by John Saul
“How should I know?”
“I don’t know. But sometimes she scares me.”
“How?”
Christie shrugged. “I’m not sure. Sometimes she seems to love me, but sometimes she gets mad at me for no reason.”
“My parents are like that.” Kim said. “That’s the trouble with grown-ups. You never know what they want you to do, then they get mad at you when you don’t do it. Are you coming?”
Still turning Kim’s words over in her mind, Christie got into her suit and followed Kim onto the narrow strip of beach.
The water, bubbling up from an invisible spring below, was clear and cold. Christie dipped her toes in, then jumped back.
“Chicken!” Jay-Jay taunted her from a rock a few yards from the shore. “Come on!”
With the other girls already in the water, Christie took a deep breath and plunged in after them. She came up for air, sputtering and kicking.
“It’s cold!”
“No, it’s not.” Kim told her. “In a minute you’ll turn numb, and then you won’t feel it!”
Christie struck out for the boulder on which Jay-Jay and Susan were lying and scrambled up onto the sunbaked granite. On the edge of freezing just a moment before, her feet were now suddenly burning.
“Get back in the water,” Jay-Jay told her, giving her a shove.
She went under, and when she came to the surface, Susan’s face was grinning down at her. “Splash the rock where you’re going to lie. It cools it off.”
“Why didn’t you tell me before I climbed out?”
“It’s more fun to watch people burn themselves.” Jay-Jay giggled. Christie began splashing, making sure she covered not only her spot on the rock, but Susan and Jay-Jay as well. Suddenly Jay-Jay jumped in beside her and shoved her under the surface. Her feet hit the bottom, and Christie let her knees buckle until she was crouching below the surface. Then she pushed up and burst from the water, screaming at Jay-Jay. Jay-Jay screeched and paddled frantically away. Christie started to follow her, then changed her mind and climbed once more onto the boulder. She settled down next to Susan and felt the sun begin to take the chill of the water out of her body.
“This is neat,” she said.
“Yeah,” Susan agreed. “I just hope we can keep on coming up here.”
Christie propped herself up on one elbow.
“Why shouldn’t we?”
“Well, up till today, nobody knew we came here. At least Miss Edna and Miss Diana didn’t. What if they make us stop?”
“Why would they?”
“Miss Diana didn’t want you to come with us,” Susan pointed out. “What if she says it’s too dangerous and tells us we can’t swim here anymore?”
“Then I guess we’ll have to stop,” Christie replied.
Jay-Jay, hauling her body out of the water, plopped down next to them. “Or sneak up here anyway,” she said.
When Christie stared at her, she grinned maliciously. “If we only did what our parents said we can do, we wouldn’t do anything, would we?” Then, an idea suddenly striking her, she stared at Christie. “Is Miss Diana your mother now?”
“What do you mean?”
“Is she going to adopt you?”
“I don’t know.”
“’Cause if she did,” Jay-Jay went on, “someday you’d own all this. You’d own the whole ranch!”
Christie’s expression turned somber. “But she’d have to die for that to happen,” she said. “She and Miss Edna both.”
“So what?” Jay-Jay said blithely. “Sooner or later everybody has to die.” She lay down once more and soon she fell asleep in the warmth of the sun.
But Christie did not sleep. Instead she wondered.
Did everybody really have to die?
It didn’t seem fair.…
And yet her parents had died, and sometimes she had a strange feeling that she was going to, too.
“This house used to belong to the Traverses.”
Diana glanced at her mother as she parked the Cadillac in the driveway of the house that had, until two weeks ago, been occupied by Elliot and Christie Lyons. Two hours had passed since breakfast. Diana had been feeding the chickens when Edna had come out to the coop and insisted that they follow through with Diana’s plan to collect the last of Christie’s belongings. Most of them, however, had been delivered by Dan Gurley several days ago and were already in the nursery. Diana had suggested that she finish the job with Christie some other day, but Edna had insisted.
“We’ll do it today,” she had said, “and we’ll do it together.”
Now, instead of getting out of the car, Edna was staring at the house, her mind apparently lost in some dim memory.
“The Traverses?” Diana asked. “I don’t remember them. Who were they?”
Edna’s sharp blue eyes appraised her daughter. “There are a lot of things you don’t remember, aren’t there?” she asked, her voice not ungentle. When Diana made no reply, Edna opened the car door and eased herself out. “Are you coming?”
They let themselves into the house, and Edna quickly scanned the living room. “Fakes,” she sniffed. “Cheap copies of second-rate junk, every stick of it.”
“Elliot wasn’t rich, Mother,” Diana reminded her.
“Nor did he have any taste, apparently. Which room was the child’s?”
They explored the house, finally coming to the small room at the rear, which had obviously been Christie’s. They found two suitcases in the master bedroom and began packing them. Christie’s remaining clothes fit easily into one, and her few toys into the other.
“She doesn’t have much, does she?” Edna asked as Diana snapped the catches of the second suitcase.
Diana ignored the comment and carried the suitcases into the living room.
“I wonder if Christie will want any of this?” she said. On the coffee table she found a photo album and sat down on the couch to look at it. From cover to cover it was filled with pictures of Carole and Elliot Lyons and Christie. They looked to Diana like a happy family, and she found herself feeling resentful of their apparent contentment. Her hands trembled as she turned the offending pages. She wanted to destroy the album, with its proof that Christie was not truly hers.
“Is something wrong?” Edna asked. She had sensed the tension in her daughter’s hunched shoulders, the tight grasp with which she clutched the album.
Diana glanced at her mother and closed the album. “No,” she said, her voice too sharp. “Everything’s fine, Why shouldn’t it be?”
Wordlessly Edna took the album and began going through it. When she finished, she closed it, but she didn’t give it back to Diana.
“What are you going to do with this?”
“Why, I—I hadn’t really thought about it,” Diana stammered.
“Don’t lie to me, Diana. I asked what you were going to do with it.”
“Keep it, I suppose. Keep it for Christie. When she grows up, she’ll want it.”
Edna’s hand flew up, and she struck Diana across the cheek. “I told you not to lie to me,” she hissed. “When your mother asks you a question, you answer her.”
Diana gasped and touched her face where Edna had hit her. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. Then: “I was going to burn it.”
“Burn it?”
Now Diana cowered miserably on the couch. “I don’t want her to have it, Mother. Can’t you understand? All it will do is remind her of—of them. But she’s mine now. She’s my little girl now, and I want her to forget all this. Can’t you understand that?”
Edna’s lips tightened, and she reached out to touch Diana’s hand. Instinctively Diana flinched. “When we get home, perhaps I should put you to bed,” Edna said, her voice suddenly gentle.
The words struck Diana like another blow. When she’d been a child, her mother had sometimes put her to bed, locked in her room, for days at a time. She shrank further into the couch, her eyes beseeching.
“No.” Her voice quavered, and
now she reached out to touch her mother. “I don’t need to go to bed,” she said desperately. “I’ll be fine, Mama. I’ve been all right for years now, haven’t I? It’s just that I’m not used to having her yet.” Her voice took on a childish quality. “Give me a chance, Mama. I can be a mother, too—I know I can. Please don’t make me go to bed.”
As her daughter began to cry Edna stood up and bent over her, her eyes suddenly blazing. “Stop that,” she said. “Stop that this instant, do you hear me? You know what happens when you cry!” On the couch, Diana shook.
Edna raised her hand, preparing to strike her daughter once more, then slowly made herself lower it. “Don’t, Diana,” she said, almost to herself. “Don’t let’s start again.”
As Diana continued to cry Edna stood still, closing her mind to the sound. Finally Diana’s sobs abated.
She stirred on the couch and sat up. Her mother was standing over her, looking at her oddly. “Mother, what happened?” she asked.
“You started crying,” Edna told her.
“But why?” Diana asked. “I was sitting here, looking at something.” Then alarm filled her face. “You said something about putting me to bed.”
“You seemed tired, Diana.”
Now Diana frowned, puzzled. She tried to remember exactly what had happened. She had been looking at the old photo album and had felt angry. But then what had happened?
Diana didn’t know. And the gap in her memory terrified her. Feeling numb, she followed as her mother led her from the house.
10
Esperanza Rodriguez finished cleaning Edna Amber’s bedroom, then climbed to the third floor, where she let herself into the nursery.
She liked being alone in the house. When they were present, her sensitive spirit never failed to pick up the constant tension between Miss Diana and Miss Edna. If she’d had any other way of earning a living, Esperanza would long since have stopped working for the Ambers, but the ranch was her whole life, and she assumed that someday she would die there, as so many people had died there.
In the nursery she lowered her bulk into the rocking chair and waited for her breathing to return to normal. She remembered the nursery from when she was a little girl and had played there with Miss Diana, who was only two weeks younger than she was. It hadn’t been often—even when she was very small, Esperanza had had chores to do, and sometimes Diana couldn’t play.
Those were the days, Esperanza remembered, when her friend had bruises on her body, and her face was streaked from crying.
Esperanza remembered the nights, too, when she had lain on her cot in the little room—now filled with broken furniture and trunks—a few feet from the nursery. She had listened to the strange sounds, though she tried her best not to hear them.
It would happen on nights when the wind was blowing. Esperanza would lie in her bed, unable to sleep, and soon she would hear the creaking of the back stairs.
Then there would be footsteps, pausing outside her door, as if someone were listening. The footsteps would move on, and she would hear the door to the nursery open and close.
And then there would be the muffled sound of voices, and the sound of Diana screaming.
The next day Diana would stay in her room, but sooner or later Esperanza would find a reason to sneak into the nursery.
She would find her friend in bed, crying softly. When she asked Diana what was wrong, Diana would only look at her sadly and shake her head.
“I had a nightmare,” she would whisper. “I dreamed I was a bad girl and I got punished.” Her eyes would grow wide as she remembered the dream. “And when I got punished, I cried.” Once, after she had said that, there was a long silence, and then Diana had reached out and squeezed her hand. “Don’t cry, Esperanza,” she had said. “Don’t ever cry. Only bad children cry, and then they get punished.”
Esperanza never had cried, not even when her mother died. Instead she had done what most of the Shacktown girls her age did. Though she was only fourteen, she got married and moved out of the house into the cabin by the mine, where her husband was the caretaker. A few years later, soon after she became pregnant, Carlos went away, and she never saw him again. Even then Esperanza did not cry.
It wasn’t until Juan was born, and the old Indian women told her she should take him to the cave to live with the other children, that Esperanza let herself shed tears. She remembered that day now as she sat in the nursery.
The women had come and looked at Juan, and had told her that she mustn’t keep him. For a while Esperanza had believed them. But as she watched her baby, and let her tears flow, she had decided it was wrong. The cave, she knew, was only for dead babies—the tiny ones that never breathed when they were born but came into the world as if they were little old men and women, their faces wizened and wrinkled, looking as though they had lived their lives before they were born.
Their little bodies would be taken to the cave, and prayers would be said over them, and then they would be left there, to await the day when they would be reborn. Esperanza knew it was true. Sometimes, when the wind blew, she could hear them crying, for her cabin was near the hidden entrance to the cave. Their voices, lonely and terrified, would drift down the mountain, crying out for the mothers that would someday come for them.
Having heard the stories, Esperanza could not send her son to live in the cave. So she had spent a day and a night letting her tears flow, and had come to her decision. Juan had not been born dead, so he must not be sent to the cave. Instead she must keep him.
And so the years had gone by, and Esperanza had begun to think that everything was going to be all right.
But now the lost children were stirring, and a man had died, and Esperanza was terrified, for she knew that one of the children in the cave was the child of Diana Amber.
She knew because she had been awake one night, not long after Juan had been born, and she had heard a strange sound outside her cabin.
She had heard a baby crying, and she had gone to her window and looked out.
There, moving through the night, she had seen a woman walking up the hill, carrying a baby in her arms.
The baby had been crying, and Esperanza had remembered Diana Amber’s long-ago words.
“Only bad children cry, and they get punished!”
She had known that Diana Amber had been sick, and as she watched she realized what the sickness had been.
And in all the years since then, as she continued to work in the Amber house, no one had ever spoken of Diana Amber’s child.
It was as if the baby had never existed, and it had not been Esperanza’s place to ask questions.
But somehow, she knew, it was all tied together. The nightmares Diana had told her about, that Esperanza knew were not dreams at all, and the baby that had come from Diana’s “sickness” and been taken to the cave.
And now a child had come to live in the nursery once occupied by one of the lost children.
As she looked around the faded room Esperanza shivered.
Somehow los niños had been disturbed, and she was sure that as they awakened, people were going to die. For the first time since Juan had been born, Esperanza Rodriguez began to cry.
Diana Amber stared nervously out the living-room window.
She had come home two hours ago and found Esperanza in the nursery, crying, but had been unable to find out what was wrong. Finally she had sent the woman home, then spent the final hours of the morning unpacking and putting away the last of Christie’s belongings. At noon, when Christie had not come back from her swim, Diana had gone to the window and begun her vigil.
The wind was picking up, and a dust cloud was forming, making everything indistinct. In the distance a figure was moving, but she couldn’t see it clearly. As she watched, it disappeared; whoever it was, was going the other way.
By one o’clock Diana could stand it no longer.
“Something’s happened,” she told her mother.
Edna scowled as she looked up from her n
eedlework.
“What’s happened is that you’ve gotten nervous. Sit down, Diana.”
“No, Mother. I’ve got to go find her.”
Edna rose to her feet, leaning on her cane. “You can’t go running off every time you get a feeling something’s wrong with that child. What about me? What if you’re gone and something happens to me?”
Diana’s stomach tightened, but her resolve was strong. “You’ll be fine, Mother. You’ve never been sick in your life, and you’re not now. But Christie’s only a little girl—hardly more than a baby. I’m going to look for her.”
She turned and left the room before Edna could say anything more. When she was gone, the old woman stayed on her feet, moving to the window. She watched Diana go to the barn, then, a few minutes later, lead her horse out. Only when Diana had mounted the horse and started off toward the hills did Edna return to her needlepoint. As she worked she listened to the wind. It was growing stronger, moaning around the old house, causing its beams to creak. It was an evil wind, Edna thought. She wished Diana had not gone out in it. But ever since that child had come to live with them, Diana had changed. And the change, Edna knew, was not for the better.
The four girls sat on the strip of gravel that separated the quarry pond from the foliage that surrounded it. The sun was overhead, and in the protection of the hillside there was no breeze.
“I’m hungry,” Jay-Jay said.
Kim Sandler shrugged. “I told you we should have brought some sandwiches.”
“Does anybody have a watch?” Christie asked. “Aunt Diana told be to be back at noon.”
“Well, it’s after noon now,” Kim told her. “Look at the sun.”
Christie squinted into the sky. The glare quickly blinded her, but her ears picked up a low moaning sound. “What’s that?” she asked, cocking her head in unconscious imitation of Susan Gillespie. The other three girls listened intently.
“The wind,” Jay-Jay said. “It’s starting to blow again.”
She and Susan scrambled to their feet. “Let’s go home,” Susan said. “I hate it when the wind blows.”
“Then let’s stay here till it dies down,” Kim suggested.
