“Don’t you like the way the light shines on the blondest parts?” I asked my sister.
“You’re crazy,” Aimée said.
“Come on,” I said. “Don’t you think my hair would look good with earrings?”
“What earrings?”
“Pierced earrings. Orange ones.”
Aimée snorted, sounding like Aunt Bonnie. “You’ve already got a hole in your head,” she said. “Now get out of my room.”
“It won’t be your room for long,” I said. I don’t know why I said it. It was as if I were throwing my whole self away. “Some other kid will be sleeping here soon.” That would do it. She’d burst into hysterical crying, and Mom would get really mad. She’d come running up here, and Freddy would start crying, too, and Dad would yell, and nothing would be calm until Aimée was comforted.
But Aimée just gave me a tired stare. “Oh, shut up, Chérie,” she said. She dropped her book on the floor and turned off her light, leaving us both in the dark.
On Wednesday morning Mom woke me up early. “If you move it,” she said, “we can go to the diner for breakfast before school.”
“What about Freddy?”
“Bonnie’s taking him.”
English muffins were better at home, I thought, as I sat in the diner. The way Mom tore them apart, you got one short, curved half and one wider, flatter half. You could put on enough butter so it dripped, and jam filled in all the little holes.
In a diner the English muffins were bigger, but they cut them so both sides were even, wide, and flat. They gave you little hard, cold butters wrapped in foil, and the muffins weren’t hot like at home right out of the toaster, so you had to scratch the butter on. There wasn’t enough butter to make it all the way to the edges, and the butter didn’t really melt, and the jelly was grape with no lumps of strawberry or raspberry seeds in it, just sweet and flat and purple and nothing.
But in a diner you could sit across from somebody and say things you might not say in the kitchen you’d lived in every day for your whole life. I was going to tell Mom how scared I had been for Wendy Boland when she’d been just missing and how much worse I felt now that she was dead. I wanted to tell Mom that I felt safer not having braids and how stupid I felt for feeling that way. I wanted to tell her how much I didn’t want Aunt Bonnie to move, never mind Dave, and Pete, and Uncle Joe.
It should have turned out differently, I told myself. Wendy should have been found alive and well. She should have grown older and gone to Claybury High School and maybe had Uncle Joe for English.
I wished all the news were different, wished Kennedy hadn’t been shot, so Nixon wouldn’t have won, wished the United States were already out of Vietnam, so Uncle Joe wouldn’t have to fight with Pete, wished everybody had listened to Martin Luther King, Jr., and not shot him, so there wouldn’t have been any riots and those kids in Washington could have been safe like me.
What was safe about me?
I ate my English muffin with the soggy cold butter and jam and drank the sweet-sour orange juice, good with crushed ice in it, and smelled Mom’s coffee, and couldn’t bring myself to say Wendy Boland’s name.
But Mom was saying, “Chérie, you know I love you with short hair or long hair, don’t you?”
“If you loved me, you wouldn’t ever let me out of the house,” I said.
“If I didn’t ever let you out of the house, how would you ever learn to keep yourself safe?” Mom asked.
“Safe from what? If some crazy guy wants to kidnap me, what can I do about it?”
“Fight. Run. Scream.” Mom thumped her fist on the table with each word.
“Fat lot of good that would do!” Our voices were soft, but our words were hard. There were tears in my eyes and in my voice, I could hear them, and Mom could, too. She knew. She had to know.
I wanted to say Wendy’s name, but I couldn’t. I never did.
Mom never said it, either.
“Chérie, baby, if I could, don’t you think I would protect you from everything sad in the world?”
I thought of Aimée asking, “Won’t I scrape the skin off my knees?” and of what I’d said: “Well, isn’t it worth it if you learn to ride a bike?”
I pulled my knees up to my chest and buried my face in them, cheekbone to kneecap and my nose in the plaid skirt that fell between. I held myself that way, and I said, “But you can’t.”
“No, I can’t.” I heard her light a cigarette, something she hadn’t done for months and months, not since long before Freddy. I’d always liked the way it smelled when she first lit it, the woodsmoke smell of the match and the sharp freshness of the new cigarette. I only hated them afterward, in the ashtray. Under my knees I held the first two fingers of my left hand up, an imaginary cigarette between them, wondering how it felt.
“Do you want to know what I do, Chérie, ma belle?”
“What?” This ought to be good. Light up and forget the whole thing. Never teach Aimée to ride a bike so she’ll be a whining cute baby all her life, a little weentzer.
“I pray a hedge around you.”
“A what?”
“A hedge. Like a high wall of bushes.”
“Bushes?”
“It’s like a barrier. A hedge. Against hardship and hurt and harm. And to keep the health and happiness inside.”
What was the difference between hurt and harm? And what was with all the H words?
“Like the forsythia hedge?” I asked. “What good would that be?”
She laughed. She knocked the ash off her cigarette into her empty coffee cup.
“None. It’s just a figure of speech, Cher. And you know what? It’s worked so far.”
She put her hand on the back of my neck, smoothed the curls there. She missed my braids.
Her hand on my neck made me want to cry. All the crying lately was getting on my nerves. I surely would not do it anymore, I told myself. You couldn’t waste time crying, not if your mother thought a prayer about a hedge was going to protect you. Hadn’t Wendy’s mother said some kind of prayer?
“Anything else?” said the waitress. I waited for her to ask me to take my feet off the seat, but she didn’t.
“No, thank you,” said Mom. “Chérie, do you want to get in the car while I pay the check?”
I nodded and took the car keys. When Mom got to the car, I handed them to her, but she didn’t start the car right away.
“I can’t keep you any safer than to pray for you,” she said. “Only God can watch over you every minute.”
Is that what I was supposed to think? That in a moment when God wasn’t looking, Wendy had been stolen away and killed?
Something broke in me. Tears and sobs came spilling out all over me, the car, the world. Mom wrapped her arms around me and rocked me and rocked me and told me she loved me and what a good girl I was and how much God loved me. I cried as if I were sick, as if I were throwing up, as if everything were collapsing. My glasses were mashed into my nose. Without thinking I reached for my braids, and they were gone, and that made me cry harder. I was losing myself. I was lost and never would be safe again.
“Chérie?” Mom was talking in her normal, calm voice. “I’m going to start the car,” she said.
It was such an everyday thing to be doing. I looked up from my arms where I’d been cradling my head and wiped my glasses on my skirt. The sun was glaring off the car hood into my eyes, and I hadn’t even noticed all that time I was crying.
“I’m sorry,” Mom said, and looked as if she really meant it. “It’s almost nine.”
“I know,” I said.
We drove out of the parking lot and down the street, the noisy, normal Post Road. The day was still going by.
CHAPTER 19
AT FIRST I THOUGHT IT WAS A STRAY PIECE of kindling that had been tossed accidentally under the new forsythia bush Aunt Bonnie had made Dave plant. But when I picked up the little log to throw it out of the ruins of my elf house, I realized that it was no usual piece of fatwood
but something someone had worked over: a little chair, carefully carved and smoothed and sanded so it sat level on the dirt floor, the perfect seat for an elf.
I wanted to shrink down to elf size, fold myself into the little chair Dave had made, in the little house I had made. I thought I’d like to dye my braids brown or wear them tied up in two buns like one of Aimée’s elf dolls, paint my pale skin with berry juice and disappear among the branches, perfectly camouflaged. Dark or light, no one would be able to see me unless I chose to appear to them. On elf feet I’d tiptoe through the woods and never crackle a leaf, perfectly hidden.
I kept forgetting I didn’t have my braids anymore.
The Rankins had been stocking up on firewood for the winter, and the Ascontis had been packing to leave. At the moment the circle of yards was empty, except for me. This is how quiet it will be when the Ascontis move, I thought.
It was Joanie who had uttered the truth of it, in her woman-of-the-world voice. “Of all the bedrooms I ever thought you’d end up in, Chérie, the last one I expected was Pete Asconti’s.”
Joanie was wrong if she thought I never thought of things like that, but I wasn’t about to tell her so. “Pete must be having a coronary,” she said.
“That’s his problem,” I said. It wasn’t Pete’s only problem. Mom said when they got settled up north Aunt Bonnie was going to try to find him somebody to talk to. I was glad that Pete wasn’t going to be living across the road from us while he worked out his problems. Once again I felt sorry for Dave. But now here was his chair, like a little peace sign planted under the bush. I would have liked to go knock on his door and say thanks, but somehow I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I’d have had to see what Aunt Bonnie’s house looked like taken apart, and I realized I didn’t want to. I’d see him sooner or later. Sooner, as it turned out. And not later.
Dave didn’t want to come into my house, either. He came and knocked at the front door two Sundays before Christmas. It was early. I was just back from my freezing cold route, and I was eating oatmeal at the counter, still bundled in my jeans and sweatshirt and the lemon yellow Converse high-tops Aunt Bonnie had given me for my birthday.
“Hi,” I said, and opened the storm door for him.
“Hi,” said Dave. He waited, thinking I was going to come outside. When I didn’t, he stepped closer and looked at me, hard. “Come on out,” he said.
“I’m eating,” I said. “Come on in.”
He shook his head. Oh. I understood. Packing boxes stood all around me in the living room, and the bookshelves Dave could see from the door were already emptied.
I held the door open, stiff-armed, to talk. “What do you want?” Casually. Let’s go to the woods. Let’s ride bikes. Let’s play curb ball or Merlin and Wart or invisible baseball or anything else we haven’t been doing together for the longest time.
“We’re leaving,” he said.
What could have happened was this: He turned around and sat down on the porch step with his back to me and looked out at Marvin Road. I sat beside him on the step. Sunlight glimmered on the frosted grass under the pine trees. I leaned my head on Dave’s shoulder (his white sweatshirt, the smell of bleach and wintergreen Life Savers), and said, “Do you think you’ll ever come back?”
He turned his head—he had to turn it only slightly—and kissed me. “Now I’ll have to, won’t I?” he said.
That was not what happened. That was only what I thought of—or, not really thought of. Rather it was what fell like first snow through my mind, all unexpected.
What happened was that I stayed in the doorway and Dave stayed outside. “We’re leaving today,” he said again, waiting for some kind of reaction.
“I thought—” Later, is what I’d thought. Next week or the week after was what Aunt Bonnie had said. This was like my fire dream, with the house burning and my mouth wide open, with no sound coming out, only croaking. “Now?” I said at last.
From across the road Pete yelled, “Come on, Davey, say your sweet farewell.”
“Ooh-la-la.” Aimée’s voice came from the top of our stairs. “Mom, it’s Dave at the door.”
So much for tender moments.
Mom thudded down the stairs in her socks and pajamas, and moved past me to ask Dave in, but he wouldn’t come. He looked shocked to see Mom, as though she didn’t live here or something.
“Mom’s going, Aunt Michelle,” he gulped out. “She said not to tell you.”
Like a shot, Mom was out the door and down the driveway and across the road. I could see Pete in Aunt Bonnie’s car, his arms around Faux Pas, hugging her or restraining her. I couldn’t tell which. Aunt Bonnie jumped out. Our mothers stood in the driveway and held each other. Oh, my heart. This was really it.
“Well, see you, Chérie,” said Dave, trying to be casual.
“Have fun in Massachusetts,” I said lamely. I thought of saying, “Come visit” or “Come back” or “Write,” but instead I stood there as if I were under a spell and said nothing.
“Yeah, right,” said Dave, without turning. His cheeks were as pink as Pete’s ever were on the coldest day.
“Thanks for the elf chair!” I yelled, feeling like an idiot.
He was surprised. “Sandy helped me make it,” he said.
Now I was surprised. “I’ll tell him thanks,” I said.
“So long,” he said in the tone of voice he might have used to say, “Shut up.”
I stood there like one of the rocks in the driveway and said, “’Bye, Dave.” He walked on. I turned back.
Aimée said, “Broken heart?”
“You little jerk,” I said.
Mom wrapped us both in her arms.
It was as if we owned two houses, ours and the Ascontis’. The new people weren’t coming into our house until after New Year’s, so we had a full month to lug stuff across the road and get set up. Mom wanted to be in by Christmas. It would be her way of christening the new house, making it ours (it would never be fully ours) by setting up a tree and putting out all our decorations, hanging our stockings by their fireplace.
By Christmas Eve we would be sleeping in the new house. And where would the Ascontis be? When would we see them again? I didn’t know. I didn’t know how I would be feeling about anything.
Pretty soon the new people would come to our old house. Until they did, I could still go over and sit in my room, only there wasn’t anything in there but the bed. The view from my old window was still my view, my view of the roof and the pines and Aunt Bonnie’s house and Pete Asconti’s window. My new window.
If I forgot that view, all I had to do was look at the painting Aunt Bonnie had left over the mantelpiece. She’d wrapped it up in brown paper and a bow and hung it on the nail, in case anyone questioned that it was a present, with a note that said: “Open now, don’t wait for Christmas!”
I was the only Witkowski who’d ever seen the other painting, the cherry red house under the pine trees. So I was the only Witkowski who stood there gaping when Mom unwrapped the painting of the lemon yellow house under the maples—Aunt Bonnie’s house. Our house.
“How could she leave it?” Mom asked, and sat down on the living room floor and bowed her head. She didn’t mean just the painting of the house. She meant the house. I didn’t tell her that what Aunt Bonnie had taken with her was her favorite view: her best friend’s house.
I sat on the floor with Mom and looked at the painting for a long time. At last Mom sighed and stood up.
“Next?” I said, as though reporting for duty.
“The garage,” she said wearily.
I got up and went to find Aimée.
While we were wheeling the bikes out, Aimée stopped right in the middle of Marvin Road and stood there. She was clutching the handlebars of her bike so tightly her bones showed through her skin. “Chérie,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Chérie!” She was standing rigidly straight, shivering.
“What?”
“Now, Chéri
e,” she said. She nodded her head at the bike in her hands.
“Now?” I looked at her closely. She was biting her cheek, but her eyes were dry.
I walked Reshna to the driveway and went back to stand beside Aimée. There were no cars coming in either direction. “Of all the fuzzy timing,” Aimée said, sounding like Aunt Bonnie.
“It’s the exact right time,” I told her. “Don’t worry.”
The asphalt and pebble surface of Marvin Road suddenly looked evil, lethal. Aimée’s legs were covered with stretch pants, her arms safe inside her wool jacket. Her hands were bare, though. I worried that soon they’d be scraped and oozing blood.
“Do you want to go over to the baseball field?”
“No,” she said. “Here.”
Her face was pointed down the road. Her hands gripped the handles tightly. Her feet on the pedals were firm.
“I’m going,” said Aimée. “Are you going to hold me or what?”
With one hand on the seat and the other on the handlebar, I ran along beside her.
“Are you going to let me go?”
I took my hand off the handlebar and kept running.
“Chérie? You still there?”
“Yeah,” I huffed. I took my hand off the seat and kept running.
“Chérie? Did you let go?”
Her eyes were bright and focused straight ahead. She was balancing perfectly and only a little wobbly in the handlebars.
“Keep pedaling,” I said. “Keep the handlebars straight. Don’t forget to brake.”
“Chérie!” Her voice flew away from me. I stood in the road and watched. Her braid hung down her back, so pretty. Without a thought I reached up to wrap my braids around my head. But they weren’t there. So I wrapped my arms around my head instead and stood there in the middle of the road like that.
There was a toot. A car was coming up behind me. “Aimée! A car!” A green car. Mr. DeLuna. Who knew what he thought? There’s that girl doing something dangerous with bikes again?
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