Surviving the Applewhites

by Stephanie S. Tolan

  The dog was sitting a few feet away from him, staring at him with mournful, heavy-lidded eyes. Every so often it made a low sort of moaning sound he could hear over the music in his ears. “What do you want?” he asked. “I don’t have any more tofu burger, if that’s what you’re after.” The dog was as crazy as the rest of them, he thought. No normal carnivore would have gulped down tofu burger the way this one had.

  “No food, see? Nothing.” He held up his empty hands toward it. “Go away!” But it didn’t go. It sighed a long, shuddery sigh and sank to the floor, its chin on its outstretched front paws, still staring at him. It was impossible to ignore the expression on its face—as if it had lost its last friend in the world. Jake patted the dog gingerly on the head. It licked his hand. He rubbed it a little behind one ear, and it flopped to its side and then rolled on its back, its stubby little legs in the air. He scratched its chest and it made such a satisfied sound that Jake had to laugh. It closed its eyes then, and after a moment was snoring peacefully, its legs twitching now and again.

  Jake’s stomach rumbled as he thought over his alternatives. He thought of the banner in the schoolroom—“the ability to think things through.” Applewhites or Juvie. Applewhites or Juvie. It wasn’t hard to think things through this time. The choice was clear. One way or another, he was going to have to make this work.

  A car went by out on the road, and Jake looked at his watch. A little after five. This must be what passes for rush hour in the boonies. He sighed. There wasn’t anything to do here. He wasn’t about to go to the old man’s cottage and ask to watch TV. He’d gone to the schoolroom to do a little web surfing, but Cordelia had been doing her math on the computer. He’d hung around for a while, looking in the book about butterflies to see what kind he’d missed catching in the meadow, just to be near her, but she was so focused on what she was doing that she didn’t even seem to know he was there. And he certainly didn’t feel like going back to his lavender room.

  Suddenly, a white-blond head popped up out of the bushes to his right. Jake was so startled that he jumped and woke the dog, who barked once before turning over and sinking back to sleep. Big round blue eyes gazed at him with fierce intensity.

  He pushed back his earphones. “What do you want?” he asked Destiny.

  The little boy whispered something he couldn’t hear.

  “What?”

  Destiny looked around, like a spy scanning for witnesses, and then scrambled up and sat next to Jake, leaning against him to whisper in his ear. “Did you use matches?” He made a gesture like striking a match. “I’m not allowed to have ’em. Not ever. They say I’m too little. Am I too little, you think? I don’t think so. I’d be careful. I used to be little.” He held his hand an inch from the porch floor, as if to show a tiny person. “When I was this big, I couldn’t have matches. But I could have ’em now, don’t you think? Don’t you think?” the boy asked again. “You’re not that much bigger ’n me, are you? How old are you?”

  This time he stopped long enough for Jake to answer. “Fifteen.”

  “Are not. I know ’cuz Grandpa said you’re the same as E.D. That means you’re only twelve.”

  “I’m thirteen,” Jake said. Destiny looked doubtful. “I am!”

  “Well?” Destiny said. “Did you use matches?”

  Jake told him he didn’t know what he was talking about. It wasn’t until Destiny yelped that he realized he’d used the F word.

  “Momma says only Paulie’s allowed to say that word. It’s not a people word; it’s a parrot word. Paulie knows lots of parrot words.”

  “It is too a people word,” Jake said.

  “Is not!”

  “Is too. She just thinks you’re too little to say it. Like you’re too little for matches. You aren’t, though. I used to say it all the time when I was your age.” Jake said it three more times.

  Destiny sat for a moment and then said it too. Slowly, as if he were tasting the sound as he said it. Then he nodded. And said it again. “I said it!” He giggled and said it again. “Just like Paulie.”

  Jake nodded.

  “Did you burn down your school?”

  “That’s what they say.”

  “With matches?”

  “Nope. I used a lighter.” He pulled his lighter out of his pocket and showed it to the boy. “This one. And gasoline. In a bottle. It’s called a Molotov cocktail. The school went up like a torch. Like a bomb!” He was telling the really bad kid story. It wasn’t true, but it was no more of an exaggeration, he thought, than the story that everybody else told. Nobody had ever believed that it had all been an accident.

  Destiny reached for the lighter, and Jake put it back in his pocket. “Oh no. Lighters aren’t for kids.”

  “You’re a kid,” Destiny said.

  “I’m a teenager,” Jake said.

  As Destiny opened his mouth to answer, the screen door burst open behind them and Randolph Applewhite came out onto the porch, a portable CD player in one hand and a briefcase in the other. Cordelia, wearing an orange skirt over her purple leotard, was right behind him. “That show is dead boring!” she was saying.

  Randolph stopped, and Cordelia collided with the CD player as he swung around to answer her. “It’s the most saccharine, sentimental piece of tripe the two of them ever wrote. But it happens to be what the Traybridge Little Theatre has hired me to direct. It’s the sign of a great director to be able to raise the level of the material. I intend to find a way to give the piece a new edge. People won’t just be humming when they leave this production, they’ll be thinking! It’s the opportunity of a lifetime. Are you going to be part of a millennial version of a classic musical, or aren’t you?”

  “Why’s this happening so fast? They just called you today. How come auditions are tonight?”

  There was a moment of silence. When he spoke again, Randolph Applewhite’s voice was tight. “They made the mistake of asking one of their board members to direct it, and he’s been sent to Japan on some kind of an international currency crisis. Can you believe it? They had a banker directing a musical! They’re lucky I happened to be between gigs.”

  “But what about my ballet?”

  “This is a community theater production, for heaven’s sake. They only rehearse in the evenings. And there’s hardly any dancing in the show. It won’t take you any time at all to work out the choreography, and after that I’ll only need you from seven to ten P.M. You’ll have all day every day to work on your ballet.” He paused for a moment, frowning. “What ballet?”

  Cordelia stamped her foot. “Mine! Where have you been? You never listen to anybody. It’s my whole fall semester project. The Death of Ophelia. I’m composing, playing, choreographing, dancing—everything!”

  “Well, then you’ll need dancers. Do this show for me and you’ll have a ready-made corps de ballet, people you’ve already worked with.”

  “I’m the dancer! It’s a one-woman ballet!”

  Randolph stepped over Winston and strode down the steps past Jake and Destiny as if they weren’t there. Jake had to duck to avoid being clipped in the head by the briefcase. “Just decide, Cordelia, and be quick about it. I need someone at tonight’s audition to see whether these people can dance at all. If you aren’t going to do it, I’ll find someone who understands the importance of this opportunity.”

  “Oh, sure, you’ll find someone by tonight. One of the many choreographers in Traybridge!”

  He checked his watch. “We begin at seven, so I’ll need you at the theater by six-thirty. You can take Father’s car. Or Archie’s truck. I’m having dinner first with that Montrose woman—the president of the board—to discuss the budget.”

  “Budget?” Cordelia let go of the screen door, and it crashed shut behind her. “I’d get paid?”

  “I told you, this is community theater. Only the director gets paid,” Randolph said as he put his briefcase and CD player into the backseat of the red Miata convertible parked in the drive.

  Cor
delia was left standing on the porch as the car sped down the drive, spraying gravel on the curve around the line of bushes and trees. She looked down at Jake and Destiny then, as if noticing them for the first time. She stepped over Winston and sat down on the edge of the porch, her ballet slipper–clad feet on the step next to Jake. She put her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands. “How does he think he’s going to get an edge into The Sound of Music?”

  Jake was very much aware of how close she was sitting. Sound of Music. He had seen the movie once on television, but he didn’t remember much about it. He remembered Julie Andrews singing in a meadow on top of a mountain. Lots of singing. And a bunch of little kids.

  Destiny poked him in the ribs. “How’d you get your hair that color? And how do you make it stand up in points that way? I never saw anybody with hair that—”

  Cordelia reached across in front of Jake and rapped her little brother on the head. “Don’t be rude,” she said.

  “Ooooowww! I’m not rude. Mommy says if you want to know something you have to ask. So I asked. I don’t see why it’s rude to just—”

  “I dyed it red,” Jake said. “Bleached it first—so it looked like yours—then dyed it. But it grows in points all by itself. I can’t help it. I just can’t make it do anything else.”

  Cordelia laughed.

  Destiny stuck out his lower lip. “Does not. Nobody’s hair grows like that.”

  Before Jake could think of an answer, there was a squeal of tires from the road. The Miata careened back around the line of trees, scattering gravel in all directions. It skidded to a stop in front of the porch, and Randolph leaped out, leaving the engine running and the door open, and stormed up the front steps, forcing both Cordelia and the dog to scramble out of his way. He slammed through the screen door and was back out in less than a minute, holding a CD box over his head. “Forgot the music,” he said as he pounded back to the car, got in, and slammed the door.

  Meantime Jake had heard the sound of another vehicle out on the road, slowing down and changing gears as it reached the driveway to Wit’s End. Randolph threw his car into reverse and backed around in front of the trees. Then he sped forward around the curve. Jake braced himself for the inevitable. There was a squeal of brakes, the sound of vehicles skidding on gravel, and then a sickening crash.

  The crash was followed by a stream of curses.

  “I told you that word was people talk,” Jake said to Destiny.

  “Sounds as if there are survivors,” Cordelia said.

  Chapter Seven

  E.D. had gone to her room to get away from Jake for a while. She must have fallen asleep. She was jolted out of a dream about fires and explosions by the sound of the crash followed by yelling, most of which seemed to be her father. She shook the dream images from her muddled brain and left her room just in time to run into her mother, who was emerging from her office, a pencil behind each ear and her computer glasses still resting on the end of her nose.

  “Where’s Destiny? Has something happened to Destiny? Somebody call 911!” she yelled.

  By the time they reached the scene of the accident, it was clear that Destiny wasn’t involved.

  Randolph, red-faced and fairly dancing with rage, was shaking his fist at a tall, thin, pale, pimply faced young man with a ponytail, shouting about incompetent drivers and refugees from a demolition derby. The young man, his hands up as if to ward off a blow, was protesting in a high, reedy voice that he wasn’t the one who’d been driving like a madman. His words were all but drowned out in a fresh deluge of verbal abuse. He kept glancing down at the thoroughly crumpled front end of an ancient and rusty Civic as if it were the battered body of a beloved family member. He looked, E.D. thought, on the brink of tears.

  “Daddy’s car won! Daddy’s car won!” Destiny said.

  It wasn’t clear to E.D. that either car could be said to have won, but there was no question that the smashed bumper of the Miata, even caught as it was in the tangle of wreckage, was far less devastating to the car’s future than the condition of the Civic’s front end. That reminded her of an aluminum can that had been smashed for recycling. Steam was rising from beneath the mangled hood, and greenish-yellow fluid was making a puddle on the gravel. It seemed impossible that one car could be so much more damaged than the other.

  Zedediah, Archie, and Lucille were converging on the bend in the driveway from different directions, all asking questions at once. The window of Hal’s room was thrown open, and his voice joined the general confusion. Winston began barking in his deepest and most threatening tone from beneath the bush where he had taken refuge.

  Randolph was now threatening to bankrupt the young man with a lawsuit charging reckless driving and attempted vehicular homicide. The young man’s face drained of what little color it had.

  Sybil, having assured herself that Destiny was unhurt, scooped him up in her arms. Zedediah, still wearing his sawdust-covered tool apron, stepped between the two men and rested a hand on each of their shoulders. Randolph stopped shouting, and in the silence the blood gradually seemed to return to the young man’s face, though he still looked ready to burst into tears.

  Under Zedediah’s patient questioning, the young man explained that his name was Jeremy Bernstein, he was a writer sent by a literary journal to interview Sybil Jameson, and he’d had an appointment for that evening. He had, in fact, been invited to dinner.

  “No, no!” Sybil said, putting Destiny down. “That’s not today! I distinctly remember that’s not until the sixteenth. I invited you for the sixteenth.”

  “This is the sixteenth,” Jeremy Bernstein said. Everyone else nodded in agreement.

  “Can’t anyone in this family keep anything straight?” Randolph said, his voice rising. “You can’t just go inviting the media to descend on the household to shatter everyone’s privacy. Not without at least warning the rest of us!”

  E.D. could see her mother’s jaw going rigid. When she spoke, it was between tightly clenched teeth. “I am immersed in what is just possibly the most important, the most difficult and complex literary work of my career. I have left the Petunia Grantham mysteries behind; I am striking out into new and unexplored territory. But do you care? Except for this young man here, I doubt that any of you even knows what I’m embarked on. I get absolutely no support from this family—I can’t be expected to keep track of details!”

  “Details! You can hardly call today’s date a detail! It’s the first sign of mental deterioration to lose track of the date.” Randolph shook away his father’s calming hand and looked at his watch. “This is an unmitigated catastrophe! I am supposed to have dinner with the president of the board of the Traybridge Little Theatre in exactly twenty minutes to talk about my work. These people are none too stable. When I don’t show up on time, she’s likely to panic and hire some lawyer to direct their show. Some accountant. That’s what they’ll do, they’ll hire an accountant to direct my production of The Sound of Music.” He pointed to his car. “Someone will have to take me. My car is ruined. Destroyed!”

  “Don’t be stupid, Randolph,” Archie said. “It’s nothing but the bumper and running lights that are smashed. If the headlights still pop up, we’ll just rip the bumper off and you can be on your way in three minutes.” He got into the car and popped up the headlights. “See? You’ll be fine.”

  “Rip the bumper off my Miata—I have no intention of defacing this car—”

  “It’s already defaced. Do you want to get to your dinner or not? The way you drive, no sane person would let you borrow their car. I’ll get the crowbar.” Archie headed for the barn. E.D. thought he seemed particularly pleased with the idea of taking a crowbar to his brother’s car.

  Zedediah took a cell phone from a pocket of his tool apron, blew off the sawdust, and handed it to Randolph. “Call the restaurant and tell the woman you’ve been delayed.”

  “Yes, Randolph dear,” Sybil said. “You go keep your precious appointment and leave the rest of us to
clean up after you. I’m sure someone will take care of whatever we need to take care of with this young man’s insurance company.”

  “Our lawyer will take care of that!” Randolph roared.

  “We don’t have a lawyer—remember? He quit after you—”

  “We’ll get another!”

  “Fine, dear. Meantime, after you’ve made your call, perhaps you’ll call a tow truck to take Mr. Bernstein’s car to be fixed.”

  Archie, who was on his way back with the crowbar, shook his head. “No point in that. It’s totalled. Dead. Kaput. The condition it was in before the wreck, it’s a wonder there’s anything left but a handful of rust.”

  Now Jeremy Bernstein did burst into tears.

  “Why is that man crying?” Destiny asked. “Did he get hurt in the crash? Is he going to be all right? Will he have to go to the hospital? Is he going to die? If he dies, what—”

  Sybil gestured at Cordelia to take Destiny into the house. Cordelia took him by the back of the shirt, and he went, protesting all the way.

  Lucille had meantime hurried to comfort the weeping young man. She patted him on the back and assured him that he could have dinner with them and that someone would take him to his hotel afterward.

  “I—I don’t—have—a hotel,” he said, wiping his nose with the back of his hand. He took the handkerchief Zedediah offered him and blew his nose. “Thanks. I was going to find a place to stay after I’d finished the interview.”

  “Then you’ll stay in one of the guest cottages,” Lucille said. Archie had begun prying the Miata’s bumper loose from the car. “E.D., please show Mr. Bernstein to Dogwood Cottage. We can deal with insurance issues in the morning.”

  E.D. turned and saw Jake leaning against the trunk of a tree. Winston was sitting at his feet, leaning against his legs. The look on Jake’s face seemed to suggest he was actually enjoying himself. Car accidents must be right up there with fires for excitement.