I Know What You Did Last Summer (12 page)

"I thought we'd just have hamburgers," Mrs. James said.

The telephone rang.

Bud's voice said, "You must have been talking to somebody pretty
fascinating. I've been getting a busy signal for over an hour."

"There must be something wrong with the line," Julie told him.
"We have trouble like that sometimes. A couple of months ago our
phone was out for three days and we didn't even know it."

"Well, I'm glad I finally got you," Bud said. "I thought you
might want to go to a movie tomorrow night. You've been studying
too hard. A little R and R might be good for you."

"Only if it's a comedy," Julie said. "Something heavy and
dramatic would finish me off."

They talked for a few minutes, and Julie agreed to a date the
following evening. By the time she came back to the kitchen to take
the ground meat out of the refrigerator, she had control of herself
again.

Though her mother kept glancing at her worriedly during dinner,
their conversation was normal, and that one instant in which the
whole story had almost come rushing out was securely behind
her.

chapter 13

The woman in the crisp, white uniform set the vase of carnations
and the window ledge and looked at the card.

"This one's from Debbie," she said. "She says, 'Get well
fast-the campus doesn't seem the same without you.'" She glanced up
and gestured to the other containers of flowers crowding the sill
and the bedside table and lining the wall along the far side of the
room.

"This place is like a hothouse. How many girlfriends do
you have, anyway?"

"Enough," Barry said shortly.

This was his least favorite of the nurses. She was young, hardly
older than he was, and pretty in a crisp, efficient way. She was
the sort of girl he might have made a play for if he had met her
somewhere else, coming on strong with the football hero routine and
knocking her off her feet. The fact that she should have him here
at her disposal, flat on his back, helpless, was infuriating.

He turned his head and shut his eyes, pretending that he was
going to sleep, and after a moment he heard the swish of her skirts
as she left the room.

It was Wednesday. They had told him that this morning. At first
he had refused to believe it-what had happened to Tuesday? And then
bits and pieces of Tuesday had begun to come back to him-the ride
on a wheeled cart down the long corridor, the transfer onto this
bed on which he now lay, his father's lined face looking down at
him. The latter part of Tuesday came into sharper focus. His
mother, weeping. A needle in his arm. A needle in his hip. The
doctor with the white hair. The doctor with the black hair.

Surprisingly, he did not recall a great deal of pain.

"He's pretty well doped up," the doctor with the black hair had
said when his father bent over him, trying to ask him questions,
but he had not been so doped up that he had not known what the
questions were.

"It was Helen," he had said, and his father had been
satisfied.

"He says the call was from Helen," he had told someone behind
him, and Barry had heard his mother's voice saying, "It would have
been, of course. I knew that girl was trouble the first time I saw
her."

This morning his mind had been clearer, and he had been able to
take things in-the pile of cards on the bedside table, the flowers
on the sill, the identity of the nurses as they changed shifts. He
was terribly weak; he discovered that when he reached out his hand
for the get-well card on the top of the pile and found that it was
shaking so that he could not open the envelope.

But, still, the pain was less than he would have expected,
considering a bullet had gone practically all the way through
him.

"I can't feel my legs at all," he had said to the doctor, the
white-haired one this time, who had come in to change the
dressing.

"They're there," the doctor had told him crisply. "Two of them.
Were you maybe looking for three?"

The sweetheart roses were from Helen. "With all my love," the
card had said, and she had signed it, "Heller," his own private
name for her. It was exactly the way she had signed her junior
class picture, the photo that was lying back at the
fraternity house face down on top of his bureau.

He wished there were some way for Helen to know about his
turning over that picture. He wished she could know that he was
through with her before this shooting ever took place.

It was one thing to reach the decision that it was time to break
up with a girl who was getting to be a drag on you. It was another
thing entirely to find the decision made for you, to discover that
the girl you had supposed to be honest, clinging and all-adoring
had in reality been playing you for a sucker behind your back.

"Helen has called to ask about you several tones," his father
had told him this morning.

"And she and a friend came down to the hospital Monday night,"
his mother had added. "I think that was in questionable taste. They
got the news from a television report."

"She came with a friend?" Barry had asked. "You mean with
Julie?"

"No, with a boyfriend. Dark-haired. Not too tall. Collie
Something-or-other she called him. They seemed to know each other
very well."

His mother had reached over and taken his hand.

'1
know this isn't the right time
to
tell you
this, dear, but is there ever such a thing as a 'right time'? I
just don't want you to lean emotionally on a relationship
which is apparently unstable."

"There isn't any 'relationship,'" Barry had told her grimly.
"Helen's free to date anybody she wants."

But the revelation had knocked the breath out of him.

Of all the lousy tricks, he had raged silently. Two whole years
of the faithful, loving, I'm-all-yours-forever bit, and all the
time she's had some other guy on the side. The lying little
two-timer. And then she had the nerve to bring him down to the
hospital with her!

If only he had gotten his own kick-in-the-teeth in first He
should have been the one to break things off, standing straight and
firm on his own two feet with some other girl on his arm, while
Helen sniveled and pleaded and begged for another chance.
But, no, he had been too worried about hurting her; he had missed
that opportunity. Now here he was, flat in bed, unable to take even
a flimsy poke in return, while his mother brought him the news and
enjoyed every minute of it.

"Take those roses and shove them," he had told the stout,
red-faced nurse who had been on duty when the flowers arrived, but
she had not done so. She had placed them instead behind some other
vases, and he could see them now, peeking out in all their pink
innocence, from the far side of a shaggy, green plant If it had
been possible for him to have gotten out of bed and crossed the
room to reach them, he would have smashed them to a pulp.

But he could not even do that. He could only lie here and fume
and hate everybody-Helen, the boyfriend, the doctors, and the
whole blasted world. Which included his mother. She had him down at
last, and there was no way of getting away from her ministrations.
It was not so bad when his father was here too, but this morning,
after a brief look-in and a "How are you feeling today, son?" he
had gone on to the office and left his wife behind. She had settled
into the chair by Barry's bed with the satisfaction of a hen
climbing onto its nest, and after two full hours of her soothing
chatter he had been ready to shout for a shot, a pill, anything
that would shut off the sound of her voice.

"We're getting your old room ready for you to come home to," she
had told him. "I thought I'd have the walls painted a pale green.
Don't you think that would be a nice, restful color? And we can put
the portable TV in there and the radio and your typewriter table.
Dad's going down to the University tomorrow to pick up your things.
Your friend Lou is going to have them all packed for us, so they'll
be waiting at home for you when you get there."

"You make it sound like I'm coming home to live forever." Barry
had tried to conceal the panic that came with voicing the thought
"I'm not, you know. As soon as this hole in my stomach heals up and
I can eat solid stuff again and get my strength back, I'llbe up and
out I've still got Europe in mind for this summer, though I guess
it will have to be the end of the summer now."

"I know, dear," his mother had said, and there had been a funny
note in her voice. "Still, while you are at home with us, it will
be nice to have a pleasant room to stay in, won't it?"

She did not argue about the proposed European trip, nor did she
repeat her earlier suggestion about the family car trip to the East
Coast This omission in itself was disconcerting and, in a way,
almost frightening.

Aside from his parents, Barry was being allowed no visitors, and
that was as he wanted it Having his mother so constantly there was
strain enough without adding a troop of fraternity brothers
and a barrage of weeping females. As the irritating little
nurse had commented, enough of them had sent flowers to open a
flower shop. He could imagine the scene with all of them-Debbie and
Pam and two-faced Helen and the rest-drifting in and out in a
never-ending stream, wringing their hands and bringing him books to
read and having to be introduced to each other as they met across
his bed.

Even Julie had sent a plant with a note on it saying, "Get
well fast. We're thinking about you." Who "we" was he wasn't
sure-herself and Helen, perhaps, or Ray or somebody else. He
could care less.

"Hey, Barry?" The voice was an echo of his last thought, a
familiar voice but one that he had not heard in a long time. "Are
you asleep?"

Barry jerked open his eyes.

"What are you doing here?"

"I came up the back stairs," Ray said, "and just walked down the
hall and in the door. I passed some nurses but nobody stopped
me."

"They should have. Don't you know I'm not supposed to have
visitors?"

"Yeah, I know, and I'll probably get thrown out by the ear in a
couple of minutes. How's it going?"

Curious despite himself, Barry studied the face of the boy who
stood at the end of his bed. In the months since he had last seen
him, Ray had changed tremendously. He looked broader through the
shoulders and chest and, somehow, older. He was very tan, and
the beard gave character to a face that always before had held a
not-quite-finished look, like a portrait by an artist who had not
been able to decide what to do with the mouth and chin. Now the
face was done and, young as it was, it was a man's face.

The eyes were steady and direct and softened with sympathy.

"It's going great," Barry said sarcastically. "I was needing a
nice vacation. How are things with you?"

Ray came around and stood by the side of the bed, looking down
at him. Crazy, Barry thought. He'd never had Ray look down at him
before. Always he had been the one to look down. He knew the
top of Ray's head by heart.

"Gee, fella, I'm sorry," Ray was saying. "I'm sorry as hell.
This is a rough thing to have happen. Are you in a lot of
pain?"

"It isn't exactly a picnic," Barry said. "What did you come here
for?"

"Well, to see how you were for one thing. All your friends have
been calling the hospital, but they don't tell you much. I talked
to your dad yesterday, and I hated to keep bugging him."

"What did he say?" Barry asked.

"That you were over the hump. Getting better. Able to see the
family. Stuff like that."

"Did he say anything about my legs?"

Barry saw a shadow flicker across the green eyes. There was a
slight hesitation before Ray answered.

"No."

"You're lying," Barry said flatly.

"I'm not. I didn't talk with him very long. He said you were
going to be okay."

"I'll just bet he did."

I hate him, Barry thought. I hate him-lying to me, patronizing
me, standing here on his two good legs, able to turn around and
walk out of here whenever he wants to. I wish somebody would
shoot a bullet into his guts so he'd know what it was like to lie
on the ground in the dark and yell and not have anybody hear
you.

Aloud he said, "How was it in California?"

"Good in some ways, not so good in others." Ray sounded relieved
at the change in conversation. "I did a lot of thinking while I was
out there. There's something about being alone with no one to fall
back on. You start learning how to fall back on yourself. You
settle down in your mind and get your thinking into balance. You
know what I mean?"

"What sort of thinking?" Barry asked him warily.

"Oh, about right and wrong and responsibility and what's
important. Stuff like that Look, what I'm driving at-"

"I know what you're driving at," Barry interrupted. "You
want to blow the whistle on me about that accident Right?"

"I don't want to 'blow' any whistle," Ray said. "I just think we
went off the deep end too fast. We were all of us shook up mat
night and we made a decision we shouldn't have made, and now I
think we ought to weigh it out again."

"Go ahead and weigh ft," Barry told him. "Weigh ft all you want
to. You can't break the pact"

"We could dissolve the pact"

"Only if we all agree, and I don't"

"Barry, look." Ray drew closer to the bed and lowered his voice.
"It's more than just a moral thing; it's for our own safety.
Somebody's got our number-how, we don't know-but somebody does, and
whoever it is put a bullet through you the other night You were
lucky. You lived through it But who's to say he's not going to try
it again when you get out of here?"

"When I get out of here," Barry said, "I'm not going to be
within range of any kook with a pistol. I'm going to be flat on my
back at home in a 'nice, restful' newly painted green bedroom with
my mom standing guard at the door."