The Stranger (15 page)

Back to Madrigals.

Back in the group she loved, in the center of things, the whirl of activity and companionship and singing. Back, if she chose, as Christo’s girlfriend, twice the center of things with that status.

But never … if she rejoined Madrigals … never again to sit in Art Appreciation. Waiting. Gazing on the boy she loved.

She knew Jethro was not coming back to school. He had said so quite clearly. And yet she knew she would see him again. She had to. A person you loved could not simply never be seen again. It was not fair.

In the end, things—especially things of true love—should be fair.

Three days of school since the roads were finally cleared, and each afternoon as she went to Art, her heart quickened, and a smile lay behind her lips. Let him come! Let me see that profile. The boy who was in darkness when they watched slides and remained dark when the lights came on.

He did not come.

If she did not continue in Art Appreciation, she would never know if he came back. If she did not rejoin Madrigals, she could not gather back those friendships and pleasures either. “I’ll think about it, Ms. Quincy.”

It had never occurred to the woman that Nicoletta might say no. There was a certain revenge in seeing Ms. Quincy’s shock. “Nicoletta,” said Ms. Quincy severely, “you are cutting off your nose to spite your face.”

Nicoletta had never heard that saying before and had to consider it.

“You will hurt yourself more than you will hurt the group,” said Ms. Quincy, putting it another way.

Nicoletta wondered if that was true. “I’ll let you know on Monday, Ms. Quincy,” said Nicoletta. “First I’ll talk to Anne-Louise.”

Anne-Louise was fully recovered. In fact, she was laughing about it. “I can’t believe how I behaved,” she said. “Isn’t it funny?”

If it’s so funny, thought Nicoletta, why did you quit Madrigals?

“You know what let’s do?” said Anne-Louise.

“What?”

“Let’s go back to the cave,” said Anne-Louise. “I mean, when I got home the other day, my mother said my eyes were glazed over. She thought I had cataracts or something. My mother said, ‘Anne-Louise, what happened out there anyway?’ And do you know what, Nicoletta?”

“What?”

“I can’t remember exactly what happened. Let’s go back and see. I’m curious. I don’t understand what scared us all so much. It was only a cave.”

“It’s more than a cave. It needs victims,” said Nicoletta. “You must not go back. You must never go back, Anne-Louise.”

Anne-Louise shrugged. “I’m going back to the cave now, Nicoletta. I
have
to see it,” said Anne-Louise. “Do you want to come?”

What way out, thought Nicoletta, would preserve us all? What way out saves Jethro, but gives him to me? Keeps us from exploring or falling? Gives Jethro life as a boy and not a monster?

But did it matter anymore? She thought she knew what way Jethro had decided would work.

No way.

The snow was so high it covered the
DEAD END
sign. The trees were like branch children with snow blankets pulled up to their shoulders.

Anne-Louise’s car reached the end of the road. Here the immense amount of snow had been piled by the plows into sheer-sided mountains. The path was not visible. There was no way in to the boulder.

The road, indeed, was a dead end.

The girls got out of the car. Nicoletta had learned how to use her cast; it was just a heavier, more annoying leg than she had had before. She did not need the crutches for pain or balance.

They surveyed the problem. The snow was taller than they were. Shovels, possibly pick axes, would be necessary to break through. And beyond the snow-plowed mountains, it would still be nearly up to Nicoletta’s waist. There was more snow here than elsewhere, as if the snow had conspired to conceal the path until spring.

Anne-Louise looked confused. She rattled her car keys. She was losing touch with what she wanted to do, and thinking of leaving.

Yes, leave! thought Nicoletta. Leave me here. I’ll get to him somehow; I know I will, because he needs me and I need him. He can’t have left me forever. Jethro! she called through her heart and her mind. I’m coming!

Christo pulled in behind them. Oh, Christo, why do you always show up, as if I cared about you? she thought.

But he kissed her, because he knew nothing. “We’ll just go around,” he said.

She had never thought of that; never thought of just walking back to where the plows had not packed the snow so high. Christo went first, kicking a path. Anne-Louise went second, widening the path.

Nicoletta went third, dragging her cast.

The boulder had never seemed so huge. Snow had fallen from the surrounding trees, pitting the soft layers on the boulder. It looked volcanic, as if seething hot lava was bubbling just beneath the snow, waiting for them to put out a wrong foot.

But only to Nicoletta’s eyes. To Christo they seemed the right places to step, where the snow was dented. He slogged forward, a football player with a goal in mind. A camera swung from his shoulder.

Nicoletta thought of the order in which they were going. Victims at the head of the line. “Stop,” she said. “Stop, Christo!” It’s dangerous for them, she thought. But not for me. Love will save me. Love always triumphs. I know it does! Jethro will save me, and we will be together.

“Nickie, I’m never stopping,” said Christo. “I’m going to figure out what’s happening here if it kills me.”

The boulder moved.

It rolled right in front of them. The ground began to shake. Nicoletta had never known how terrible, how awe-full an earthquake is. Nothing in life was so dependable as the ground under her feet. Now it tossed her off, as if she were going to have to fly; she could no longer stand, the old order of human beings was ended.

Anne-Louise’s scream pierced the sky, but the sky cared nothing for humans without sense and her scream flattened to nothing under the gray ceiling.

The stone rolled onto Christo’s ankle and pinned him.

A huge and terrible noise came from beyond; greater noise than Nicoletta had ever heard; a shattering of rock and earth deeper than man had ever mined. Jethro had dynamited the entrance to the cave.

And then, and only then, Nicoletta knew what way out Jethro had thought of. Not one of hers. But his own.

For there was no way out that preserved them all.

Nicoletta was right that love triumphs. Jethro loved her. And he had put that first. He loved her enough to prevent her from coming back, from bringing her friends, from risking their lives.

He had closed his door forever. Himself inside.

They will all be buried this time, she thought. Every sorrowful spirit will find its rest. Buried at last.
Including Jethro.

The shaking dashed Nicoletta against a tree.

Jethro gave me life, she thought. For the second time in his terrible life, he sacrificed himself for the person he loved. He wanted me to have my life: sharing a bedroom with a little sister, singing in Madrigals, and eating in the cafeteria.

He wanted no more hunters falling, no more Christos, no more Anne-Louises. He did not want me to risk myself again. He did not want another person on this earth to abandon, or to be abandoned.

Jethro. I love you.

The earth ceased its leaping. The stone rolled off Christo. He was only bruised. He got up easily.

The path through the meadow had received no snow. It was clear as a summer day, straight as the edge of a page. Christo and Anne-Louise led the way, Nicoletta following, her good leg walking and the other leg dragging.

There was no rock face left. There were no ponds. A jumble of fallen stone and rock lay where once a tall cliff and two circles of water had been.

“Wow,” said Christo reverently, and lifted his camera. He got into camera athletics, squatting and whirling and arching for the best angle.

Nothing else moved.

Not a rock. Not a stone. Not a crystal.

“I didn’t abandon you, Jethro,” whispered Nicoletta. “I want you to know that. I came this afternoon to find you. So we could be together after all. I didn’t know this was your plan. I swear I didn’t. I thought you were only going to bury
them.”

There was only silence. The rocks that had made such a tremendous crash had made the only sound they ever would. They were done with motion and noise. And Jethro? Was he, too, done with motion and noise?

Jethro. I love you.

“Wow!” Christo kept saying. He bounded from rock to rock. “What do you think set it off? Was it an earthquake? I never heard of earthquakes in this part of the country. Wow!”

It was my father’s dynamite, thought Nicoletta. But it was Jethro’s courage.

Are you well and truly buried now, Jethro? Is the curse over? Are you safe in heaven?

Or deep within this cruel earth, are you still there? Your upward path closed? Still in the dark, forever and ever caught with the raging undead? Never again to hear laughter? Never again to hold a hand?

Oh, Jethro, I hope what you did for me worked for you, too!

I love you. Jethro! Be safe!

Christo finished the roll of film. “Let’s go home,” he said. “I want to call the television studio. The newspapers. I think my science teachers would love to see this, too.”

Love, love, love. How Christo had misspelled that precious word. Only Nicolette knew what love was. And only Jethro had shown it.

“Jethro!” she screamed then. It was too much to keep inside herself.
“Jethro!”
she shrieked, trying to explode his spirit as the dynamite had exploded the rocks. She tried to run toward him, or where he had been, tried to find the place from which he had waved, his stone arm lifted to say farewell.

But of course she could not move, for the cast kept her in place, and the broken, destroyed surface of the earth presented a thousand rocky obstacles. “Jethro!” she screamed. “Jethro!”

She hated silence. How dare Jethro be silent? She wanted him to answer! She wanted him to speak!

Her tears spilled down her face and fell on her pleading hands.

It seemed to her as she wept, that the tears were full of sand, not salt, and that when they dried on her hands, she had some of Jethro in her palm.

“Be safe!” she cried. “Be at rest! Oh, Jethro, be safe!”

Christo said, “What are you talking about?” He shepherded the two girls toward the van.

Talking?
thought Nicoletta. I am trying to be heard through hundreds of years of abandonment, and through thousands of tons of rock. I am screaming! I am screaming for the soul of a boy who loved me.

Anne-Louise rattled her car keys.

Christo rewound his film.

They reached the boulder. Nicoletta rested her hand on the snowcap it wore. There was nothing. Snow. Rock. Solidity. She put the same hand on her heart. It was as cracked as crystal thrown from the cliff. And no one knew, or heard.

“Jethro,” she whispered.

It seemed to her that for a tender moment, the frozen trees of the woods, the lakes and ledges and stones of the earth, bent toward her and understood her sorrow.

Christo opened the van door for Nicoletta, and boosted her in. “Where does that Jethro kid live anyway?”

She looked into the silent woods and thought of Jethro, silent forever. “He moved,” said Nicoletta. Let it be true, she prayed. Let him be safe wherever he moved to, wherever he lies.

Jethro, it was too much. To die for me was too much. I wanted you alive! I wanted us together! You can’t do that with death. With death you can’t be together.

Christo started the engine.

She looked down at her hand. Caught in the tiny cup of her curved palm was a grain of sand glittering like a diamond. She closed her fingers to keep her diamond safe. The way, with his death, Jethro had kept her safe.

They left in the little lane with its dwindling ruts, and the trees closed around the road as if it had never been.

Her breath was hot in the icy van. It clouded the window. With the hand that held no diamond, she traced a heart in the mist on the glass. She wrote no initials within the heart, for she did not know Jethro’s, and Christo would expect his initials to go beside hers.

They drove on, and the van heated up, and the warm air erased the heart.

But Jethro would not be erased. Jethro had lived and loved. He had loved
her.
Nicoletta Storms opened her hand. The diamond lay still and silent in her palm.

And always would.

Caroline B. Cooney is the author of ninety books for teen readers, including the bestselling thriller
The Face on the Milk Carton
. Her books have won awards and nominations for more than one hundred state reading prizes. They are also on recommended-reading lists from the American Library Association, the New York Public Library, and more. Cooney is best known for her distinctive suspense novels and romances.

Born in 1947, in Geneva, New York, Cooney grew up in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, where she was a library page at the Perrot Memorial Library and became a church organist before she could drive. Music and books have remained staples in her life. 

Cooney has attended lots of colleges, picking up classes wherever she lives. Several years ago, she went to college to relearn her high school Latin and begin ancient Greek, and went to a total of four universities for those subjects alone!

Her sixth-grade teacher was a huge influence. Mr. Albert taught short story writing, and after his class, Cooney never stopped writing short stories. By the time she was twenty-five, she had written eight novels and countless short stories, none of which were ever published. Her ninth book,
Safe as the Grave
, a mystery for middle readers, became her first published book in 1979. Her real success began when her agent, Marilyn Marlow, introduced her to editors Ann Reit and Beverly Horowitz.

Cooney’s books often depict realistic family issues, even in the midst of dramatic adventures and plot twists. Her fondness for her characters comes through in her prose: “I love writing and do not know why it is considered such a difficult, agonizing profession. I love all of it, thinking up the plots, getting to know the kids in the story, their parents, backyards, pizza toppings.” Her fast-paced, plot-driven works explore themes of good and evil, love and hatred, right and wrong, and moral ambiguity.