Specter (9780307823403)

by Nixon, Joan Lowery

  “Good night,” she says.

  In the morning Mrs. Cardenas serves another big breakfast. Then she announces it’s time to get ready for Mass. “Nobody has to go,” she says. “But it would be nice. After all, it is the Lord’s day, and you don’t have to be Catholic to go to Mass.”

  “She makes everybody go to Mass,” Mr. Cardenas says.

  His wife ignores him. “In a family it’s a good thing when everybody goes to church together. You see, I’m not telling you to go. I’m just saying it would be nice.” She cocks her head like a fat little robin as she looks at me. “Dina, did you ever go to Mass in a Catholic church?”

  “No.”

  “Well then,” she says, “you don’t know what it’s like, how beautiful it is, and you won’t know unless you go.”

  How do I explain to her that I’m blank inside, that I tried to pray and I couldn’t? “Please,” I say. “I’m not ready yet. Not now.”

  She gives me a long look, then nods. “Okay. Not just yet. How about you, Julie? Want to come with me?”

  “I want to stay with Dina,” Julie says.

  Mrs. Cardenas sighs. “Then it’s up to you and me, Carlos.”

  He leans on the table and pushes himself upward from his chair. The wood creaks, and he says, “That’s my knees complaining they’re getting too stiff to kneel.”

  “Going to church is good for stiff knees.”

  “She is trying to make me holy,” he says to me.

  “You’re much closer than you used to be,” she says.

  “Maybe it’s not going to church that’s doing it. Maybe it’s old age.”

  “Hurry up, old man,” she tells him.

  “I’ll take care of the kitchen,” I say. I carry the plates nearest me to the sink and rinse off the runny yellow egg yolk that paints the rims.

  Julie comes to the sink, too, and nudges me out of the way. “I said I’d do the breakfast dishes.”

  “We can do them together, and make the beds, and then read the comics in the newspaper.”

  “You’re supposed to rest.”

  “I just got up. I’m not the least bit tired.” I smile at her. “Come on, Julie. Let’s work together.”

  “All right,” she says, putting the dishes she is holding into the sink. “And then you can write your letter.”

  But the letter doesn’t get written. In just an hour Mr. and Mrs. Cardenas return, and there are preparations for dinner and everything anyone said at the party to retell in detail. Mrs. Cardenas is still hung over with happiness.

  Dave comes at two, just as he had promised, and we climb into his father’s car. Somehow Julie ends up between us.

  “Hola, señorita,” he tells her.

  “Is that Spanish?” she asks.

  “Yes. Wouldn’t you feel less crowded in the backseat?”

  “No,” she says, and she folds her hands primly in her lap.

  Dave smiles at me over Julie’s head, and I feel a rush of joy in this special day that belongs to me.

  Dave has a nice smile and a nice profile. I memorize it with quick, secret glances as we drive through the older part of the city and the downtown area. Finally we park in a wide lot near the Hilton Hotel.

  “The river is to our right, but we’re going to La Villita first,” Dave says. “A glass blower there makes little animals. I think Julie would like one.”

  Julie perks up. She chatters about a glass blower she saw at the beach once when her father took her, as we cross the street and head into a narrow passageway paved with cobblestones.

  Dave is telling us about the history of this early center in San Antonio, but I am watching the people and the shops. The area is filled with tourists.

  “The glass blower first,” Julie says, as I stop to look at a pottery display in a nearby window. Someone takes my hand, but it’s not Julie. The fingers are long and firm, and I like the feel of them.

  I see that Dave has Julie by his other hand. He has moved between us. Across the way a tall, stocky man with dark hair is watching the three of us, and I automatically smile at him. This is a day for smiles.

  If he smiles back, I don’t notice because Dave is saying, “Right in here, Julie,” and fishing some change from his pocket to pay the ten cents admission.

  We edge past some plump women who are leaving the store, gingerly carrying well-wrapped purchases, and enter an ice-and-diamond-spangled world. There are blown glass figurines of all sizes and shapes lining the walls and hanging from the ceiling. Ships in full sail, ballerinas, skittish horses, leaping porpoises—

  “This is fantastic!” I tell Dave.

  Julie adds, “Oh! Look at the merry-go-round!”

  “Tell you what, Julie,” Dave says. “I’d like to buy you anything in the store, but I haven’t got that much money. Over on this tray are a lot of little animals, and I can afford one of those for you. Take your pick.”

  Julie is delighted. She chooses, changes her mind, and chooses again until she has decided on a small, pink dog. “I never had a dog,” she says.

  Dave has picked something else. He pays for the purchases and puts mine in my hand. “A duck,” he says. “A very soft-bellied duck.”

  We leave the store laughing in our own world, not noticing that Julie has stopped on the bottom step, until we nearly stumble over her.

  “Watch it!” Dave says, catching his footing and grabbing my arm.

  “Sikes!” Julie whispers, and she clutches my skirt. “That man looking in the window, with his back to us, is Sikes!”

  Before I can react, she begins to run into the crowd, back toward the street. “Dave!” I cry. “Catch her!”

  A policeman is standing on the next level. Should I yell for help? No. My mind is trying to think while my feet are running toward him.

  He turns. “What’s the matter?”

  My words gulp and gasp and spill into each other. “There’s a man. His name is Sikes. Please come with me.”

  I lead, and he follows quickly. It isn’t far. The shop is here—no, there. At the window. But he’s gone.

  “Oh, no! He was a big man. Tall, with dark hair. His back was toward us. He must have seen me run to you for help. He’s—”

  The door of the shop opens, and a woman comes out, her wide-brimmed straw hat flopping at every step. The man follows her. It’s the same man who had been watching us earlier.

  “It was hot in the sun,” he complains. “I thought you were never going to make up your mind.”

  “That’s him,” I tell the policeman. I don’t have to go toward him. He and the woman walk right into our path.

  “Just a minute, please,” the policeman says, and they stop. The policeman looks at me.

  I glance wildly around for Dave and Julie, but they aren’t in sight. “I—there’s a little girl with us. She—well, she was afraid of this man. She said his name was Sikes. William Sikes.”

  “For goodness’ sakes!” the woman says. She squints at us and retreats behind an overlarge pair of sunglasses. “That’s not our name. It isn’t even close.”

  “I’ll show you my identification,” the man tells the policeman. He pulls out a wallet, and the policeman studies it. I wish I were any place in the world except right here.

  “Dina!” I am so glad to hear Dave’s voice. He comes through the crowd, pulling Julie after him. She looks at me as though I had betrayed her, and she’s trembling. “I don’t want to see him, Dina!”

  I take her other hand. “Look, Julie. This is the man you ran from.”

  She stares at him and shakes her head. “He isn’t Sikes.”

  “He’s the man who was looking in the window. You just saw his back. You made a mistake.”

  Other people have stopped to watch the scene. I feel like a fool, trying to apologize, to explain. There is really nothing I can explain. I wish the man and his wife would help me, but they’re annoyed. They walk away.

  The policeman shrugs and goes back to the spot where I had found him. He isn’t c
urious, and I’m thankful for that. How do I explain someone like Sikes?

  Dave has a hand on my shoulder. “Calm down,” he says. “Julie just made a mistake. No one got hurt.”

  “I want to go home,” Julie says.

  “But we haven’t been to the river yet. And whoever you thought this guy was, he wasn’t.” Dave pauses. “Does that make sense?”

  “I know that man wasn’t Sikes,” Julie says, as she stares at the clusters of people who are strolling past us. Her fingers grip my hand so tightly it’s painful.

  “I wasn’t looking at that man,” Julie adds. “I was looking at Sikes.”

  CHAPTER

  10

  “Who is Sikes?” Dave asks me later, so I tell him Julie’s story.

  “That’s weird,” he says. He leans back on the thick pad of grass under Mrs. Cardenas’s crape myrtle tree. The tree is dotted with hard little gray-green balls that in a few weeks will relax and become fragile pink flowers.

  “Her story is possible,” I tell him. “Mrs. Cardenas thinks Julie’s parents were running from something or someone. I wonder if they were running from Sikes.”

  “Do you think he’s following Julie? Or does she just imagine that she sees him?”

  I pull at a broad strand of grass and smooth it between my fingers. “Dave, I’ve even wondered if Sikes was a real person. But he must be. The things she’s told me she couldn’t make up. And she does have those marks on her back and bruises on her arms.”

  “Maybe they came from her father.”

  “I doubt it. She adores her father. She told me she looks just like him.” I watch a bee who is investigating my toes. I pull my foot back, and he shoots off in a straight line. “That’s odd.”

  Dave rolls over on one elbow. “It’s odd that she looks like her father?”

  “No. I just thought of something Arturo said. At the party he mentioned that Julie was a pretty little girl. Then he said she must look like her mother.”

  “It was a compliment.”

  “I don’t think so. He’s a policeman. Maybe he saw the driver’s license description of her father. Or maybe it’s the Texas kind that has a picture on it, and he knows what her father looks like.”

  “Remind me to show you the picture on my driver’s license. No. Remind me not to. I look like I’m planning to rob the savings and loan company. All I need is a number under my chin.”

  “I’ll show you my license. I’ve got a big, silly grin that scrunches up my eyes. If a policeman ever stopped me and looked at my license, he’d never recognize me unless I made the same face.”

  It’s a lazy afternoon. The scene at La Villita seems out of place. Wrong movie. Wrong actors. I’ve forgotten something.

  “Dave, I didn’t remember to thank you for going after Julie.”

  “She’s a fast one,” Dave says. “Scared me to death when she ran out in the traffic before I could reach her. She just missed being hit by a car. It’s surprising she wasn’t.”

  Cold, cold, cold. Sitting in the sun with shivers up my back and through my shoulders and into my neck. There is something here I don’t understand. A needle of cold pricks me, frightens me. Dave begins talking about his job, and I’m distracted. Tomorrow I’ll call Dr. Lynn. I need to talk to her. All I have is pieces, and I need her to help put them together.

  “So frying fish and french fries gets kind of boring after a while, but the job pays okay, and it’s fine for summer.”

  I realize Dave is talking, but it’s hard to pay attention.

  What do I tell her? About Julie cutting her arm? But it was an accident. About Julie running into traffic? But she was running away from someone she thought was Sikes.

  I try to look interested as Dave says, “And you can sure get sick of that fish smell. We get all we can eat, but you can only eat so much fish, and you start dreaming it’s a pizza.”

  What’s happening to Julie doesn’t make sense. It sounds crazy. She’s just a little girl. With problems.

  “Obviously the story of my career as a fryer of fish has you stunned into speechlessness,” Dave says.

  I tuck away the problems, pulling myself back to the here and now, back to Dave. “I was just trying to visualize the story of your job as a TV mini-series. Sort of like cooked Jaws.”

  I feel at ease with Dave, and he likes to be with me. I know he does. But the afternoon turns warm again, and it’s over too soon. Reluctantly I say good-bye to Dave and go into the house. Mrs. Cardenas is chopping cucumbers and tomatoes for a salad, so I set the table.

  Mr. Cardenas tosses down the comic section of the Express-News.

  “There’s nothing funny in here today,” he says.

  “You read those comics three times at least,” his wife says. “If they’re not funny, why read them?”

  “I keep looking.”

  The house is very quiet. “Where’s Julie?” I ask. I’m glad I had a break from her, but now guilt is moving in again.

  “Oh, she’s back in the bedroom. Probably still playing with that little glass dog,” Mrs. Cardenas says. “She sure likes that little dog. That was nice of Dave to buy those things for you. Didn’t I tell you he was a nice boy?”

  Yes, he’s very nice, and the little duck is nice, and I want to see it and touch it again. “I’ll go back to the bedroom and talk to Julie,” I tell them. “She may want some company.”

  As I enter the bedroom, Julie stares up at me. There is a strong message of fear. She is hunched in a little ball in the middle of her bed, and she holds out a closed fist.

  “I want you to have my dog,” she says.

  Pink glass shines through her fingers.

  “No,” I tell her. “That’s a gift to you from Dave. He wouldn’t want you to give it away.”

  “I want to give it to you, because I broke your little duck.”

  “Oh, no, Julie! No!” I glance at the top of the chest of drawers, where I had put it, but it isn’t there. “What were you doing with it?”

  “I know. It was yours, and I should have left it alone.”

  “Where is it? How did you break it?”

  She climbs from the bed and carefully picks up a tissue which is wadded around something. I hold out my hand, and she places the tissue in it.

  “I dropped it. Please don’t be mad at me. I was just looking at it, and I dropped it.”

  I stare at the crushed pieces of yellow glass lying on the tissue in my hand. “Tell me the truth, Julie.”

  “I am! I dropped it.”

  “To smash it like this you must have stepped on it.”

  “Oh. Maybe I did when I was trying to pick it up.”

  I meet her gaze, so steady, so innocent. She had to do this on purpose. Because Dave gave it to me?

  Facing her, I sit on the edge of my bed. She is so small, so thin, so young for her nine years. “I think if we have an honest talk with each other, it will help,” I tell her. “Something is bothering you, and something is bothering me. Talk to me. Tell me why you did this.”

  She looks at me for a long time, and I hope she is weighing what I’ve said.

  “Julie, do you think I’m spending too much time with Dave and not enough with you?”

  She shakes her head.

  “People have many friends. At the home I spent a lot of time with Holley Jo, but I had other friends, too. And I taught swimming lessons in the summer, while Holley Jo took advanced French in summer school. And sometimes she went out on a date, and I stayed home. Sometimes it worked the other way. We didn’t have to be with each other the entire time. Do you understand?”

  Her mind has shifted, and I can see the change. “I know what’s bothering you,” she suddenly says. “You don’t like being sick and waiting to find out if you’re going to die.”

  I can’t help sighing. “I am trying to talk about you. The way you’ve been behaving is one of the things that is bothering me.”

  Does she smile? It was just a flicker. A strange, little smile. “Don’t worry,”
she says. “Everything’s going to be all right.”

  I can’t get through to her. I don’t know how. Carefully, I wrap the shards of yellow glass in the tissue and tuck it in the right-hand corner of my top drawer. When I get the chance, I’m going to call Dr. Lynn.

  In the morning Mrs. Cardenas leans across the breakfast table and says, “Dina, you told me you could drive and run errands for me. You got a driver’s license?”

  “Yes. I’ll show it to you.”

  “That’s okay. I believe you.” She plops back in her chair and says, “Carlos is such a bad driver he takes the bus to work. And I don’t like to drive. Too many crazy drivers who want to put their cars in the same spot my car is in.”

  “I’ll take you anywhere you want to go,” I say. “I’m a good driver.”

  “Muy bien,” she says. “Today I got some errands for you.”

  “I want to go, too,” Julie says.

  “Sure,” Mrs. Cardenas says. “This one place you’re going to, a shoe repair shop—Oh, how that man wears down the heels on his shoes!—is right next to a nice little ice cream store. I’ll give you some money to have ice cream cones.”

  “Thank you,” I say, and Julie repeats it like a small echo.

  “You’d better give me some directions,” I add. “I’m not familiar with San Antonio.”

  Julie clears the table while Mrs. Cardenas draws red dots on a gas station map of the city. “Here’s where we are, and here’s the shoe repair shop. It’s in a big shopping mall over near the Loop. I’m going to give you a grocery list, and you may as well get the things at that store in the mall because they got a good buy on eggs and a half-price on tomato juice.”

  She’s busy writing lists, and I’m studying the map. The city isn’t that big, and map reading isn’t hard. In fact, I like it.

  Julie is next to me. Her finger points to I-10. “This is the freeway that goes to the hospital,” she says.

  “You’re a good map reader,” I tell her.

  “I know,” she answers.

  Finally we are loaded with a list; a paper bag with a pair of shoes in it; Mr. Cardenas’s suit, which has to go to the dry cleaners; and some money for the grocery store.