Stranger With My Face (10 page)

“It’s too early in the year for senioritis,” my algebra teacher remarked crisply.

I could do nothing but nod in agreement. There was no excuse I could offer. How could I have explained that on those evenings
when I was supposed to have been studying I had been meeting with the astral image of my sister?

The one person I could talk to was Helen. She was the receptacle into which I poured all my newfound information, the sounding
board upon which I bounced the strange thoughts that were a constant tangle in my mind. I expected her to respond with the
same wonder and excitement I was experiencing.

Instead, she seemed decidedly unenthusiastic.

“It’s not good for you to get so wrapped up in this,” she said. “Like Mrs. Kelsey said in her letter, it’s a part of your
life that’s over. Actually, it was
never
a part of your life. You were only a couple of weeks old when the Strattons adopted you. Whatever went on with Lia and her
mother is part of their history, not yours.”

“That woman was as much my mother as Lia’s,” I said stiffly. “Of course what happened to her is important to me. The whole
thing’s like a romantic novel, with a beautiful, abandoned woman searching the world over for the man she loves.”

“I don’t think it’s romantic,” Helen said. “I think it’s sad and stupid.”

“What do you mean?”

“A woman leaves her husband for another man, gets pregnant, and gets dumped,” Helen said flatly. “It happens all the time.
To me the real story is your adoptive parents.”

“It’s not a put-down to them if I’m interested in my other family,” I said defensively. “Lia’s my twin. She’s closer to me
than anyone in the world.”

“You don’t know a thing about her,” Helen said.

“How can you say that? I know myself, don’t I? We’re identical.”

“In looks,” Helen said. “But not in other ways. Your mother sensed a difference. That’s why she chose to adopt only one of
you. I felt it, too, that night I spent at Cliff House.”

“You’re jealous,” I accused her. “You don’t want me to have a closer friend than you.”

It was a cruel thing to say. I could see the hurt flash deep in Helen’s eyes, but she kept her voice steady.

“Maybe that’s true,” she admitted. “It’s more than that, though. I’m scared for you, Laurie. You’re in this too deep. It’s
dangerous.”

That was Friday.

Saturday I slept late. It was ten fifteen when Mom came to wake me and to tell me that Helen was in critical condition at
Saint Joseph’s Hospital.

Leaving Dad to stay with Meg and Neal,
Mom and I caught the eleven o’clock ferry across to the mainland. From the pier we took a taxi to the hospital.

The traffic was heavy, and the sidewalks were crowded with bustling hordes of holiday shoppers. I stared out at them through
the dirty window of the cab, feeling as though I were waking from a dream. I had been so absorbed with my own concerns that
I had totally lost track of the fact that Christmas was approaching. Now, suddenly, it surrounded us. Strings of bright, colored
lights crisscrossed the main streets of town, and bearded Salvation Army Santas jangled their bells on corners. Carols blared
gaily from loudspeakers, and in the lobby of Saint Joseph’s Hospital a gigantic fir tree glowed resplendent in red bows and
striped candy canes.

We checked at the information desk and then took the elevator to the fifth floor. The first person we saw when the doors drew
open was Jeff Rankin. He sat slouched in a chair across from the elevators, looking as though he had molded himself to his
seat and taken root there. His eyes had the glitter that comes from lack of sleep. I wondered how long he had been there and
how he had learned about Helen so much sooner than I had.

“How is she?” I asked him by way of greeting.

“Not good.” He didn’t seem surprised to see us. “She’s been unconscious ever since they brought her in at seven this morning.”
He paused. “Her parents are over there in a sort of waiting room across from Intensive Care. They let them go in and look
at her for five minutes every hour.”

“Oh, god,” Mom said softly. “How terrible.”

She put her arm around me, and we walked together down the corridor to the door Jeff had indicated. It stood open. The Tuttles
were the only ones in the little room, sitting side by side on a brown leather sofa.

When I had first met them, I had thought they looked too young to have a daughter who was a high school senior. I could no
longer say that. They looked as though they had aged a million years.

Mrs. Tuttle’s eyes were red from weeping. It seemed to take her a moment to recognize me, and then she said, “Oh—it’s Laurie”
in an expressionless voice.

“I phoned the Strattons a couple of hours ago,” Mr. Tuttle told her. “I thought Helen’s best friend should be told before she learned about it from the papers or on the news. You were
good to come, Laurie.” His eyes moved past me. “Is this your mother?”

“Yes, I’m Shelly Stratton,” Mom said before I could make introductions. “I’m so very sorry about Helen’s accident. She’s such
a warm, lovely person. She just has to be all right.”

“Keep thinking that way,” Mr. Tuttle said. “Think positive. That’s all any of us can do right now. She’s got good doctors.
They’re doing everything they can for her. And she’s a strong girl. If she weren’t she’d never have survived the exposure.”

“What exactly happened?” I asked hesitantly. “Mom said you didn’t tell her much—just that Helen fell and hit her head.”

“We don’t even know that, really,” Mr. Tuttle said. “It seems like the only thing that could have happened, but, of course,
she hasn’t been able to tell us anything. A man who was taking a shortcut on his way to work found her this morning in the
little park across the street from our town house. To think she’d been there all night and we didn’t know it! She could have
died there, a hundred yards away from us.”

“What was she doing in the park at night?” I asked. “That doesn’t sound like Helen.”

“She was with that boy,” Mrs. Tuttle said. It was her first contribution to the discussion, and her voice shrilled unnaturally.
“That creepy boy. They went out together last night, and Helen never came back. He was with her. He was responsible.”

“Jeff wasn’t with her in the park,” Helen’s father said gently.

“How can we know that? How can we know anything until Helen gets well enough to tell us?” The dull, dead look was gone from
her face now, and it was contorted with pain. “All we do know is that Jeff Rankin took our Helen out at seven thirty and at
half past midnight, when she hadn’t come home, you called out to the island. Jeff was there. He was in the shower, his father
said. When he called back a few minutes later, he said that he’d left Helen all by herself downtown.”

“He didn’t just ‘leave her,’” Mr. Tuttle said. “He put her in a taxi.”

“Then why was she in the park? Laurie’s right. There’s no reason Helen would go into the park alone at that ungodly hour of
the night. Girls don’t do that. Girls don’t jump out of taxis in front of their houses and go running off somewhere else.
If it was true, what Jeff said—if he did send her home in a taxi—then she would have paid the driver and come directly into
the house.”

“We can’t question her reasons right now,” Mr. Tuttle said. “We know that she did go into the park and something happened
to her there. From what the police tell us, she slipped on an icy path and hit her head on one of the iron benches. At any
rate”—he directed himself to Mom and me—“she didn’t come home. When it got to be twelve thirty I called the Rankins. Jeff
said he’d put Helen into a cab at around eleven and given her money to pay for it. That meant she should have been home by
eleven thirty at the latest.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Mom said in a low voice. “What you must have gone through.”

“We called the police, of course,” Mr. Tuttle said. “They came out to the house and took Helen’s description and all that.
Then they sent a patrol boat to pick up Jeff. Everything they did took such a long time. It seemed like they weren’t even
worried. One policeman had the gall to suggest that Helen had run away. ‘She’s that age,’ he told us. ‘We get reports like this all the time. Usually it turns out the girl’s had a
fight with her parents or her boyfriend and just wants to shake people up a little.’”

“If only it had been that,” Mrs. Tuttle broke in, “but we knew it wasn’t. Helen would never hurt us that way. And that boy
is not her boyfriend.”

“They were in the middle of interrogating Jeff when one of the squad cars radioed in,” Mr. Tuttle continued, as though he
had not been interrupted. “Some man, a cook in a coffeehouse over east of where we live, had found Helen. He said he almost
fell over her. She was lying unconscious by the side of the path, and her legs were sticking out across it. She’d been there
all night in the cold.”

He drew a deep breath, and his wife reached over and touched his hand. Now it was she who was trying to give comfort.

“She’ll be okay,” she said. “We’ve got to believe that. God wouldn’t have let her make it this far if he were going to turn
right around and snatch her away from us.”

There was a moment’s silence. Then I asked, “May I see her?”

“I’m sorry, they’ve restricted visitors to family,” Mr. Tuttle said. “Just her mother and me for a couple of minutes every hour. Not that it means much. We stand there and look at her
and go out again. If they did allow you in, she wouldn’t know you were there.”

But I would know it,
I thought miserably.
I could tell her that I’m sorry, even if she couldn’t hear me. I’m sorry about her accident. I’m sorry I was so mean to her
yesterday
.

Suddenly there seemed to be nothing left to say.

“You will call us, won’t you, the moment there’s any change?” Mom asked. “We’re so concerned—not just Laurie, but all of us.”

“Of course, we’ll call as soon as there’s anything to report.” Mr. Tuttle got to his feet. “Thank you both for coming. It
means a lot to know there’s somebody around here who cares.”

“That boy,” Mrs. Tuttle said. “Is he still out there?”

“Jeff ?” Mom said. “Yes, he’s out in the hall. We talked to him briefly on our way in.”

“He shouldn’t be here. He doesn’t have any right.” Her voice was sharp. “If it wasn’t for him, this never would have happened.”

“Dear—don’t—” her husband began.

“Stop telling me ‘don’t.’ I’m only saying what’s a fact. He took Helen out and didn’t bring her home again. If he cared about
her he would have taken care of her. And now here he is when it’s too late, imposing himself and acting like he belongs here.”

“He’s not ‘imposing,’” Mr. Tuttle protested mildly. “I called him myself, and the police brought him over from the island.”

“But that’s over now. He’s talked with us; he’s talked with them. Why doesn’t he leave? Aren’t we upset enough? Why did Helen
go out with him, anyway? She didn’t need someone like that. So she didn’t have a lot of boys calling her all the time; what
did that matter? She’s a late bloomer. So was I. A lot of girls are late bloomers, but they don’t settle for a boy with a
face like that, a boy who looks like the devil himself. Whatever happened to Helen, he was in on it. A mother can feel those
things.”

“I can’t believe that,” I said. “You can’t judge a person by what he looks like. Just because his face was burned—”

“Looks can warp a person,” Mrs. Tuttle interrupted. “Somebody has Fate turn on him like what happened to Jeff, and he gets
bitter. He can’t have what he once had, and he takes it out on others. I don’t have any proof, of course, but I swear, from
the first moment that boy walked into our house, I knew he was bad news. I said to Helen afterward, ‘You’d better watch out
for that one.’ She just laughed. She wouldn’t listen. And now look what’s happened.”

She was crying now, the harsh, ragged sobs cutting through the room in jagged little bursts. She raised her large, freckled
hands to cover her face, and all I could think was that they might have been Helen’s hands except for the heavy gold wedding
band on one of the fingers.

There was nothing more that I could bring myself to say.

Mom must have felt the same way, for she simply said, “We’ll pray. Please, do call us.”

“I will,” Mr. Tuttle told us, but his full attention was on his wife.

Outside in the corridor, Mom turned and put her arms around me in a fierce embrace.

“Dear god, Laurie,” she said in a strangled voice, “what if it had been you? How could Dad and I have dealt with it?”

“She is going to live, isn’t she?” I asked shakily. It was a stupid question, for, of course, Mom knew no more about the situation
than I did, but childhood conditioning is not shaken easily. If Mom said, “Yes,” I knew I would feel secure.

But she said, “I hope so,” and tightened her arms in a convulsive hug. Then, as quickly as she had reached for me, she released
me. We continued down the hall together, not touching, not speaking, yet closer somehow than we had been for many months.

Jeff was still embedded in the chair across from the elevators. His eyes were closed, but they snapped open at our approach.

“Did you find out anything?” he asked us.

“Probably not anything you don’t know already,” I said.

“The Tuttles”—his voice cracked a little—“they hate me for this, don’t they?”

“They’re too upset to think reasonably.” I know my mother’s face in all its variety of expressions. At this moment, there
was something in it that I was used to seeing only when she looked at Neal. “Come along, Jeff,” she said quietly. “There’s
no use waiting here. We can’t see Helen, and there’s no way we can help her.”

“I’ve got to stay,” Jeff said gruffly. “I’m responsible. If I hadn’t sent her home alone—”

“You couldn’t possibly have anticipated this,” Mom said. “You did what you thought was the right thing at the time.”

“It seemed so practical,” Jeff said. “I mean, the movie lasted longer than we thought it would, and the last ferry was leaving.
If I’d taken her home I’d have missed it. It was late, but I thought she’d be fine in a cab.”

“You didn’t have a fight, then?” I asked.

“Hell, no! It was just that time got away from us. There was a store Helen wanted to look in, and that made us late for the
movie, and everything went later than we’d planned. If I’d missed that boat, what would I have done, slept over at the Tuttles’?
Yeah, right! Helen’s mom has had it in for me since the first time she saw my face.”

“Oh, honey, it’s not that,” Mom said. It was the first time I’d heard her use that endearment for anyone but family. “She’s
a mother hen with one chick, that’s all.” She put a hand on his arm. “Come on, now. We’ll all go back together. There’s nothing
to be gained by staying. I honestly think the Tuttles are better off without us. They have each other, and that’s all they
need right now.”

Somehow, and I’ve never quite understood how, she got Jeff onto his feet and into the elevator. She kept her hand on his arm
all the way to the street as though she were afraid that if she let go he would rush back. There were no available cabs, so
we took the bus to the pier, wedged in among holiday shoppers with their armloads of parcels.

The mood on the bus was festive. People laughed and jostled each other good-naturedly. The woman behind me was humming “Jingle
Bells.” In front of me a little boy was asking questions in a shrill, piping voice: “Was that man in the store really Santa?
Is he the same Santa who comes to our house?”

I stood, holding on to the ceiling strap for support as the bus lurched along with its load of happy passengers, feeling as
alien as one of Dad’s visitors from outer space. The last time I had been lighthearted seemed a million years ago.