by Richard Peck
“Should you be up and around?” Mrs. Montgomery said. She looked almost shocked when she answered the door.
“I’m fine,” I said, bubbling, totally in command, nearly bouncing. I was ready to burst right into her front hall, except that her hand was still on the doorknob.
“Well, come in, Gail,” she said, dropping the hand. Angie and Missy were in the living room, watching Sesame Street on the set where I’d spent so many hours with The Late Show. My eyes flickered over to the fireplace and the brass poker. I couldn’t help that.
“Come on back to the kitchen,” Mrs. Montgomery said. “The living room’s being occupied by hostile troops.” Her house was shadowless and unthreatening during the day. It could have been anybody’s. There was still a morning pot of coffee on the stove and the smell of burning from the oven. The kitchen table was swirled with grape jelly. “Not one of my organized days,” she said, transferring a pan of black brownies to the sink.
“Let me help—”
“No!” She whirled around and blew a strand of hair out of her eye. “No, I can manage.” We stared at each other for a second before she said, “You didn’t go back to school, did you?”
“Yes, sure. Couldn’t stay home forever.”
“No, I suppose not.”
The conversation was earthbound. And I needed to start home anyway. “I just came by to say I can start sitting again, on Saturday night.”
“I doubt if your mother—”
“I may have a battle there, but—”
“Don’t fight her, Gail,” she said. “I don’t think you should bother.”
“Look, if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s to be careful.”
“Yes. Well, so have I.” She turned back toward the sink, changed her mind, and came over to sit down across the table from me. “I don’t know how to tell you this,” she said. “I didn’t think you’d want to baby-sit any more. It never even crossed my mind.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve found somebody else already.”
“In this town? Not with my luck.”
“Well, then.”
“I just don’t think it’s a good idea, Gail,” she said, very fast. “I—I wouldn’t be easy in my mind, about you or the kids. After—it—happened, I thought it was all my fault. I felt like an absolute ass going out every Saturday night to that club, carefree as a . . . I almost said a young girl. You’re not all that carefree though.”
“Let’s try it again,” I said. “Then if I find out I can’t stand being in this house alone with the kids, and you can’t stand going out and leaving me in charge, then we can call it off.”
She sat there a long time, picking away at a hangnail, letting time pass as if she hadn’t already made up her mind.
“I’m sorry,” she said finally. “I’d just like to forget it. Phil Lawver—I didn’t even mean to mention his name to you—won’t get what’s coming to him. There’ll be no . . . just conclusion to any of this. So what’s left but to just try to forget it?”
“I don’t see how we can.”
“Well, I don’t mean this to sound harsh. But it happened to you. It didn’t happen to me or to . . . Angie or Missy. It’s hard enough to raise two little girls all alone even without reminders all the time of what can happen.”
“Is that what I am? A reminder?”
“Don’t take it personally,” she said. “I wasn’t ready for this conversation, and so I’m saying everything wrong. Let’s just drop it. I appreciate your help in the past, but things are different now.”
What could be more final? When I got to the front door, she told me to wait a minute. I thought she’d changed her mind, but she ran back down the hall to dig in a drawer of the telephone table. She came back holding out a closed fist. I was afraid she was going to try buying me off—severance pay. But she dropped Steve’s green heart into my hand. When I was walking away down the street under the bare branches, I looked at it and the broken chain.
I walked on, not even trying to see things from Mrs. Montgomery’s viewpoint. I was feeling too lost for that. Determined to be so careful all the time, I made it nearly to the end of the block in a daze. I never heard the MG sports car edging up next to the curb, crackling the leaves in the gutter. It was right beside me and braking to a stop when I looked down to see Phil Lawver in the driver’s seat.
CHAPTER
Fourteen
“Want a lift home?” he said. It would have been the perfect casual touch if he’d ever offered me a ride before. His pale blue eyes were washed gray by the time of day. My legs tried to buckle. I caught the side of my shoe in a crack of the brick sidewalk, nearly fell, but didn’t.
Clenching the heart and the chain, I wondered what kind of weapon they’d be. I began walking faster, planning to outdistance a sports car, I guess. The red hood crept forward, pacing me. “Hey, wait a minute, Gail. What’s wrong?”
“I think I can just make it back to Mrs. Montgomery’s,” I said in a pretty stable voice. “She’s at home. She’ll hear me yelling before I get to her door. You remember Mrs. Montgomery’s house, don’t you? It’s just back there.”
“What’s all this about Mrs. Montgomery?” he said in a sensible voice. I forced myself to look at him. His arm in the suede sleeve was resting along the low window. He was guiding the steering wheel with a couple of careless fingers. His blond hair was in shadow, but it looked damp at the ends.
If anybody says or does anything you don’t like, yell bloody murder, the lawyer had said. Shall I yell now, I wondered, scream bloody murder into the late afternoon air without a soul in sight? Shall I bring all the housewives defrosting dinners to their small-paned windows? What if you yell and nobody cares? I could picture myself in the distance, screaming my heart out there on the sidewalk, while that nice-looking Lawver boy sat astonished in his sports car.
“Keep away from me, Phil,” I said. “I don’t think you understand . . . anything. So just keep away.”
“I didn’t realize.” He looked up at me as the car drifted along. “I just didn’t realize you were that interested in me. You know Alison and I have this thing going. I can’t let anything . . . get in the way of that. Surely you understand.”
I crossed the intersection, reeling from that. No traffic unfortunately. Nothing stirred. Even the songbirds had gone south.
“You don’t remember, do you? You don’t remember the other night,” I said, watching where I walked, wondering if that car door might suddenly swing open.
“Which other night?” Phil asked. He was trying to be patient again.
“You don’t remember that you raped me.”
The wire wheels crinkled through the leaves. “Rape?” he said. “I’d say that was fairly unlikely from both our points of view. I don’t have to . . . rape . . . anybody, and you, well, you’re pretty open-minded.”
“Don’t ever come near me again, Phil. I’ve already seen a law— Just don’t ever come near me again.” Was I repeating myself? Beginning to babble?
“I can’t think why I’d want to,” he said. There was just the slightest edge in his voice, cutting the cool.
We were coming up to old Mr. Wertheimer’s house. The property nobody could ever run across when we were kids, because Mr. Wertheimer had a rock garden out in front with a little flagstone path winding in and out of the marble Cupids and moss roses. Every rock carefully in place.
My hand surprised me by sweeping down and grabbing up one of the border rocks. It was whitewashed, the size of a baseball, heavy as a boulder. The heart and the chain I was clutching fell into the little muddy bowl of earth beneath it.
I whirled around and brought the rock down on the hood of Phil’s car. The explosion of stone against smooth sheet metal. The hood latch sprang open. My red reflection creased. I swung the rock sideways then with a discus thrower’s might. It crashed against the windshield. A star shape of frosted glass appeared between me and Phil’s face. His mouth was open in surprise.
He must hav
e hit the accelerator. The MG jumped forward, and I leapt back, teetering on the curb. He didn’t brake for the next corner. The car was a red blur in the gray distance before I caught my breath.
I walked on then. My fingers felt mashed. I’d broken my nails on the car hood. But there was still a lot of fight in me. If that MG had cruised by again, I could have sent the rock through the side window. Oh, I could have done a lot of things. I could have killed.
Just knowing that helped. Knowing I could give Phil Lawver a little hell, even if that only meant scratching his surfaces. Even that much would have been hell for him.
I knew all about Phil then. I felt drunk with all the knowledge. I knew he was missing an important, human part. Call it insanity if you feel like making excuses for him. He thought everything belonged to him and that he could do no wrong. Nobody had ever told him otherwise. At that moment it didn’t even chill me to realize how many people there are like that in this world.
But still he was a cripple. When he finally forced himself to prove his virility, he had to stage a horror show to bring it off. Even knocking me out had helped to preserve his privacy.
How scared he must be. How scared he’d always be, always having to forget things he couldn’t stand to remember. It was a life sentence, in solitary confinement. He’d be in his house alone, no matter who was there with him.
What can I say? That thinking this made me feel better? No, but it got me through the moment. I carried the rock from Mr. Wertheimer’s garden all the way home, not thinking about the moments to come.
* * *
On Saturday night Mother and Dad and I drove through a winterish rain to the Pilgrim Theatre to see the Dovima Malevich Film Festival. The three of us. I hadn’t been to a show with both my parents since—when, grade school? Something Disney at Radio City. That little family of ours, once three free spirits, hardly connecting, was still in a huddle. The lights were down when we stumbled in to find three seats together. But I was past caring about being seen out on a weekend night chaperoned by my parents. There weren’t any alternatives anyway.
They showed the film we’d seen at school. The thief in the French garden one. And two others a lot like it except that one was a desert picture and the other was set in wartime—World War I, I guess. The men all wore stiff-billed hats and wrappings around their legs. They went to a bombed-out nightclub where Madam Malevich was a dancer, shedding long-fringed shawls and spinning to silent music. She was always the same. Sinuous, young, with worldly eyes working the camera, impossibly slim. She flickered at us in the darkness, and the fairly unruly crowd would lapse into silences, captured by her over and over.
“I just can’t believe it,” Mother whispered. “Can it really be that same old lady?”
Three films were enough. When the lavender lights came up, people craned their necks, hoping to catch a glimpse of Madam Malevich in the audience. She wasn’t there, of course.
It was a full house without her. When we stood up to leave, I caught a glimpse of Sonia Slanek at the end of the front row. I remember that especially because we were both putting on yellow slickers. She even had a red scarf something like mine. But she was better at draping it around her neck. And who knows what exotic costume she had on underneath? She was alone, of course. Then I couldn’t see her any more for the black silhouettes all moving to the exits.
They found Sonia the next day, just at the edge of town where Meeting Street becomes the Woodbury Road. She’d been walking home, out to the barn where the sculpture stood in the yard.
When I heard, I pictured her teetering along on the crown of the road in high-heeled boots, lost in her world, enjoying the rain in her face and the dark. Not minding the solitude. Not noticing at first the car lights behind her, the dented hood creeping closer.
I wondered at first if Phil had thought it was me. But I could never know that. And what could it matter to him? The town was full of girls with red scarves and yellow slickers. Or in Levi’s or tweed skirts or waitress uniforms. Girls slipping out of cars in parking lots, unlocking front doors, walking home alone from the Pilgrim Theatre. We didn’t deserve identity in his mind. We were prey.
That Sunday was cold and bright. A perfect day for weekenders up from New York to tear around the country roads, inhaling real air and scouting for antique shops.
A young couple from Bronxville found Sonia. Somehow they noticed the red scarf in the ditch and the tire tracks on the soft shoulder of the road. They had the wits to stop and investigate.
They brought her in to Oldfield Hospital, thinking she was dead. I imagined her lying in the back of their station wagon, stiff from the cold like a bundle of firewood. She was half strangled by her scarf, people said, and under her slicker her clothes were torn off.
The weekly newspaper carried the story. It doesn’t go in for vivid details. The readers add those. It didn’t even give Sonia’s name, protecting her, I guess, because she wasn’t dead. It used the word assaulted and moved quickly on to say she was being treated for exposure at the hospital. Her condition was listed as fair. She had pneumonia by the middle of the week. And again I pictured her, under the oxygen tent now, like Snow White in her glass coffin.
The town held its breath—at least the school did—wondering if Sonia would die. Waiting for that moment, suspending judgment. Passing the time by passing the word.
The man who ran the British Imports Automotive Garage was said to have said that the tire tracks were made by an MG. Somebody said that Sonia was conscious and giving information. Somebody else said she wasn’t, that they were keeping her alive on a machine. Valerie Cathcart said the police chief had been seen coming out of the principal’s office. Somebody else said that couldn’t be right. Nobody ever came out of the principal’s office. Not even the principal.
I hadn’t been to my locker for a week, not when I knew Alison would be there. We’d worked around each other, and I’d carried a full load of books through all the school days. Suddenly, they were too heavy. I was at my locker after morning classes, and so was she. Our elbows were inches apart, but we pretended we were on separate planets.
Then Steve was there too, taking me by the arm, turning me around. “Do you know who did that to you?” he said in a voice that carried past me to Alison and beyond. “Did you identify him?” We stood there, as close as lovers, and he wasn’t letting go of my arm. “I didn’t ask you before because I thought you wouldn’t want to talk about it. Maybe couldn’t talk about it because of the police.”
“The police were through with me in the first moment,” I said, “but I told them who it was.”
Still he didn’t let go of my arm. “Do you think it was the same one who did this to Sonia Slanek?” Why is he getting at me now, I wondered, but in a way I knew.
“I think so.” And then I turned away from Steve. “Don’t you, Alison?”
I’d never seen her run from anything. Not actually pick up her heels and run. She wove through the lunch-hour mob, leaving her locker door standing open.
I closed it for her. People will rob you blind. Even people without needs. “It wasn’t . . . was it Phil?” Steve stared past me to the point where the crowd was swallowing Alison up. I could feel what he was feeling. We were still close enough for that. There he stood, a perfectly reasonable, more-than-intelligent human being who hadn’t seen the truth because he’d been standing too close to it.
“Yes. It was Phil.”
“And you didn’t tell—”
“The lawyer told me not to make any accusations I couldn’t prove, and there wasn’t any proof.” My mind swerved quickly among the people I’d told anyway.
“I don’t require proof,” Steve said. “You should have told me.”
“What was the point? You—you might have done something silly. You and I—we were coming to the end of what we had together. That very thing might have— Oh, I don’t know.”
“Might have forced me to make some grand gesture?”
“Yes. Maybe som
ething like that. What do I know about the male ego?”
“Here’s more male ego for you. I’m not quite the well-coordinated jock Phil is. But I could have come up behind him in a dark alley and laid a length of pipe across the back of his head.”
“And what good would that have done me?” I said.
“I wasn’t thinking about you. You seem to be protecting yourself pretty well by keeping silent. I was thinking of Sonia.”
“It’s pretty damned easy for you to talk. It couldn’t have happened to you.”
He dropped his hand from my arm. “In a way, it’s happening to us all, isn’t it?” he said, and walked away.
It was. I knew that later, when my defenses were down. If Sonia died or withdrew farther into her shell, Phil would be home free again. There’d be another victim and then another. It was happening to us all. Who was safe, except for Alison, who was in a kind of danger all her own? Let Alison work that out for herself, I thought. But I couldn’t let it go at that.
* * *
I cornered her in the locker room. In a way it was just the right place. She hated gym class. She never liked to sweat.
“Oh for Lord’s sake, what do you want,” she said when I moved in on her. I had her in a corner. There was nothing behind her but a high wire-covered window.
“You said the other day that if I ever made any waves, you’d go right to Mrs. Lawver,” I said.
“Yes, and I meant it. You can’t manage to keep that mouth of yours shut, can you?” She was only half into her gym suit. It was true she was never without a bra.
“I just can’t please anybody,” I said. “Steve’s accused me of keeping quiet to make things easy for myself. And you say I talk too much. Maybe you better have the Lawvers run me and my nothing family out of town.”
“Oh, why don’t you just go of your own accord.” She brought up a deep breath and tossed her head. A very bad performance.
“I think you ought to go to Mrs. Lawver, Alison, and have a talk with her. Maybe you can make her understand about Phil. You may just be the only girl in town safe enough to be outdoors by yourself, let alone near his house.”
