Shades of Simon Gray

by Joyce McDonald

Kyle was taking their breakup harder than she’d expected. If they passed each other in the hall, he wouldn’t look at her. Because they no longer met after fourth period or ate lunch together in the cafeteria, Devin, who had no appetite at all these days, had taken to spending her lunch period in a stall in the girls’ room writing in her journal.

  She had developed her own code because it was too risky to write about what had really been happening in her life. If the cops ever confiscated her journal, they wouldn’t know what to make of it. Or so she hoped. Sometimes she wrote her sentences backward. Mih ot netsil reve I did yhw? Sometimes she wrote obscure poems that held meaning for her alone. Sometimes she scribbled images in metaphor. I am at the bottom of a well. The walls are damp and slimy. My fingers slip on the mossy stones. Sometimes I think I will never be able to pull myself out of this dark place.

  The police, if they ever got their hands on her journal, would assume these were the adolescent hormone-induced rages of an overly angst-ridden teen. She was counting on it.

  At least she didn’t have to worry about memorizing lines for Macbeth anymore. The day before, she’d told the drama coach, Mr. Newcombe, about her grandmother’s illness and how she would probably have to miss a lot more rehearsals than she already had because she’d be spending a lot of time at the hospital. She had told him she couldn’t possibly concentrate on her role.

  What she didn’t tell Mr. Newcombe was that Lady Macbeth’s lines had begun to creep into her thoughts at the most unfortunate times, like on the bus on her way to the hospital. O, these flaws and starts,/Imposters to true fear, would well become/A woman’s story at a winter’s fire,/Authorized by her grandam. Shame itself! You couldn’t grab your head, tear at your hair, rub the palm of your hand, and scream, Out, damned spot! out, I say! in front of a busful of people, no matter how desperately you wanted to.

  Mrs. McCafferty was slumped in the single chair, staring at the wall, a magazine lying open on her lap, when Devin came through the door to her grandmother’s room. Since the doctors had determined that Devin’s grandmother had West Nile virus, which wasn’t contagious, they had moved her into a double room.

  A young girl, about Devin’s age, was in the other bed, the one by the door. An IV needle was taped to her hand. She appeared to be asleep. And since no one was visiting her, Devin quietly lifted the empty chair from the girl’s side of the room and set it next to her mother’s. “How is she?” Devin whispered.

  “It’s progressed to encephalitis.” Her mother stared down at the magazine in her lap. “They’re making arrangements to move her to the intensive care unit.”

  Encephalitis. Devin looked over at her sleeping grandmother. The woman’s face was ashen. Dried spittle caked the corners of her thin lips. Devin had an overwhelming urge to put her arms around her grandmother and hold on for dear life. Instead she wrapped her fingers around the arms of the chair. “So how are they treating it?”

  “Dr. Chu says they’ve had some success with a drug called Ribavirin.”

  Devin waited for her mother to go on. When she didn’t, Devin said, “So that’s what they’re giving her?”

  Her mother slapped the magazine closed and tossed it on the floor beside the chair. “Yes.” Her eyes shifted away from her daughter.

  “But …?” Devin saw the unspoken word in her mother’s expression.

  Mrs. McCafferty sighed. “Your grandmother doesn’t seem to be responding to the medication.”

  “Why not?” Devin’s legs had begun to twitch. She locked her ankles around the chair legs.

  “They aren’t sure. Dr. Chu says this could be a new strain of the virus, one they haven’t dealt with before.”

  “So now what?”

  “They’re doing what they can—intravenous fluids, nutrition. Mostly they have to be careful she doesn’t get some other kind of infection, like pneumonia.”

  “What about antibiotics?” Devin said. “They can give her those, right?”

  “If she gets a bacterial infection, yes. But this is a virus, honey. Antibiotics won’t have any effect on it.” Her mother got up and walked to the single window. The only view was a brick wall across an air shaft.

  “I’ll stay here if you want to walk around,” Devin said.

  Her mother nodded, although her back was still to Devin. “I need to stretch my legs a bit.” She reached for her handbag on the table beside the bed. “If Gram wakes up …” She paused and looked down at Devin. “If she should say something, well … odd, don’t get upset, okay?”

  Devin blinked back at her. “What’s that supposed to mean? Odd?”

  Mrs. McCafferty slid the strap of her purse over her shoulder and shrugged. “Encephalitis can cause mental confusion.”

  “What kind of mental confusion?”

  “The doctor called it altered mental states.”

  “So, has Gram been saying weird things to you or something?”

  “She seemed a little agitated earlier today. That’s all.” Mrs. McCafferty put her arms around Devin and gave her a gentle hug. “I just thought I should warn you.”

  When her mother was gone, Devin slid the chair closer to the bed. She would spend some time with her grandmother; then, as soon as her mother returned, she would go down to the ICU and see if she could find out how Simon was doing. Liz had told her Tuesday morning in school how she had sneaked in to see Simon the afternoon before, and how she believed one of his fingers had moved. Devin had been hopeful. But then on Wednesday, there had been rumors at school that Simon had taken a turn for the worse on Tuesday afternoon. Devin didn’t know whom to believe. So she was determined to see for herself.

  She reached through the side rail and touched her grandmother’s hand. Her skin felt like fine-grained sandpaper.

  She thought about the day her grandparents moved into the already cramped Cape Cod on Meadowlark Drive, how furious she had been with them, with her parents, with the world in general. They had stolen her new bedroom right out from under her. Never mind that Granddad McCafferty was in a wheelchair, unable to talk or move. He was a thief! They both were.

  Devin had made sure everyone was at the kitchen table, eating dinner, the night she stomped through the room with the first box, passing them to get to the basement door. All in all, she carried four boxes and two armloads of clothes from her closet to the cellar, and not one member of her family ever looked up from the table or said a word. They just kept right on eating as if Devin’s moving into the basement was the most natural thing in the world.

  As she sat there holding her grandmother’s hand, Devin thought maybe it really was the most natural thing, although her intention at the time had been to make them all feel guilty. They had banished her to the basement, after all. A dark hole where you could feel the tickle of tiny feet and tails on your arms as the mice scurried across the bed, where spiders wove webs over your lips while you slept. Or so she sometimes imagined. But no one had forced her to move to the cellar. It had been her own idea.

  Now her cozy little corner, curtained away from the rest of them, had become her sanctuary. It wasn’t at all what she’d intended. Neither was her grandmother’s illness. Still, Devin couldn’t help wondering if the silent angry curses she’d heaped on her grandparents each time she passed through the kitchen that night three years before, arms loaded with her few precious belongings, hadn’t come back to haunt her.

  One of the nurses came in to change the IV bag. She smiled at Devin. “I’m just checking on her,” she said as she slipped a clean plastic cover on the thermometer and held it inside Mrs. McCafferty’s ear. She checked her pulse and blood pressure, then wrote something on the paper on her clipboard. “They’ll be down soon to take her to the ICU,” she told Devin as she headed out the door.

  When Devin looked back at her grandmother, she was startled to see the old woman’s glassy eyes staring up at her. “How are you feeling, Gram?”

  Her grandmother didn’t answer. She kept her eyes on Devin. Then, as her grandmother�
��s lips slowly parted, Devin had the strangest sensation that time itself had slowed down.

  “They know,” her grandmother whispered.

  Later that night, in her corner of the basement, Devin lay in bed on her side with her pillow curled into her stomach. Not only was her grandmother’s illness worse, but the nurses in the ICU had confirmed that Simon’s condition was still critical. Devin had come away feeling that he might be even worse than the nurses had let on. It was only an intuition. But it was a strong one.

  She pressed her forehead against the cool pillowcase, unable to sleep. She kept thinking about what her grandmother had said, wondering who “they” were. When it came right down to it, probably her grandmother didn’t know either. Her warning—or whatever it was—had no doubt been a feverish outburst caused by her illness. That altered mental state Devin’s mother had mentioned earlier.

  But despite her attempts to reassure herself, Devin’s mind kept returning to a story she had seen one night on the national news. Stunned, she had watched as lightning knocked a man right out of his Birkenstocks as he stood at the back of his cabin cruiser in a thunderstorm down in Key West. The man had a can of Coors in his hand, his face turned up to the drenching rain, and was shouting, “Okay, let’s see your best shot. I dare you!” And of course, “they” took him up on it. With one swift bolt of lightning, the guy was history. The video had been filmed by one of the deceased man’s friends, who had been standing in the cabin doorway at the time.

  Devin’s father had been watching the news with her. He leaned forward in his recliner, slapped his knee, and held his palm out to the TV. “Well, what the hell did he think was going to happen? You stand out there in the middle of the ocean during an electrical storm, you’re going to end up toast!”

  But Devin couldn’t help feeling there was more to it than the scientific inevitability her father’s explanation implied. For some reason, she had thought of the ancient Greek plays she had studied in her English class, and of the Furies. Those ministers of punishment. Those emissaries of swift justice. It didn’t matter who or what “they” were—the gods, the fates, supernatural forces—you simply did not mock them. Ever.

  Wasn’t that what she’d been doing for the past three years, she and Kyle and the others, thumbing their noses at “them”? Outright daring “them” to do something about it? She rolled onto her back but kept a tight hold on the pillow, pressing it against her chest as if it could cushion any blows that might come her way.

  Simon was sitting on Mr. Neidermeyer’s split-rail fence with Jessup Wildemere when it occurred to him that he had never seen Jessup move beyond the area canopied by the branches of the Liberty Tree. It was as if Jessup was being held captive, locked in by some invisible force field.

  When Simon asked Jessup where he lived, knowing full well he was treading on touchy ground, since Jessup wasn’t actually living at all, Jessup gave him a blank look. He didn’t seem to grasp the situation. Not in the same way Simon did.

  Jessup said, “I have been wondering the same about you.” It wasn’t an answer and Simon was disappointed.

  “It’s like I said before, I’m from here.” This time he didn’t mention Bellehaven.

  It was barely dawn. Dark clouds hid the sun. A steady, soft rain was falling, but there wasn’t so much as a spot of water on Jessup. His clothes were as dry as dust. Simon, too, remained bone-dry.

  Jessup slid off the fence and began to pace, slow steps that took him only to the very tips of the longest branches and back again. “I know everyone in these parts. The name Gray is not familiar.”

  “Who is it you keep waiting for?” Simon asked, hoping to change the subject. “Every time I come to this place, you’re here waiting.”

  Jessup rubbed his fingers across his forehead, looking puzzled. “Yes. That’s true. It has been a long wait.”

  “How long?”

  Jessup looked over at Simon; his expression shifted from blank to bewildered. “I don’t know. I can’t seem to recall when I first came here.”

  Simon’s skin rippled with goose bumps. He had suddenly realized that he, too, had begun to lose count of how many times he had come here. It seemed he was spending more and more time with Jessup and less in the hospital. But he couldn’t say for certain how much time had passed. He no longer traveled the halls of the intensive care unit, no longer visited Stanley Isaacson, or found himself in his bedroom at home, or down by the river. The only place he came to was the Liberty Tree. And he had no idea why that should be. He knew there must be some connection, but he still had no recollection of the accident and no idea why he was in the hospital.

  “Are you here to meet someone again?” Simon was hoping Jessup’s answer would help him solve his own mystery. Maybe he was supposed to meet someone too.

  “Hannah.” Jessup stared over at the Gulf station. But Simon knew from what Jessup had told him before that he saw only a narrow dirt road leading to the green at the center of what, in 1798, could scarcely be called a town.

  “Hannah?”

  Jessup looked worried. “You must swear not to say a word to anyone.”

  “About what?”

  “Hannah Dobbler.”

  “Why not?”

  Jessup frowned at Simon. “I shouldn’t be meeting her here at all. She is betrothed to Elias Belcher.” He cocked his head to one side and narrowed his eyes. “If you are truly from around here, you would know that.”

  Simon ignored Jessup’s observation. “Why are you meeting her, then?” But Simon thought he already knew the answer to that. He’d been living a similar story for the past year.

  “She doesn’t love Elias Belcher,” Jessup said. “He is widowed with five children and has barely a tooth left in his mouth.”

  “Then why would she marry him?”

  “Her father has arranged the marriage. Cornelius Dobbler’s land borders Elias’s. They are old friends. And their two properties together will amount to several thousand acres.”

  Simon was only now beginning to realize that Hannah Dobbler was the daughter of the man Jessup Wildemere had murdered.

  The rain had stopped, but a heavy fog had crept over the area. Jessup Wildemere blurred in the mist. Simon jumped down from the fence. He knew what was going to happen, knew Jessup was going to kill Cornelius Dobbler. Simon had to stop him. He reached out, but his hand found only air.

  He wanted to know what had happened to Hannah. Why hadn’t she come? He wanted to know if Jessup would get a chance to see her one last time.

  The fog was so thick he could no longer see the Liberty Tree. No matter which way he turned, he found only the damp gray mist.

  ANOTHER HEAT WAVE HAD MOVED INTO BELLEHAVEN, sending ripples of alarm and fear up and down the streets. People worried that the mosquitoes might start to hatch again if the weather didn’t turn cooler soon, which could mean more cases of West Nile virus. Fifteen more families packed up and left town.

  Late Thursday night, Liz sat on the floor of her bedroom in shorts and a T-shirt, her back against the foot of the bed, with both bedroom windows wide open, her notebook in her lap, and Pandora stretched out against her leg. Pandora’s chin and one paw rested on Liz’s thigh. Liz was on her third cup of coffee and fourth Snickers bar, and it was only eleven-thirty. Already her handwriting had the jagged, frazzled look of a caffeine-sugar high. But if she was ever going to get her paper done for Mrs. Rosen by the next day, it would mean pulling an all-nighter.

  It was her own fault, of course. Liz had found Lucinda Alderman’s diary almost a week earlier, sneaked it home in her backpack, glanced at the first few incredibly boring pages, and hadn’t bothered to look at it since. She had other things on her mind. Namely Simon. Lately she’d been spending every afternoon and early evening at the hospital, sitting in the waiting room outside the ICU, hoping for some word.

  Courtney wasn’t at all informative. When she returned to the waiting room between her ten-minute visits, she slumped into a chair, eyes closed, and l
istened to whatever was on her Discman. The music was turned up so loud Liz could hear it even though Courtney wore earphones.

  Mr. Gray at least nodded to Liz, or mumbled some form of greeting, although he never sat in the waiting room with Courtney, as far as Liz could tell. Still, she continued to show up every day, hoping she hadn’t misread the signs—that almost indiscernible feather-light movement of Simon’s finger—hoping that each minute, each hour, he was struggling to come back to them. But every evening Liz left the hospital disappointed.

  She had barely been able to keep up with her regular homework assignments. Spending extra hours researching her history project was more than she could handle. Earlier in the marking period, before her enthusiasm for the assignment had dwindled to almost zero, she had managed to pull together a fairly decent account of daily life in 1798 Bellehaven, or Havenhill, as the town was called back then.

  At the historical society she had even discovered an old map from 1787, the year New Jersey became a state. The park was the green in those days, the heart of the town, as in many ways it still was. Only a few homes and shops were scattered around the green, and only one main road came into town. On the outskirts were a number of farms. The one closest to the green, as far as she’d been able to find out, was the Alderman farm. The boundary of the Dobbler farm, one of the largest in the area, abutted the Alderman farm on one side, and another farm, owned by Elias Belcher, on the other. The town’s population, according to census records from that time, was 107.

  Old court records turned up even less information, a single entry for September third “on which day, in the year of our Lord 1798, the execution of one Jessup Wildemere for the brutal murder of Cornelius Dobbler was carried out.” When Liz first stumbled upon this information, a few days before she found the Alderman journal, she had realized almost at once the discrepancy in the date. Local legend had the people of Havenhill hanging Jessup Wildemere in the dead of winter, after a severe blizzard and a dangerous food shortage. The court records, however, stated that the execution took place in late summer.