Wildwood (10 page)

Authors: Drusilla Campbell

BOOK: Wildwood

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The young mother asked, “Do you come here often? It’s nice to have someone to talk to. The parks at home—I’m from outside Cleveland—they’re full of moms and kids. Here it’s different. More women work.” She nodded toward the man hunting and gathering with his shopping cart. “Mostly you see
them.”

“I’m usually too busy for the park.”

“Maybe we could work out a babysitting co-op. I used to do that with my friends.”

“I don’t go out much.”

“You might change your mind. Once the novelty’s worn off.” She wiped Tootsie-Pop drool and sand off her toddler’s face. “What’s your name?”

“Hannah.”

“I’m Judy.” The toddler tugged her pant leg and whined to be lifted. Judy groaned. “No rest, I guess. Gotta go. See ya, Hannah.”

“See ya, Judy.”

In the distance a school bell rang and from farther away a siren screamed. No harm done. She kissed the top of Angel’s head.
When you’re mine it’ll all be true anyway.

Hannah made a late lunch of cold meat loaf sandwiches and chocolate chip cookies with milk. After eating she and Liz stood at the sink and put the dishes in the dishwasher. Liz talked about her neighbors in Belize City: the fortune-teller named Divina, the man who drove a Cadillac and sold bananas by the stem door to door, Petula who chartered boats to tourists. She described frogs the size of softballs that squatted on her steps and sang while the rain poured down.

Hannah listened and tried to pretend she was interested. All the while she observed Liz for signs of illness, but the amazing thing was she had never looked better. The years had softened her rather sharp features and she smiled a lot and her laugh came from somewhere deep inside. She must be happy, Hannah thought. Happy or sad, the young were always pretty. But to be a pretty middle-aged woman, happiness was more important than cosmetics or surgery.

If she’s not sick, why did she go to the doctor?

Hannah couldn’t stand the waiting. “Liz, tell me what—”

“I almost forgot your present. I brought you something special from Florida.” Liz went upstairs and in a moment she came back into the kitchen. “Close your eyes and stand with your back to the sink.”

Hannah did as she was told. “It’s not a bug or anything? From Belize?”

Liz laughed and then Hannah heard a soft unidentifiable squeak and water in a fine spray touched her cheeks and wet her eyelids.

“What? . . .”

“It’s rain,” Liz said. “I brought it from Florida like you said I should.”

Tears again.

They walked down to the barn.

When Dan and Hannah bought the house on Casabella Road, there had been nothing on the lower field but a long, ramshackle old henhouse—a sinister place, thick with webs and shadows and the hint of snakes. Even the Fearsome Threesome, intrepid at eight and nine, had been reluctant to explore it until one hot autumn afternoon when Jeanne led the way and pried open the door with a screwdriver.

They had peered down a long empty space striped by mustard-colored shafts and plates of sunlight entering through knotholes and gaps between the boards. Through a cloud of shimmering motes they saw straight ahead of them, dead in the middle of the barn and spotlighted in dark gold, an oversized wooden chair joined by bolts the size of silver dollars with a high square back and chunky square-edged arms and legs. In a hushed voice, Jeanne said it was an electric chair without the juice. It was easy to believe her.

Years later on the day the builders demolished the old coop, Hannah stayed on the hill and watched, eager to see the electric chair brought out. The workman found a wooden kitchen chair with arms, the kind mass-produced in the Twenties and Thirties.

“It was nothing at all,” she told Liz as they walked through the paddock gate and were immediately surrounded by clambering dogs and cats with their tails straight up and quivering. “Just a chair. All those years we were so afraid of it . . .”

Liz nodded and inhaled as if she were about to say something. Now she’ll tell me, Hannah thought.
Tell me, tell me.

Instead Liz gestured toward the animals. “Are they all yours? There must be a dozen cats.”

“The dogs and the donkey came from the Humane Society. People just leave cats at the end of the driveway.”

“You’re such a soft touch.”

“What am I supposed to do? Walk away and let them die? Ramon comes morning and afternoon to help. They’re no trouble.”

Beaten, starved, neglected: the streetwise orphans always kept their distance at first. But gradually, inevitably, they trusted Hannah and learned to come when she leaned on the paddock fence and called. They trembled when she stroked their coats but did not run.

In Levi’s and sweatshirt, ancient boots pulled on over a discarded pair of Dan’s wool socks, Hannah fed the dogs and measured out oats and forked fresh hay down from the loft. The work was basic and hard, and she felt strong doing it. Liz sat on the gate of an empty stall and gabbed at her, but Hannah only listened with half attention. Liz wasn’t saying anything that mattered, not yet. Sooner or later she would have to get down to it but for now . . . well, Hannah admitted, she was just as glad not to go there. Instead of worrying about Liz and her mystery, she preferred to imagine how Angel would love the barn and the animals. When she was four Hannah would teach her to ride. She’d make her a brown velveteen weskit and a matching jacket . . .

Liz had stopped talking.

“What’s the matter?” Hannah asked.

“What’s going on with you?”

“Look who’s asking.”

“I know a lot about depression, Hannah.”

Hannah waved the word away. “Who said I was depressed?” Hannah hung the pitchfork on a hook. “You’re gone for years and now all of a sudden you’re back and full of secrets and you know everything.” She regretted her tone but did not apologize.

“There’s things we should talk about.”

“What kind of
things?”

“Bluegang.”

The answer startled Hannah. “Oh. That.” She sighed and crouched down to pat a mangy beagleish sort of mutt. Pus accumulated in yellow gobbets at the corners of its eyes. She’d have to call the vet, get some drops.

She stood up and waved her arm in the direction of the creek. “It’s right down there, over the hill. If you’re so interested, go look at it.” She headed out of the barn. “Tomorrow night you can talk all you want to Gail Bacci about Bluegang. It’s one of her favorite subjects. That and how much money she’s making.”

“Please, Hannah. Don’t make this hard. I have to talk about it. That’s why I’ve come back.”

Hannah stopped. “What about the doctor?”

“That’s . . . something else. I told you not to worry about me. I’m not sick.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I have nightmares . . .”

“The doctor’s a shrink?”

“I keep seeing that boy.”

Hannah felt her jaw tighten and a brooding ache burrowed in beside her right ear. “We made a deal we wouldn’t talk.”

“We were children, we wanted it to go away like it never happened. We were scared. But now—. I can’t make it go away anymore. And it’s crazy not to talk about it. Something like that happens and we have to talk about it.”

“Leave it.” Hannah pressed her index finger hard into the pain behind her ear and told herself to relax and it would diminish.

“It’s not over for me,” Liz said. “The last year I’ve been obsessing.”

“You?”

“And I can’t sleep.”

Hannah laughed. “Who can?”

“I did something terrible that day, Hannah.”

You?

“I should have insisted that we tell someone right then. I almost did but I thought how my parents were so busy and how upset they’d be with me.”

Hannah’s voice broke as it rose in volume. “Did you hear what I said?”

“I knew what was right to do but when Jeanne started talking—”

“I said leave it. I don’t want to talk about this.” Hannah gestured Liz through the paddock gate and slammed and latched it shut behind them. “And I won’t. Period.”

Jeanne wove Teddy’s Waterman pen between her fingers. On the desk before her, the report from the housekeeping staff lay open, but she could not concentrate on complaints about old plumbing, long hours and low wages. Across the room the bell-curve walnut clock on the credenza struck two. She double-checked the clock against her watch: 2:01.

She had allowed Robby to take Adam Weed into town. Older honor students like Robby were given such privileges on special occasions. In this case, Robby needed to buy his mother a birthday gift. Using the Waterman like a drumstick, she played an irritable riff on her desktop. She had wanted the boys to bond, but maybe it had been a mistake to trust Robby with someone as fragile as Adam Weed.

She could have a drink at five. Five was a legitimate time for a drink.

On the credenza, a little to the left of the clock, was a picture of her father and mother, an enlargement of a snapshot taken one Easter by her brother, Michael, during his photography phase. Against the backdrop of the rose cloister, it showed her father’s stubborn chin and wooden back. Her mother’s equally unyielding nature was disguised by a floral dress and exuberantly gauzy hat. As far as Jeanne could remember, they had been almost moderate in their habits in those days. The drinking had begun in earnest after Michael died.

There was a knock on the hall door.

Jeanne slipped the pen into her purse, smoothed her bun and tugged down the jacket of her blue wool suit. “Enter.”

A frail, delicately featured boy with muddy shoes stood on the threshold.

“Where have you been, Adam?” Jeanne frowned at the footprints on her hardwood floor.

He looked down at his feet.

“Answer me, Adam. I won’t bite you.”

“Robby and me . . .”

“. . . Robby and I . . .”

“We went to the drugstore.”

“I know that, Adam.” Jeanne smiled. “Was the drugstore muddy?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Then how did your shoes get so dirty?” Bluegang and the wildwood were off limits and all the boys knew it from their first day at Hilltop. Nevertheless, the temptation of trees and water and rocks was too much for most of them. “You’ve left tracks across my floor.”

Adam looked at his feet and then up, as if the answer to her question were written somewhere in the far corner of the ceiling.

Jeanne waited. When his gaze didn’t shift, she repeated her question with more force but with sweetness too; she didn’t want to frighten him. She hoped no teacher had ever frightened James/Mark. She hoped that all his life loving, thoughtful people had surrounded him. She gentled her tone still more. “Where did you get the mud on your shoes?”

He looked out the window.

“Adam?”

“Where the roses are.”

“What were you doing in the rose cloister?”

Adam blinked and thought. “Smellin’ ’em.”

Jeanne considered him. “Where did Robby tell you to take your shower bucket, Adam?”

“Where the roses are.”

Was he lying? She couldn’t tell. With a troubled, distracted boy like Adam Weed, truth and falsehood were often indistinguishable and by doggedly pursuing the truth she would only cause humiliation and further confusion. As it was the boy quivered with tension and she pitied him.

“Do you like your room, Adam?”

He nodded.

“You’re in the oldest wing of the school. Boys have lived in your room since I was younger than you are now.”

And before them, nuns in black habits.

Adam blinked several times. She wondered if his eyes had been tested recently and made a mental note.

“I know you’ve never shared a room before. You might feel a little strange at first, but you’ll get used to it. If you have any trouble, I want you to remember that the secret of living with people happily is cooperation and compromise.” Adam’s gaze was on the ceiling again. She wasn’t even sure he was listening. Jeanne made another note to herself: reexamine his test scores. “Roommates are like a little team, Adam. They have to work together.”

His face brightened. “My Uncle Louis plays for Chicago. He’s the nose tackle.”

That stopped her. “I didn’t know you had an uncle.”

“He plays nose tackle.”

“That’s an important position. My brother played football. I was very proud of him.” She paused. “You must be proud of your Uncle Louis.”

Adam nodded.

“My brother played for Stanford back when they were called the Indians. He was a wide receiver.”