Pete said, “Go on, let it out. Make some noise. Waah!”
I’d never seen Pete this nasty. What kind of boy set somebody up, put somebody down, so you could laugh at them? What was going on inside Pete?
I went at him. I leaped on his back to knock him down, get him away from Joanie.
Pete stood still, not trying to wrestle me off the way he would have anytime before. Instead he said, so quietly that only I could hear, “I’ll punch your face in, Chérie, I swear to God.” I let go and slid to the ground.
But the one I hit when I jumped up was Dave. I socked him right in the stomach, so hard he doubled over, so hard he cried. Some friend he was, some friend!
Sandy went to the gimp box and took out two colors. “Black and red?” he said to Joanie. Pete whipped them out of Sandy’s hands and threw them back into the box. Sandy actually shoved Pete out of the way. “Black and green?” Pete didn’t dare scuffle with Sandy; Bunny was crossing the softball field.
“Let her tell you,” he said to Sandy.
“Black and white!” I told Sandy. He threw the green back, pulled the white out, tossed them one by one to Joanie. Tears and all, she caught them deftly and jumped off the table. She sat in the grass on the other side of the big tree, her head down, the rolls of gimp cradled in her lap.
She wasn’t the only one I watched, though. I kept my eye on Dave Asconti, in his blue All-Stars shirt. From then on he kept his back to me.
CHAPTER 9
PAMMY RANKIN HAD A NEW RED BIKE. A two-wheeler. And she could ride it. It wasn’t the least bit unusual for a seven-year-old like Pammy to be riding a two-wheeler. She just hadn’t had the chance before. Dave Asconti had ridden at four. I’d been five. Sandy had been six, but, well, that was Sandy. He grew too quickly and was awkward, not like Aimée.
I felt so bad because Aimée couldn’t—wouldn’t—remotely consider taking off her training wheels. When I watched Pammy circling the circle on her two-wheeler, I burned for Aimée, but I burned about her, too. Why was she so chicken?
“So show me this famous elf house,” said Joanie to Aimée. For a second I thought, Hold it, that’s pretty fresh. But there was real interest in Joanie’s face. I hadn’t told her Aimée couldn’t ride, but it seemed she’d figured it out. So together we three got down on our knees and crawled under the biggest forsythia bush into Elfland, leaving Pammy to conquer the circle on her bike.
There among the branches were the beginnings of the elf house masterpiece: an elevator and a television set, an old tea set teacup, and a piece of hose. “That’s going to be the sink,” I said, and Joanie listened as I described how water could get pumped to the sink from a thermos bottle tucked behind the leaves.
Mom called out through the neighborhood for us to come home. “’Bye, Em!” yelled Pammy, all puffed up with importance and too busy to come riding over.
Joanie walked around the corner with Aimée and me to the foot of our driveway, waved a hand at the Ascontis’ house just in case they were watching, and rode off on Frank up Marvin Road.
The second Joanie was gone, sobs gushed out of my sister.
I went up the steps and sat on the porch, my head in my hands. “You can try,” I said. “Right here. Right now.”
“No way! I’m a baby, like Pammy says,” she said.
“Pammy calls you a baby?”
“Only about bike riding. And crying when I get upset.” Her crying right now made more sense than it usually did.
“I’ve offered to teach you,” I said in a businesslike way. Then I changed the subject. Riding a bike was something real to be afraid of, like being kidnapped. You could get killed. For the first time I knew what Aimée felt when she was so scared she shook. All I could do was change the subject.
“Aimée?” I said. “What kind of baby do you think Mom’s going to have, a boy or a girl?”
“A thingy,” she said, and cried some more.
“A thingy?”
“I don’t care,” she said.
Who was I to be disgusted with Aimée for being scared, whether it was about riding a bike or adding a child to the family? I wasn’t sure what I thought having a new baby would be like … or how my room, and I, might have to change to squeeze the baby in.
And I might have been brave about bike riding, but I didn’t want to walk anywhere. I couldn’t stop looking behind me to see what cars were coming, looking ahead of me to see what cars were coming, wondering where in the world the green station wagon was that had taken Wendy Boland away.
More and more often I found myself working on elf things alone in my room. I was there now, sitting on my bed with a big wooden cutting board in my lap, building a bed out of some giant Legos Aimée said she didn’t want anymore. Fabric and glue and scissors were all around me, and chopsticks and a handkerchief. I was trying to use the last two to make a canopy, but it wasn’t working. The glue wouldn’t hold, and the whole thing kept collapsing.
Across the road I could see Aunt Bonnie’s head in her sewing room window. She was done painting our house and was back to painting the house picture in her studio. Not that I knew this from experience, because I’d been staying out of the Ascontis’ house completely since Pete tried to shut up Joanie. I missed Dave, missed knowing what book he was reading even if he wasn’t about to start acting anything out. And I missed pasteling beside Aunt Bonnie. Aunt Bonnie wasn’t coming over much lately anyway because she was in the doghouse (she and Faux Pas both) with Dad on account of our cherry red house.
It looked so beautiful, but he had come home from his two-week meetings and just stood there in the driveway, staring, his five o’clock shadow making him look tired, his old leather briefcase drooping from his hand. Chicken Aunt Bonnie was hiding in her house, but Mom stood on the porch with her hands folded, waiting to see what he’d say.
He said, “You painted the whole thing on your own?”
Mom must have thought it best just to nod. Yes, the whole thing. She would get around to the on your own part later.
“Oh, Mitchie,” Dad had said. She came down the step, and he put his arm around her shoulders and turned to walk into the house. They had been a long time apart, so the fighting came later. But it did come.
“Did you hear about that kid?” Joanie said.
“What kid?”
“That girl in Claybury.”
I crossed my arms over my stomach and leaned over the edge of the Little River bridge, noticing the pattern of the stones at the edge of the wall. Joanie had been riding Frank, and I’d been doing my route on Reshna, and we’d bumped into each other and stopped to talk about boys at camp she thought were cute. Not Pete anymore. Not Sandy. Dave. And Nathan. Not Ziggy, of course, who would?
This—Wendy Boland—was some subject change.
“Claybury is really far away,” I said.
“No, it isn’t,” said Joanie. She used her thumb and pointer to flick pebbles off the wall. “We had a swim meet there last year. They beat us. That girl could have even been on the swim team. There was this one girl who swam butterfly who keeps coming into my mind. I was trying to remember from the newspaper picture, you know? But she probably had her hair under a bathing cap, so it’s hard to tell. I think maybe—”
I said, “Stop it. Please stop talking about it. Do you have to talk about it?” My throat felt funny. Maybe I was getting sick. I felt tears filling my eyes. I felt—oh, God—I felt the way Aimée looked when she got into one of her states, as if things were going to fall apart any minute.
I turned my face toward the road and automatically watched for green station wagons. The air blew cool on my neck. I’d gotten Mom to pin my braids up across my head, Heidi style. I’d told her it was because it was hot, but the truth was I didn’t want them hanging down, an invitation to kidnappers.
“Claybury’s not so far away.” Joanie rattled on. “Just a couple of exits on the thruway, my mother said.”
I forced words out of my mouth. “Your mother?” I repeated. My own mother hadn’t e
ven mentioned the kidnapping, only snapped the radio off again one day in the car when news about it came on. I still didn’t even know if Mom had heard about Wendy Boland. I tried to picture Mom talking about it.
I wished I were with her right now. I wished Joanie and I weren’t on this bridge with nothing between us and the cars going by, nothing but the river on the other side of the wall, no getaway but our bikes.
I tried to breathe deeply, the way Mom always told Aimée to do when she got nutty.
“What’s the matter with you?” Joanie asked.
I breathed louder, deeper. I said, “I’m thinking about riding up that big hill on Hill Road.”
“And back down?” Joanie asked.
I nodded slowly, wiggling my eyebrows in a way I hoped was cool like Lucy DeLuna.
“My mother would have a coronary,” said Joanie.
“Good,” I said.
I hoisted myself up and leaned out far over the bridge wall, lying across the warm stone, my feet kicking air. Beside me, Joanie had her feet on the ground, standing very still. “Chérie, we’re not going to get kidnapped, you know.”
“She’s just like us,” I said. “She goes to school and plays at the park. Her father even works in a factory, like mine. She has braids like mine. When she goes to high school, she might be in Dave’s father’s English class.”
“She’s thirteen,” said Joanie.
“I’m going to be thirteen in November,” I said.
But Joanie said, “I’m already thirteen. So what?” She flung a pebble into the Little River. “Every girl in the eighth grade at St. John Vianney’s is thirteen. And so is every girl in the eighth grade at Bridgefield Junior High. And Claybury Junior High. And every junior high. Hundreds of thirteen-year-old girls. Thousands. All over the country there are thirteen-year-old girls!”
“So?”
“So he only took one.”
I thought I was going to throw up. The pattern of the edge of the bridge wall went: big rock, little rock, big rock, little rock, big rock …
I swept both my hands forward over the wall, sending a shower of pebbles and sand into the river.
“It could have been me,” I said.
I wished vacation were sooner. I was ready to get out of the county, out of the state. Things were quiet in the newspaper. The news about Wendy had slowed to a trickle of pleas. Please.
When we come back, I told myself, things will be different. We’ll all be back at school, and Pete and Dave and Uncle Joe will settle down.
We’ll have a nice time away, I told myself, and when Mom gets home, she’ll see our cherry-sweet house and love it again and want to stay here. And Wendy Boland will come out of the woods where she’s been camping out like that boy in My Side of the Mountain and fall into her parents’ arms.
If only that was what happened.
CHAPTER 10
WASHINGTON ON LABOR DAY WEEKEND WAS HOT AND STILL. Aimée loved it. She said that the white monuments were like wedding cakes or the kind of sand castle she wished she could build. She wanted to fly kites on the hot long green mall and look at herself in the creepy reflecting pools. She wanted a tiny lit-up Capitol Building or White House. She wanted to climb on everything. She wanted a flag with an elf on it, to fly over her elf house the way President Johnson flew a flag over the White House.
I liked the big pendulum in the Smithsonian and the money factory and the elevator in the Washington Monument. I didn’t like the heat and the walking and the blisters.
Every building in Washington—every statue!—had writing on it that you had to stop and read. Everything was stiff and quiet and was built in memory of somebody dead. I had had too much news of Washington this year to take being there calmly.
Mom, who would rather have been home soaking her feet, tried to look as though she were having a decent time. So did I, at first. I worked on staying a little bit ahead of Aimée—or, anyway, not far behind her—as she bounced over walls and steps and the rims of the reflecting pools and in and out of the heavy trees that stood at the edges of the plazas and parks. She didn’t read anything, she didn’t listen to anything Dad or Mom told her about the places, and she wasn’t worried, for once in her life.
On the afternoon of our second day we went to Arlington Cemetery. Mom stayed near me, rubbing tears off her cheeks, and told me about things: the eternal flame at John F. Kennedy’s grave, the newer marker nearby for his brother Bobby, and the view—as if a grave needed a view—down to the Lincoln Memorial and to the Washington Monument and the Capitol beyond.
“It’s a big cross, see?” Mom said. “We’re one point, the Capitol is another, and the Washington Monument is the center. The other arm has the Jefferson Memorial at one end and the White House at the other.” I turned to see the thousands of white crosses across the rolling hills of Arlington, one for each soldier who had died. My heart hurt.
“What did we have to come here for?” I asked. “It’s not fun or anything.”
Mom slipped her arm through mine. “Cher, you’ve been delivering all those papers. You’re getting so smart and curious. Dad thought you’d like it. It’s good to understand your country.”
I was silent. In Washington nothing was just there. Everything meant something. Nothing just was.
Then they dragged us to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Unknown, Dad said, because he couldn’t be identified. “Why not?” asked Aimée. I told her to shut up and walked away to keep from hearing Mom or Dad answer her. It also shocked me to find out that there were several unknown soldiers. They added bodies or whatever was in there for each war.
We were supposed to watch a ceremony, the changing of the guard, where one guard went away and a new one came to patrol in his place. I didn’t see what the big deal was and didn’t want to stay there any longer than necessary. When Aimée got the giggles because the soldiers were so stiff and stuffy, I was so jumpy that I joined in. Poor Dad couldn’t get us to shut up, although he made us turn our backs to hide our faces and stifle our laughter.
Suddenly a guard turned and walked straight toward us. He stopped in front of us, and said sharply, officially, “Silence must be maintained at all times at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier out of respect for the dead.” We shut up. We didn’t start up again until we were back in the car.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with you two girls,” Dad said tensely, his face dark. He didn’t, or couldn’t, go on.
“Who would want to be the unknown soldier?” Aimée asked.
“Nobody wants to be, stupid,” I snapped.
“It’s a great honor for any soldier to be buried in Arlington Cemetery,” Dad said.
“What do they care?” I asked. “They’re dead.”
“Because they gave their lives for their country,” Mom said. I thought she sounded overly serious. Mom and Dad both were on the verge of making a speech, so I quickly ducked the subject. We were crossing the river again, back into the city.
“What’s that building?” had already proved to be an easy gambit because even if Mom and Dad didn’t know, they started trying to figure it out. They looked for signs or titles or clues like the symbols in the architecture, such as the scales of justice on the Supreme Court building.
Mom and Dad knew where they were from the map, even knew how to get to a neighborhood beyond the Capitol building, where there were signs of the burning and riots that had happened after King’s and Kennedy’s assassinations in the spring. “What are we here to see?” Aimée asked, looking out the car windows at the hot sidewalks and apartment buildings with fire escapes, some kids spraying each other with a hose, just in their shorts, not even bathing suits.
Mom didn’t answer at first, just made us look, pointing out boarded-up stores, a skateboard go-cart, a cat on a fire escape, a grandmother calling down from a window to a kid in the street. Under a shady tree, on the sidewalk, a girl my age sat playing jacks by herself. “We wanted you to see how lucky you are to live in a place where this kind of thing d
oesn’t happen.”
“Why?” I asked, feeling indignant.
“Would you want to live in this neighborhood?” Dad asked.
“No,” said Aimée.
“Why not?” I asked. An odd shaking began in my stomach.
“Come on, Cher,” said Dad.
“Why should I feel lucky to be safe, if somebody else … those kids … aren’t?” BIAFRAN HUNGER CRISIS WORST FOR YOUNG.
They shut up for once. That day was the start of something new in me. I could tell that Mom and Dad, especially Dad, wanted me to feel different things about Washington from what I was feeling. I could see that I was supposed to feel sort of solemn, or patriotic, or interested in certain places in Washington, and I found I couldn’t get into the appropriate mood.
All of a sudden I looked over at my little sister. Tears were coming down her cheeks. At first I thought she wished she had jacks or something like that. But it was not like Aimée not to ask. Was she afraid of something? What could she be afraid of? Not typical Aimée car things, like whether I’d get my arm taken off hanging it out the window, or whether the tunnel under Baltimore Harbor was really going to cave in when we drove through, the way I’d told her. She wasn’t letting anybody know she was crying, not sniffling or sobbing. She was just looking out the window at this cheerful-enough neighborhood, and tears were coming down.
I didn’t tell Mom and Dad. I reached over and held her hand. Aimée scooched over, leaned her head on my arm, closed her eyes.
I thought about how Dave once told me that his father didn’t get along with Uncle Sam. I was proud of Dad for making helicopters that helped our soldiers fight in Vietnam. Was there any other way to feel about that? Thinking alone in the car (even though everybody else was there) gave me goose bumps. I rubbed them off and asked, “What’s Uncle Joe going to do about Pete?”
Even though Dad was driving, he whipped his head around to look at me in the backseat. Then he looked at Mom. Neither of them said anything. Neither of them answered my question.
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