“I keep imagining the Narragansetts who were driven from their village at Great Swamp,” Joelle tells him. “If they went to the Crying Rocks, they would have been trapped.”
Carlos doesn’t answer.
“What I mean is, maybe some mothers could have decided to jump with their children, horrible as it seems. They would have felt desperate.”
Carlos makes a sound that might mean agreement, or might not.
“Did you feel as if someone was following us through the woods?” Joelle goes on. “I felt someone, on the way to the rocks and on the way home. I think that mural in the library is beginning to get to me. It’s on my mind all the time.”
Silence.
“So what could possibly have made those terrible screams?”
Finally, Carlos speaks. “Listen, I’ve still got homework to do,” he says. “I also have to forge my excuse for school. I’ve also got to put my jacket in the dryer. It’s soaked. And don’t forget about the Spanish test tomorrow on the major cities of Spain.”
“Actually, I did forget.”
“Bilbao, Pamplona, Madrid, Málaga, Córdoba, Sevilla, Granada, et cetera.”
“Etcetera, what city is that?”
“You better study.”
“I think your father was right; it was the wind,” Joelle says. “There’s some way the rocks are formed. The wind passes through and makes a noise—like when we put a blade of grass between our thumbs and blow. It’s interesting about that skull I found, though. Did you notice how small it was? And there was a crack that ran down the middle of the forehead. I think—”
“I can’t talk anymore,” Carlos interrupts, and hangs up fast.
* * *
The next morning Michiko greets Joelle at the hedge in a frantic state.
“Where were you yesterday? I waited and waited, but you didn’t come out. I knocked on the door, but no one answered. I had to run to school, and I was late.”
“I said you shouldn’t wait for me every day!” Joelle snaps at her, stricken with guilt.
“Where were you? I didn’t know where you were!”
“I was somewhere else,” Joelle tells her angrily. “You shouldn’t depend on me so much. I can’t always walk with you for the rest of your life!”
The truth is, Joelle forgot about her. In the excitement of cutting school and going to the Crying Rocks with Carlos, she forgot how Michiko would come and stand behind the hedge in the cold, gazing at her door. Joelle can’t apologize, though. If she apologized, it would mean she was taking responsibility for Michiko, and she doesn’t want it. She can’t bear even the thought of such a burden.
“You need to grow up and take care of your own problems,” Joelle finds herself saying in a hard voice.
“What problems?” Michiko can barely answer. The glinty sheen of Joelle’s beer-tab necklace is just visible around her neck, under her winter coat.
“Penny Perrino, the Secret Princesses who don’t like you, I don’t know. All your stuff. It’s not my job.”
“But I only want to walk with you,” Michiko says in a tremulous voice. Her eyes suddenly bulge with tears. With a great sniff, she tries to hold them back, but unsuccessfully. They overflow onto her cheeks.
“I was scared when you didn’t come out,” Michiko explains, weeping. “I thought you didn’t like me!”
There is a long silence, punctuated by the sound of their shoes crunching along the frozen sidewalk. Overnight the light snow has turned to ice. Puddles have become congealed craters of crystal.
Somewhere along their route Joelle realizes that her arm has reached out and gone around Michiko’s shoulders. She can’t help it, she feels compelled to care about this small girl. She can’t push her away or let her down, and inside the circle of Joelle’s arm Michiko knows it. As they trudge on down the street she gazes up from time to time into Joelle’s face, not speaking until the elementary school comes into view.
“Bye,” Michiko says at the turn to the front walk. She detaches herself lightly from Joelle’s arm and trots away.
“See you,” Joelle replies.
Somehow everything has been fixed. Tomorrow Michiko will be waiting outside her house, as usual, and Joelle won’t mind. Secretly, she’ll be happy. Michiko has found a place in her that, mysteriously and inexplicably, needed filling.
11
ONE MORNING A FEW DAYS later Joelle is called out of her first period class and told to go to the principal’s office.
She’s quite sure this has to do with her cutting school and expects to see Carlos herded in beside her. The school has detected the forgery in their absence notes. Or perhaps someone did see them, as Carlos had worried, in a place where they shouldn’t have been that day. Whatever, Joelle needs a few minutes to marshal her defense before turning herself in, and she takes a short detour into the girls’ bathroom.
There she decides to use Aunt Mary Louise’s bad health for her excuse. Carlos will have to fend for himself. She stayed home to watch over Aunt Mary Louise, she’ll say, and forged her own note so Aunt Mary Louise wouldn’t be bothered. Joelle will claim she was scared that “something might happen” to her aunt that day. You can argue scared feelings and get away with it. Besides, it’s not a complete lie. She really is worried about Aunt Mary Louise and lately has been going upstairs to check on her before leaving. Aunt Mary Louise has scoffed at this new show of concern, of course.
“Get out of my sight!” she’d told Joelle yesterday with a half smile. “Can’t a person have any privacy?”
“You can’t if you’re going to fall over and knock yourself stupid,” Joelle had said. There have been other dizzy spells since the one reported to Carlos.
“If I’m going to do that, I’ll let you know,” Aunt Mary Louise had replied. “Don’t worry, you’ll be the first to know.”
It’s their usual game. If Joelle has learned anything from Aunt Mary Louise, it’s how to joke around when you want to cover something up.
When she finally walks into the school office, Joelle is primed and ready to defend herself, but from the first minute, she sees that something else is going on. The secretaries keep glancing over with sympathetic smiles as she sits, waiting for Mrs. Lincoln, the principal, to call her in. One secretary even offers her a cup of water. Joelle says, “No, thanks,” and glares at her.
When Mrs. Lincoln appears, she doesn’t ask Joelle into her office. With an arm around Joelle’s back, she guides her out to the hall, where they walk toward the front entrance of the school.
“Honey, there’s been an accident at home,” she says with such terrible kindness in her voice that Joelle’s heart takes a leap and begins to pump. “Your aunt has gone to the hospital. Now, don’t worry. Someone will be here to pick you up in a few minutes. You don’t have to come back today if it’s not possible.”
“What happened?”
“I think your family can tell you better than I. They’ll know the details.”
“What details?” Joelle exclaims. “Did Aunt Mary Louise fall?”
“I think so,” Mrs. Lincoln says. “I believe she did.” Her forehead is wrinkled with concern. Her arm squeezes Joelle’s shoulder, then drops off as they approach the door. “Let’s just wait here a moment. I understand someone’s on the way.”
Almost instantly, Vernon’s pickup appears across the parking lot and rattles toward them. This is such an odd sight that Joelle forgets for a minute to be frightened. Vernon has, literally, never been on the school grounds. He’s always at work. Joelle wonders if it really could be him driving or if someone has stolen his truck. Is it a trick?
But when the pickup pulls closer, she sees Vernon’s slouching bulk through the windshield. Mrs. Lincoln gives her shoulder another irritating squeeze before Joelle can fend her off. Then the truck pulls up, and she’s getting in.
“What’s going on?” she finds herself shouting. “Why are you here?” And Vernon, being who he is, doesn’t answer. He puts the truck in gear, steps on the gas,
and starts off without even looking at her.
“Where are we going?” Joelle yells, though she already guesses where. They are pulling onto the main road, heading out of Marshfield toward the highway. The hospital is in Westerly, a few exits down. She’s been there herself, for stitches one time when she cut her foot on a piece of glass. Vernon is trying for every bit of power in the old pickup. His messy turkey-farm boot is hard down, grinding the accelerator into the mat.
“She called Emergency. She couldn’t breathe,” he says, speaking for the first time as they pass a car. “They came and got her.”
“When? I was just there!” It’s only nine thirty in the morning. “She was okay when I left, just getting up. What happened?” Joelle asks, remembering how she’d planned her silly lie about Aunt Mary Louise. Now, in a most frightening way, the lie has come to life.
“I don’t know. I don’t know,” Vernon mutters. He mops his big hand over his face and hunches toward the windshield.
Sometime later, as they’re entering the hospital parking lot, he begins to pound his fist against the steering wheel.
“What?” Joelle cries.
“She wouldn’t see a doctor,” he chokes out. “I told her to go, but she wouldn’t. I should have made her. I should have taken her there myself.”
“You didn’t know she was this sick,” Joelle says.
“Yes, I did! I knew!”
They park and race on foot for the entrance that says emergency patients only. When they get inside, Vernon talks to someone in a glass booth. He goes off with a nurse, so Joelle finds a chair, but she immediately has to stand up again and walk around to keep her stomach down. It’s rising, threatening to turn over. To calm herself, she tries to think back to what Aunt Mary Louise looked like when she left this morning. She was on her feet, making the usual remarks. It was going to be “Italian night” that evening, she’d announced. Joelle was supposed to pick up some dry pasta and French bread on the way home.
“You want French bread for Italian night?” Joelle had kidded her.
“Well, what’s the difference? There’s no difference that I can ever tell.”
And Joelle had explained that French bread was long and skinny while Italian bread was short and fat, and that there was a tremendous difference to people who knew bread.
“I’m not one of those!” Aunt Mary Louise had declared cheerfully. “All I know is how to make a good American tomato sauce, which I’m going to pass on to you tonight. It’ll come in handy someday when you get hitched.”
This was another joke between them. “Getting hitched” is Aunt Mary Louise’s phrase for getting married, which, as she’s well aware, is positively the last item on Joelle’s list of things to do.
Suddenly, Vernon is back. He wanders out into the waiting room and looks vaguely around for her. Joelle is beside him in a flash.
“Where is she? Can I see her?”
He shakes his head.
“Why not? How is she?”
“She’s gone,” Vernon tells her in a bewildered voice.
“Gone! Where?”
Vernon waves a hand, aimlessly. He looks over at the glassed-in office where a nurse hovers, shuffling a pile of documents.
“Just . . . gone,” he repeats. Everything in his face is sagging. The whites of his eyes have turned pink.
Joelle stands very still. She stares at him and tries not to understand what this means.
“Where did they take her?” she asks in a dumb voice.
“Not yet,” Vernon answers, just as dumbly. “I have to sign some papers first.” He wanders toward the nurse behind the glass.
“Are you all right?” Joelle hears her ask him. “Can we give you something? The doctor will be here in a minute to explain. I know it must be a shock for you.”
Since he apparently has to fill out and sign a large number of forms, she kindly invites him to come in and use an empty seat in her office.
“Is this your daughter?” Joelle hears the nurse ask.
And Vernon answers, “Yes, it is.”
“She can come in too.”
“She says you can come in too,” Vernon turns and tells Joelle, as if he’s translating from a foreign language. And it might as well be, because Joelle can’t understand one thing that’s going on. She’s standing and staring at the nurse in the glassed-in office and at the papers that need to be signed and at Vernon, who has just called her his daughter. And nothing is real. It’s like a dream you half wake from in the middle of the night and it’s too bizarre to even try to figure out.
“Come in, dear,” Joelle hears the nurse say again. “You can sit over there.”
12
EVERYONE IS SHOCKED BY AUNT Mary Louise dying so suddenly. No one had expected that she was remotely close to the end—not her friends in town or her former coworkers at the chicken plant. Not even the Tiverton relatives, who haven’t set eyes on her in years but still claim her as one of them, it seems. On the eve of Aunt Mary Louise’s funeral day they appear at the front door without warning, six of them, bearing food, flowers, and God’s love at full strength. Jesus is watching, they assure Joelle. He has taken Aunt Mary Louise to His heavenly mansion and will tell Joelle what to do next . . . if she will only listen.
Vernon would have shut the door in their faces, but he’s back working at the turkey farm. Joelle invites them in—they are another chapter in the dream she is dreaming—and seats them in the living room, as Aunt Mary Louise would have done, she feels sure. Despite the passage of time, she recognizes them: sisters, brothers, a heavily bearded cousin. They resemble Aunt Mary Louise in creepy, distorted ways; all are marshmallow pale and small of stature, as she was. Joelle towers darkly above them, repeating words the doctor used when he spoke to her and Vernon on that unreal morning in the hospital.
Stress. Smoking. Overweight. Congestion. Lungs. Heart attack.
The relatives listen with closed faces. They watch Joelle, suspiciously. Maybe they think she’s trying to pull another fast one on them, the way she did when she reached for the corn bread too soon.
“The family would like a chance to make a final statement at the service,” one brother informs her, as if Aunt Mary Louise has been kidnapped all these years and her body is only now being returned.
At the service arranged by Vernon at a local funeral parlor the next afternoon, quite a few mourners come by to pay their respects. They approach and speak softly to Joelle, reaching out to hug her or grasp her hand. They stand in line and file past the gleaming wood coffin where Aunt Mary Louise lies, weirdly waxen, in a slate-blue outfit the funeral home put on her. It’s a dress and jacket she hasn’t worn in all the years Joelle has known her. Vernon chose it from her closet, probably recognizing it from some far-off era when they’d first been together.
Vernon looks terrible. He sits slumped in a folding chair, not even trying to greet visitors. A subtle atmosphere of menace drifts off him—off the boots he hasn’t bothered to change from this morning’s stint at the turkey ranch, off his hunched back and the beefy hands cupped over his knees. Not once does he go up to file by Aunt Mary Louise, and only a few people venture over to speak to him. Most don’t seem to know him. They are Aunt Mary Louise’s friends. Joelle suspects that he hasn’t told his own group about what’s happened, the men he drinks with at night and works with during the day. That would be like him, to hole up and bury any outward sign of feeling.
In the week since Aunt Mary Louise died, he’s hardly spoken to Joelle. But he’s stayed home in the evenings with her, cooked dinner, helped wash up, watched television beside her on the couch. While others may feel afraid of his sullen slouch (the Tiverton relatives won’t go anywhere near him), Joelle, for once, does not. Underneath that threatening surface, she perceives his pain. When, at the end of the service proper, Aunt Mary Louise’s brother rises to speak the final words (“Though she was a poor sinner in life, departing from Thy divine guidance, yet by her death Thou makest her acceptable in Thine eyes .
. .”), she sees Vernon clench the chair in fury to keep from coming out of it, while at the same time a river of tears pours silently down his face.
The afternoon is nearly over and the Tiverton relatives have departed (taking with them most of the flowers they’d originally brought) when Carlos comes awkwardly into the room. He’s dressed in a dark suit and tie and looks so completely out of place that Joelle is embarrassed. She turns her head away and pretends not to see him. He spots her, though, and comes over.
“Hello, Joelle. I’m so sorry about your aunt,” he says.
“Well, it’s a free country. You didn’t need to come,” she snaps back. It’s what she’s wanted to shout at every person who’s said this same stupid thing to her all afternoon. Politeness has kept her numb. But with Carlos she doesn’t need to be polite. “So go home,” she tells him. “You can go home now.”
“That’s okay. I want to stay.”
“Well, she’s over there.” Joelle jabs a crude thumb toward Aunt Mary Louise’s box.
“I know.”
“They put makeup on her.”
“Makeup?”
“To make her look, you know, alive!”
This is such an over-the-top remark that a big lump comes into her throat and she almost starts laughing. Carlos gazes at her.
“Can I sit down?”
Joelle nods. Her hand is over her mouth. She’s afraid she really will start laughing. Luckily, he’s distracted by the scene around them and she has time to get herself together.
“How’ve you been?” she inquires after a while.
“Okay. Everybody at school feels bad for you.”
“Oh, sure,” Joelle says. She hasn’t gone to school all week. She’s stayed home reading and watching TV. Except for short conversations with Michiko, who stops by in the mornings as usual, she hasn’t seen anyone.
“When are you coming back?” Carlos asks.
“Monday. Otherwise, they’d probably arrest me.”
Carlos is looking at her. She knows what he’s thinking—that she doesn’t seem that sad. She’s wondered about it herself. She hasn’t cried once.
The Crying Rocks Page 10
