Outside In

by Karen Romano Young

  CLAYBURY GIRL DEAD.

  I ran into the kitchen, gave Aimée a wave good-bye. She had her cereal bowl in her hand and was drinking out of it. She looked at me with one eye and waved one hand. Her pajamas were halfway down her bottom, like a littler kid than she was.

  I hauled Reshna out of the garage and stuffed her baskets with the papers, stack by stack, with no regard for order, no funny papers neatly on the outside.

  I took the fastest way out of the neighborhood, down the hill of Marvin Road and around the corner to the Little River. I rode over the bridge to the other side where it was somebody else’s route and no one would know me.

  I rode Reshna right down to the edge of the river and laid her on her side. I kicked off my shoes and stuffed my socks inside them and left them on the bank. I rolled my jeans above my knees.

  I dragged the papers out of the baskets in neat piles, hauled them under the bridge and into the water. The grass was spiky with frost that melted under my feet, wetting them in ice water.

  Already frozen, I waded into the river. In stacks I drowned the newspapers. I weighted them down with stones and covered them with river sand.

  I dried my feet on my socks, pulled my sneakers over the sogginess, climbed shakily onto Reshna. I went home.

  •  •  •

  Mom and Dad’s bedroom door was still closed. When Dad finally got up at about eleven, he asked, “Where’s the paper, Cher?”

  “Let’s see it,” Mom said. “Our House for Sale ad is in it.”

  I acted as if they both were crazy. It wasn’t difficult. “It didn’t come,” I said. I followed Dad as he went out to look up and down Marvin Road, as if I thought he really might find a paper.

  “Nobody got one?” he asked.

  “It didn’t come,” I said again. Aimée was already outside on her little bike with its training wheels, riding between the lanes of bricks she’d lined up on the driveway. Dad had built nothing with the bricks yet, and now our house was in the paper. When Aimée toppled a little and stopped herself by putting her foot down, she looked up and saw us all there looking around.

  “It really didn’t come?” Mom asked.

  I shook my head, grasping the handlebars to steady the bike.

  “Leave me alone!” Aimée said fiercely.

  “Well, isn’t that strange?” said Dad.

  “Very,” said Mom.

  I asked myself what I’d been expecting. A funeral without a body? A girl who disappeared and was never seen again? The shock of hearing that Wendy was dead was worse than anything else I’d ever imagined happening to her.

  I couldn’t stay in the house. I didn’t want to leave the yard. “Let’s make a castle,” I said to Aimée.

  “Brickland,” said Aimée. “Brickville. Brickarama.” She started piling up the bricks as though they were Legos. It wasn’t long before Pammy came to see why we were outside but not in the circle and joined in the building.

  When Joanie came into the backyard, I was being a big, nasty bird I’d seen in a movie in Mr. Stone’s class, a fearsome eagle on my nest, squatting on top of the brick pile with a brick clutched in each hand-claw. Aimée and Pammy were coming up to me one by one to beg and plead for bricks. Aimée said, “Please, sire, I crave a boon,” a phrase she’d read in one of Dave’s books.

  I snarled, “What will you give in return?”

  “My firstborn child!” Aimée said, weeping, and shoved Pammy forward. She didn’t care, as long as she got some bricks out of it. They dragged the bricks away in Pammy’s wagon.

  Joanie climbed onto the brick pile beside me.

  Aimée wept, “Please, sire, I beg of you, have mercy!”

  Joanie sneered at me. “I advise you to consider carefully, Your Highness. Are you certain this peasant can be trusted?”

  I raised a claw and scraped it at Aimée, and Pammy snatched away the brick I’d dropped. Joanie and I snarled. The little kids ran away, their arms full of bricks.

  To me, Joanie looked like an egg still incubating, scrunched down on top of the brick pile in the middle of the driveway. I raised my claw again at Aimée and Pammy, busy by the garage with their bricks.

  When I turned, Dave was standing right next to my pile. His appearance was so sudden, and he looked so tall standing over me, that I jumped. He didn’t seem to notice.

  “What?” I said.

  “Where did you come from?” asked Joanie in her flirty way.

  “Chérie?” Dave took a breath, and then another one. “You know that girl?” His voice shook. “The one who was missing from Claybury Junior High?”

  “Who?” I asked. “Wendy Boland?”

  It was the only time I ever said her name.

  “They found her dead,” said Dave. He continued so low that I could barely hear him, yet every word came through perfectly and distinctly. “She was in a cave.”

  I wrapped my arms around my knees. Terror made me rock as if waves were pushing me over. It was as if I hadn’t known, as if I’d somehow made it not true by drowning the newspapers.

  I looked at Joanie’s tight black curls, at her cherry black eyes and pink cheeks. Around Joanie’s eyes the skin was white. Joanie poked her fingertips out from the sleeves of her red sweater and held her eyelids closed, but tears spurted out from underneath. I don’t know why I didn’t cry, too, except that I didn’t like the way Joanie’s crying looked, as if she were going a little crazy, as if she was afraid that someday she might be found dead, too, it was just a matter of when.

  I couldn’t cry. I wanted to crawl under the garage and hide forever. My shoulders wouldn’t stop rocking me back and forth. Dave put his arm around me to stop my shoulders, but they rattled hard against him. I put out my arm and hugged Joanie.

  Joanie said, “She was thirteen, just like me.”

  “And me,” Dave said. “She was going to go to my father’s school.”

  I whispered back, “I’ll be thirteen in six days.” Joanie nodded, understanding: The danger she was in, I would soon be in.

  We sat there together on the cold, hard bricks. When Aimée and Pammy used up their bricks and came back to the pile for more, Joanie jumped to her feet and rubbed her bottom. “Ooh, my butt,” she said rudely, and the little kids laughed and forgot they’d seen us hugging.

  “How do you know?” I whispered to Dave.

  “What do you think?” he asked. “They called Dad.”

  “I didn’t know,” I said. “We didn’t get our papers.”

  Dave looked down into my eyes, and his own looked deep and black and sorrowful. “Well, neither did we, Chérie.”

  That night Mom and Dad got me on my own when I came in for dinner. They said they knew I would be hearing at school about the death of the little girl in Claybury and they wanted me to hear it from them first.

  Nobody knew what had happened to her, they said. But she had been alone near the woods, and now she was dead.

  Freddy was asleep in his bassinet in the dining room, and Aimée was upstairs in the tub. They had planned this, planned telling me, and now they were sitting there, looking at me to see what I would say or do. I said, “Wasn’t there a car?”

  Dad shook his head and scratched inside his ear. Late-afternoon light picked up the reddest parts of his hair and made it glow from behind. “They’re discounting that now,” he said. “They think she might have gotten lost in the woods.”

  Mom’s face was still kind of puffy and pinkish-pale the way it had been since she’d had Freddy. “Poor little kid,” Mom said. She shook her head, too.

  I jumped up and ran away from the table, up the stairs.

  “Chérie?” Mom called after me.

  “Let her go,” I heard Dad say. Or maybe he just didn’t want to wake Freddy.

  •  •  •

  When you’re little, your mother tells you scary stories to keep you safe. Just the other day I had heard Mom telling Aimée the one about the kid who hid in a pile of leaves at the edge of the street and
got run over by a car that drove too close to the curb. I don’t know, maybe that story was for real. Maybe in twenty years mothers would tell their kids not to go anywhere by themselves because they could wind up dead in the woods.

  Right now Wendy Boland was more than a scary story. Hers was a scary, real, true story. Hearing about her wasn’t making me safer; it was putting me in danger. Or maybe I’d been in danger all along and never known it, like Aimée hiding in the leaves, until I heard the story about what had happened to Wendy. I decided my parents were making up a story just to keep us kids from worrying. Stay out of the woods, and you’ll be safe. Stay close to home, and you won’t get hurt.

  I lay in the bathtub, covered shoulders to thighs with water, my knees sticking up, and let myself sink, let myself think of those woods where they’d found Wendy. I saw the birch leaves, the yellow-pink (not a color that came in pastels) leaves like the trees next to the garage. But this time all I saw was leaves. I made Wendy not be there among them anymore. I saw only leaves, drier, blowing over the spot where Wendy had been.

  I sat up and let my knees go under, warming them even though it meant catching a chilly breeze on my wet shoulders. It was a trade-off, I thought. Wendy gone from the woods meant Wendy in the cemetery, and thinking that took me back to Arlington again.

  It wasn’t until I was out of the tub and dry and in bed in my pajamas that I let myself see the image I’d been holding back from my imagination: the gravestone with Wendy’s dates on it, same as mine at the beginning, but not—I hoped, with forty-five days left in the year—at the end: 1955–1968. My whole life so far was just that for Wendy: her whole life, period.

  Monday I stayed home. I said I had a sore throat, but the thought of going out in the world was the real source of the pain I was feeling. Any number of things could happen if you went outside. A gun could shoot you; a bike could slip off a bridge; a station wagon could pull up beside you; a scary headline could hit you in the eye.

  I faked. I think Aimée knew but didn’t bother telling. Mom stayed away from me so she wouldn’t carry germs to Freddy. She left me a thermos of orange juice. I drank from it and slept all day, safe in the sunlight falling through the pines onto my bed. In the afternoon Dave came over to do my route. I saw him coming across Marvin Road and guessed what he wanted. When Mom came to the door, I told her to let him. “Just today,” I said.

  Tuesday I must have still looked green around the gills. Those were Aunt Bonnie’s words for it. She offered to pick up some books at the library for my oral report. We were doing heavenly bodies, and I had the moon. “Dave told me,” Aunt Bonnie said.

  “How are things with you?” I asked. She looked so surprised that I wondered if I’d ever asked her such a question before.

  Her eyes widened into that anxious look. “Fine,” she said quickly, brightly. Then she lowered her voice. “The painting’s almost done, Chérie.”

  “Really?” It truly was something to be happy about. When Mom saw how beautiful our house was, she’d have to give up the idea of moving.

  “Shh!” Aunt Bonnie gave me a sly look. “Not a word.”

  “Okay.” I smiled.

  She sent Dave over later with the book, and when he offered to do the papers again, I said yes. I flipped through The Moon and You and noticed that it had been written long before any rocket got close to the moon. If I’d been a better reporter—and if Mom, worried about having the house on the market with a new baby on hand, hadn’t been so quick about throwing out the old papers—I could have gotten lots of information from the October papers about Apollo 7.

  I didn’t want to read the paper ever again.

  Wednesday my stomach hurt again. I groaned and looked as green as I felt, and Mom said, “Stay.” Aimée went into my room and told Mom I was a big faker, that I hadn’t been too sick yesterday to make an elf birthday cake out of clay and that she, Aimée, wasn’t staying home just because she didn’t like Sister Maria, even though she didn’t. I would have liked to yell at her, but I didn’t. The little weentzer.

  Sick of my bed, I got up and shambled down to the kitchen. The radio was on—“Those Were the Days,” which Mom liked (I didn’t), and “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” which she didn’t (I did). And then the news. I should have stayed in bed but couldn’t move quick enough now to escape the radio voice.

  “In Hanoi today … President-elect Nixon said … The police investigation continues in nearby Claybury—”

  Mom switched the radio off. “I don’t want to hear any more of that,” she snapped, and turned away. I stared at her back. Any more about Wendy Boland? Or was it just that the news, all the news, bugged her?

  I asked carefully, “Any more of what?” Mom stayed busy at the sink, looking out the window. I was hoping, hoping, hoping that she knew how scared the news about Wendy Boland made me, hoping she knew so that she’d never expect Aimée or me to leave the house and go anywhere alone ever again.

  “Oh, all the bad news of the world, that’s all. The war, the crimes, the ugly behavior.”

  This was a conversation I was ready for. But Mom wasn’t.

  “Some days I just put it out of my mind,” Mom said. “And you should, too, Chérie.”

  Freddy woke up in the dining room, and Mom shooed me out of the way, back to my bed.

  I heard them talking about me. “She hasn’t been to school all week,” Mom was saying. “She isn’t really sick, just—I don’t know. She seems worried.”

  “Schoolitis?” Dad said.

  “No, she really did have a virus at first,” Mom said. So I had fooled her a little. “But now she’s just dragging it out.”

  “Well, what do you think it is?”

  “Some kind of nervous thing,” said Mom. “Maybe something about going to school. Or moving. I don’t know.”

  Moving? All I knew was that the house was for sale.

  “If I went upstairs right now, Pat, I guarantee you, she’d be in there with the hall light on and the door wide open. I shut the door the way she likes, but she keeps getting up to open it.”

  I slunk away then, couldn’t bring myself to shut my door, climbed into bed with the door open, so that I could still hear their voices, see the light. I tried to stay awake but fell asleep, asleep although I was afraid to be.

  Thursday morning my stomach hurt again. “What’s bothering you, Chérie?” Dad asked from the edge of my bed. “What’s got you afraid to have the door closed? Why can’t you go to school?”

  In my mind a gray-faced man got out of a green station wagon and walked toward me. I couldn’t tell my father that. The illustration from the Reader’s Digest in the upstairs bathroom leaped into my mind. “What if our house caught fire?” I said.

  Dad was so nice about it that I felt guilty. He borrowed my drawing pad and sketched a map of the house, both floors, overlapping, with all the doors and windows drawn in. Together, we came up with four routes for getting out of the house, plus getting Aimée out safely, and planned a meeting place across the road in the Ascontis’ front yard.

  I lay in bed that night and envisioned it: the heat of the door with a fire on the other side, frantic Aimée made calm by my confidence, the trip down from the roof in my pajamas, my bare feet in the frosty grass. I’d gotten Aimée out but couldn’t throw the rocks high enough to reach the windows and save the others.

  I woke up sweating, found my bedroom door closed again, with a light glowing underneath. Not caring if there was a fire, I pulled the door open and walked into the hall. “Mom? Mom? Why’d you close my door?”

  Dad said gruffly, “You were asleep. We didn’t want anything to wake you up. You were sound asleep for once, snoring.”

  I knelt there at the edge of my parents’ bed and cried. And got to stay home Friday.

  PART FOUR

  Outside In

  November 1968

  CHAPTER 17

  SATURDAY I TURNED THIRTEEN.

  It was my birthday dinner. Pete and Dave were in the living room
with the rest of us. Even Joanie was there, watching football with Dad and Uncle Joe. Aimée and I walked around, passing out plates of birthday cake. It had to be a birthday for people to be allowed to eat off their laps in our living room.

  When the football game ended, Dad opened a bottle of wine, poured glasses for Mom and Aunt Bonnie and Uncle Joe and himself. “We’ve got a teenager now,” he said, toasting me.

  He offered a glass to Pete, but Pete shook his head. “I’m in training,” he said. The football team had made it to States, and Pete was being very serious about it, as if it were war, not just football.

  “Mr. Good Conduct,” said Uncle Joe. He was praising Pete and mocking him, all at the same time. Pete’s pink cheeks turned a shade pinker. He ran his tongue across his top teeth as if he were holding his thoughts in. He extremely carefully separated his icing from his very large slice of cake.

  Baby Fred was asleep in Aunt Bonnie’s arms, and she was pacing around the room, rocking him. Now she walked away, humming to the baby, turning her back on the room. “I’ve got an idea,” she said softly. “Why don’t all you kids go outside and have one of your creepy games of hide-and-seek in the dark?”

  Joanie said, “Oh, yes! I’ve heard about this!”

  Nobody else was very enthusiastic, but there was something serious in the faces of the adults, as though they wanted time alone to talk. So we all trudged dutifully outside. I was surprised to see that Pete had come, too, but maybe he’d gotten the same message I had about our parents.

  We stood in our front yard for a few moments. I didn’t like the dark look on Pete’s face. He actually had wrinkles on his forehead from thinking so hard. Dave looked as if he were having trouble swallowing. If it had just been the two of us, I would have said, “Dave, what?” but it wasn’t just the two of us. Aimée was hanging on Joanie’s arm, and Joanie was waiting to see what we all would do.