The Other Side of Dark (2 page)

“I’m pregnant,” she says. “In just two months you’re going to be an aunt.”

My mouth is open, and I know I’m making owl eyes, but I don’t know what to say.

“Last year,” she says, “Dennis and I were married.” She glances at Dad from the corners of her eyes. “I had to promise that I’d get my degree, and I will—in May of next year. See, Dad, I’m keeping the promise.”

“But I wasn’t there!” I wail. “I was going to be your maid of honor. You always told me I could be.”

She holds the palm of my hand up against her cheek. She’s still smiling, but I see a terrible sorrow in her eyes. “Stacy, love, things were—well, so different. Dennis and I didn’t have a big wedding. Just a few people and the priest.”

“But you always said when you were married, you’d have a train six feet long! And loads of bridesmaids, all in blue, and wear the pearls that Grandma left to Mom.”

Dad clears his throat as though he were about to say something, but Donna interrupts. “It doesn’t matter,”
she says. She shakes her head, lays my hand gently on the blanket as though it were made of fine china, and awkwardly gets to her feet, one hand pressing the small of her back. “I can’t wait till you meet Dennis. Dennis Kroskey. Hey, you’ll have to get used to my new name!” She walks to the door, turning to say, “He’s patiently biding time out in the hall because I wanted to see you first.”

Dennis enters the room, and Donna props open the door. He’s tall, with skin tanned the color of his reddish brown hair, and he has a summer smell of lots of soap and showers. I’ll bet he plays tennis.

“I’ve met you before,” he says, “when you were—sleeping.”

“You came to see me?”

“Lots of times, with Donna. She introduced us, and she talked to you about our wedding, just in case you could hear her. Your family talked to you about everything that went on.”

“Maybe that was part of my dream.” There were so many voices, and they came and went for so long a time. I can’t remember what they said. I don’t want to remember. He’s smiling, too, so I hurry to add, “Donna told me about the baby. I’m glad you’re going to have a baby.”

“So are we.” He hugs Donna in such a special way that I ache right in the middle of my chest. I wasn’t there when she fell in love and when she got married and when she first found out she was going to have a baby. I have to get used to all this at once, and it makes me feel lonely and shut out, no matter what they tell me.

I take a long breath, trying to keep things going right. “I’ll baby-sit for you whenever you want. I guess I should say I’ll baby-sit if Mom gives me a chance. She’ll be so crazy about that baby the rest of us might not get to hold it until it’s old enough to go to school.”

No one laughs. No one answers. There’s a funny kind of chill, like when you open the freezer door on a hot day and the icy air spills over your feet. “When’s Mom coming?” My words plop into the cold. “Where is Mom?”

Dr. Peterson is suddenly there, head forward, his shaggy eyebrows leading the way like the prow of a ship. “Donna and Dennis,” he says, “we’ll keep your visit short. Why don’t you come back to see Stacy tomorrow?”

Donna quickly kisses me, Dennis pats my feet, and they disappear before I can protest. The door swings shut, and the room is silent.

Dr. Peterson lifts my wrist in strong fingers and looks at his watch.

I try to tug my arm away from him. “You interrupted,” I tell him. “I was asking a question, and I want an answer!”

“Take this,” he orders. He hands me a pill and a glass of water from the table.

“Not now.”

“Yes, now.”

As I obey, quickly gulping the pill, he nods at my father, and Dad leans forward, holding my hand again. His skin is clammy and hot, and he has to clear his throat a couple of times before he can talk.

“Honey,” he says, “all along we’ve had faith in you.
We knew you wouldn’t give up. Remember even when you were just a little girl and you’d be so independent and set on getting your own way? You’ve always had a lot of courage, Stacy, and—”

“Daddy, tell me now. Where’s Mom?”

He is hurting, and I can’t help him. I don’t even want to help him. My toes and fingers are warm and relaxed, and a numb feeling is seeping through me. It’s like the drowsy waking-sleeping in the early morning after the alarm has been turned off. But I’m awake, and I hear what he’s saying.

“The day you were shot—” His words are jagged pebbles on a dry, dusty road, and his voice trips as he stumbles through them. “Your mother was shot too. But Jeanne—oh, Stacy, Jeanne was killed.”

“No,” I answer, because I don’t believe these strange words that are as hollow as shouts inside a tunnel, ringing and echoing and sliding away. My father is gray and crumpled, and he’s crying. I try to pat his hand with fingers that are too heavy to lift. Something is wrong. Maybe it’s still part of the dream, and I’ll wake up and tell Mom about this crazy dream while we’re making breakfast, and she’ll give me a little swat on my backside and say, “For goodness’ sake, stop talking and eat, or you’re going to be late for school.”

“Tell me everything that happened,” I murmur, wanting the dream to be complete. “No one has told me.”

It takes a few minutes for my father to answer. His voice seems farther away, but I clearly hear every word. “Donna said you were going to the backyard to sunbathe,” he begins.

I remember. I was wearing my new red shorts, and I had Pansy with me. There wasn’t any smog, and it was a golden day, and I wanted a head start on my tan.

“We don’t know what happened next,” he says. “Donna went to the grocery store down at the boulevard to get a couple of things. She came home and found that the front door was unlocked. Your mother was lying in the den. Donna said she screamed at Jeanne to get up, but she didn’t move. Donna telephoned for an ambulance, and then she remembered you. She ran outside and found you lying on the grass near the back porch steps.”

I hear the words, but I don’t feel them. I am in a tunnel, but I can still hear what Dad says. Except that his words get mixed up with the other sounds and voices that are in my head.

There’s a weird noise, like a yelp. It’s coming from inside our house.

But a hand begins stroking my forehead. A deep voice says, “Go to sleep now, Stacy. Relax and sleep.” I want to open my eyes, but I can’t.

I run toward our back porch, and the screen door bangs open. Somebody runs out. He stares at me.

“Is she asleep?” Dad asks, and the voice murmurs, “Not yet.”

This guy on the porch stares at me. I can’t see his face, but I know he’s staring. I feel it, the way words and ideas I need to know seem to sift through my skin and pour into my mind. He’s scared. I know that too.

“Daddy, did they catch him?”

“Don’t worry about that now,” he says.

“But did they? I have to know!”

“No,” he says. “They couldn’t find out who it was. There were no witnesses.”

It’s harder and harder to speak. There’s a humming in my head, and it moves Dad farther and farther away. I whisper, wondering if my whisper is real or only in my head. “I’m a witness. I saw him, Daddy.”

“Hush, Stacy,” Daddy says. “Don’t try to talk now. Go to sleep.”

The sounds in my mind melt together and dissolve the words. I am so tired. I don’t ever remember having a dream in which I felt tired. I wonder what my mother will tell me about this dream.

When morning comes, gray light poking around the edges of the venetian blinds, I wake and know this has not been a dream. As though a tape recorder were inside my brain, part of last night’s conversation comes through loud and clear.

A picture appears. I am standing in our backyard. I’m listening, wondering what it was I heard. “Mom?” I call as I walk toward the porch steps. “Are you all right?”

But the door suddenly slams open, hitting the siding on the house with a clatter, and someone races out. He pauses on the second step as we stare at each other. But I can’t see his face!

“Show me your face,” I say aloud. “You’re someone I know. I remember that much!”

The face is blank. But there’s something in his hand. It’s a gun. He points it at me. I can’t move. I can’t make a sound. I want to cry out, “Mom!”

Mom.

Some part of my mind has clutched and hidden what Dad told me about Mom; but now his words spill out, and I have to face them. I roll onto my stomach and
cry, the pillow stuffed against my mouth. I cry until no more tears will come, and dry, hiccuping shudders shake my body. The soggy pillow smells sour, so I push it to the floor. I’ll never see my mother again.

The door snaps open, and a tall, angular nurse, who matches the crispness of her uniform, strides to my bed. “Well, hi,” she says. “I’m Alice.” I can tell that she’s taking in the pillow on the floor and my swollen eyes, but she doesn’t react until all the temperature-pulse business has been accomplished. She checks under the bandage on my hip, makes a note on her chart, puts it down, and for the first time looks at me as though I were a person. “How about a shower before breakfast?” she asks. “It will help you feel a lot better.”

“Yesterday I got kind of dizzy when I tried to sit up.”

“That was yesterday, and that was the medication.”

“Have I got out of bed to take showers before?”

She smiles. “Every day, and I’m usually the one who’s given them to you.”

My face is hot. I’m embarrassed that I blushed, but she doesn’t seem to notice. The shower does make me feel better on the outside. I hold my face up to the water, feeling its sting on my forehead and scalp.

But nothing has helped on the inside. Maybe I can’t be helped, because a hollow has been carved in there, and inside that hollow there are no feelings at all.

Alice, making sure I’m steady on my feet, leaves me to towel-dry my hair. She hums under her breath as she makes my bed.

There’s a small mirror over the sink in my bathroom.
I drop the towel and study myself in the mirror. It’s the weirdest sensation. I feel that I’m looking at Donna the way Donna looked when I was thirteen. The person in that mirror is different from the one I was used to seeing. The face is thinner with shadows under the cheekbones. I remember when my best friend, Jan, and I would stick our faces toward the mirror and suck in our cheeks and say, “This is what we’ll look like when we grow up and are beautiful!”

I wonder how the eyes in the mirror can droop with so much pain when I feel absolutely empty inside.

Alice brings me a short gown sprigged with blue violets. “The nurses thought you’d like something pretty,” she says, adding, “Norma picked it out.”

I don’t know what to say. I think I mumble, “Thank you.”

She glances at me from the corners of her eyes. The shyness doesn’t match her efficient look. “We’re all so glad that you recovered. We really care about our patients, especially the young ones. Especially you, Stacy. You’ve got most of your life ahead of you, and we—” She stops, and the briskness takes over. “Your sister’s going to bring some of her clothes for you.”

“Don’t I have any clothes here? What did I wear?”

“During the day we put you into cotton knit jumpsuits, which you could wear when the therapist helped you ride the exercise bike and use the other equipment.” She reaches into the small closet, pulls out a shapeless gray thing, and holds it up, its arms and legs dangling. It looks like an ad showing what happens when you use the wrong brand of soap.

All I can say is “Yeech!”

She laughs and tucks me between the stiff sheets, cranks my bed until I’m sitting upright, and hands me a hairbrush so that I can brush my hair.

Breakfast is brought in, and while I’m munching through the eggs’ curly brown edges, a girl appears in the open doorway.

She looks at me as though she were afraid of me, and for a moment I don’t know who she is.

“Stacy,” she says, still in the doorway, “I’m Jan. Can I come in?”

“Jan?” I know I’m sitting there with my mouth open, but it’s hard to believe that this tall auburn-haired girl in the pink, tailored shirt and tight jeans and makeup that looks like a cosmetic ad is my friend Jan Briley.

Her knees seem a little stiff—or maybe it’s the jeans. She shoves a small package toward me, backs off, and perches on the edge of the armchair across from the bed. “It’s not much,” she says. “Just some lipstick and eye shadow and mascara and stuff I thought you’d need.”

“Thanks.” This isn’t Jan. It can’t be Jan. I shiver and push the breakfast tray away.

“You look—you look good, Stacy. How do you feel?”

“Okay.”

“You’ll feel lots better when your makeup’s on and you’ve done something with your hair. Do you have hot rollers?” She looks embarrassed. Her fingers are white from gripping the arms of the chair. “Of course you wouldn’t have them here. I should have brought mine, I guess.”

“It’s okay.” I look at her hair closely. “You never used to wear your hair like that. You used to wad it up in those big brown barrettes to keep it out of your eyes when we played baseball. Do you still play on the team?”

“Team? Oh, no.” She gives a funny little laugh and says, “There’s a mirror in the package. Why not get it out?”

“What for?”

“So you can put on your makeup.”

“Mom lets me—let me wear lipstick, but I don’t know what to do with the eye stuff.”

“Oh. I didn’t think about that. I just take makeup for granted, like brushing my teeth or wearing shoes.”

“How long have you worn real makeup?”

“Well gosh, Stacy, for ages. After all, I’m seventeen.” She pauses. “And so are you.”

I shake my head. “I’ve got to get used to that. I still feel like I’m thirteen. I feel like everything took place yesterday.”

“I’m sorry about what happened—all of it. When they took you to the hospital and thought you might die, I wanted to die too. I couldn’t bear to lose you. And then last night your father called me, and I couldn’t believe it. I just sat right down on the floor and cried and cried, I was so glad you were going to be all right again.” Jan leans forward, forearms resting on her knees. “Do you want to talk about it?”

I can’t help it, but I feel as though she were one of Donna’s friends, not mine. It’s hard to answer. “I haven’t remembered all of it yet.”