, a billion times better. I looked at Mr. Warren, who was in the same dress shirt as last night, one shirttail hanging out, and a pair of shorts, casual, slouched, and at home while my father stood, watchful, trying hard to make conversation, trying not to let me down.

  I never told anyone—not Sage, not Marie, and definitely not my mother.

  Outside Thomas’s window, the storm had now subsided. I flicked through a National Geographic, using a flashlight he kept beside the bed. Finally I heard the motorcycle start on the drive and take off up the road. A few minutes later Marie came up the stairs to Thomas’s room and stood beside the bed.

  “Libby, what’s going on? Why are you being like this?”

  “Like what? He brought back souvenirs? He’s obviously crazy, and you’re acting like he’s normal. I feel like he’s a cat bringing his kill trophies to our doorstep. What’s he done? Tony De Martino told Sage they’ve hurt him so bad he might be dead.”

  “You knew?”

  “Sage told me. But I only found out today what Tony said, that they’d actually beaten him up. But I heard like a week ago that Wilson knew the guy was from Pottstown and that he was bribing a gang to go there with him.”

  “Why didn’t you say?”

  I’d wanted to tell Marie, but I was angry with her for bringing Wilson into our lives and then deciding to go live somewhere else, leaving me with the wreckage.

  “I asked you over and over to make him go away, and you wouldn’t. I thought maybe you might even know.”

  “I didn’t.” Marie sat beside me on the bed. “Look, I don’t think he did something so terrible, or else he wouldn’t be showing us. He’d be scared.”

  “I don’t think he’s scared of anything. I have a bad feeling, a really bad feeling. There’s something wrong with him.” I told Marie that he must have followed me on the trail when I walked Sage to the ARCO. How when the storm was looking bad, I thought I’d shelter at the bottling factory, and I’d already gone down the hill and was trying to cross the creek when he turned up on the motorbike.

  “How could he know I was there? In all the woods, in all the miles and miles of woods, how could he know where I was, and how did I never hear him? How do you know him anyway?”

  “I don’t know if he followed you,” said Marie. “I met him after a show. I’d gotten a ride into Philly with Michael Miller. He was going to some basketball game or something. Michael said he’d bring me home if I stood outside The Hot Club at twelve thirty. I waited for like forty-five minutes, and he never showed up. There’s no trains or buses or anything to the suburbs at that hour. I only knew people vaguely at the show and most of them had gone and Rae wasn’t there. I was standing on South Street in the middle of the night, thinking, What am I going to do? I mean, everyone was gone. Then Wilson pulled up in the Buick. He said he’d seen me earlier and had wondered what was one of the Gallaghers from Valley Forge Mountain doing at a punk show, and he brought me all the way home to the top of the street.”

  Marie lay back next to me on the bed and raised her hands together to cup a papier-mâché planet hanging on a string. She had on black lace gloves with all the fingers cut off. Her fingers were so small compared to mine.

  “See, that’s just strange,” I said. “How did he know to check on you like that?”

  “I think it was a coincidence,” Marie said. “But he is definitely interested in us. When we were driving home, he asked about Dad. You know how no one ever talks about it, but he just said it. How everyone knows our mom’s not around that much, working and everything, and our dad’s gone.”

  “I just don’t understand what he wants. He’s way older than us. None of us were ever friends with him. He doesn’t even have friends.”

  We both stayed quiet. I lifted my arm and tipped the edge of an asteroid so that it swung above me in slow circles. Thomas’s little spinning projects made me sad. Since the funeral he seemed to spend all his time in his room, except when he was at school or swimming. He never saw Jack anymore. I wasn’t sure about his school friends. He went to an all-boys Catholic school.

  I sat up suddenly, my heart pounding the inside of my rib cage. “Oh my God, Marie, I’ve just thought of something. Ellen told that guy she lived on the mountain. She said she was going to Valley Forge Mountain and would take a ride to the covered bridge. She was wearing her school uniform.” I could hear the hysteria building in my voice. “We’re the only ones on the mountain that wear those uniforms. If he’s alive, he’ll find us and get revenge for whatever Wilson and those boys did.”

  11

  Sage and I sat on the floor of her bedroom with copies of the Pottstown Mercury spread out in front of us. She’d bought them at the newsstand in King of Prussia over the last few days, and we scoured the pages for any report of a man being beaten or killed the week before. We were trying to figure out what had happened that night. Sage had taken Charlotte’s map of Pennsylvania from her car, and we found Pottstown. We traced the route Barbie Man must have driven the night Ellen got into his car, and the one Wilson and the others probably drove to get him. Investigating helped me forget what Sage had said about Jack, and we were almost like ourselves again. Sage had also been asking around. Tony told her that he’d heard now that the man had got a bad beating, was maybe hospitalized, but not dead.

  “Oh God, look at this.” Sage pushed an open page toward me. An inmate at Graterford Prison had told a Mercury reporter that he had raped and murdered two women in French Creek State Park. He said he’d picked them up hitchhiking. We looked at the map, trying to find French Creek. It was southwest of Pottstown. Graterford was east. I felt sick thinking about what could have happened to Ellen.

  “There’s nothing in these about Barbie Man,” I said.

  “He wouldn’t report it, though, would he? They’d ask him why he was attacked, and what would he say? Because I kidnapped a twelve-year-old girl?” Sage was right. He wouldn’t have told the police.

  “What if he doesn’t know why he was attacked?”

  “Wilson told those boys why they were going up there. One of them will have said something to him. Probably Wilson. It wouldn’t feel like justice unless he told Barbie Man why.”

  Sage folded the papers back up. Her fingers were black with newsprint. So were mine. “We should just ask Wilson what he did,” she said.

  I didn’t want to have anything to do with Wilson. What if Barbie Man was organizing his own gang to come to Valley Forge and get revenge? Wilson’s craziness had brought us a world of trouble.

  Grady knocked on the door of Sage’s bedroom and cracked it open. Sage pushed the papers under her bed, and we looked up at him in the doorway.

  “Libby, Marie called. You need to head home. She said y’all are going out for her birthday. I can give you a ride,” he said. “I’m on my way out anyway.”

  I sat in the front seat of Grady Adams’s Mercedes. We talked about nothing as we drove, just the weather, Marie’s move to the city. We turned down my street and pulled into our driveway. Beatrice was standing at the front of the house in a pale-yellow sundress, waving at me. I said thank you and went to pull the door handle.

  “By the way, how’s Ellen doing now?” Grady looked straight at me, a serious and concerned expression on his face.

  He knew.

  “Oh, fine,” I said. Heat flushed my cheeks. Why hadn’t I said What do you mean? or I don’t know what you’re talking about? I’d made it sound like I knew what he meant. I couldn’t believe Sage had told him. After all we’d talked about, how she’d sworn she’d say nothing. I just thanked him again, pushed his car door shut, and walked toward Beatrice.

  Upstairs, the others were stuffed into the bathroom. Ellen was brushing
her hair, Thomas was brushing his teeth, Marie was up close to the mirror, applying thick black eyeliner.

  “You’ll scare the Amish,” Ellen said to Marie as she added extra-thick layers of black under her eye.

  “Oh God, it’s not Plain and Plenty Farm, is it?” I asked.

  My mother loved Amish country. Plain & Plenty was one of those all-you-can-eat family-style dining places where they seat you at a long table with other families and serve up communal bowls of food. She liked the country style, the ordinariness, and sitting with strangers, who she seemed to like better than the people we actually knew. The other families were usually from somewhere in the middle of the state or Maryland, and conversation was always awkward. But we rarely ate together in the house, never mind go out to eat, and we were all happy to be going.

  We drove down Route 30 toward Lancaster, to Pennsylvania Dutch. Thomas told us the Amish weren’t Dutch, they were German, and so, technically, it should be Pennsylvania Deutsch.

  “Nerd fact,” whispered Ellen, sitting between us.

  In Exton we passed the Guernsey Cow, famous for the gigantic billboard that was supposed to be the largest cow sign in the world. We’d been there before. You could get your homemade ice cream in a cone and then walk through the barns where they milked the cows. We’d all watched as the tubes attached to the cows’ teats flowed white with milk. I concentrated on their faces, the bored, impassive expressions looking back at me, then wondered aloud whether it hurt and cringed when my mother answered that it felt beautiful to breastfeed. We’d all looked away or at the ground. Marie said our mother liked having babies, the first part, giving birth and stuff and being embarrassing about it, but not the other part, like raising them.

  I looked out across the cornfields as we drove farther west, pastures and acres of wheat starting to brighten to gold. I was trying to push what Sage had done out of my mind. If Grady had said nothing so far, he probably wasn’t going to. But she’d told. The fields outside were patterned and neat, the wheat spikes, farmyards, and silos illuminated by the setting sun. We saw Amish buggies and clothes tacked to lines like paintings: blues, blacks, purples, and grays. Marie and Thomas argued about whether the closed carriage meant they were married or not married.