Are You in the House Alone?

by Richard Peck

“I guess she must have.”

  “Who does she think she’s going to send to see you? Because I don’t want a lot of people trailing in here and—”

  “Who knows?” I said. But I knew who she’d send.

  * * *

  Madam Malevich’s visit didn’t crumble Mother’s defenses. No one else got past the front-door barrier until the end of the week. Steve came as far as the front steps every day, but he handed over my books and assignments to Mother.

  I spent one long afternoon with the sun flooding in across those terrible chrysanthemums, wondering if Steve and I could start over, fresh. Wondering if . . . being with him would only be using him. He’d be sympathetic and very gentle. But then I decided you can’t use people for your own personal therapy. Unless of course, you’re Phil Lawver.

  Madam Malevich sent Alison. Maybe Mother knew that when she let her in. Anyway, she left us alone. It was Friday afternoon, and school had been over for hours. I didn’t turn on a light. Alison lurked at the door. “Hi. Where’ve you been?” she said.

  “Where’ve you been?”

  “I’d have come sooner, but . . .”

  She’d brought me a box of chocolate truffles and approached the bed on my bad side, the one with the railroad tracks. The room was dim though, and she didn’t look right at me. I’d been in and out of bed since Wednesday, but I was lying down when she came. It made me feel stagey.

  “I can’t stay,” she said, perching on the chair, but not taking off her coat. “How are you feeling? Everyone wondered. You know how Valerie Cathcart runs off at the mouth.”

  “She may be right for all I know.” I let the silence last. With the storm windows in, the room seemed sealed like a jar. I guess I wanted Alison to squirm. She was trying not to and giving me her serene profile.

  “Well, what happened?” she finally said, very impatient. I flicked on the bedside lamp. The skin around the stitches was still puffy and inflamed—how well I knew. Black X’s on a red field. She looked once and fixed her eyes on the far corner of the room.

  “I tripped at the top of the stairs, fell all the way down, and was raped while passing the landing.”

  “Is that supposed to be funny?” Alison said, retreating.

  “You know what happened, Alison. Did he tell you?”

  “Steve hasn’t said a word. You know how he is when he gets into one of those moods of his.”

  “I’m not talking about Steve, and you know it. It was Phil. He was the one who sent me those notes. You knew it from the first. You probably recognized his handwriting. You probably—”

  “Why, you dirty little liar,” Alison whispered. If she’d really been surprised, she’d have bellowed at the top of her voice. “What are you trying to pull?”

  More silence.

  “You got yourself into . . . some kind of trouble, probably with Steve. And this is your way of getting out of it and hurting Phil. I always knew you were jealous of—us. What’d you ever have going for yourself except with that dip, Steve? You were going nowhere, Gail. And now you think you can . . . why Phil doesn’t know you’re alive!”

  “He didn’t when he left me unconscious on the floor.”

  “You really have gotten yourself into a mess, haven’t you?”

  “I’ll get out of it, Alison. Will you?”

  “You’re out of your mind. What are you babbling about?”

  “I’m not much in the mood for offering friendly advice. But Phil’s through with me now. Is he through with you?”

  “Are you kidding? This doesn’t make any difference to—I mean what does this have to do with Phil and me?”

  While I waited her out, I sensed that someone was standing on the other side of my bedroom door. It figured. Mother wasn’t about to let Alison in without hearing for herself. I didn’t mind. I was learning the necessity of witnesses.

  “I think you’d better be careful about Phil,” I said, quietly but clearly.

  “You’re the one who’d better be careful, Gail, throwing around accusations. If Phil ever thought . . . why he doesn’t even notice you’re not in school.”

  “Yes he does, Alison. He sent me these flowers.” I didn’t like that being heard on the other side of the door, but it needed to be said.

  “I think when you hit your head, something happened to your mind,” Alison said, almost kindly.

  I rummaged around in the table drawer, pulling out the florist’s card hidden there. “Here’s a note you won’t tear up, Alison. The only one Phil signed.” I held it up to her until she looked at it. He’d written his name in oversized letters. She laced up her fingers in her lap, knowing she couldn’t grab for it.

  “Well, that just proves . . . he didn’t have anything to do with . . . anything. Who in their right mind would . . . rape somebody and then send her flowers. It’s crazy.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to say to you, Alison. I think you’d better be careful. I doubt if Phil understands that he did anything wrong—or could do anything wrong. I guess that’s what the flowers mean.”

  “If anybody has amnesia, it’s you, Gail.” Alison tucked her hair behind her ears. “I’m not listening to any more of this. I know Phil. And he’s certainly no rapist. If anything, he’s—”

  “He’s what?”

  “He’s too much of a gentleman.”

  “He’s a very disturbed gentleman,” I said. “For my sake I’d like to see him in jail. For his sake I’d like to see him in a mental institution.”

  “And what about me?” Alison yelled, jumping up. “Have you got room in your paranoid little fantasy for me?”

  “For your sake, Alison, I wish Phil hadn’t been born rich and handsome and social. Then you could have gone after somebody safer.”

  “Okay, that’s enough. I’ve had it,” she said, jerking a knot in her belt. “But listen to this and remember it. If you ever have the nerve to show your face at school again, and if you ever try to spoil anything for Phil and me, I’ll go straight to Mrs. Lawver and tell her. And the Lawvers will run you and your nothing family out of this town.”

  “I wish we were already gone,” I said, mostly to myself.

  “So do I!” Alison screamed. She rushed to the door and banged it back against the wall, pushing past somebody who was standing out there in the hall. But it wasn’t Mother. It was Dad.

  CHAPTER

  Thirteen

  “I wrote a letter to Aunt Viola,” Mother said on Sunday evening. “Aunt Viola in Harrisburg.” She stood there, fingering the wooden curlicues on the foot of my bed.

  Aunt Viola. Mother’s aunt, not mine. Aunt Viola who started me out at birth with the add-a-pearl necklace. Who kept sending me educational toys right up through my thirteenth birthday. Aunt Viola of the annual twenty-dollar Christmas check.

  “She’s—you know she has more money than she knows what to do with.”

  Aunt Viola and money. What’s behind this? I wondered. Mother had spent the week weighing every word she spoke. Now the words were catching in her throat. She was so intent on her thoughts that she only cast a troubled glance at me. I was lying fully dressed on top of my made-up bed, when Mother still wanted to see me in pajamas between the sheets.

  The chrysanthemums had vanished from my bedside once when I was out of the room. I’d come back. They were gone.

  “I always could be absolutely frank with Aunt Viola,” Mother said. “She always understood. Anything.”

  “You wrote her about me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I thought, because I knew she’d be willing to help.”

  “How could she?”

  “It’s nothing definite. But I thought, under the circumstances, she’d be willing to pay your tuition. If you wanted to go away to school. Not this semester, of course. I don’t want you even thinking about school right now. But after the winter break. You could certainly get into a very nice boarding school for your last year and a half and—”

  “Oh
Mother.” What could I say? I’d spent all day long on a plan of my own, working up my courage. Now this. And she was racking her brains to help. I couldn’t even let myself get mad at her. “Mother, is this the kind of thing you and Dad talk about at night, late?”

  “Oh no, nothing like that. Don’t say a word to him about this until we hear—”

  “I won’t, Mother. I won’t breathe a word to him about it. Because I’m not going away to school. Even Madam Malevich said I couldn’t run from this.”

  “Oh that funny old lady. Do you realize how often I’ve heard you laugh about her?”

  “I guess I was laughing only because the rest did. And do you know what people say about girls who suddenly disappear to boarding schools in the middle of the year?”

  “You wouldn’t be around to hear whatever they say. I’m trying my best to think of a plan—”

  “So am I—”

  “—that we can all live with.”

  “Dad couldn’t live with that plan.”

  “If you knew, Gail, what this is doing to him. I promised myself I wouldn’t say anything like that to you, and here I am blurting it out. But if you knew what he’s going through. He was so certain something could be done legally, and now he’s just—floundering. He’d be delighted to see you have a—fresh start.”

  “But he couldn’t afford my tuition and board bills if I went away. How do you think he’d feel if I was Aunt Viola’s charity case?”

  She stood at the foot of my bed with her arms wrapped around her middle. I could almost see her pity turning back on herself. “I suppose you’d both fight me on any idea I came up with,” she said quietly.

  “Don’t send the letter to Aunt Viola, Mother.”

  * * *

  The walls of my room began creeping toward me. The bulletin board loomed. The mirror reflected railroad tracks at every turn. The gray ring on the table where the chrysanthemum pot had been. Initiating my plan, I kept consulting the closet, pulling dresser drawers out too far until they tipped. Taking the first steps.

  I went downstairs for dinner before they had a chance to bring it up. No more meals on trays. Mother and Dad were both in the kitchen. When they saw me, they stepped apart like a pair of guilty teen-agers. Cut-off words hung over the sink. Dinner was nowhere. Mother’s hand slipped off the arm of Dad’s coat. He had a death grip on the car keys.

  You could have cut the atmosphere with a knife. Dad was going someplace. Mother wasn’t. Where?

  “Why aren’t you in bed?” they asked, coming together in chorus.

  “Where are you going?” I looked right at Dad. His face was colorless. Stop looking so middle-aged. He seemed to be somebody who’d just missed the last train and was willing to run for it.

  “He’s not going anyplace,” Mother said, but not to me.

  “I’m going over to the Lawvers, Gail.”

  Could I picture that? The Volvo in the circular drive. Dad’s hand on the knocker. Phil himself answering the door. Or, no—maybe Edna. He’d probably get in. And then the frosty, mildly astonished reception. The voices on both sides determined to be low, civilized. The disbelief, the there-must-be-some-mistake. The blank look of remote astonishment on Phil’s face. Veiled threats. Ice forming on the chandeliers. Dad’s accumulated anger boiling over. All his angers. The mention of lawyers, but not by him. Lawver lawyers. The we-think-you’d-better-leave. I couldn’t picture it—not the conclusion.

  “It won’t work,” I said. “They always entertain on Sunday nights. Their set—the Hathaways, the Bradfords, the Wycoffs, sometimes the Forresters. They wouldn’t be alone.” I was pulling names out of a hat, guessing.

  “See?” Mother said, gripping his arm again. “You’d only make a fool of—you can’t touch them. Nobody can.”

  “I’ll end up lying under a bush somewhere,” Dad said, “waiting for a chance to kill that kid.” The car keys rattled down on the counter.

  We huddled together that night, brought the Sony into the dining room and watched everything on it. From family hour right through to Kojak and Bronk. We saw crimes being solved all evening. That night I dreamed of having brothers, battalions of them. And of Dad and me on a Ferris wheel. Analyze that. I didn’t have the time. The next morning I went to school.

  I’d laid out my clothes the night before. Even had a dress rehearsal. I experimented with makeup above my eye. Too heavy in the daylight. So I painfully wiped and picked off crusty tan pancake around the places where the stitches pulled at the skin. All my cosmetics were tough and cracked in their tubes, ancient relics of the days when Alison and I practiced “makeup hints.” The bruises on my legs were faded. I could even take gym if I wanted to. The dirty feeling inside was fading too.

  “Out of the question,” Mother said when I came downstairs all dressed, hair combed in an unsuccessful swoop over my eyebrow.

  We fought about it all through breakfast while the toaster popped nervously. But I’d won in the first moment. The fight was going out of both of them. “Do you want people to see those stitches?” Mother said, playing one last small card.

  “Yes, I don’t care.”

  “If you’re only going back to defy . . . everybody—”

  “I’m going back because I have a right to go back.”

  Dad didn’t make it through breakfast. He went off to pace a floor upstairs. We listened to his footfalls above us while Mother poured coffee over her cup and saucer. “I don’t want you to go,” she whispered. “I don’t want you to be in the same building with—”

  “Phil.”

  “Him. How do you know he won’t try something again?”

  “At school? I was always safe from him there.”

  “You’re so sure! And I don’t want you to have to face that little . . . minx, Alison, who turned on you. Yes, your dad told me every word. I don’t want you to have to face any of it. And do you know why?”

  “I think so.”

  “No, you don’t. It’s because I wouldn’t have the courage if I were you. And so I can’t understand how you can do it.

  “But we couldn’t stop you, could we?”

  I shook my head and looked down like I was brushing crumbs off my lap. Mother cupped her chin in her hand, tucking her mouth away out of sight.

  Dad drove me to school. “If I don’t come up with a job pretty soon,” he small-talked, “we may just have to sell the house and move back to New York.” He spoke of joblessness in a pretty bright tone of voice.

  He wanted to walk with me right into school but restrained himself. We sat in the car till the first bell rang, and the tide of kids surged from across the street, slapping books on the car hood, flipping butts, yelling, broad-jumping curbs. The thundering herd. After a week of quiet, I’d forgotten about the unnecessary noise pollution. I leaned over and kissed Dad in the last second and slid out of the car. He was still sitting there when I looked back at the door of the school.

  They made way for me when I walked down the corridor, a little like they did for Sonia Slanek. At least I thought so. But it wasn’t one big dramatic moment after another. Major scenes you plan for never seem to come along on schedule. Alison spotted me from afar and kept her distance.

  I remembered how many times before—say around seventh grade—when I’d vowed never to speak to Alison Bremer ever again, over some matter or other. And how we’d be blabbing at each other ten minutes later. That was when we never played for keeps.

  Word reached Steve that I was back in school. He was at my elbow by lunch time, silently escorting me a little formally through the cafeteria line. We talked about schoolwork, carefully, across the vast width of the lunch table. Even the salt and peppers seemed significant barriers. I decided he hadn’t heard any of the gossip. He always could go deaf around Valerie Cathcart. Did he want me to tell him what he didn’t know? I couldn’t be sure. “You and Alison have a falling-out?” he asked, out of the blue.

  “Yes, a terminal one. Why?”

  “Because she just sat down
without saying anything. You’re practically back to back. They’re at the next table.”

  “They?”

  “She and Phil.”

  Lunch was too long for our short supply of conversation. Valerie skipped around me between fifth and sixth period, suddenly in a mad dash to be somewhere else. But it was a weirdly normal day. By the end of it, I was feeling my way back into the old routine. There were empty spaces in it that Alison had filled. And Steve. But, proud of myself, I skated around these. People spoke, waved, glanced at my stitches. If somebody looked ready to come up for information, I kept moving. People only care within limits.

  I didn’t have Sonia’s . . . visual impact, so I melted into the pack, and besides, I was only last week’s rumor. This week had a new topic. The Arts Assembly with Madam Malevich’s old movie had made waves—and the local paper. Suddenly Oldfield Village was sitting up and taking notice of its celebrity. The one and only movie theater got hold of three or four of her old flicks and was planning to run them back-to-back in a “Dovima Malevich Film Festival.” Posters were plastered all over school.

  The next day in drama class, she made no mention of it. Her hooded eyes skimmed the class as usual, flickering over me with maybe a salute of recognition, then resting on Sonia. She was dressed in a Tyrolean “Heidi” outfit with hair pulled temporarily into braids.

  By Wednesday I was hurting. For two days I’d elected not to eat lunch with Steve. One lunch hour in the library. The second at a corner table with a noisy bunch of brown-baggers. I was lonely, but it was too late to go back to bed and be a rape victim. Instead, I pretended that time was passing faster than it really was, urging the weekend nearer. But on Wednesday afternoon the new/old routine came unglued.

  Mother’d been conducting a daily countdown to see how fast I’d get home after school. There was no sense in fighting her about it. Maybe in time she’d begin to relax. I wanted to stop by on the way home and see Mrs. Montgomery, only for a moment. Just to reinstate myself as a baby sitter. I wasn’t looking forward to more solitary Saturday nights—at the scene of the crime, but I wasn’t going to let that cheat me out of my sitting money, or change anything. Nothing was going to cripple me.