“Hey,” I say. “You should just do those clothes tomorrow. You look pretty tired.”
Marita massages the corner of her eye. “Tal vez,” she says. “I am waiting for your brother to come home.”
“How did you know he was gone?” I demand. “Did you see him leave?”
“Sshh,” Marita hisses. “I see him just before and he says he forgot his shoes by the bohío you all are building.”
“The war fort. He didn’t go there, though. He went to Ninth Street to go fight some kid, like he said at dinner. Like I told you he was going to do at dinner.” I can hear my voice accusing her.
“Well, what can I say when Charlie tells me he is back in fifteen minutes?” Marita hooks her hands together into her lap and her tired eyes fasten on me sternly. “You know this thing, you say nothing to Señor y Señora?”
I twitch my head up away from her gaze. “I wouldn’t rat on Charlie.”
“He will be home soon. You can wait with me if you want.” she says. “But no jumping around the way you do, like a loco monkey. Makes me jump, too.”
I try to relax and so I sit on the floor to do my meditating. Marita reaches down and turns on her standing floor fan. The breeze lifts the ends of my hair and cools my sunburn. Marita settles back in her chair and picks up her paperback from off the floor.
“What are you reading?” I ask her. “Another romance?”
“Mmm, a good one,” she says. “Very—ah—with lots of love.”
“Like, sumptuous, you mean?”
“I do not know this word,” she murmurs. She reads intensely, like the words are a feast—I know how she feels, since I bet it’s how I look when I read my Nancy Drews. I study the cover. The woman is very bosomy and the man behind her looks like he’s biting her neck. It definitely looks very sumptuous. I just learned that word myself.
“I know a poem about winter,” I say after a minute. I’m interrupting her reading but my meditating just seems to be making me more nervous. “Do you want to hear it?”
“Claro.” Marita fixes her gaze to me and tucks her knees up beneath her, and for the second time today, I recite my poem. When I’m finished Marita’s face is just a blank.
“Pues, entonces … I never saw winter and snow,” she says. “Except in movies.”
“It’s just a stupid nursery rhyme and sometimes it makes me sad but it feels good to say.” I shrug.
Marita picks up her book and starts reading again, but when she feels me looking at her she waves it at me. “Escucha—I will read you this,” she says. “Listen.” Marita opens the book and reads out loud from it. The strange, Spanish words don’t exactly stick to me, but when she is finished I’m quiet, because Marita’s eyes are far away, dreamy, and wistful like the girl on the cover of my journal. I wonder if she just read me a sexy part.
Linda’s body stirs, as if she understands the sense of Marita’s words even in her sleep.
“I only understand a little bit of Spanish.” I confess what Marita already knows. “But I am going to try to learn more. I know more than Charlie, that’s for sure.”
“Maybe then you teach it to Charlie,” Marita says. “He listens to you, sometimes.”
Charlie. Where is he and where is Ted? Marita’s room is beginning to feel way too warm.
“I need some water,” I say, getting up from the floor.
“No running off to find him,” Marita orders. “I don’t need two missing. He will be back soon.”
I close the door gently behind me. It hadn’t occurred to me that I should run off to find him without Ted until Marita slipped the thought into my head. Now the idea gradually shifts through me and I move slowly, like a zombie, from the kitchen to the front door and step outside to the concrete steps. But I don’t feel so good. My stomach’s kinked with worry and the sunburn’s heat on my face warms my cold fingertips. Maybe I really am sick. I wonder what the symptoms are for yellow fever.
Sounds of music and laughter from the house lap at me in waves. I look out over the yard, torn between the safe light leading to my house and the dim glow of the moon that might lead me to Charlie. Above me, a moth snaps into the small iron lantern that burns over our front door. I watch it until I can’t anymore.
All at once, tiredness pours through me, heavy and gray as concrete. I am stopped by the feeling, by its thickening in my feet, my fingers, around my heart and lungs. I lift a bare foot off the step, surprised that I can move at all, amazed at how I can fill each minute with so much worry that I feel like I’m always drowning. It’s a clear break of thought, and then the accident smashes through my mind in a thousand hurting pieces. I close my eyes but the noises don’t end; the police and ambulance sirens, the shouts through the darkness, the screaming. Again I can feel the cold cold air, the horrible weight of a body crushed over me, and then lifted away.
I leap off the bottom stair and start running.
18
IT’S NOT SO MUCH that I know where Charlie would go as I can reason out what he wouldn’t do. He wouldn’t want to run down Main Street, but would try to cut through as many people’s properties as he could, so that he could feel more covert and commando-ish. He also has less chance of being spotted and asked for ID by the night-patrolling MP’s if he keeps away from the paved roads.
I turn off Third Street when I hit the top of the hill, then veer diagonally through Major Wimble’s lawn and over to Fourth Street. Charlie wouldn’t want to be close to the gatehouse of the base, because he has more chance of running into a parent who might telephone Mom and Dad about sighting one of their children on the loose. Charlie sightings, at odd hours in strange places, are commonly reported by Fort Bryan do-gooders. By staying over the hill and near the pit, where we know fewer people, he’s better camouflaged.
I’m running fast, but my heart’s pounding in sick, stop-motion thuds. I feel like I’m in one of those dreams where no matter how fast you run, your joints seem stuck and you know you can’t get away from where you are—or get to where you need to be. Dr. Forrest says those dreams are common for people with chronic anxiety. My feet stub into unexpected rocks and sticks and I cry out in whisper-screams. The regular old sounds prickle me now; a shout, the slam of a screen door, the rustling of unseen enemies lurking in the trees.
Moonlight trickles weakly over the houses. A few have their porch and outside lights on, but pockets of black space seem to jump out in front of me. I just keep hoping that I won’t trip over a lawn chair or a Big Wheel or something. Faceless commies could be hunched in the dark spaces, waiting for me, and I run faster, swallowing up the black night air. My dress keeps twisting up around my legs, and my feet throb every time they slap the ground.
My mind’s whispering “Where is Charlie? Where is Charlie?” like a meditation chant, but I’m remembering something else, thinking back to this other night—it was when we lived in Rhode Island—and Charlie and I were playing food truth or dare.
Charlie dared me to eat a red pepper, chili sauce, and a crusty smear of horseradish, which he had mushed all together and spread on a saltine. When I first told him I wouldn’t eat it, he said that he’d have to tell all the kids at school how I kissed and hugged my stuffed animals before I went to sleep.
“No fair!” I shouted. “That truth’s too familyish!”
“Then you gotta take the dare, I guess. You must eat zee fire cracker!” He held his creation to my mouth—the cracker was so unfairly much worse than the spoon of coffee grounds and Crisco I had just made him swallow.
“Come on, Charlie.” Frustrated tears welled up in my eyes. “Telling that’s not even a choice for me.”
“Sor-ry. One or the other,” he taunted.
“That’s so mean.”
“That’s life.”
The saltine was so poison-hot that I bolted out of the house into the winter cold, and then, since it was dark and there was nowhere to go, I just kept running around and around the house, screaming, like I was in a cartoon. Every time I passed the
kitchen window I could hear Charlie laughing. When I came inside, though, tears still streaming down my face from all those spices, I saw that Charlie had made another fire cracker, which he crammed into his mouth right in front of my eyes.
“Why are you doing that—don’t do that!” I gasped. He howled like a dog and shot out the door, doing laps around the house like I just had, and that’s when I started laughing. I laughed so hard I forgot how much my mouth burned. When he came back inside we both sat on the kitchen floor, rubbing our tongues with wet paper towels while laugh tears striped our cheeks.
But that was over two years ago, before the accident, when Charlie used to know how to undo his mean things. I don’t even know why I’m thinking of that story now, except that I feel sort of the same way now as I did then, doing those laps around the house, running and running and mad at Charlie.
Past Fourth Street the base gets wider, and the neighborhoods are separated by flat fields instead of square, identical yards. The darkness becomes harder to understand or predict. I run through the flat spaces that divide Fifth and Sixth and Seventh streets; I’ve never pushed myself so far so fast and my worry pulses in every heartbeat and every uneven exhale of my breath.
Someone’s approaching, running toward me in the dark; I hear the noise from a distance and then it’s impossibly close. “Charlie!” I cry. “Is that you, Charlie?” I’m scared; Please let it be Charlie, I pray; but the figure that adjusts and takes shape in my eyes is too tall. It’s some man, not Charlie. A freezing terror clenches me and I brake, spinning hard on my heel to sprint in the opposite direction.
“Lane, it’s me. I found him.” A pair of arms grabs me rough around the shoulders and wheels me around.
“Ted! You found him?” I have to work to register and connect to Ted’s face, to calm myself.
“Yeah, yeah, but he’s in bad shape.”
“Charlie,” I repeat. “He’s okay?”
“Hang on a sec, Lane. What I’m trying to say is—”
“What—what are you saying?” I’m shivering and the sweat running down my arms and legs feels cold and slick. My knees buckle and I feel Ted wrenching me up, his hands hooked strong under my arms. He is pulling me up and shaking me.
“Listen,” he says. I’m shivering so hard—I can’t seem to stop shivering.
“Look up and listen, Lane, it’s not that bad. At least, I don’t know, but I don’t think—stop shaking, Lane. You need to get hold of yourself. He’s just off Ninth Street and he’s—okay, he’s a little messed up, okay? And I’m going to get my truck and I need you to help me out. Help me out. Are you listening to me? Are you listening?”
I make my eyes stare at Ted. His face looks gray and damp; it could be shaped from clay, the way it appears under the moon.
“Where is he? I need to see him.”
“That’s right, okay, you need to go stay with him while I get the truck. I think his left leg’s broken and he’s missing some teeth, too, and I don’t know what else, but look—hey are you listening to me?”
“I—yes, I’m listening. Where is he?”
“He’s right off the road by the BQ. He wants me to get the truck and not tell your mom or dad or anyone, just get him to a doctor first.”
“That’s crazy. You know that’s crazy.”
“Listen to me. It’s okay, it’s Charlie being Charlie. So look, this is what I’m going to do. I’m going to get the truck and take him to the Fort Bryan clinic. We’ll call the Duchess and whoever else once we get there. But we got to get him help fast. Are you listening?”
“I’m listening. I hear you.”
“He’s not winning any beauty contests right now.” Ted half-laughs. “Lighten up, Lane, okay? Just try to act like everything’s cool, like he’s not as bad as he looks and most likely feels.”
“Okay, okay. Let me go, I want to go.”
“Then go, go.” He shoves me in the direction of where he has come from and I start running, my fears replaced with purpose. I’m clenching my hands at my sides like Ginny Barker, the fastest girl runner in my grade, and my face feels smooth and determined as I sprint closer and closer to Charlie.
The BQ looks like a prison by night, dwarfing the smaller houses that stand on either side of it. A paper-shaded square of light through one of the BQ windows helps me to pick out my surroundings, but not enough to avoid the exposed drain pipe I accidentally crack my shin against. I fall to the ground with a yelp of pain.
“Lane!”
And then I see him.
19
HIS BODY’S LIKE A bent wire, twisted and leaning against the poured cement wall of the BQ.
“Hey!” I jump up and hobble closer to him, rubbing my shin. “I was so worried about you.”
“That’s a big surprise,” Charlie sniffs. “So long as you didn’t tell Mom.”
“No, I didn’t tell Mom or anyone. Will you tell me what happened?” I crouch next to him, touch the top of his head to make sure he’s real. He looks up to stare at me and I have to fight to keep my expression calm.
Charlie’s face looks like someone torch-blasted it open. Besides being scratched and dirty, blood and dirt are caked around the sides of his mouth. Fresh blood trickles from his gums, and I see dark pockets where teeth should be. Then I notice that one of his legs is bent out from the knee at an abnormal angle. When I touch it, he winces.
“Don’t,” he says.
“Ted’s coming with the truck. He’ll be here any minute.”
“He’s not telling Mom and Dad?”
“No. He says we’ll get you to the clinic first thing and worry about the rest later. That’s not your bad leg, is it?” I ask.
“Other one.”
“That’s some luck, I guess.”
“Yeah.” Charlie touches his hand to the side of his jagged mouth, gently pressing at the scraped puffy skin and the drying blood around his lips. When he talks more blood dribbles out of the corners of his mouth.
“What happened, anyway?”
“I must look pretty bad, the way you’re staring at me.”
“You don’t look so bad now that I’m adjusted. What happened?”
He hesitates, like he’s searching his memory. “Jason McCullough,” he says finally.
“Are you kidding? You got in a fight with Jason McCullough? You found him? He was here with you?” I cannot believe it. And then I don’t believe it.
“I got to the fort and started calling him.” Charlie begins. I have to hold my breath to hear his voice. “I was calling out, like—‘Jason McCullough, you gonna hide in a tree your whole life, like a monkey? Or you gonna come down and fight the fight with me?’ And I was making chicken noises—you know, stuff like that. And then I hear something in the tree like a whispering sound and I start getting more like, anxious, and so …” He stops and pushes the bottoms of his hands into his closed eye sockets. I can’t tell if he’s crying or just really tired.
“I think I scratched my eye.” He speaks just on top of a whisper. “Something feels really weird in my eye, like dirt got in there.”
“Ted’ll be here any minute. Did you climb the tree?”
“So no—yeah, I shinnied up the trunk and got a leg up and when I got to the top there’s this wood ledge and Jason McCullough was there and he punched me and grabbed my leg—my bad one—but I punched him back and he lost balance so he started, like, holding onto my other leg but I kicked him in the face and he let go. That’s when he fell. When I climbed down from the tree, though, he was gone.”
I make my face a mask of concern, but specks of doubt are stirring up in my brain, as I try to grab hold of this crazy old image of Charlie battling Jason McCullough, who keeps flipping back and forth in my memory; sometimes in a soccer uniform with a bowl hair cut, then as a pair of sneakers in a tree.
“We’ll get you to a doctor, Charlie. Someone to fix you up.” I flatten over my doubts with my confident older-sister voice.
“I just wish Ted would hurry,” he s
ighs. “I’m hurting all over.”
It seems like hours before Ted’s truck pulls up to the BQ. He jumps down from the driver’s side and runs to Charlie, hoisting Charlie up in his arms with a mild, “Easy does it, Charleston.”
I follow. In the shadowy dashboard window I see Marita’s face, eyes dark and glittering as a stray cat’s but a million times more comforting.
She climbs out and takes Charlie from Ted with capable arms.
“I’m too heavy,” Charlie insists.
“Lucky for you I ate my fruit this morning,” Marita answers him. Charlie laughs, thankfully.
“You think something got punched up inside him?” I whisper to Ted as Marita slides into the passenger seat, Charlie cradled in her arms.
“We’ll make the doctors take x-rays,” he answers. “Everything’s fine now that we’ve got him.”
I wonder if Ted can see how nothing’s ever exactly fine with old Charlie, that no doctor’s going to be able to find Charlie’s broken parts in an x-ray or stitch him back together so that he doesn’t want to rip himself up again. I wish Ted could see. I’m getting tired of being the only smart pair of eyes watching Charlie.
I try to get rid of these pointless thoughts before they upset me too much.
“Lane, are you okay alone back in the flatbed? We’re just going a short ways.”
“I’m good.”
“Hang on, then.”
I hold its edges as the truck gathers speed once we are off Ninth Street and onto Main Road. I wonder what Mom and Dad are doing, if they noticed that we’re gone. I guess they would just think we were sleeping at the Davidson’s, if anyone bothered to check.
I notice first. The clinic’s closed. There’s only enough amber light shining over the glassed-in reception area to show that it’s empty. I reach my arm around to tap the side of Ted’s door as he wheels the truck around. He leans out.
“Plan B,” he says. He speaks tightly. “McKenna clinic. Okay?”
“Good thinking.”
Ted drives way too fast now, whipping down the road and off-base. McKenna will actually be better; more like a real hospital with an emergency room staff, I remember all the helpful starched people from that time when Charlie stepped on a broken root beer bottle and had to have six stitches in his ankle.
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