Being Dead

by Vivian Vande Velde

  The whole setup was pretty. Not as pretty as my friend Jennie's rose garden, but pretty in a wildflower kind of way.

  It was hard to tell if there were any fish. There were lots of rocks and water plants, both in and around the pond, and I was trying not to trample anything.

  Something splashed, though I wasn't quick enough to see what So there were fish. Or frogs. That was kind of neat.

  Another splash, in the same area as before. I still couldn't see anything. I waited where I was, hoping that if I stayed long enough I'd see something.

  The third splash came from exactly where the previous two had. All right. Apparently if I was to see anything, I was going to have to move closer. I stepped on some of the decorative rocks between the plants at the edge of the water.

  Yet another splash. This time I caught a glimpse of something light colored. One of those fat pale goldfish, maybe, jumping into the air? Was it trying to catch something? Or was it caught on something and trying to wriggle loose? I hoped I wouldn't need to administer first aid to a fish.

  I put one knee down on a rock and leaned over the murky water. I couldn't make out the bottom, couldn't make out any movement. "I bet you just waited for me to get here before you'd move," I whispered to the fish. It was only when I heard my own voice that I was aware the bicycle bell had finally stopped.

  The water in front of me rippled, so I had fair warning that the fish was moving. I waited for it to come to the surface....

  Except it wasn't a fish that flopped in the water—it was a hand.

  I sat back with a startled yelp.

  The hand clawed at the air—I could distinctly see the fingers—then it disappeared back under the water.

  Jeez! Some kid must have fallen in and was drowning right there in front of me. "Hold on!" I yelled at the kid in the pond, even though there was no way a kid entirely underwater could hear me. I scrambled to my feet and waded in.

  And found that the pond was only a foot and a half at its deepest.

  How could any kid bigger than a baby drown in a foot and a half of water?

  And there was no kid.

  There I was stomping around on all those delicate little water plants—and no kid. Nothing that looked at all like a human hand. Whatever had been Hopping in the water wasn't flopping anymore.

  I don't want to do this; I don't want to do this, I told myself. But I had to, just in case. I forced myself to reach down with my hand, to feel in the dark water, to touch the mucky, slippery bottom.

  I jerked back. Was that hair? Had I just touched someone's hair?

  Or was it those wispy plant tendrils?

  Clamping my teeth together to keep them from chattering, I once more reached into the cold water. Tendrils brushed my fingers, just tendrils.

  I took a step forward to check that last corner of the pond.

  Nothing.

  Except that the pump suddenly turned on, which had to mean Danny was in the kitchen, watching me be a fool.

  Setup, I thought. There might not have been a drowning kid in the pool before, but let me get my hands on Danny....

  I clambered out of the pond, squashing more of the plants and upsetting a little tower of rocks.

  Gee, I thought sarcastically, maybe Mom and Dad won't notice.

  I walked back to the house, my sneakers squishing rudely with each step.

  No sign of Danny. Smart boy. But he can't have found a good enough hiding place, I told myself.

  Going upstairs I tripped over the hose to my water bed, even though I thought I wasn't stepping anywhere near it The way things were going, I knew I'd better detour into my room to make sure I hadn't yanked the hose loose.

  That wasn't the surprise I found in my bedroom.

  The surprise was that the double doors to the closet were open and all my clothes were on the floor.

  "Danny!" I yelled in fury.

  "What?" he called from his room. That was not what I'd expected.

  Still, "Get in here," I shouted.

  "I'm busy."

  I stomped down the hall to his room.

  He looked up from arranging his action figures on one of his shelves and obviously took in that my shorts were wet and muddy. As though he hadn't already seen, he demanded, "What happened to you?"

  "What happened to my room?"

  The fact that Danny didn't have a snappy comeback, that he waited to hear what I was going to say, made his innocence more credible.

  "Did you or did you not knock my clothes on the floor?" I asked.

  "I did not," he said.

  "And did you or did you not have a nasty little surprise for me in the pond, and then you turned on the pump once you had tricked me into going in?"

  "You were in the pond?" he asked. "With all the, like, fish poop and frog slime?" For a boy Danny could be awfully prissy. When he saw that I was still waiting for an answer, he added, "I never left my room."

  And whatever I'd seen in the pond, on second, rational thought, wasn't anything Danny could have had anything to do with—he'd been helping tote stuff indoors from the car and the truck, then he'd been arranging his room the whole while since. He'd had no time to set up a joke.

  I would have preferred a Danny joke to just about any other explanation I could think of.

  It had probably been a sick or mutant frog, I tried to convince myself, or some exotic fish. If there could be bottlenose dolphins and hammerhead sharks, who was I to say there was no such species as a finger-finned something-or-other? I hadn't seen what I thought I'd seen, I told myself.

  And I kept telling it to myself all the while I picked my clothes up off the floor of the closet This time I made sure the clothes were securely on the hangers, and the hangers were properly hooked on the bar. And the feet that some of the clothes were damp only meant that I should have changed out of my wet shorts before starting.

  I hadn't made up my mind if I was going to tell my parents about the weirdness of the afternoon—the big problem being what I could tell them—when they came home with the second vanful of stuff. It was nine o'clock in the evening.

  Mom walked in complaining about the Honda. "Brenda," she asked, "did you notice when you were driving last night that it had a tendency to pull to the right?"

  Hungry, and hot and tired from scrubbing the grease off the kitchen cabinet doors and from peeling off the Con-Tact paper that the shelves were lined with—Con-Tact paper that came off in one-inch strips—I demanded, "How come you immediately assume I did something to break the car?"

  Hungry and hot and tired herself, Mom snapped, "I'm not accusing you of breaking the car. I'm asking if you noticed that the car was pulling to the right."

  "No," I said.

  I didn't add that I had been too miserable about seeing my friends for the last time to notice much of anything. Well, I had run off the pavement, then back on, but surely cars aren't that delicate.

  Dad said, "It probably just needs to be aligned. I'll make an appointment next week."

  No doubt ticked off by my tone, Mom muttered, "It didn't need to be aligned yesterday morning when I drove it" To my father she added, "She isn't even supposed to drive at night."

  Here we go again, I thought.

  Dad, the peacemaker, said, "It's probably been out of alignment since this spring, when there were all those potholes. You just noticed it today because the car was riding low from all the stuff packed in it" Then he added—his usual complaint—"This family has too much stuff. Come on, let's unload, then we'll go out for pizza. We've got all of tomorrow to finish unpacking."

  "Think Westport has a pizza place?" I scoffed, not willing to make peace that easily.

  "No," Mom said, "I think you'll have to hunt down some elk all by yourself, shoot it, skin it, and cook it over an open fire, because we've moved to Westport just to torment you."

  And she tells me not to be sarcastic.

  By the time we got back and had our showers, I wasn't in bed until after 1:00 A.M. I figured I'd be asleep i
n ten seconds. The last night in our old house, Dad had already drained my water bed, and I had to sleep on the couch. So, even if I hadn't gotten in at three—which was about two and a half hours later than I'd admitted to when my parents asked—I wouldn't have had a good night's sleep. But now here I was, exhausted from a long day's work, in my own cozy water bed, and I started to drift off right away.

  I was so for gone I wasn't alarmed when I felt the mattress jiggle under me. Traci's cat, I thought muzzily. Then, right as I was about to drop off totally, I thought, I'm not at Traci's house.

  I came awake enough to open my eyes and see that there wasn't anything sitting at the foot of the bed. I closed my eyes.

  Something moved.

  I sat up and turned on the light.

  The light revealed ... nothing.

  The mattress sloshed around from my movement. Just an air pocket, I reasoned. And by causing the mattress to slosh, I would have broken it up.

  I turned the light off and settled down again. The water bed stopped moving.

  Then started again.

  A snake or a mouse had gotten in between the covers—I knew it.

  I jumped up and yanked the top sheet down. Nothing. I pulled off the under sheet. Then the mattress pad. Nothing. Gingerly I poked with my toe at the comforter, which had fallen to the floor from where I keep it folded across the foot of the bed. I saw nothing. Which didn't guarantee that there was nothing there.

  It wasn't bad enough my parents had to tear me away from my school and my friends to plunk me down in the middle of Green Acres? They had to buy a house that was crawling with vermin?

  Reluctantly I picked up a corner of the comforter, sure that something was just waiting to run up my arm.

  Nothing did.

  "And don't come back," I muttered.

  I shook out the sheets, just to be sure, then remade the bed. I switched off the light and climbed back into bed. Well, that was nice and restful. Home sweet home. I closed my eyes.

  Something moved.

  All right, I'm sixteen years old and I wasn't currently on speaking terms with my mother—but I ran to get my parents, anyway.

  They were still up, reading in bed.

  "There's something in my bed!" I yelled.

  "Is it Goldilocks?" my father asked.

  Mom, even though we were mad at each other, gave him a dirty look and followed me into my room.

  Silently, still not talking to me, Mom pulled the sheet back a bit more than it already was.

  I told her, "I took all the covers off and I couldn't see anything, then when I got back in, I felt whatever-it-was moving again."

  My father came in carrying the flyswatter.

  "I'm not talking about a bug," I told him, aware that my voice was veering into shrillness. "Something big enough to make the mattress move."

  My parents didn't say anything, but they stripped the bed, shaking out the sheets.

  "I did that already," I said.

  "Could something have gotten between the mattress and the frame?" Mom asked Dad.

  "Something big enough to make the mattress move?" Dad sounded skeptical. And understandably so. Even to get the comers of the mattress pad around the mattress, you've got to wedge and jam. It was hard to believe anything living could fit in there.

  Still, Dad looked. He worked his way all around the bed, peeling the edge of the heavy mattress back from the frame.

  "I don't see anything, honey," he assured me.

  "This place has rats," I complained.

  "No, it doesn't," Mom said, which I guess meant we were talking again, even if she was disagreeing with me. 'I'll get fresh sheets."

  I'm sure they were convinced it was a spider.

  Mom and I made up the bed with the clean sheets.

  "How's that?" Dad asked as I climbed back in.

  I was about to grudgingly admit it was fine, when I felt something move beneath me.

  I shot out of bed. "It's in the mattress!" I yelped.

  "There can't be anything in the mattress," Dad protested as I once more pulled the bedding off.

  We stared at the bare mattress. Ifs a dark blue plastic, so of course you can't see in, but I was sure we'd see it bulging here and there as whatever was inside poked around.

  But we didn't.

  "There's something in there," I insisted.

  "A rat could not live in a water-bed mattress," Dad said. "First of all, how would it get in? Second, how would it breathe?"

  I was angry, even though he was right. "I don't know," I said. "It doesn't have to be a rat. I couldn't see what it was. I only felt it."

  Dad rested his hands on the bed. He moved them around, pressing, to entice whatever was in there to move. Nothing did.

  "It would have to be a fish," Mom said.

  Dad gave her a wary look.

  "To live in the water."

  "How would a fish get in?" Dad asked.

  How could anything get in? We all looked at the plug in the water bed—just big enough to accommodate the end of a hose.

  "I was only trying to be helpful," Mom said. Obviously she was joking, trying to lighten the mood. But talk of fish reminded me of what I'd seen in the pond that afternoon. Except that hadn't been a fish—it was a hand. Standing there in my bedroom, knowing that there was something in my water-bed mattress, I admitted to myself what I had been denying all afternoon: That hadn't been any kind of exotic or mutant or tumored fish or frog I'd seen in the pond—it had been a hand, a living hand, in a spot that wasn't big enough or deep enough to accommodate the person that hand had to be attached to.

  And if my parents were looking at me weirdly now, how would they look if I told them that?

  "I'm not getting back in that bed," I told them.

  "Brenda...," Dad said reasonably.

  "I'm sleeping on the couch." I picked up my pillow.

  Dad sighed. "We'll drain the bed. Not now"—he glanced at my alarm clock, which showed 1:30—"but we'll do it in the morning."

  I knew he wouldn't find anything in the morning.

  It wasn't bad enough my parents had to move to Green Acres. They had to buy a house that was haunted.

  Whatever had been in my water bed didn't migrate to the couch.

  That does not mean I slept well. The house creaked. Cars went by all night long—not a lot of them, but all night long. And the boxes stacked in the living room suddenly struck me as a good place for something scary to hide behind. Then, early, early, early in the morning—just as in countless Disney films—I heard a rooster crow. But guess what? They don't do it just once. And you know what else? People always talk about good, fresh country air, but I kept getting whiffs of something that was neither good nor fresh but definitely country.

  Of course, the bedrooms have window air-conditioning units; besides, my parents' room faces the backyard and Danny goes to sleep with his radio on, so none of them were bothered by the road noise. Apparently they slept through the barnyard racket and were oblivious to the fact that the whole house could use a breath mint. They woke up with way too much energy and good cheer.

  When I come in after people are asleep, everyone expects me to close the door gently and tiptoe my silent way to bed. You'd think they'd have the same consideration for me when they get up while I'm asleep.

  I moaned loudly to show that they were disturbing me, but they were making too much racket in the kitchen to hear. When I got up to complain, Mom said, "The day's only going to get hotter. The morning is the best time to work."

  "Central air would be nice," I pointed out.

  "So would a condo in Palm Beach," Mom said.

  Which I guess meant Lots of luck.

  Dad asked me, "What do you think; do you still want me to drain the water bed?"

  "I don't care." I knew he wouldn't find anything.

  Dad looked relieved, but Mom asked, "If we don't drain it, will you sleep in your room tonight?"

  "No," I admitted. "But I won't even if you do drain it."
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  "You can't sleep on the couch for the rest of your life," Dad said.

  "Just until college."

  "Drain it," Mom told Dad. She was probably figuring if I got hot enough in the living room I'd return to my room for the air conditioner.

  We spent the morning unpacking and settling in. Dad was in charge of hooking up the TV, VCR, and stereo. Danny put our books in the bookshelves. Mom and I worked in the kitchen—me washing, her drying all the dishes that we'd had to wrap in newspaper to protect during the move. But after a while I ended up doing both washing and drying, because she was having trouble settling what should go where in the kitchen cupboards ("That's the glasses cabinet; no, wait, that's where we'll keep the mugs; no, wait..."), and as she kept changing her mind, I ran out of space in the dish drainer.

  When the water was all out of my bed, the mattress lay pretty much flat. Mom poked at the wrinkles left in the plastic. "Whatever it was could have drained out with the water," she suggested, looking at the hose that Dad had dangling out the window. "Was anybody watching?"

  It had taken almost four hours. Of course nobody had been watching.

  Danny snickered. "I think her brain drained out."

  I wasn't sure it hadn't.

  By then we were done with the dish washing, and Dad hooked the hose back up to the kitchen sink to refill the mattress.

  By midafternoon the important boxes were all unpacked and flattened for recycling. Dad moved the remaining boxes into the basement, from where we could gradually unpack them as we needed the stuff, or at least wait until Mom had one of her I-can't-stand-this-clutter fits. Not that anyplace besides the basement was at all cluttered, but she gets like that. With everything either put away or still in its box, the house was neater than our house in Buffalo had usually looked, and the rooms were bigger, so it would take a longer time of things not being picked up before the place would look messy. We had more room to spread out, too. There was die extra bedroom, where Mom had set up a guest bed that looked a lot more comfortable than the couch, and that's where the computers went, too: the Mac for serious work, the IBM for games. And there was a wraparound porch, so you could sit in your rocker and watch the neighbor across the street hold up traffic by driving his tractor down the road, or you could sit on the right side of the house and watch that neighbor rounding up his cows. I still hated it.