Before He Finds Her (7 page)

So many bodies, and she was moving toward them. The excitement she felt last night at the thought of going to the carnival with Phillip had faded over breakfast, faded more on the walk over. She’d been able to compress her fear into the smallest nugget. But stepping onto the church grounds, her body stiffened. It would be easy to release his hand, turn around, walk away. Rush home and apologize to Kendra and Wayne for being an ungrateful niece.

She willed herself on.

As they walked toward the center of the grounds, stepping around muddy patches, Melanie kept an eye out for anyone she might recognize. What if someone spoke to her? She walked head down, avoiding eye contact and talking only in quiet, clipped sentences that were lost among the carnival sounds. “Pardon me?” Phillip kept asking. Finally, he stopped walking and put his hands on her shoulders. “Melanie—no one cares that we’re here.”

She chose to believe him and tried to enjoy herself, taking in the scene: kids riding the Zipper and shrieking; clusters of people huddled at the game booths; smoke from the food carts rising into the sky; couples everywhere strolling arm in arm or hand in hand. She took Phillip’s hand again and let herself be guided through the grounds.

When she first smelled the smoked meat, corn dogs, caramel popcorn, she awaited the nausea, but it was just the opposite—she found herself wanting all of it, right now. And the creaking of the rides’ moving parts, the shouting coming from the game booths, the hum of generators beneath a curtain of calliope music, it hit her all at once, a sharp hunger.
Look at what
I’ve missed
, she thought. Then she shook it off. She hadn’t missed everything. She was here, right now, living this.

She stopped walking on the trampled grass and looked around, slapping one finger into her palm, then two fingers, then three.

“What are you counting?” Phillip asked.

“I’m making a mental list of the things I’ve never done before.”

“What’ve you got so far?”

“Funnel cake,” she said.

He whistled. “What else?”

“Ferris wheel.”

“Is that a good idea?”

“How do you mean?” When he placed his hand gently on her belly, she said, “Oh, look how slowly it’s turning.” They watched until the ride stopped, and a couple of young children—seven or eight years old—stepped out of a car. At its highest point, the cars swayed gently in the breeze. “I can definitely do that,” she said.

“Well, count me out.”

“Why? I thought we could...” She grinned. “Oh, right. Heights. I forgot.”

“It’s a common fear,” he pointed out.

She patted his hand. “You’re a delicate flower. Oh, and I’ve never played one of those games where you try to win stuff.”

So they tried to win stuff: ring-toss, then a booth where Phillip’s plastic racehorse, moved forward with a squirt gun, finished a close second. The winner, a boy of eleven or twelve who himself looked like a horse, with a broad nose and hair down to his neck, pumped his fist into the air and reached out to the game attendant for his prize, a stuffed-animal horse, which the boy looked proud to receive until it occurred to him that he was a twelve-year-old boy holding a stuffed animal. He handed the horse to a smaller girl beside him, who hugged it to her chest.

Melanie was watching the girl pet her new horse, combing back its mane, when she heard: “Mr. Connor! Miss Denison!”

Melanie dropped Phillip’s hand and spun around. Her twelfth-grade English teacher, Mrs. Henderson, beamed at them. “Why, just look at you!” She was flanked by her two daughters.

“Hello, ma’am,” Melanie said.

“You know, Bethany was just asking me if I’d run into any of my students here, and I said to her, well, we’ll just have to wait and see. Isn’t that what I said?”

“Yes,” said her older daughter, who was six.

“No,
I
said it,” said her three-year-old sister.

“You
didn’t
,” Bethany said.

“And now here you are,” Mrs. Henderson said, “looking beautiful as always. So what have you been doing with yourself?”

“I’m taking classes at Mountain Community,” Melanie said. Saying it made her realize how proud she was of this small achievement.

“Oh, I’m glad to hear that,” Mrs. Henderson said. “I thought you’d decided against college.”

“My parents and I talked it over.” She always referred to Kendra and Wayne as her parents. “Aunt” and “Uncle” would invite questions.

“Parents do know best sometimes,” she said, and raised an eyebrow. “Now on to more pressing matters: Phillip, why didn’t you tell me that you and Melanie were an item?”

“We like keeping our business to ourselves,” he said.

It wasn’t particularly scandalous, the two of them. He was never her teacher. Their age difference was only six years—five, come December. He’d graduated from the University of Connecticut and come down here as part of the Teach for America program. Had she seen him in the high school hallways? Sure. But they didn’t formally meet until after she’d already graduated, and she was working in the office supply store and he’d come in one day as a customer.

“Oh, how silly!” Mrs. Henderson said. “Secrets don’t stay secrets for long in Fredonia. Well, you picked yourself a good one. Melanie didn’t have much to say in class, but she’s as smart as—Caitlin, please don’t do that.
Caitlin
. You’ll get muddy.” She took her younger daughter’s hand and helped her to stand up again before refocusing her attention on Melanie and Phillip. “Young love is a wonderful thing!” she announced, and then fake--whispered to Melanie: “You watch out for his big city ways.”

Melanie forced a smile.

“We were about to head over to the Ferris wheel,” Phillip said.

“Of course. You two have yourself a good time.” She winked at Phillip. “See you bright and early on Monday, young man.”

He smiled back. When they’d walked away, he said, “That woman is an idiot.”

“She was always nice to me.”

“Let me ask you something—did you learn anything from her?”

A good point. Melanie was better educated in the progression of Caitlin’s toilet training than in
Hamlet
or
To Kill a Mockingbird.
“Well...”

“And she treats me like a child. You know she’s only twenty-six?”

That seemed impossible. “So tell me,” she said, “what exactly are those big city ways I’ve been warned about?”

He stopped walking. “Come over again tonight, and I’ll show you.”

Her face got warm. “I’m going to ride the Ferris wheel now.”

It was almost 1 p.m., cooler than yesterday, a lovely day to be out. As she waited in line, she plucked a dandelion out of the grass and tucked it behind her ear. The ride attendant put her alone in a pale-green car, lowered the lap bar until it was snug, and said, “Bon voyage.” A few seconds later, she was rising into the air and swaying softly. The ride didn’t go very high, but at the top was a view of the streets of her town, the houses and lawns and cars. Below were the fairgrounds, clumps of people waiting for rides and food. She went up and around, down, up again. The car moved slowly, and the sensation in her belly wasn’t unpleasant. She lost sight of Phillip. Scanning the ground for him, she noticed a group of young kids waving at whichever car was at the top of the loop. Next time she reached the top, she waved back, and then, scanning the crowd again for Phillip she noticed an older man watching her. His gaze stayed on her as she came down to the bottom of the ride, and as she climbed again he raised a large camera to his face and held it there.

“Hey!” she shouted, but he was already walking quickly away, melting into the crowd.

When her car descended again—how many loops would this ride make?—she shouted to the ride attendant, “I need to get off the ride!” but he either didn’t hear or didn’t care, and there she went up again, and down again. “Please!” she shouted the next time, her eyes filling with tears. She considered leaping off, but this was a crazy thought, and anyway she was stuck underneath the lap bar. When the attendant had lowered the bar, his fingers had grazed her thighs. Was it an accident? A cheap feel? In the span of seconds, the whole place had turned sinister.

On the next loop she spotted Phillip again—he had moved off to the side, near where she’d be exiting—and she shouted, “Stop the ride!” just as it began to slow. The attendant started letting people out of the cars beneath her, but the process was maddening: one car, then another, then another. Finally, hers. She ran down the ramp and nearly collided into Phillip.

“Did you see that man?” she asked.

“Who?”

She grabbed Phillip’s arm and tugged him in the direction the man had gone. “He was watching me. He took my picture. We have to find him.” As they ran, she described him: thin, older, gray facial hair, faded blue jeans. They move in and around the crowd, which had swelled from just a few minutes earlier. There were too many people. They’d never find him. He was already gone.

Then, remarkably, there he was: over by the game where you threw Wiffle balls into colored cups to win prizes. His camera was out again.

“Why did you take my picture?” Melanie asked, breathless.

The man turned to face her. “I did?” He studied her face. “Oh—the Ferris wheel.” He stuck out his hand. “Manny Simpson,
Mason City Democrat
.”

“You work for the newspaper?”

“Of course.” He nodded to his camera. “I’m taking pictures for tomorrow’s paper.”

She was momentarily relieved. Who had she thought this man was? She’d been reading too many Hardy Boys novels. But her relief lasted only a moment. “You can’t put my picture in the paper.”

“You looked lovely up there—so happy. And with that flower in your hair...”

She reached up to where she had put the dandelion behind her ear, but it must have fallen out during her rush across the carnival grounds. “You can’t use it.”

“She doesn’t like being photographed,” Phillip said.

“I’m taking hundreds of photos, and the paper will probably only use two or three, so it’s highly unlikely—”

“You can’t, though,” Melanie said. “You have to promise.”

“All right. I’ll make a note of it. No lovely girl on the Ferris wheel.” He smiled and turned away.

Still feeling uneasy, and no longer hungry, Melanie said to Phillip, “I want to leave.”

“Are you sure?”

She didn’t want to disappoint him. This was supposed to be their day out. Their day together. “I’m sure,” she said.

They walked away from the carnival, back toward Phillip’s house, neither of them talking. Finally, he said, “What about my own camera. I’m just curious. Would you ever let me take a picture of you?”

She thought about it. “No.”

“Don’t you trust me?”

“It isn’t a matter of trust.”

“I don’t understand.”

“If I didn’t want you to photograph me naked, would you understand that? Even if you never planned to share the photo with anyone else?”

“Sure,” he said.

“Then just think of me as naked all the time.” She didn’t like her own response—too flippant for the occasion—and she stopped walking. “Okay, I don’t like having to say this, but I will. I need you to protect me. Not like a policeman or a parent. I’m not a helpless child. But I’m also not some typical college freshman. I spend every minute of every day looking over my shoulder. It isn’t a joke.”

“I get that,” he said, rubbing her arm. “It’s just that it was all so long ago—”

His touch felt good, but she needed him to understand. “You’ve been dealing with this for less than a day. I’ve been dealing with it for fifteen years.” The sun had moved out from behind some clouds and was heating up the ground. Before long, the day would probably be as oppressive as yesterday. They started walking again. “Forget it,” she said. “We can talk about it some other time.”

“All right.” He put his arm around her. “But I can handle it. I really can.”

These were reassuring words that raised her spirits until about three seconds after he’d said them, when a squirrel dropped out of the tree under which they were passing. It had either misjudged a jump or slipped, and came whooshing out of the branches and plopped down onto the road just a few feet in front of them.

Melanie heard:
Slap, slap, slap, slap, slap, slap.

The squirrel froze, momentarily stunned, before finding its bearings and darting away from the road toward the curb and scurrying up the nearest tree.

Melanie looked left. Phillip was no longer beside her. She turned around. He was at least twenty feet back, looking sheepish in his flip-flops, which had broadcasted his hasty retreat.

“What the hell was that about?” she asked.

“It startled me.”

“You ran away from a squirrel?”

He walked back to her. “It could have been rabid.”

She started walking quickly ahead without him, this man whose quirky fears were suddenly not remotely endearing. Maybe she’d been drawn to him because he was so different from her aunt and uncle. But if they were smothering her, this was no antidote. An antidote like this would get her killed.

“I need to go home,” she said. “I need to not see you right now.”

“Melanie—”

“Let’s just walk.”

The carnival sounds faded. Soon there were only their footfalls and the cars going by, and the birds and, yes, squirrels mocking them from the trees. When they reached Phillip’s house, they went inside and Melanie collected her backpack and returned to the front door.

“I’m sorry,” Phillip said.

She wouldn’t look at him, wouldn’t talk to him. She wasn’t intentionally giving him the silent treatment, but she felt nauseous and sweaty and exhausted. She descended the concrete steps and returned to her car.

There was only one way to deal with the storm she was walking into. By the time she’d made it back to Notress Pass and driven up the pebbly driveway and put the car into park, her aunt and uncle were already rushing out of the trailer.

“I’m fine,” Melanie said, shutting the car door behind her. “I spent the night with the man I’ve been seeing. But things between us didn’t work out. I’m very tired and need to rest. We can talk about anything you want, I promise—but later. I’m very, very sorry for worrying you, and I love you both very much.” She walked between them, her face hot with humiliation, and was quickly past, up the stairs, into the trailer, into her bedroom, shutting the door and locking it behind her.