Wildwood

by Drusilla Campbell

  “Were we?”

  Don’t fuck with me, Liz wanted to say.

  “She’s depressed. Says she isn’t but it’s obvious to someone who hasn’t seen her in a while. And she’s distracted. Her mind’s always somewhere else.”

  “You mean she’s not paying enough attention to her house guest?”

  “You’re the limit, Jeanne. You know what I mean. There’s something on her mind.” Liz’s ankle tickled. Reflexively, she scratched. “Damn.”

  “Ask Dan to give you a pill or a shot or something. There’s great medicine for poison oak. Or we could go over to the school. We keep an ointment for the boys.”

  Liz hadn’t flown in from Florida to let herself be distracted by poison oak. “You see her all the time. What’s going on with her?”

  “She seems the same to me.” Jeanne swatted a yellow jacket. “Older, but we’re all that. I suppose it’s menopause. She’s having a little trouble there.”

  “Are you?”

  Jeanne shook her head. “Sailing right through.”

  Liz remembered puberty. Pimples. Cramps. The oily unpleasantness, the constant agitation that came of not being hooked up properly to her own body. Now this new change, different but the same feeling of not being hooked up quite right.

  “What about you?”

  I thought I was in it and so I relaxed and then . . . and then . . .

  “No problems,” Liz said.

  They sat swinging their bare legs over the flume’s edge. The parched, breathless scent of autumn dust and dry grasses sucked the moisture from Liz’s nose and mouth.

  “Does she ever mention Bluegang?” For a long moment Liz’s question vibrated between them like a hummingbird.

  “Gail’s driving her nuts with that cleanup committee of hers. I think it’s a good idea and we’ve given her some money, but I don’t have time—”

  Jeanne talked about the problems Bluegang caused at school, the need for a fence, her fear that someday a boy from the school would be hurt.

  “Another boy.”

  Jeanne cocked an eyebrow at her.

  “A boy died down there and we’re the only ones who know the truth,” Liz said. “Don’t you ever think about it?”

  When Jeanne answered the edge in her voice was sharp. Liz knew it as a warning. “Is that why you came home? To talk about Bluegang?”

  The deep internal stirrings of imagination, emotion, and memory that directed Liz’s behavior, these were alien to Jeanne as far as Liz knew. And if they hadn’t been acquainted all their lives, they might not even like each other. Liz wasn’t sure they actually liked each other now, that it wasn’t their history and shared love of Hannah that bound them.

  “For the last year or so, I’ve had the feeling like it’s . . . in my way somehow.” She flicked her hand at a yellow jacket. “I dream about it all the time.”

  “No kidding? I barely remember it.”

  Liz knew this could not be true.

  “I feel like I’m haunted by it.”

  “So you’ve come home to exorcise the demon.” Jeanne shook her head. “Think I’ll pass.”

  “Are you afraid to talk about it?”

  “Afraid?” Jeanne cocked her eyebrow again.

  Portcullis down. Drawbridge up. Fortress Jeanne. Impregnable.

  “My feelings have nothing to do with fear.”

  “Well, then, even if you don’t need to talk, I do. Can’t we? For me?”

  “It’s not that simple.” Jeanne examined her nails, pushing back the cuticle with the pad of her thumb. “When you’ve flown home to your tropical paradise and your perfect French lover, Hannah and I will still be here. Nothing will have changed for us. Rinconada is where we live and Bluegang runs right through our backyards the way it always has. If we don’t want to talk about what happened down there almost forty years ago, to three little girls who bear absolutely no resemblance to any of us today, then I think that’s the way it ought to be.”

  Liz felt the color rush to her cheeks. “Jeanne, I need this.”

  “You are so self-centered. It’s all about what Liz Shepherd wants. Or needs. Or thinks she needs. You haven’t changed a bit.”

  Liz jumped to the ground. Tears of frustration flooded her eyes. “You’ve always been good at making me feel like dog dirt.”

  “No, Liz, you’ve always been good at making yourself feel like dog dirt.” Jeanne glanced at her watch. “I’ve got to get back.”

  Liz grabbed Jeanne’s arm. “If you won’t talk about what happened back then, tell me something about now. Hannah’s depressed but she says she’s happy. What about you? Are you happy? Has life turned out the way you wanted it to?”

  Jeanne looked off through the branches and sprays of barbed oak leaves, across the valley. A haze the color of winey mustard veiled San Jose and the eastern foothills and hung low over the vast grid of blocks and streets and the freeway serpentines that wove through and connected the valley, graceful and ugly at the same time.

  “I don’t think happiness is the point.” Jeanne spoke precisely, teacher to student; but the sarcasm was out of her voice and that was a blessing. She wanted to like Jeanne, wanted to love and admire her as she had when they were young. “Just like anybody else, I’ve had good and bad times. There’ve been trade-offs, but there’s been rewards too. And commitment. In the long run, for me it’s commitment that really counts. That’s something you and I disagree on—”

  “Why do you say that?” The unfairness stung. “How could you possibly know that?”

  “Look at your history.” Jeanne leaned back against the flume and crossed her ankles in front of her. Such a neat and precise motion, Liz wanted to slug her. “How many men have there been? How many cities?”

  And all of them my business, not yours.

  Liz had lost count. Forgotten on purpose or accident the one-night stands, the weekends in the country with too much to drink and too many drugs. She had forgotten the men she met in bars who fascinated her for twenty hours or so and the ones she would have liked to know better who didn’t call back. And cities? Well, Rennes and Paris and Avignon. London and Florence. Vienna. Now Belize.

  “I love Gerard,” she said. “That’s part of the problem.”

  “Oh?”

  “He wants to get married.”

  Jeanne grinned and it was clear the news truly pleased her.

  “He’s not the first, you know.” There had been other proposals of marriage, and she had been in love before. But when it came to saying yes, she couldn’t do it. Even when she wanted to, she couldn’t manage it.

  “What’s stopping you?”

  It had something to do with Bluegang, though it was impossible to explain an intuition that came to her in the middle of the night with the chill clarity of moonlight. During the last year Gerard had helped her by asking the kinds of questions that cornered her and left truth the only way out.

  “We shouldn’t have left him there.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. What’s that got to do with you and Gerard? And, anyway, it’s so far in the past now. We did the only thing we knew to do . . .”

  “No. I wanted to tell someone.”

  “Then why didn’t you? Are you saying it’s my fault?”

  “Not a bit. We all . . .”

  “It was an accident, Liz. And what’s more, it’s one Billy Phillips went asking for. He attacked Hannah. Have you forgotten that?”

  Sometimes she did. Sometimes it seemed like Billy Phillips had come after her, not Hannah, and that it was she who had pushed him down onto the rocks. Gerard said she didn’t just carry her own guilt, she hauled around Hannah’s as well and probably Jeanne’s too.

  “Teddy and I run a fine school, Liz. We’ve created something strong and worthwhile together. Once in a blue moon I have a bad day and wish I could run off and join the circus. But it passes. You have to let it pass, let the bad stuff go. I can’t believe you’re fifty years old and you haven’t learned that lesson yet.”

&
nbsp; “It hangs on to me.”

  Jeanne took Liz’s hands. The unexpected sign of affection brought more tears to Liz’s eyes. “Try to understand. If Hannah and I don’t want to talk about Bluegang, it’s our choice. We’re playing our cards the best we can. And you need to play yours while you have a chance. Marry this guy and get on with your life before it’s too late.”

  “But I need to talk about it.”

  “God, you’re a broken record.” Jeanne walked away. “Why don’t you think about someone besides yourself?”

  Liz’s throat hurt from the effort it took not to cry. “We were all there.”

  “Don’t try to hang this on us. You’ve decided you need to talk about what happened for yourself. You don’t care any more about Hannah and me and Billy Phillips today than you did back then.”

  “That’s not true.” Liz scratched her ankle. “I can’t believe you’d say that.”

  “Don’t scratch, it’ll spread.”

  “Fuck it. And you too!” Liz dropped to the ground and gave in, began to sob. “I didn’t want it to be like this. I didn’t want to fight.”

  “We always fight. If you’ve forgotten that, you’ve been away too long.” Jeanne crouched beside Liz. Jeanne took a tissue from her shirt pocket and handed it to her. “Keep your hands off your face. If you touch your face it’ll spread.”

  “I hate you,” Liz said, dabbing at her tears. “You always have to be right. You always have to have the last word.”

  “Yeah,” Jeanne said. “It’s the cross I bear.”

  They parted at the road, and Liz walked down to the Bluegang bridge and looked over the edge at the gray stones, dead leaves and litter. She counted three beer cans, an empty Mondavi wine bottle and, under a manzanita bush, a shopping cart tipped on its side, wheels scavenged. How had that gotten all the way up Casabella Road?

  Poor Bluegang, she thought. And good luck, Gail Bacci. She would write her a check before she went back to Belize.

  The feeling after a fight was a weight at the base of her rib cage, resting on her stomach like too much rich food. She and Jeanne had always been quick to spar and then forgive. And sometimes Jeanne’s arguments were right on target—like that jab about commitment.

  If commitment’s what counts in life, Liz had screwed up big time. She hadn’t managed to commit to anything or anyone except herself. Until Gerard, home was wherever she built a bookcase and ate the local food. No deep bonds, few responsibilities. And for most of her life she had been comfortable living that way.

  Into her mind came the man in Belize City who delivered bananas every week, a refugee from Haiti with skin black and shiny as Italian leather. He drove an ancient Cadillac painted two shades of pink. On Monday mornings she heard him coming from blocks away when his horn sang the first bars of Beethoven’s Fifth to warn other drivers that his brakes barely worked. Parked in the sun in front of the guest house, the old Cadillac’s chrome acreage blinded her eyes. So wonderful on the outside, the interior workings and the very bolts and screws that held the thing together had traveled their limit. Liz too had gone as many miles as she could manage without an overhaul. She was worn out and cul-de-sacked into the unavoidable conclusion that until she understood what happened that day at Bluegang, her life was on blocks, going nowhere. But it looked like she would have to do it without her friends’ help.

  She walked to the end of the bridge and climbed around the cement piling and slip-slid down to the creek. Close up, there was more litter. Cigarette butts and cups and condoms. Was there anywhere people wouldn’t fuck if the mood struck them? Liz wished for a plastic garden bag and a stick with a nail on the end.

  She followed a well-trodden path up the creek toward Hannah’s. In some places there was no litter at all, just manzanita and scrub, rocks and poison oak and she seemed to be walking into the past through a wildwood caught in a net of sunlight.

  Now with the steep slope of the wooded canyon to her left, the dry creek bed widening on her right, she looked across to where a bit of frayed rope dangled from a sycamore branch. She remembered the Bolton boys and Jimmy Mesa and his crowd swinging way over the water and dropping into the deepest part of the creek. Some of the girls did it too on those summer days when the town pool closed and Bluegang was crowded with kids; but Liz never had the courage. Hannah jumped and Jeanne, of course. She had the nerve to climb way up the bank and push off hard so she swung far out like the boys did. Liz thought about the varieties of courage and how in her own way she was braver than either of her friends.

  In the drought the wide flat boulders where she and Hannah and Jeanne had sunned themselves like pinups stood up in the dirt and sand like gray whales beached. She looked down at her feet and then up the hill at the great California live oak and its saddle of roots. Billy Phillips had fallen to more or less where she stood now. And that’s where they left him; that’s where the little boys with fishing poles found him the next day.

  At breakfast that morning, her father forgot about their special appointment to talk. Instead he and her mother talked about who would be the next president, Stevenson or Eisenhower. They were enjoying themselves and Liz knew better than to interrupt them. As she was washing the breakfast dishes, the phone rang. From the next room she heard her mother’s hushed voice; but not the words she said except, “Oh, my God.”

  Dorothy Shepherd pushed the swinging door between the dining room and the kitchen so hard it banged against the wall. “That unfortunate Billy Phillips is dead,” she said. “Apparently he fell and hit his head on the rocks at Bluegang.”

  Liz had been afraid to speak.

  “He didn’t come home last night and his mother didn’t know what to do. Finally she called Father Whittaker and he got the police out looking.” Dorothy Shepherd looked at the wash water in the sink. “Run fresh water. Hot as you can bear. Look at the grease scum.” She reached into the sink and pulled the plug.

  “That was Hannah’s mother on the phone.” They watched the dishwater drain away, leaving a few dishes stranded in the sink. Liz crammed her hands deep in her pockets to hide their shaking. “She thinks—and for once I can’t fault her logic—you girls shouldn’t play down there again.” She fixed Liz with her pale blue eyes, and it was obvious she expected an argument. Liz looked away. She ran steaming water and poured in soap as if the work fascinated her.

  “I never did like that place and now I know my instincts were right.” Dorothy Shepherd looked out the window over the sink to the backyard where her husband sat in a lawn chair correcting blue books in the shade of a wide-brimmed straw lifeguard’s hat crammed down on his head. “This is going to upset your father.”

  That morning her parents talked outside until almost noon. After lunch Arthur Shepherd called Liz into his study. He took her hands and said, “I want your word of honor that you won’t go near that place again, Elizabeth.”

  “I won’t, Daddy.” She loved him more than she did her mother. He was no more interested in her than Dorothy was, but in a father remoteness seemed normal.

  “Your mother and I are very busy people, and we have to be able to trust you.”

  “You can trust me, Daddy. I won’t go there again.” She added, fearing her willingness might betray a guilty conscience, “If you don’t want me to.”

  And until now she had kept her word. What had she expected, revisiting the scene of the crime? A white-light epiphany or a purging grief? A boy had died, a mother had been orphaned, a part of Liz, of her possibilities, had died too. And she felt nothing. Flatline.

  He was buried in the town cemetery on Casabella Road in a plot purchased by St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church because everyone knew Mrs. Phillips had only Social Security and her husband’s Army death benefit. Hannah’s father officiated at the ceremony with his assistant, Father Joe. Out of pity and respect for Mrs. Phillips (whose husband had been a hero, Liz heard her father say, at Guadalcanal), everyone along the road went to the graveside and heard Father Whittaker’s homily about c
hildren being nearest and dearest to God. During the service, Jeanne and Hannah and Liz stood far apart not looking at each other, and for days afterwards they remained apart. Two weeks elapsed before they talked on the phone and rode their bikes to see a Judy Garland movie on Saturday afternoon. Liz couldn’t remember the name of the movie but she did remember this: In the dark of the theater and without speaking, they reached out and held hands.

  Saturday

  The clock beside Jeanne’s bed indicated it was not yet 6:00, but she knew the cooks were already at work in the school kitchen. Because it was Saturday, breakfast would be pancakes; and because it was October, there would be applesauce. In less than an hour, the housekeeping staff would punch in, and by noon the sitting room and hall of the main building would be full of the fragrance of freshly cut roses, and sometime during the day she knew Edith White would turn to her and say, “End of season blooms always smell the sweetest.”

  Saturday lunch: make-your-own sandwiches from cold cuts and cheese and—because it was October—bowls full of Pink Lady apples. Intramural or league, all through October and November there were Saturday games Jeanne could count on. If she felt blue, watching the little boys play mayhem soccer almost lifted her spirits. On Saturday nights the senior school had a social exchange with another school or games and movies while the junior school crowded the common room to play board games, watch movies and eat big sticky handfuls of caramel popcorn. In the early days, when the school was short-staffed and struggling they had taken a few boarders as young as six and seven, boys marooned by parents gone off on world cruises, parentless boys put out to board by overwhelmed grandparents. Jeanne was touched by the bravery and stoicism of these abandoned boys who deserved to be at home with siblings, a messy room and a big gallumphing dog. She looked forward all week to the time in her Saturday night schedule when she read aloud to them. For the occasion she dragged out books Teddy told her no kid read anymore—Dr. Dolittle, The Jungle Book and Just So Stories; and when she looked up from the pages at their intent faces she imagined one of the boys was her own son returned to her by the whim of a perverse god, and that the story of Mowgli encouraged him.