A Place Apart

by Paula Fox

  I turned out my light and she turned out hers. I lay in the dark thinking how Hugh would like that poem. I imagined copying it out for him and leaving it in his locker. I had never written him a note or a letter. I imagined him reading it, and then asking me to have coffee with him, and everything being the way it had been at the beginning. I fell asleep in a daydream of happiness.

  It was a nice week. Jed and I went to movies and walked out on a few, and to museums, and one day Lawrence took us to lunch at an Italian restaurant and I drank a glass of Chianti, and things were very merry. One afternoon, Jed and I returned some books to the library for Uncle Philip. Jed had to look up something in a medical dictionary for his schoolwork. We spent the afternoon looking at descriptions of diseases, and by the time we got out of the library, we were shell-shocked. “We’d be dead if we had everything we think we have,” I said. “Do I look like I have a fever?” Jed asked. “Just leprosy,” I said. “Take an aspirin.” On our last night, we all played Monopoly and I cleaned up. I was so triumphant that even Uncle Philip got annoyed with me. “I’m glad you’re not my landlord,” he said.

  We returned to our cold house on Sunday. Lawrence started a fire in the stove and Ma made us an early supper out of the groceries she’d bought in Boston. There were still a few days before school began. I was sorry I’d cleaned my room so well. I didn’t even have any homework to do. The minute we’d driven into New Oxford, all the troubles that seemed to have gone away in Boston came flying back to me like a flock of noisy crows.

  I picked up the phone and called Elizabeth.

  “I love the necklace,” I said.

  “I loved the gloves. Green is my favorite color,” she said.

  I thought of Frank Wilson’s green sneakers and I made a face at the phone.

  “I’m glad you’re back,” she said. “Listen, Frank’s been working on an old junk car for months and he’s got it ready to run. He wants to drive up Mt. Crystal tomorrow evening. Will you come with us? I’ve only been up to the top in the summer. But at this time of year, you’re supposed to be able to see three states and the lights of Boston if it’s a clear night.”

  I didn’t want to go at all, but I felt Elizabeth was trying to include me in her life in some way, and also, I figured I’d better hang on to whatever was left for me in New Oxford.

  “I’ll ask Ma,” I said, “and I’ll call you back in the morning.”

  When I went to bed and turned out the light, a ray from the street lamp struck the little glass pear on my bureau, which old Mr. Thames had given me. I remembered Uncle Philip telling me that my pear dream meant I’d have to find my own country. If I had, I thought, most of the population had fled from it.

  CHAPTER NINE

  It should have been a straightforward question, but when I asked Ma if I could go for a ride with Frank and Elizabeth, I heard my voice and it was wheedling and slick and not straightforward at all. Ma suddenly darted off to the kitchen, saying she’d left something on the stove, and when she came back she was frowning, and she asked me what I had asked her as though it had been a year ago. Why was she being so difficult? I described Frank’s car—which I had not seen—and told her what good friends Elizabeth and Frank were. The more I talked, the falser I sounded. Ma was sitting on the sofa, staring at the stove. I went and stood in front of it. Finally, she looked up at me. Her expression was puzzled, but all she said was, “Tory, you can go, but be home by ten.” I grabbed the phone and called Elizabeth. “Why are you whispering?” she asked. I shouted that I’d meet her in ten minutes. Then I hung up and flung on my clothes and got out in a hurry. And when the door closed behind me and I looked down the dark street and felt the cold wind and saw the shut-away, secret look of the houses, I felt on my own and alone and worried.

  I was glad that I had told Elizabeth—on an impulse I hadn’t given a thought to—that I’d meet them in front of the old movie house. But why? I ran nearly all the way there as though I could leave my confusion behind me on my own doorstep. I slowed down on Main Street and stared into the windows of the bakery where a sleeping cat had curled itself next to a stale-looking loaf of bread. I wished I was asleep, too.

  It was fiercely cold and the usual group wasn’t hanging around under the marquee. But just in front of it was a parked black car, and I could see Elizabeth and Frank sitting in the front seat. She waved at me through the windshield. My heart skipped a beat; I felt breathless as though I was riding the crest of a high wave and had, all at once, glimpsed the sliding, shifting sand far below.

  As I drew close, I could smell fresh paint on the car, which looked like an antique. It was just a black box with wheels and a narrow running board. Frank reached over Elizabeth’s shoulder and opened the back door, and I climbed up and in.

  “Hello, Vicky,” he said. Elizabeth shot him a look but said nothing. Did he call her Lizzie? I wondered. She looked very sedate, sitting there with her hands folded on her lap.

  Frank turned on the ignition. “Takes a while each time,” he said to no one in particular.

  “There’s Tom Kyle,” Elizabeth said suddenly, as the car coughed and rattled.

  He was standing in front of the entrance to the Mill, and the door was closing behind him. I saw him look up and down the street, then wrap his long scarf around his neck. He stamped one foot, then the other, stared up at the sky, then, as his glance fell, he saw us. He smiled faintly in our direction, and the anger I’d seen on his face disappeared as though a hand had smoothed it away. He walked slowly toward us and Elizabeth cranked down her window and called hello.

  “Is this a car?” he asked Frank.

  “Made by hand,” Frank said, “every inch of it.” He looked slyly at Elizabeth. “Want to come with us?” he asked. “We’re going up Mt. Crystal.”

  It must have been owner’s pride in the car that made Frank ask Tom. I couldn’t believe he cared much for his company. As far as I knew, no one in the sophomore class was especially friendly to him.

  Tom glanced back at the Mill. “My friend is late, very late,” he said, mostly to himself. His friend. Hugh had stood him up, I guessed.

  “All right, I’ll come along,” he said, as though persuaded against his will. He got into the back seat, next to me, and coiled his scarf on his lap. He didn’t look at me at all.

  “We’re off,” Frank said, and the car, which had been idling, jumped and began to move.

  It was damp and cold inside, like the cellar of a deserted house. I sat as far away as I could from Tom. We didn’t move; we didn’t speak. In the front seat, Elizabeth and Frank muttered to each other, and laughed and hummed songs and paid their two silent passengers no attention at all.

  I’m going to make a big scene, I thought. I’m going to ask Frank to stop the car and let me out, and when they ask me why, I’m going to say that I have better things to do with time than spend it with two idiots and one snowman. I didn’t. But I felt a little better just imagining the scene. Frank asked Tom what he thought about New Oxford’s basketball team and its chances against a neighboring village team. Tom replied he didn’t know much about the chances because he wasn’t much interested in basketball. I don’t know whether he meant to be scornful, but he sounded that way, and I thought of Hugh’s easy, indifferent dismissal of sports, of anything that didn’t interest him.

  “Yeah? Well, I’m interested, and so is everyone else,” Frank said in a challenging voice, and Tom said uneasily, “I guess so.”

  We were out of the village now and on a blacktop road that went past several farmhouses.

  “Isn’t one of those houses where you live?” Elizabeth asked.

  “No,” Tom said, and that was all. I saw Elizabeth and Frank exchange significant glances, and I felt as if I’d been slapped, even though their silent little conversation wasn’t about me but about Tom. It was as if I was the one who wasn’t giving the right answers.

  “Runs like a dream,” Frank announced. Why did he leave out pronouns, like a television-commerci
al announcer?

  “It’s amazing,” Elizabeth said, “I don’t know how you did it!”

  “Had to hit a dozen places to find parts,” he said.

  We suddenly veered sharply to the right and Elizabeth let out a small, very polite, scream. Tom was thrown against me and his elbow hit my rib cage. “Sorry,” he muttered.

  “A little ice,” Frank said. “Notice how the wheels held?”

  “Great,” said Elizabeth.

  Tom and I rearranged ourselves, making sure nothing touched, not our coats or our scarves or our feet on the narrow floor space. Had he been given orders by Hugh not to speak to me?

  Frank turned off the road we had been following, and at once, we began to climb. Frank and Elizabeth weren’t murmuring now. He was hunched over the steering wheel, working the gearshift back and forth as the road grew steeper. On our right, the dark pine forest on the slopes I had glimpsed all the way from Autumn Street rose like a vast black cliff. Ahead, on the narrow road, I saw large patches of ice shining in the headlights. Then the road would curve in a hairpin turn and we’d be driving next to the mountain itself where boulders loomed over us and seemed, as we passed them, to be only momentarily at rest, ready in an instant to tumble down and silence the rattling little car and its passengers. I began to be scared.

  “It’s pretty icy, isn’t it?” Tom asked anxiously. He leaned forward toward the front seat. “Maybe we’d better not try it,” he said. “We could take a bad skid.”

  Frank said nothing, only bent closer over the steering wheel.

  The cold was intense and I felt it to my bare, shivering bones. There were no street lamps; we could see only the road and the pale watery headlights. What could live in that forest? Everything, I imagined, was by itself and silent—a hunting fox, a snake beneath a rock coiled in winter sleep, a bird, half frozen on a branch, strayed off its course to a warmer place. I looked at Elizabeth, and she, too, looked frozen. Tom moved and fidgeted constantly, straining to stare out the window, sinking back, then rearing up.

  “Let’s go back,” I croaked.

  “No,” Frank said. It was a no like a dropped stone.

  “I think—” Tom began.

  “No!” Frank shouted. “We’re going all the way up to the top!”

  We wound upward. I saw a broken wood railing, the jagged edges pointing out toward nothing, and I wondered what had crashed through it, and I shivered and my teeth chattered. When we skidded, Frank would turn and twist the wheel violently. Each time we went into a sickening slide I felt as though I were falling into a black ravine. I heard Tom gasp. Once he made a noise like a puppy—it was such a small noise, so private, I think I was the only one to hear it.

  Then there were no more trees, only a sense of the earth falling away forever. We were nearly flying. We were in a frozen tin box, attached to the earth by Frank’s hands on the steering wheel. I couldn’t think what Frank looked like. I told myself he had a mustache and reddish hair, but he had become for me some senseless thing that drove on.

  Suddenly we stopped. We were there, on the top of the mountain. Our deep-drawn breaths sounded as though we were lowering pails into a well for water. Frank laughed.

  “We did it! The car did it! Come on! Let’s get out.”

  We were next to a parking area where people probably came in the summer to see the view. It was covered with drifts of snow, and as we walked through them, there was a sound like many candles being blown out. An iron railing circled the parking place, and when we reached it, I could see the earth far below us, a dark ocean with pools of light here and there like ships. One of those pools might have been New Oxford. Frank pointed to a haze of light at the farthest horizon. “That’s Boston,” he said, so proudly you would have thought he was pointing at his own city.

  We were looking at a great living map. The air was sharp and it crackled like a new bill. My lungs ached. Above us, the icy stars glittered; in the forest below, perhaps, a snowshoe rabbit was poised, listening to the echo of our racketing passage up the mountain, a sound as mysterious to it as the stars were to me. I was looking down at the world, and I felt such a wave of happiness I thought I would sail out into space.

  “We’ll have to go back,” called Tom. I turned and saw him standing close to the car. With one hand, he clutched a door handle as though he were teetering on the edge of a cliff. “It’ll be worse going back,” he said.

  “You don’t skid any worse going down than going up,” Frank said scornfully. “Why don’t you take it easy?”

  “Much worse,” Tom said in that voice of his which didn’t rise or fall, which didn’t match up with the way he looked or the words he spoke. I could tell he was too frightened to take a step away from the car. Yet how strange it was that he held on to the car so desperately, held on to the thing he dreaded.

  “Maybe you’d better walk down,” Frank said as he stomped through the drifts toward the car. Elizabeth stepped precisely in his boot prints. Her head was down and I couldn’t see her face. “Are you scared?” I asked her. “Oh, Tory,” she exclaimed, not looking up. What did that mean?

  Frank had already swung into the driver’s seat, and Elizabeth and I were standing next to Tom.

  “I will walk down,” he said in a low voice.

  “It’s miles,” I said.

  “He’ll kill us,” he said.

  Elizabeth put her hand on the car door. “He won’t kill us,” she said in a voice as cold as the air. “He’s a good driver.” She got in and sat there, letting whoever cared to look at her calm profile. I suddenly remembered her face swollen with hives. Did having a boyfriend have to make a person so proud?

  “We’d better get in,” I said to Tom. “You can’t walk down. You’d freeze to death.”

  He looked at me for an instant, then he opened the door and waited while I got in. I was thinking hard about the expression I had seen on his face and I forgot for a moment what might lie ahead of us. He had looked timid. Tom Kyle was timid. Did Hugh tell him what was important and what wasn’t? Did he tell him what to do, the way he used to tell me what to do? I looked sideways at Tom. He was huddled in the corner of the seat, that long scarf wrapped around the lower part of his face. I wanted to say something to him—I don’t know what. I wanted him to speak to me.

  Frank started the car. It coughed and shook and he drove it in a circle until it was facing downhill.

  “Okay,” he said. “Here we go.”

  Everything was fine for a few minutes. Then we lurched forward and slipped sideways to the edge of the road. Frank stamped on the brake, and Elizabeth shouted, “No brakes! My father said no brakes on ice!”

  “Shut up!” Frank yelled. “Everybody shut up!” Tom and I piled up like a football scramble. Elizabeth was flung forward against the windshield, and she screamed. Oh, my poor Ma, I thought. We’ll all be dead soon! The car straightened out; the pale lights that felt along the road like an insect’s antennae went off.

  “Okay, okay …” Frank muttered. “That’s the worst of it.” He started up and we inched forward in first gear. Elizabeth had her hands on her head. “Are you all right?” I asked. She just shook her head. I looked at Tom, and he had his gloved hands on his face.

  “I can’t stand this!” I said. “Let us out!”

  Frank didn’t stop. We went along with no skids for a while. I noticed a large boulder I’d seen on the way up and I knew we were close to the tree line. If we have an accident now, I thought, at least the trees will stop us from tumbling down the whole mountain.

  We hit ice. The car spun completely around. Tom and Elizabeth and I all screamed together as if we were singing, but Frank was silent, bent over the wheel like a demon, his elbows straight out. The engine stuttered and stopped. We were facing up the mountain. We were still alive. I heard Tom Kyle gasping into his scarf. I realized he was crying.

  “Listen,” Frank said weakly. We all listened. “We made it,” he said. “I’ll just turn around. We’re nearly down. Nothing can
happen now. Listen … we’re all right.”

  We skittered a hundred yards or so and emerged on the main road to New Oxford. Frank was sitting up straight now, and I looked at him, my mind full of murderer’s thoughts.

  Elizabeth said, in a voice that trembled, “We shouldn’t have gone up there.”

  No one spoke.

  As Frank drew up and parked in front of the Mill, I saw there were a few people inside, eating and talking. That meant it wasn’t ten yet, when the Mill closed. How long had we been gone? The time that clocks measured might be uniform, but there was no measurement I could think of for what had happened to us on Mt. Crystal. Should I thank Frank for the ride and then hit him? He was opening the door for Tom and me. Why didn’t Tom move? Why did he just sit there?

  “Are you getting out?” Frank was asking. Suddenly I saw Hugh’s face just above the plastic turkey in the window of the Mill. He was standing there, looking out at us.

  I touched Tom’s arm, and he moved very slowly. Just as he got his feet on the sidewalk, Hugh came quickly out of the restaurant door. Tom was holding his bunched scarf in his hands. He looked dazed, as though he didn’t know where he was.

  “I’ve been waiting for you for an hour!” Hugh said in such an accusing voice I would have been only a little surprised if he’d taken out a rope, tied Tom up, and led him away.

  Tom said nothing. Frank was staring at him, at his trousers. I looked. I saw dark uneven stains like the shadows of tall grass.

  “Where did you go—what were you doing with them?” Hugh shouted.

  Tom’s voice rose in a thin wail. “I waited for you …”

  Hugh turned and walked away up the hill. Tom wrapped his scarf around his throat, letting one end of it hang down to hide the stains on his pants. He glanced once at Frank and said without any expression at all—as if he were talking about the weather—“You freak.” Then he walked down Main Street and I watched him until he vanished from sight.

  “He wet himself,” Frank said. “He was scared out of his mind and he wet himself.”