The Window

by Jeanette Ingold

  "That's OK," Hannah says. "Does it say our school's expected to win?"

  When we're out in the car, I tell her she didn't have to do that, pretend she was interested.

  "I was interested. And besides, it's touching how much they care about what you're doing. You're lucky, Mandy."

  Me, lucky? How can she say something so dumb? "Want to trade places?" I ask.

  I expect to her to say, "Shut up. That's sick." Instead she says, "Maybe. Families, anyway."

  Then she lightens up. "Want to meet mine? Mom said I could ask you over for dinner and to spend the night."

  I don't know until we get to the game that we're meeting anyone else. The football field is behind the high school, on the far side of the parking lot. As we walk over from the car, Hannah's saying, "Mandy, this is Charla," and, "Mandy, Rosa," and "Blakney, Mandy."

  I try to hear how their individual voices sound, but they don't say enough words for me to get down which is which. Within minutes the talk is a jumble and the only person I can pick out is Hannah.

  I'm moving along OK, using my cane, one hand barely touching Hannah's arm. Then one of the other girls says, "They're lining up for kickoff. Let's hurry."

  I walk faster, stumble. Someone says, "Hannah, why don't we meet you in the stands?"

  I can feel my face flaming red. I want to tell Hannah she doesn't have to wait for me, but I can't. Where would I go if she left me?

  Someone else has stayed back, too, and I hear Hannah call her Charla.

  This girl, Charla, she wants to talk about a dance that's coming up, a girl-ask-guy holiday thing. "You're taking Ryan, Hannah?" she asks.

  "I guess."

  Then Charla says, "Mandy, are you going to ask someone?"

  Is she joking? I replay her words, listen for the emphasis on you that would give her away. It's not there. What's wrong with her?

  "No," I say. "No one to ask."

  "How about Ted?" she asks. "Don't you two hang around some?"

  Now I get it. I open my mouth to say, "Pair up the misfits?" but before I get a word out, Hannah pinches me.

  "Shut up," she whispers. "Just don't say it."

  After the game, which is more loud than anything and I'm glad when it's over, Hannah and I go to my house for my stuff. Aunt Emma acts like I'm going on a world cruise, instead of just to spend the night, and I'm embarrassed that she lets Hannah know she thinks this is such a big thing.

  Hannah lives in town. We have to go back almost to the school to get to her place.

  "Tell me what your house is like," I ask when we drive up.

  "It's brick, one floor. Looks like all the other houses around here."

  I stand inside the front door for a moment and listen to how far, Hannah shouts when she calls, "We're here." Listen for echoes. Notice cold coming up from the tile under my feet. Do not smell dust or mold. It's a clean-feeling, hollow-seeming house.

  "Hello, Mandy."

  Hannah's mother has a voice that is perfect and polite and without one bit of niceness. The voice of the kind of woman who will pry right into me.

  "Now," she says, "you're Emma's niece? I don't remember ever meeting your mother." She makes it a question that has to be answered.

  I wish I could wrap my arms around my insides, keep her eyes off my mom and me and my privacy.

  "Emma is my great-aunt," I say. "But it sounds silly to call her Great-aunt Emma, so I say Aunt Emma..." I hear myself babbling, but I can't stop. "You've never met my mother. We never got down here."

  Dinner is awful.

  It's in a dining room, with a cloth on the table, and Hannah's parents are both there and her little brother. And nobody says a word about how nice the table looks, so I know this isn't just for company.

  The food's spaghetti, which is hard for me to manage because of the sauce, and I eat very slowly and carefully, cutting small sections. Once Hannah reaches over and does something to my plate, and another time her mother whispers, "Hannah," and Hannah whispers, "Mandy, use your napkin."

  Her father wants to know about the equipment I've got, and I get talking about how the school computer has an add-on that synthesizes speech, how whatever is on the screen is read out loud. It really is a neat machine, and he seems interested.

  But then Hannah's little brother says, "Those computer voices are so bad," and he's right, of course.

  After dinner Hannah and I go to her room, where she turns on some music, tosses a cushion at me, and says, "So, want to hear about Ted?"

  "Ted?"

  "Or anybody else. I thought maybe you've been around long enough you must be getting people sorted out. That maybe you'd have questions about them?"

  "Or about you?" I say, I guess a little mean. But I am curious about this Hannah who lives in a perfectly clean house. Hannah, who is all the things I've never been, even nice. "That Ryan that Charla talked about, he's your boyfriend?"

  "Yeah, sort of. No. I don't know."

  "He's the guy who scored all those points today?"

  "Yeah."

  "Figures," I say, but she goes on like she doesn't hear me.

  "We're friends. It just makes it easier if we say we're a couple. Takes the pressure off, from everybody else, I mean."

  I think about that. Nod like I know what she means, even though I'm not sure.

  "Did you have a boyfriend," she asks, "before you came here?"

  "You mean when I could see?" But Hannah lets that pass, too, and I've got to think of a better answer.

  "There wasn't really time," I say. "Mom and I moved around a lot."

  "Maybe you'll find one here," she says.

  "Ted?"

  "He's good-looking." She puts a bowl in my lap. "Popcorn, made it last night."

  "Would you go out with Ted?" I ask.

  "No. But not why you're thinking. He's so smart he scares me. And it's hard to tell when he's joking."

  Yeah.

  We talk for a while, then Hannah has me move over so she can reach under her bed. "Ever play with a Ouija board?" she asks. "We can get us both boyfriends."

  I hear her click off the light. "It works better in the dark. There's enough moonlight to read the letters."

  Then Hannah shows me how to rest my fingers on the plastic disk. She says in this phony fortune-teller voice, "Oh tell us, Great Ouija, who will Mandy's love be?"

  Nothing happens. Hannah whispers, "Just wait."

  I wait, feeling foolish at first, and then holding in giggles and trying to make myself believe.

  The marker wiggles right, joggles left, suddenly moves fast three or four inches.

  "It's stopped on X," says Hannah. "Mandy, concentrate."

  Her mother opens the door. "Hannah," she begins, "why don't you find something Mandy can...," but switches to, "Don't stay up late, girls."

  "We won't," Hannah says. We wait for the door to close before we go back to the Ouija.

  The board tells us Hannah is going to marry someone with the initials B. T. S., and we can't think of anybody at school with those initials unless it's Boone Simon. Hannah says nobody would ever marry Boone Simon, who never takes a shower, and maybe the Ouija board is nonsense.

  A while later we're lying a few feet apart in twin beds. I'm wondering if Hannah is asleep when she says, "Mandy, wouldn't it be great if you really could ask about the future and get answers?"

  "Maybe," I say.

  "My dad says his dad saw a ghost once, who warned him not to go fishing and he did anyway and almost drowned."

  When I don't say anything, she asks, "You ever know anybody who saw a ghost?"

  "No," I say. And then, I don't know why, maybe because I've never before in my life stayed overnight with a friend, talked in the dark like this, I say, "but there's this girl, Gwen..."

  I tell about the lace curtains, about the voices, about Gwen and Abe and Paul, and Hannah doesn't think I'm crazy. She says what happens—how I lean out the window and become Gwen, become her and watch her at the same time—is one of the mo
st exciting things she has ever heard.

  "Sometimes when I'm doing something I get the feeling I'm watching me do it," she says. "Is that how Gwen is?"

  "Sort of," I say, looking for a better way to tell her. "More like when you read a book, and you're seeing what the main character is doing, but you're inside and thinking her thoughts at the same time."

  "Do you think Paul's going to come back? Or Gwen's dad?"

  "I don't know."

  Then Hannah says, "You must miss being able to read, if you used to do it a lot."

  "There are substitutes," I say. "Books on tape. Braille, if I ever learn it. But, of course, it's not the same thing."

  And a long time later, Hannah says, "I wish something like Gwen would happen to me, but I guess it won't. I'm too ordinary."

  And the way she says it, I realize she means I must be somebody special. That she wishes, at least for this, that she could be me.

  And, lying in shared darkness, I take that thought and turn it over, and don't try to throw it away.

  Sometime later, I don't know how late, we fall asleep. I wake up once, listen to Hannah's slow, quiet-whistle breathing. What a nice, nice night.

  In the morning Hannah and I sit around the family room in bathrobes, drinking hot chocolate while her father reads the funnies. Every few minutes he laughs and says, "Girls, listen to this."

  Hannah's brother must be sitting next to him. "Dad," he says a couple of times, "you're leaving things out."

  I think we're all sorry when Hannah's mom comes to tell us we can't wait any longer to dress. "Mandy," she adds, "we'll drive you home before we go to church, so no one has to come for you."

  "Thank you," I say, "if it's not any trouble."

  "Certainly, it's trouble, but I wouldn't have offered if I weren't willing to take the trouble." The way she says it makes me flush and wonder how I was rude.

  When they let me off, Hannah asks me, "Can I come over later?" but her mother says, "Not today. I need you at home today, Hannah."

  It's not until a couple of hours have gone by that I realize I wasn't rude asking how much trouble it would be to take me home. It was Hannah's mother who was rude, with her answer.

  I try to do homework in the afternoon, but I can't concentrate. I end up standing at my dressing table. I find the photo of my mother, move my hand to the smaller frame next to it, the one of my grandfather in his airman's jacket. I run my finger down until I'm touching right where his face, blurred and almost lost in shadow, would be. "That's you that didn't come home to dinner?"

  Except as soon as I say it, I know I'm wrong. The photo is of my grandfather. The man whose dining room chair stayed empty, Gwen and Abe's dad, and Gabriel's, he would be my great-grandfather.

  It's hard to keep straight.

  And where was Margaret, my grandmother? Why hadn't she been at the dinner table with the others? Had she already left home? Gone off to have the baby she would put up for adoption? The baby who would be my mom.

  "Mandy," Aunt Emma calls, "would you like some hot chocolate with us?"

  "Yes, please," I call.

  I think again of asking the uncles about Gwen. If I ask, will I risk losing her? Might that somehow stop me from going back to her time?

  Be honest, Mandy girl, I think. Aren't you scared of what you might say if your uncles want to know why you're asking about Gwen? Scared you might blurt out, "Well, every so often I lean past the lace curtains and skip off to 1950?"

  Right, go from being Mandy who's just blind to being Mandy who's got multiple problems. There'll be a million more conferences with doctors and counselors, and then the next time there's a student admitted to Ms. Z.'s room, Ted can do a new introduction:

  "And this is Mandy," he'll say, "blind, PLUS she entertains the notion she can time-travel. Tell our new inmate, Mandy, is hindsight better than no sight?"

  "Oh, shut up, Ted, and sit..."

  "MANDEEE!" Aunt Emma calls. Maybe I really am losing it. "Coming. Right now."

  No, I won't ask who Gwen is.

  Chapter 7

  WHEN I GO to Gwen again I go to another Texas morning. This time the passage is slower, as if the wind can hardly stir. It is a passage to a morning later in that summer....

  Gwen asked, "Do you want the pillowcases sprinkled, Mama?"

  "Certainly."

  Her mother was ironing, going piece by piece through a basket of rolled, damp linens. Linens they could no longer afford to send out.

  It was early, but already the day was heating up. They were working on the screened-in side porch.

  "Nobody sees pillowcases," Gwen said.

  "Nobody sees your shirttails, either, but you keep them ironed."

  Gwen traced a monogram with one finger. Her mother's maiden name initials. Probably embroidered before she got married, maybe even before she got engaged.

  "Mama, do you miss Daddy?"

  "What kind of question is that?"

  "But do you?"

  "Gone is gone, and there's no use crying over spilt milk."

  "But, Mama ... I was wondering ... how are we going to live? I mean ... do we have any...?"

  Gwen watched her mother's lips tighten into a straight line. "I will be starting work next week, Gwen. The bank has hired me to be a receptionist."

  Gwen rolled the last two pillowcases together and tucked them into the bottom of the basket. "Do you want to do that?"

  "Want doesn't come into it."

  "But, Mama ... how do you feel about it?" The words rushed out. "About Daddy leaving us, and you having to go out and work, and us ... What are you going to do about us? Abe and..."

  "Feel?" Her mother repeated the word as though she was trying out a strange sound. "Feel doesn't come into it, either. And you can help with the boys in the afternoons, you're big enough."

  Gwen thought about Abe, who had hardly talked at all since he'd realized that their father wouldn't be coming back. She'd found what was left of his pill bug circus scattered behind an oleander bush, every toothpick broken and every tiny flag wadded up.

  Gabriel seemed less affected, bicycling off most days to see his friends. Still, Gwen had occasionally caught him looking puzzled in a way that didn't seem right for a kid.

  But now her mother was setting down the iron. "Oh, that dust!" she exclaimed as a car turned in the drive. "Gwen, is that that salesman again? Didn't Gabriel say he was here yesterday?"

  Paul called, "Good morning," as he got out of the car. Then he opened the screen door without being asked and came onto the porch.

  Gwen's mother picked up her iron. "What are you selling this time?"

  "Nothing. I came to see if I could take Gwen for an ice cream."

  Gwen's mother looked surprised, and then like she'd tasted something bad. "How do you know Gwen? Gwen is too young to go on a date."

  "It's not a date, Mama," Gwen said. "It's for ice cream."

  She ran down to the car, heard Paul following, even while he was calling back things that sounded polite.

  Gwen whispered, "Let's go, before she says no."

  They were out the driveway, out of sight of the porch, before Paul looked sideways, met her with a smile.

  "You really want ice cream?"

  I wake up cold on Monday morning, cold air blowing in on me from the window. Aunt Emma has stopped asking me why I leave it wide open at night.

  "Fresh air never hurt anyone," Gabriel told her the last time she asked. "When I was in the army, we always kept windows open in the billets."

  Abe said I was cleaning spiderwebs. I finally figured out he meant I was clearing cobwebs from my brain.

  I wiggle further into the covers, my thoughts shifting from the kids at school to Gwen and Paul, drifting from football games to a band of woods beside a summer lake. Cobwebby woods. Nice woods, I think, although...

  "Hey, lazy bones, don't you know what time it is?"

  It's Uncle Gabriel, at my door. He's gotten me this talking clock that you hit and it tells you the tim
e.

  I grab for it, hear a perfectly flat, absolutely one-tone voice say, "Seven-oh-clock—oh-seven-hundred-and-fifteen-seconds."

  At school Hannah is full of plans for finding out about Gwen. "Maybe I can come over to your house and go through photo albums with you," she says. "Maybe we'll find Gwen's name written on a picture."

  "I've about decided to ask Aunt Emma who was in my uncles' family. See if she mentions Gwen."

  "And if she doesn't?"

  "I don't know. Go to Plan Two, I guess."

  "Which is?"

  "Hannah, I don't know. I don't have a Plan Two. Probably Aunt Emma will tell me Gwen's a retired librarian in San Antonio or Dallas and that will be that."

  But now Hannah's the one who wants to be all mysterious and makes me promise we'll try to find out ourselves about Gwen before I ask. I get the idea that what she really wants is an excuse to go home with me instead of to her own home. And, of course, I should have her over since I spent the night at her house.

  "OK," I say, "it's OK with me."

  Hannah leaves me at the door to my gym class. "I'll be at your place about four," she says. "And Mandy ... let's not tell anybody else about Gwen. She can be, our secret?"

  I try to remember if I've ever had a secret with another girl before. I don't think so.

  Not that I'm sharing this one quite all the way. I don't think I want to tell Hannah about that last time, how Gwen and Paul were kissing in the car. It seems sort of .. personal.

  The tardy bell startles me and I turn quickly, groping for a handle on a closed door that won't push in. I find a knob instead, pull the door open, and a second later bang my stomach against something solid.

  I cautiously run my hand along it until I realize it's a sink. My shoulder hits something that clatters to the floor.

  This isn't the gym.

  I try to think what I know about the wall by the gym door. What's along it? Hannah hasn't said there's a girls' room. What if I've barged into a boys' bathroom? I take a panicky step and knock something else over.

  Then my hand finds the stiff bristles of a brush and next to that a wet cloth. I'm in a cleaning closet.