by Una Mannion
I woke to the smell of pancakes. The afternoon sun was streaming through the leaves and throwing patterns across the wall next to my bed. For just a moment I didn’t remember, still between sleep and waking. I lifted my hand to my neck, and its nakedness was like a jolt, summoning the night before.
Thomas and Marie were in the kitchen. Marie put two pancakes in front of me, and a bottle of Aunt Jemima maple syrup.
“Where did you get the ingredients?” We lived on a diet of peanut butter and jelly, Campbell’s soup and canned SpaghettiOs with meatballs; we didn’t actually ever cook.
“Well, we had milk and butter. I went over to the Walkers’ and knocked on the door and said, ‘Hi, Mr. Walker. I didn’t get a chance to do the grocery shopping. Could I trouble you for three cups of flour, two eggs, and would you have any syrup?’ And he said, ‘Oh yes, no problem, of course,’ and then he asked me, ‘How’s your sister?’ And I asked which one, and he said ‘Ellen.’ I said, ‘She’s fine.’ And he waited, as if I might say more. Then I said, ‘She’s headed off to a prestigious art camp today.’”
Thomas was eating through a pile of stacked pancakes. His mouth full, he said, “They taste better for having come from the Walkers.”
Marie spoke to the camp director, saying she had misplaced the name of the hotel where our mother was staying. He gave her the forwarding number, and Marie called it and left a message with reception saying it was an emergency and could they ask her to call home. We waited and talked about the night before and all that had happened and might happen, and what exactly we would tell Mom.
When the phone rang, the three of us went silent. Marie picked up, and I instantly knew it wasn’t Mom because of the way Marie spoke, polite and friendly. Both Thomas and I were watching, and Marie looked over at me. “Yes, okay, Mrs. Boucher. Oh, we’re all fine. I’ll tell her. Thank you for letting us know.”
When she’d hung up, I waited for her to say it.
“Mrs. Boucher says she doesn’t need you to babysit next Friday. She sounded a little weird.”
I could feel the heat seeping into my face. Both Marie and Thomas were looking at me.
“What’s going on, Libby? What’s wrong?” Marie knew something was up. “Is it because we’re involved in this that she doesn’t want you near her kids, or something?” She sounded angry.
I shook my head. “It’s not that. It’s something I did.” I told them the story of the car headlights cutting out all those nights, how I’d known for a while that she was seeing someone, and that she wanted it kept secret. I told them all the reasons I suspected it was Grady Adams—him knowing about Ellen, the night he hit the deer.
“How does that mean they’re having an affair?” asked Thomas. “Your story makes no sense. You have no evidence or proof.”
“That’s the worst part. I went and got proof.”
Marie stared at me. “You what?”
“I know.” I could feel the shame all over me. “On Friday night I asked Wilson to drive up and see if there was any car parked along Horseshoe Trail Road. I feel so shit.”
Marie looked disgusted with me. “If Mrs. Boucher and Grady Adams are having an affair, that’s none of your business. Seriously.”
“I know. I know.”
“What did Wilson say?” Thomas asked.
“It was a Mercedes. Just like Grady Adams’s, parked by the Nike site.”
“I’m still confused,” said Thomas. “Why would Mrs. Boucher ask you not to babysit? Did you say something to her?”
“No. I told Sage.”
“Oh shit, Libby.” Marie put her head in her hands.
“I’m sorry.”
“Is that why she wasn’t talking to you at the police station?”
“Yeah. I think so. He must have admitted it to her on the way to get you in the city, because I could tell she’d been crying. She never looked at me.”
“You shouldn’t have done it,” said Marie. “That was their business, not yours—or Sage’s. And now Charlotte will know.”
The thought of hurting Charlotte tightened my insides. She had always been kind to me, and I loved her ferociously for liking my father. I couldn’t even bring myself to tell Thomas and Marie that I had only told Sage in order to crush her own idea of her father when I thought she’d questioned mine.
We waited for Mom to call. When it was almost dark, I dialed Information and asked for the number of Phoenixville Hospital, then called and asked if I could speak to Wilson McVay. I got connected to the nurses’ station, and a woman told me he couldn’t receive calls. Marie called her boss to say she wouldn’t be in for the next few days, that her younger siblings had been victims in a criminal incident, and we still hadn’t been able to contact our mother.
Mom called at nine. Marie spoke to her and outlined everything: what happened to Ellen when Mom kicked her out of the car, Barbie Man showing up at the fireworks, Thomas and me being vigilantes, stabbing and shooting the man with a dart gun but not doing a good enough job of it to kill him. Marie was trying to give the facts but be funny. It was like she was the mother, trying to reassure Mom that it wasn’t such a big deal and we were all fine. Our mother stayed quiet on the phone. She listened and then said she was on her way. She was leaving North Carolina and driving all night. It would be nine hours before she got back to the mountain.
Wilson was sitting up when we went in to see him, me, Marie, Thomas, and my mom. Every speck of skin on his face was bruised, even his eyelids. The swelling had distorted its shape. He’d had surgery to wire his broken jaw shut, and they’d inserted a chest tube through his ribs to drain the air around the lung, where a broken rib had punctured it. He would recover, but it would take the rest of the summer.
“Libby,” he wheezed when we came into the room. “My gallant knight. Did they cut your hair as ritual punishment?” His voice was hoarse from surgery, and it was hard to understand him talking through closed teeth.
“You look dreadful.” Marie said what we were all thinking.
“Thank you very much,” he said.
“Hi, Wilson.” Thomas was hanging back in the room, uncertain how to act.
“Hey, Thomas. Thanks, man. You and Libby.”
Thomas gave a nod of his head to acknowledge this, shy and proud. I thought about what he had done, what I had done, both of us that night. While I felt like shit about some of the choices I’d made, I now knew I could fight when I needed to.
Mom was quiet. She stood near Thomas at the foot of Wilson’s bed, holding the rail with both hands. I know the sight of Wilson shocked her; he made visible the violence we’d been through. Wilson’s broken bones and swollen body made it real.
Wilson looked directly at her. “Faye, I’m sorry,” he said.
“No. I’m sorry. We’re so sorry. It’s my fault you got pulled into this.” She started to say something else and stopped, then started again. “I would do things differently if I could. I wish I could change what I did.” She hadn’t said it to us, but she could to Wilson, and we were here too. Later, I would tell Ellen: “Mom will never get over it, leaving you on the road, even though she can’t say it.”
Marie chatted to Wilson about some bands. A nurse came in to check his blood pressure, and we shuffled toward the door. Wilson said something garbled.
“What?”
“Libby’s hair. Very New Wave. It’s good.”
I touched my bare neck. “I think I’m still really a hippie.”
“I’m working on her,” said Marie.
When we left the hospital, it was Mom who suggested we go to the Guernsey Cow for ice cream cones. We bought double scoops and walked through the barn, which smelled like soured milk. We sat in the car then, and my mom left on the radio while we finished our ice creams. “She’s a Rainbow” came on, and even Thomas sang. The sun was setting, and everything and all of us—Mom, Marie, Thomas, and me—were washed in a golden-orange light. The farmland, cows, picket fences, and silos were pink, catching the sun before the co
ming dark. Everything was beautiful, and for a moment we were held together by our longing to be what we had once been. I could see my mother as she sang. I could see her face, see how like a child she was in some ways. She hadn’t slept and had spent the whole day at the police station, and I wondered how much they had questioned her about why she’d kicked Ellen out of the car and why she’d left her children home alone. She must have felt accused. But here she was, eating ice cream. And she had driven through the night, straight back to us. I knew she loved us in the way that she could. And when I’d been most afraid, I had wanted her. There in the car she sang with us, and every time the part about combing hair repeated, we burst into laughter because of mine.
On Wednesday morning Mom drove back to North Carolina. None of us said anything to her about going back. I didn’t feel angry or resentful. I knew she felt outside of what had happened, that she didn’t know how to be in charge, that being here made her feel guilty. She needed to go back to what she had left so suddenly. She would be close to Beatrice, and somehow it was okay. Marie was already taking care of things. Before she left, Mom had gone to the Gambinos’. She and Ellen had had to be questioned together a second time, and afterward she had taken Ellen out to Gullifty’s in Rosemont, just the two of them, and they’d talked. Ellen told us that Mom had said she was sorry, that Ellen had been so brave, braver than she could imagine anyone in that situation being. Ellen said it was all going really well until Mom told her she needed to work on her bad temper.
When Mom left to go back to North Carolina, I stood with her in the driveway.
“I did look for her that night, Libby,” she said. “I took the car and went and looked for her.”
“I know. Marie heard you leaving. We figured you were trying to find her.”
“I wish you felt you could tell me things.”
I looked at the ground.
“I’m proud of all you did, Libby. Your father would be, too.”
She left us forty dollars this time, and Marie and I took the bus to King of Prussia to go food shopping at the Acme. It was there that we saw Sage and Charlotte Adams.
We had gotten a shopping cart, even though we had to pack light to carry the groceries up the mountain in backpacks. Marie said she was going to cook properly for us, and we picked up fillets of steak and green beans and potatoes. We chose three ears of corn. Our dad used to buy paper bags full of corn from stalls on the back roads in New Jersey and bring them home and tell us to start shucking. We’d done it outside to avoid mess. We bought flour, eggs, and maple syrup to take to the Walkers because, as Marie said, she didn’t want them to have one up on us. Ever. We were in the baking stuff aisle, and Marie was reading a recipe for brownies on the back of a Hershey’s block of chocolate. I was looking at the boxes of brownie mix where you just add eggs and water when I turned and saw Charlotte and Sage coming toward us with their shopping cart. Sage was in her J. C. Penney’s waitressing uniform. Charlotte had sunglasses on even though she was inside and wore a madras golf skirt and pink tennis shirt, but when she got closer, I could see she looked disheveled, and I knew she knew. They had stopped but hadn’t seen me yet. Sage was speaking to her, leaning over, intense and serious. Charlotte turned and saw me just as I was going to look away.
“Libby,” she said, and it came out like a sob. I took a step toward her. “Libby, your hair. I didn’t recognize you. Can you believe he’s done this to us?” And Charlotte Adams put her arms around me and held me, and she was crying in the baking section of the Acme supermarket. I put my arms around her thin frame and tried to hug her back, feeling awkward and tall. I’d only ever seen Charlotte as elegant and distant. She was always kind but reserved, and this was unfiltered raw emotion; she was showing us how hurt she was. Her hair was flattened at the top and back, as if she had just got out of bed, and she seemed suddenly small and diminished.
“Charlotte, stop it,” said Sage. “Please. Come on. Leave the cart. We’re going back out to the car.”
“I’m so sorry, Mrs. Adams. I am so, so sorry.”
“I know you are, Libby.” Her shoulders were shaking, she was crying so much. “I’ve always thought you and your father . . . had empathy.”
“Charlotte. Mom.” Sage took her by the hand and pulled her away from me, and they left, Sage with her arm around her mother as if she’d tucked her under her wing.
Marie and I stood in the aisle and looked at their abandoned shopping cart and our half-full one. Whenever someone mentioned my father, it went through me. I had hurt all these people who had treated me like their own and brought me into their homes. I started to shake. I had failed her idea of me, and my father’s.
Outside, I sat on a bench and watched the traffic flash up and down Route 202 and cried. There were cars everywhere, across the parking lot, on the highway, and construction and noise. Dump trucks trailed clouds of dust to and from the asphalt plant and building sites. Jackhammers clanged against rock, and bulldozer blades screeched metal on pavement. The sun was blinding and hot. I couldn’t stop crying.
A Rolling Stones line kept going through my head: I look inside myself and see my heart is black. Nothing could ever be put right. Marie was inside paying for the groceries, and when she came out, pushing the cart, we gathered the bags into our backpacks and walked over to the bus stop. Every few feet I had to wipe the fluid running from my nose, and Marie walked beside me and knew it was better to say nothing at all.
27
Thomas had practically become a celebrity on the mountain. Stories circulated about how he and Wilson took on the giant with the gun and Thomas struggled for the knife and stabbed him. Meredith Hunter came up to see how Ellen was, and even though Ellen was away, she stayed and recounted to us all the variations of the stories they’d heard. She said that one of the Walkers had told them that Thomas had stabbed the man over and over.
“No wonder they practically threw the pancake ingredients at me,” said Marie.
I barely played a role in these stories. It was all about how Wilson and Thomas had saved me and Ellen and pinned the guy down with a knife.
“Don’t worry,” Marie said. “They always make it about men heroes. The world makes better sense to them that way.”
I didn’t care. I wasn’t proud of any of it, and I didn’t want people to even know I’d been there. But in a weird way it was helping Thomas and bringing him back out into the world. One night he came home, and he’d been pool-hopping at the swim club. And he was spending time with Jack again.
“Was Sage there?” I asked. But he said he hadn’t seen her since the night at the police station.
A week or so after he came out of the hospital, Wilson pulled up our driveway on a new motorcycle, which he said was a loaner from the dealer.
“Aren’t you supposed to be resting in bed? I thought they said no driving.”
“I’m fine. I’m just going for a little spin. I thought you might like to come.” His voice was muffled from the wires. He took off his helmet and I could see his face again, the shape of it, even though it was still bruised yellow and orange in places.
“How do I know you’re not swilling down your painkillers recreationally and stuff?”
Wilson laughed. “I haven’t taken them, not even medicinally. They’re shit. There’s much better stuff in our medicine cabinet at home.”
I looked at him and tried to raise my eyebrows.
“I swear, I haven’t taken anything at all. Not for days. It’s safe.”
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“To a place with no trees.”
“I don’t think I’d like that.”
“I want you to see it.”
I looked up through the light and leaves at the blue sky and remembered that night on the motorcycle coming back from the tower, how I’d felt.
“Okay,” I said, and picked up the helmet on the back of the bike.
“No, you have to change. Long jeans. And boots if you have them.”
“
I only have Wellies.”
“What?”
“You know, like rubber boots they wear in Ireland. My dad always brought them back for us.”
“Okay, those and jeans and bring a light jacket.”
I wore a white T-shirt, a green corduroy jacket, jeans, and black Wellies. I had started wearing earrings after my haircut, and I had big silver hoops in, a bit Belinda Carlisle, even though I wasn’t a Go-Go’s fan. I’d put on mascara and eyeliner, too. Marie said it was a new look, edgier than my long, straight Crystal Gayle hair, and that it suited me. I hadn’t gone anywhere with it yet, just around the house. But standing back outside by Wilson’s bike, I felt more grown-up, comfortable with my ridiculous boots and short hair, someone with my own world inside me.
I forgot when I got on the back of the bike that Wilson was injured, and I held on to his sides. I felt the jolt of pain go through him, how he buckled.
“No,” he said, “lower,” so I held his hips instead, and by the time we were out on Route 23 I had my fingers hooked through the loops of his jeans and trusted myself not to fall.
We headed west, through Phoenixville and out beyond it on Route 724, past clapboard houses with American flags stabbed into their front lawns and through towns where the Fourth of July bunting still crisscrossed the road. We saw fields of corn and cows, yard sales and flea markets and heaps of rusted junk and more cornfields. I could feel the heat of the sun on the back of my bare neck, and the cooler shadows of trees passing on the road beneath me. I was so lost in the landscape that I almost missed it: a sign for Pottstown. Was Wilson taking me there? I tapped him on the shoulder, and he pulled to the side of the road.
“I don’t want to go to Pottstown.”
