Libby on Wednesday

by Zilpha Keatley Snyder

  The hallway was wide, with a domed ceiling and a floor of handmade Mexican tiles. In the dim light it was just possible to make out a narrow table against one wall and a hand-carved antique bench against another. To the left was a closed double door, but to the right an open archway let in a pale column of light. As Libby stepped forward into the hall, she heard footsteps behind her and felt someone brush against her arm. The others were coming too.

  The double doors led to a living room, full of heavy Spanish-style furniture. There was a round-topped fireplace in one corner, and two large wagon-wheel chandeliers hung from the beamed ceiling. There was a heavy, musty smell of tobacco, and the room was littered with papers, magazines, glasses, and overflowing ashtrays. Shutters were closed over most of the windows, and nothing stirred in the dim light.

  Retreating backward into the hall, Libby bumped into Wendy, who grabbed her by the back of her coat and pulled her toward the front door. “Come on,” she whispered. “We shouldn’t be in here. Let’s go.” But Libby pulled away and went on down the hall. She didn’t look back, but she could tell by the soft shuffle of footsteps that they were still behind her. As she opened the door at the end of the hall, they pressed in around her, and when she caught her breath in a sharp gasp, the others gasped too—a sharp, frightened, breathy chorus.

  Someone was seated at the kitchen table. An enormous man with great, heavy shoulders was leaning forward across the table, his head resting on his outstretched arms. His blotched and bloated face was turned toward them, and for an awful minute Libby was sure that he was dead. But then she realized that the other sound she was hearing, a deep rasping noise, was the man’s heavy, labored breathing. Her own lungs, which seemed to have stopped working, began again with a hungry gasp, but her mind and body were still frozen when Wendy pushed her aside and stepped around her.

  “Hello, Mr. Greene,” Wendy said. “Please excuse us for coming in this way and bothering you, but we rang the doorbell several times and no one …”

  The man’s eyes didn’t open, and his heavy breathing continued. Wendy’s voice was already dwindling away when Tierney interrupted her. “Forget it, Wendy. The dude is locoed out. Smashed. Look.” She pointed to the glass near the man’s right hand and an empty bottle that lay on its side near his feet.

  “Drunk?” Wendy whispered.

  Tierney nodded. “Can’t you smell it?” she said.

  Libby noticed the smell then, too, a strong odor, sharp and at the same time sickly sweet. For a crazy moment something, perhaps the relief of knowing he wasn’t dead or dying after all, made her want to laugh, but then she remembered.

  “G.G.?” she said to Alex. “What about G.G.?”

  Alex shook his head slowly and then suddenly nodded and almost ran from the room. Moving as fast as he could, Alex led the way down the hall and up the stairs to the second floor and then to a room at the back of the house.

  It was obviously a boy’s bedroom, cluttered and messy and decorated with pennants and pictures of sports stars. At first Libby thought the room was empty, but then someone gasped and pointed. G.G. was there all right, in the corner behind the bed, slumped forward against the wall like a limp rag doll. There was blood on the side of his face, and when they talked to him, he didn’t answer.

  19

  That night, and then all through Thursday and Friday as well, Libby found it hard to concentrate. Even when she was busy with other things, talking to the family about entirely different matters, or sitting in class at school, parts of what had happened that afternoon kept flooding out again—and for brief moments, drowning out everything else. Whether the memories came in a slow, spreading trickle or a rushing tide, she would barely stop one leak when another would come oozing through.

  At first, of course, it was only to be expected. In fact it had been necessary to remember everything in detail, for the police at first and then later, back at home, when she had gone over it all again for the family. And then at school on Friday after the whole story came out in the paper, people kept asking questions. But what Libby hadn’t expected was how it would all keep coming back when she wasn’t trying to remember—and didn’t want to.

  At one moment it might be just the interior of the house—the Greenes’ Spanish hacienda—the look and feel of the dim hallway; the musty, cluttered rooms; and the deep, threatening silence. Or, more often, the sound of G.G.’s voice on the telephone, or a sudden visual image of him slumped against the wall in his room, or as he had looked later on the stretcher that carried him down the hall and out to the ambulance. Before bedtime on that Wednesday night some of those memories had already repeated themselves at least a hundred times, and Libby went to bed feeling tense and anxious and tired of remembering. Too tired, it seemed, even to write in her journal, although she tried.

  Of course it had been fairly late at the time. After dinner the whole family sat in the library talking for a long time. They talked about G.G. and his father and what had happened that afternoon, and what might be going to happen next. Then for a while they had discussed alcoholism in general, and both Gillian and Cordelia told about people they had known who were alcoholics and what it sometimes did to their personalities, changing them from perfectly normal people to cruel and violent strangers. Three times during the evening Gillian called the hospital, and at last, on the third call, there was some news. G.G. was conscious and probably out of danger. Not long after that, Libby went to bed, but when she tried to write about what had happened, she was too tired. There was nothing too surprising about that, but it was surprising that she still wasn’t able to the next day—and the next.

  She didn’t know why. She was still remembering it in bits and pieces all during the day, and sometimes at night in frightening nightmares, but when she sat down—sometimes in the Treehouse and sometimes in bed at night—and tried to write about it, she was unable to get past the first sentence. She supposed it was like writer’s block, but she couldn’t understand why it was happening now.

  It was on Friday evening that she told Christopher about it. “I can’t write about what happened to G.G.,” she told him. “I don’t know why. Mizzo says that it’s very important to be able to write about feelings and that we should always try to write about things that we feel strongly about. But when I try to write about what happened that day, I get this tight, nervous feeling and my brain just starts spinning around and nothing comes out.”

  Christopher put down his newspaper, clear down on the coffee table instead of just on his lap, which meant that he was ready to talk for a long time if Libby wanted to. “Yes,” he said. “It is very important to be able to write clearly and vividly about emotions. But there are times that feelings are too violent or too close to us to be put into words. When that’s the case, one just has to wait.”

  “How long?” Libby asked. “How long do you think it will be before I can write about it?” She could hear the jittery tension in her voice, and Christopher must have heard it, too, because he reached out and pulled her into his lap and wrapped his arms around her. Cuddled down with her head against her father’s chest, she felt herself relaxing.

  “Not long,” Christopher said in his soft, poetic voice. “Not long at all.”

  So Libby put the green notebook back in its hiding place in the Treehouse settee and went on trying to think about something else. But on Sunday morning she went up to her room right after breakfast and climbed out the window. In the Treehouse she got out the notebook and put it on the drum table. She even picked up her pen—and doodled some birds and flowers up and down the margins. But, at last, she shook her head and climbed on up to the triangular room and checked to see if the bird feeders needed filling before she went on up the ladder to the lookout.

  It was a bright, clear spring morning. Looking out toward the river, she could see Christopher coming and going with the lawn mower, and Cordelia in her gardening dress and floppy sunhat, cutting irises and lilies. It was a familiar scene, the moving, sparkling river, t
he bright colors of flowers, and the widening, velvety swath of mowed lawn. She had seen it many times before, all of it—the lawn and flowers, and Christopher and Cordelia doing exactly the same kinds of things. But suddenly she was seeing it in a different way.

  It was a mysterious feeling, deep and strong and comforting. A kind of steady, solid knowing that it was all there, around her and inside of her, and that all of it—the family and the house and the Treehouse, and everything she had ever learned or read or done—would always be there inside her, no matter what else happened. Christopher had mowed almost to the riverbank before Libby left the lookout room and went back down to the drum table and her journal.

  It began with a phone call and G.G.’s voice calling—screaming—for help. And so we went there, the four of us, Alex and Tierney and Wendy and I. It was a large Spanish-style house, but inside it was dark and dirty, and in the kitchen we found his father lying across the kitchen table. He seemed to be asleep or maybe sick, but it turned out he was just extremely drunk. And then Alex remembered where G.G.’s room was, and we went there and found him, only he was unconscious, and at first we thought he was dead.

  She wrote the first page slowly and calmly, but after that her heart began to thud so hard it made her hands shake, and she wrote faster, with her handwriting getting more and more rough and scrawly.

  He looked dead. I felt frozen, like nothing was working except my heart, which was pounding so hard and fast I could barely breathe. We were all frozen at first, I think, but then I put a blanket over G.G., and Wendy helped me. I didn’t know whether to put the blanket over his head. He looked so dead, and I didn’t want to look at him anymore and see his swollen face and the blood coming down out of his hair and across his forehead. But then, without either of us saying anything, we just didn’t. I don’t know why. We just didn’t cover up his face, and I am glad we didn’t, because he was alive after all, and somehow it seems that—if we’d covered up his head, it would have all been over, and he would have been dead. So Wendy and I covered him up all except his face, and then we stayed there with him while Alex and Tierney went to call the police.

  She had to stop for a while then, until her hand stopped shaking, so it was several minutes before she went on.

  Everyone is talking about it at school, and some of it has been in the paper. G.G.’s father was taken away to jail and then to a special hospital for alcoholics. There was an interview with him in last night’s paper. He said, in the interview, that he was terribly sorry about what happened and that he plans to stay at the sanatorium until his alcohol problem is cured forever. I hope he means it.

  Elliott thinks he means it and so does Gillian, but Cordelia doesn’t. Cordelia says drunkards always say they’re quitting, and she thinks Tony Greene ought to be put in prison for life. Gillian and Cordelia argued about it for quite a long time.

  Libby had begun to write about Gillian and Cornelia’s argument and how it related to what happened to G.G., but she’d only completed a line or two when she heard Gillian calling to say that Wendy was on the telephone—Wendy usually called several times a day on weekends. So Libby put the journal away, thinking she would have to find some time later on to finish writing about what had happened that terrible Wednesday afternoon.

  But then there was a shopping trip with Gillian and Cordelia, and in the afternoon Tierney came over to play billiards, and it was quite late at night before she had a chance to write again. It was dark by then, so she only stayed in the Treehouse long enough to get the green notebook out of its hiding place in the settee. Back in her room she crawled into bed, opened Graham’s safari writing desk, and got out a pen.

  There was some unfinished business. What she fully intended to do was to continue writing about G.G., but then something caught her eye—Mercedes’ latest letter, still lying where she had dropped it on her dresser. And suddenly, without even deciding to, she began to write something entirely different—the first letter she had written to Mercedes in a long, long time.

  Dear Mercedes,

  I’m sorry that it’s been so long since I’ve written but …

  She thought for perhaps as much as five or ten minutes before she went on.

  … I’ve been angry at you because I blamed you for making me go to Morrison Middle School, and I HATED it. At least I did for a long time.

  It turned out to be one of the longest letters Libby had ever written. She began by telling about how terrible Morrison Middle School had been at first and how she had lied to everyone so that she would be allowed to quit as soon as the school year was over. She told about the beginning of the writers’ workshop and how frightened she had been about it, and how it had turned out to be so different from what she’d expected.

  She also wrote about what happened to G.G., but only briefly, because she knew that Gillian and Christopher had already written to tell Mercedes all about it.

  The last paragraph went …

  So now the school year is almost over, and I really kind of want to go on going to Morrison next year. And I guess you would say that that’s because your plan worked and I’ve been SOCIALIZED. Right? No! Wrong! I actually haven’t made much progress at all at being socialized. I still get tense and jittery if I have to say anything in class, and I usually can’t talk to people I don’t know without being very nervous and making an idiot of myself. So I’m a long way from being really socialized. The only reason that I want to go on going to Morrison next year is that there are some people there that I like and some others that I am curious about and …

  She stopped again and sat staring at what she had written. Staring and thinking and wondering—until her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of her cuckoo clock counting off the hours—it was eleven o’clock. And the next day was a school day.

  So the letter ended right there, in mid-sentence.

  … some people there that I like and some others that I am curious about and …

  Wow! It’s eleven o’clock.

  Your SOCIALIZED daughter,

  Libby

  So she didn’t get anything more written about G.G. that night, and the next day was a Monday with lots of extra homework. It was several days before she was able to write in the green notebook again, and when she finally did, she decided that that particular part of her journal—about the day they found G.G.—was as finished as it needed to be.

  20

  The FFW continued to meet. Only there were just the four of them now since Gary Greene was no longer a member or even a student at Morrison Middle School. The rumor was that after he’d been released from the hospital, he’d been sent to live with some relatives in another city.

  But the reduced membership wasn’t the only change. For one thing, there had been a definite decrease in what Mizzo would have called nonconstructive-type activity. They’d all noticed it—a whole different feeling at the workshop meetings. Everyone had commented on it from time to time, particularly Alex. And Alex himself was one of the things that had changed the most.

  In the last few weeks, during what Alex called the “post-G.G. era,” he seemed much less nervous and twitchy, and he did a lot more talking during the workshop sessions. As Tierney said, Alex Lockwood might not be very well coordinated in some ways, but there certainly wasn’t anything wrong with his brain-mouth connection. Sometimes the rest of them complained about the amount of time Alex used up commenting and critiquing, as well as just running off at the mouth in general, but at the same time they all agreed that everything he had to say was interesting or funny, or both.

  After a while they started calling him Alexander the Great—Libby started it actually—and pretty soon they were all doing it. “Here comes Alexander the Great,” they would say, or “Alex the Great,” and after a while just “The Great.” And it was pretty obvious that “The Great” liked his new nickname, as well as all the extra attention he was getting.

  In early May the workshop received a letter from Mizzo addressed to the FFW at 1177 Windward,
and the return address was Morrison instead of San Francisco. Mizzo was out of the hospital but she wouldn’t be coming back to school for two or three more weeks, so the time and place continued to be after school on Wednesdays at the McCall House. Usually they held the workshop in the Treehouse, but once, in cold, rainy weather, they met in the Great Hall in front of the fire. And always, after the workshop was over, there would be refreshments in the kitchen, and usually the family would be there too.

  By now the workshop members and the family were well acquainted. Too well acquainted, Libby sometimes thought. In the kitchen after the workshop meeting it sometimes seemed that Gillian and Cordelia, and now and then Elliott, were doing most of the talking, telling old “famous people I have known” or “exotic places I have traveled” stories. Stories that Libby had heard dozens of times but that Tierney and Wendy and Alex, for some reason, seemed to find fascinating.

  Gillian was perhaps the biggest favorite. Tierney and Wendy loved to get her talking about her life in Paris. And Alex had discovered about Gillian and Cordelia and politics, and he liked to bring up political subjects and then just sit back, grinning, and enjoy the fireworks. Subjects like Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Libby tried to tell him that mentioning subjects like FDR in front of Gillian and Cordelia was just asking for trouble, but he just smiled fiendishly and said, “Yeah, I know. Exciting, isn’t it?”

  Sometimes Libby actually got a little frustrated—like when she had something important to say and no one was listening. It was rather ironical really—the fact that she’d worried so much about what the FFW would think of the family and now she sometimes wished they liked each other a little less.

  The workshop itself was coming along fine. Alex had started a new parody, on detective stories this time, and Tierney had given him permission to use some ideas from the one that she had written. Ideas like calling his detective Hatchet, instead of Spade or Hammer.