“No, I’m sorry, the answer is,” Alex Trebek said, “ ‘Who was Queen Elizabeth the Second?’ ”
Mrs. Finlay made a disgusted sound.
A train hooted in the distance. Charlie turned to the window. Set low in the wall, it looked out on a big backyard filled with trees, now throwing long shadows in the evening light. Beyond the trees, there were the playing fields of Bishop Carroll. In seven years, he’d be out there in the spring, playing lacrosse. There was no talking in lacrosse, that he’d seen anyway, and it was invented by the Indians, and he liked Indians.
Charlie picked up his Captain America book and walked across the worn carpet, stiff-legged. Waiting for him, propped against an old Nike box, was Buzz Lightyear, the king of Planet Earth of the future.
Charlie.
The voice had come from inside his head, but far away inside it. Charlie looked up, startled. No one had ever talked to him inside his head before. Not even his daddy. Only the Magician, who’d visited twice.
The window shades were pulled all the way up and he could see leaves blowing over the white snow in the backyard. The trees shook their branches in the wind back and forth. Who would be in the backyard? The Kittinger boys next door had stopped sneaking over to throw rocks at his window, ever since his father found out what they were doing and went over to have a talk with Mr. Kittinger. He never even saw the boys in their backyard for six months after that.
Charlie?
The voice was closer now. Charlie squinted his eyes, and suddenly his heart skipped a beat. There was something out there, in the back corner of the yard. One of the tree trunks had gotten thicker at the bottom. There was something extra on it. No, standing next to it. Not moving, pretending to be part of the tree trunk.
Charlie scuttled back against the back wall across from the window. The open doorway was three feet away to his left. Should he get Mrs. Finlay to come in here with him? Or should he go out there and sit and watch Jeopardy! with her? Charlie turned and through his doorway saw the circle of light from Mrs. Finlay’s reading lamp on the living room carpet. He could be there in three seconds.
Charlie turned back. The dark shape was gone, but now, four trees closer, he could make out someone standing in the snow. It was a girl. She was wearing a hood that made a teepee shape over her head.
His stomach grew cold. He looked again at the glow of light from the living room, but his eyes came back to the girl. What did she want? And how could she talk inside his head?
What do you want? he said, without moving his lips.
He could hear the girl’s voice. Raggedy, as if there were something wrong with her breathing, as if she had something caught in her throat.
Please help me, Charlie.
The girl stepped behind a tree and disappeared. Charlie searched the window frame frantically. Maybe she’s hiding, he thought. He started to crawl toward the windows, his fingers scraping across the nub of the carpet. As he passed a Captain America figure sprawled on the rug, he picked him up in his right hand and carried him along. The room suddenly seemed huge and the window far away. He was small and down low, like an ant crawling on the floor.
He heard breathing in his head. Ragged breathing.
Help you do what? he thought.
“Rhett Butlah,” he heard Mrs. Finlay say, but she seemed far away now. He couldn’t hear Alex Trebek’s answer. His ears filled with a low staticky sound.
He reached the window and propped Captain America up against the wall beneath it. He put one hand up on the white paint of the little window shelf under the glass pane. Then the other. He lifted his head up and brought his nose up and peeked from just above his hands. Where did she go?
His eyes shifted all the way left, but all he could see were the blue-gray shadows of the trees on the snow and the green shape of the Kittingers’ garage and the front end of Mr. Kittinger’s Mustang through the chain-link fence. His eyes came around slowly to the right, scanning, pausing, and scanning again. There was the bird feeder on the pole that his daddy had put up. The tool shed with its two big Xs on the doors. Hanging on a wire, an old sack full of clothespins that his mommy . . .
Suddenly, he felt her. His eyes froze, then shifted slowly all the way right.
Please, please, don’t let it . . .
The girl was standing right outside the window. Her skin was blue, and her eyes were looking at Charlie with some awful expression, as if there were someone standing right behind him with a . . .
Charlie swept his head around. Nothing but his own room, empty. He was panting now, his heart racing.
He turned back to the girl. Her mouth was open, and she was pressing her fingers against the glass, as if she wanted to come in. The fingers were pale as French fries when they go in the oven. Charlie’s heart leapt and froze at the same moment. His eyes were riveted on her pale neck.
The throat. There was something wrong with it. It was ragged and black with dried blood.
That’s why you can’t breathe good, he thought.
Yes.
Somebody hurt you?
Her breathing.
Come with me.
Charlie stared at her. The glass seemed to disappear, and it was as if he were out there in the cold, standing next to her, the freezing wind blowing right through his jammies and goose-bumping his skin.
The Jeopardy! music rang in his ears, just the faintest trace. Mrs. Finlay’s voice came to him from far away, but he couldn’t tell what she was saying through the wall of static.
The girl stared at him, the eyes round and horrible, glistening. Why could he feel her terrible breath on his face?
Watch, Charlie.
She closed her eyes. Her head sank down, the greasy hair hanging at both sides. Charlie’s eyes were bugging out, but he knew she wanted to show him something. He tried to turn toward the door, but his head wouldn’t move now. The muscles were frozen like when he fell asleep in his daddy’s chair.
Are you . . . watching?
Charlie let out a whimper and shut his eyes slowly, the light flooding out until there was nothing left.
He was in a basement, lit by a naked bulb. Clanging behind him. Like something walking. The basement was filled with old broken furniture and a box that said Morgan’s Apples and an old-fashioned thing that heated up water and it was dark and cold.
I don’t like it here, he said to himself.
A fat teenager walked straight past him, carrying a wooden box. He blotted out the light from the bulb, and then he was past it, a few feet in front of Charlie. He set the box on the ground, then stepped up on it. Charlie saw something dangling above the boy’s head that brushed gently against his hair. Was it a vine, one that was growing on the inside of a house, and how could that be? Charlie couldn’t see the boy’s face, but he felt that he knew him. The boy moved and the thing above him . . . It was a rope, tied to one of the beams above, a rope with a little circle at the bottom of it.
Too sccaaaaarrrry.
The boy began to chant something. Charlie listened, but the words were strange and not even English. The boy took the rope and looped it slowly over his head. It fell onto his back with a little thump, and the coil was thick as a snake. The boy began to pull the rope from the other side, like Charlie’s daddy putting on a necktie and pulling it tighter and tighter around his neck. He was chanting those strange words. When the rope was as tight as it would go, puckering the skin on the back of his neck, the boy leaned forward.
Don’t do that, pleeeeeaaase.
Something was going to happen. It was going to happen soon and Charlie tried to open his eyes but they wouldn’t go and then the boy fell and the rope caught him with a jerk, making a ripping noise against his neck.
He swung there, turning, and Charlie couldn’t close his eyes and now he didn’t want to see the boy’s face but here it came, around and back and around
again, and his tongue was sticking out and the eyes were staring at Charlie.
Uncle Matt. Uncle Matt from the photo in the hallway.
The basement disappeared, and now it was a young blond woman, her back to him, wearing a red dress and black shoes with tall heels that his mommy always said were hard to walk on. She was sitting at a desk with a mirror propped on the back edge and things spread across it in a mess in front of her, as if she’d been pulling things out of the desk drawers looking for something. Yes, that was it, because two of the drawers were hanging open. The girl took a thick silver thing and held it up. It was a penknife like the one Mr. Roy, the janitor at school, had on his key chain. She slowly opened the blade, which winked in the light from the table lamp.
Please make it stop, I want it to . . .
The woman looked into the mirror and reached up with the knife. She turned the blade to the flat side and slid it along her neck like she was hot and the steel was cool on her skin and her eyes were wide now, like she was surprised, and her lips were saying something over and over. Then the blade turned and—Oh, no, please no—went into her neck, and Charlie watched as it sliced down and a spout of blood went rushing at the mirror.
No, please make it—
Aunt Stephanie, who was supposed to live in Georgia with the peaches.
A young boy, his own age, asleep and being carried from a car, its engine rumbling. The vehicle was old and heavy, the road covered with ice. Charlie couldn’t see who was carrying the boy, but he whimpered in his sleep and they were walking across the road and it was icy so they should watch out. There was a railing coming up; he could see it now and past it, all black and scary. The woman carried the boy toward the railing, then stopped a few feet away, as if listening. Charlie watched the side of her face and it was the right side and the eye was black and staring, and suddenly he knew: this was Middy. Bad old Middy. Charlie’s heart seemed to thud against his rib cage so loud that surely Mrs. Finlay would come and he was very afraid now and wanted to wake up oh so much.
The wind howled and little funnels of snow came racing down out of the black and past the railing. Middy opened her mouth and made a horrible sound, like when you step on a dog’s foot by accident. Then she shook her head and rushed toward the railing, the boy limp in her arms, his bare feet hanging down over her limbs, and they must be very cold. Why didn’t she give him some socks? Why did she have him out so late—
Middy stumbled to the railing and she threw the boy into the funnels of snow, pushing him out from her chest as if he were hurting her, and the boy screamed once loud and scared as he went down, down, down into the darkness.
Middy turned and ran back to the car. She opened the driver’s side door, and Charlie saw a jumble of nightclothes, feet, and uncombed hair. There were more children, stacked like firewood on the backseat. But she bent down and reached into the car, and her big behind shook like a dog’s as she tried to pull the top body off the others, and Charlie tried to look away but the muscles in his neck were still stuck. And as Middy was fumbling in the backseat, pawing at the kids there, his eyes locked on the face of one of them—a girl, with a green nightgown with red flowers on it, almost like Christmas—because the girl was waking up, and Charlie watched as she wiped her eyes and then she saw Middy and the bridge railings and the girl’s mouth opened wide and she began to scream and Charlie screamed, too:
Middy, ppppppleeeeeeaaaaasse!
Suddenly, Middy and the road and the bridge vanished and Charlie’s eyes snapped open and he was kneeling on the floor. The light above his head was on. His hands were trembling as he reached up to rub his face.
“Charlie?” came a voice from behind him, far away. It was Mrs. Finlay. “Are you all right?”
Charlie looked at the window, showing only the inside of the room and his reflection, pale, mouth open. The girl was gone. He could feel it.
Mrs. Finlay was pulling on his arm. He didn’t want to get up. Middy was in the hallway, and Charlie now knew what she’d done.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Ramona Best was asleep on the living room couch. She was dreaming. Her lips were moving, and a whine of protest slipped out from between her lips.
From the kitchen came the sound of the back door rattling on its hinges.
Ramona slept on, her eyes moving rapidly back and forth beneath the lids.
The door shuddered. A shadow blocked the light underneath it, and the handle jiggled. Something was slipped into the key of the lock, and the shadow shifted.
Ramona sat up with a start. She looked to the window and began to edge cautiously up from the chair. Then she heard a lock turning and her eyes went to the doorway to the kitchen.
The back door rattled, sharper this time. Ramona froze and drew a breath deep into her lungs.
Zuela. It had to be Zuela.
She walked quickly to the kitchen and up to the door.
“Who is it?” she said.
The voice came back instantly. “Michael fucking Jackson. Open the door, girl.”
Ramona closed her eyes, then turned the dead bolt and opened the door. Zuela came striding in. She was tall and regal, dressed in a thick Saks Fifth Avenue overcoat that she’d bought at T.J. Maxx in one of the great coups of her life. Her long and handsome face was done up, but lined with exhaustion behind the makeup. She had a broad beak of a nose, full lips, and luminous brown eyes.
Zuela worked on the perfume counter of Saks Fifth Avenue, selling lotion and scents to rich American women and bargain-shopping Europeans. She shook her head at Ramona.
“You still up?”
Zuela flicked on the overhead light, then went to the kitchen counter and hoisted a plastic bag—it looked to be full of green plantains—up on the newly washed linoleum counter.
“Yep,” Ramona said.
“Mona! Why are you sitting here in the dark?”
Ramona shrugged. “I was in the living room.”
“Mm-hmm.”
Zuela went to the fridge and reached for one of the three bottles of wine—two red, one white—that stood next to it. She took down a wineglass and poured herself a full glass of red, the merlot chugging at the neck as she tilted it down. When it was nearly full to the brim, she set it down, put the cork back in, then came down and sat across from Ramona at the kitchen table.
“You enjoying your break?”
Ramona said nothing. She’d told Zuela that Wartham observed something she called Founder’s Day, a long weekend when they honored the Puritans who’d signed the deed creating the college on an old Shawnee settlement. Zuela didn’t use the Internet, and she was a little in awe of Wartham College, which she’d seen exactly once, when she dropped Ramona off, idling in the Altima amid the gleaming Range Rovers and Mercedes coupes that ferried the other girls to school for freshman orientation.
I’ll come back for your graduation, she’d said then. And you better make sure you’re up there on the stage with aaaalllllllll these white bitches.
Ramona could feel Zuela’s eyes boring into her now.
“It’s Saturday night, Ramona,” Zuela said.
“I know that.”
“When’s this Founder’s Day thing over with?”
Ramona shot her a stay out of my business look. “It went on all week,” she said.
“A day that goes on all week? My, my, those white folk can do anything up there, can’t they?”
Ramona glared at her. “Have I ever had a problem at Wartham?”
Zuela took a sip of wine, then shook her head slowly.
“Have I ever brought home one report with anything lower than a B-minus?”
“Unh-uh.”
“Then mind your affairs, thank you.”
Zuela’s eyes were heavy. “You haven’t left the house once since you got back. You haven’t called Girl or nobody. You’re up half the night—I can hear y
ou watching TV on that computer. And if the circles under your eyes get any darker, they’re going to start calling you Raccoona.”
Ramona frowned.
“What happened, Ramona? Are you in some kind of trouble?”
Ramona shook her head. “I told you to mind your business.”
“Honey, listen to me. You’re one semester away from graduating. First in your family. Baby, please don’t tell me you got messed up with some boy up there . . .”
Ramona sucked her teeth. It was just like Zuela to think the worst thing that could happen to a twenty-first-century college woman was to get herself pregnant. The woman was trapped in some 1950s idea of coeds and rampaging college quarterbacks. She had no idea. No one around here did.
She opened her mouth to reply, but Zuela held up a finger.
“Don’t get fresh,” Zuela said.
“My grades are fine. I will graduate. Can you just leave me alone?”
Zuela exhaled. “Tell me what’s wrong then. Are you involved with one of those girls?”
Ramona rolled her eyes. The second worst thing that could happen to her in Zuela’s eyes would be a lesbian affair. “No, Zuela.”
Zuela gave her a hooded, doubtful look. “What then?”
Ramona caught her aunt’s gaze and held it. Zuela’s eyebrows went up, and she took another draw on the merlot.
Should I or shouldn’t I? Ramona thought. She wanted badly to tell someone, just to speak the words out loud and see how they sounded. Zuela was crafty and practical, but prone to becoming excited. Ramona didn’t know if it was worth the risk.
Finally, Ramona spoke.
“Zuela?” she said, softening her tone.
“Yes, baby?”
“Have you ever seen someone who died?”
Zuela’s eyes had been mellowed by the wine. A smile spread across her face. “Shoooo. Seen someone who died? I’ve been to a million wakes.”
Ramona rolled her eyes. “See someone in your dreams, Zuela. Someone who’s passed.”
Zuela made a tch noise. “Well, of course, Mona. I dream about your mother all the time.”
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