by Lois Duncan
“It didn’t cost very much,” Helen said.
“Then why didn’t you earn the money for it? Why can’t you get an after-school job and put some cash in instead of taking it out? That fast-food place on Carlisle is looking for kitchen help during the supper hour. All you’d have to do is apply.”
“I don’t want to cook hamburgers, thank you. I do enough of that here.” Helen went over and hung the dress in the closet. “Come on,” she said to Julie, “let’s go get a soda or something.”
“I can’t,” Julie had said, glancing self-consciously at her watch. “I’ve got to get home. Ray’s coming over.”
She had smiled at Elsa. It had not been easy.
“Goodbye,” she had said. “It’s been nice meeting you.”
“Likewise,” Elsa had answered.
Reaching back now in her mind, that was the picture that Julie had retained of Elsa: heavy-legged, square-faced, hair matted from the pillow, a slight double chin, and those sharp eyes, glaring through the glasses, and the bitterness, the terrible bitterness.
“She could have done it,” she said now to Ray. “She could have called Barry and pretended to be Helen. She could even have shot him.”
“You think so?” Ray sounded skeptical. “She’s a mess, I’ll agree with that, but what’s she got against Barry? You don’t go out and shoot your sister’s boyfriend for no reason.”
“Jealousy,” Julie said. “By hurting Barry, she’d be hurting Helen.”
“I guess it’s possible. And the cover-up with the notes and stuff to you and me. She could have learned about the accident. Helen said they used to share a bedroom. Maybe Helen talks in her sleep or something.”
They had reached the James’ house now. Ray pulled up in front, leaving the motor running.
“You want me to come over later? We could talk.”
“I think we’ve talked enough,” Julie said. “My head’s churning now, and I don’t see how hashing it over any further will help. The person we need to talk with is Barry.”
“Well, maybe by tomorrow we can.” Ray moved as though to touch her, then thought better of it and put his hand back on the wheel. “Take care.”
It was not a casual goodbye. His eyes were worried.
“I mean it, Jules. Please, be careful.”
“You mean, watch out?”
“Yes. And don’t go rushing out to meet somebody who phones or, you know…. We can’t be sure it was Elsa. We can’t be sure of anything right now. So take care. Okay?”
“You too,” Julie said. “You take care too.”
She got out of the car. The dark was beginning to close in quickly. The sky had faded from pink to purple, and one lone star twinkled directly above her. The house lights were on, and when she reached the steps she looked back to see that Ray was still parked there, watching her. It wasn’t until she was inside with the door closed behind her that she heard the engine rev and the car pull away.
Her mother was baking again. A bread smell filled the house.
“Julie?” she called from the kitchen. “Is that you, honey?”
“Sure. Who else?”
For a long moment she stood in the living room, bracing herself, trying to calm the beating of her heart. Emotional exhaustion from the afternoon’s confrontations threatened to overwhelm her. The warm comfort of the house, her mother’s welcoming voice, the safe, familiar odors and sounds and feel of home were suddenly more than she could bear.
“Julie? I’m in the kitchen.”
“Be right there.” Drawing a deep breath to stabilize herself, Julie went through the living room and out into the kitchen.
Her mother, who was removing bread from the loaf pan, glanced at her casually and then not so casually. Her eyes were questioning.
“What is it, dear? Is something wrong?”
“No. What could be wrong?” Julie motioned toward the bread. “What’s all this baking bit lately? Are you trying to turn us both into elephants?”
“A few extra pounds wouldn’t hurt you in the slightest.” Her mother turned back to the job at hand. “Where in the world have you been? It’s after six thirty.”
“Ray picked me up after school. We rode around and talked.”
“That’s nice.” Her mother smiled. “I’m glad Ray’s back. I just wish he’d shave off that silly beard and look like himself again.”
“I sort of like the beard,” Julie said. “He seems older with it.”
“I noticed that too, but it’s more than the beard, I think. That year in California matured him a lot. I’ve always been fond of Ray, as you know, but when I was talking with him yesterday evening, before you got back from Helen’s, it was like talking to another adult.” Mrs. James laughed. “I don’t suppose either of you would consider that much of a compliment.”
“That’s funny,” Julie said. “You like it that Ray seems older, but with Bud, who really is a little bit older, you don’t like it at all.”
“Well, there’s older, and then there’s older. Bud acts like my grandfather. I’m willing to bet he proposes before he so much as kisses you good night.”
“I’ll let you know. He hasn’t done either one yet.”
Julie stood, leaning against the doorframe, watching her mother transfer the bread loaf onto a plate. The overhead light caught her hair in a glint of silver.
Wow, that’s gray, Julie thought, startled. She’s turning gray.
She stood frozen, staring at her mother’s hair, always so thick and dark. “Like raven wings,” her father had said once, reaching out a gentle hand to stroke the shining richness. When had it begun to change? Yesterday? Last week? Last year? Wrapped up as she had been in her own concerns, she had not noticed.
The veins stood out like thin purple cords on the backs of her mother’s hands as she lifted the cake lid to set it over the plate. They were no longer a young woman’s hands.
“Mom.” Julie spoke softly, swept by a wave of tenderness so great that it bordered on pain. “Mom, I love you so much.”
“Why, honey!” Her mother turned to her in surprise. “I love you too. Julie, what is it, dear? Something is wrong.”
For one crucial instant Julie wavered, torn by the temptation to step forward and throw herself into her mother’s arms to weep out the whole dreadful story. What comfort there would be in letting it all out at last! To lean upon an adult shoulder, to cry, “I have done an awful thing! I have been part of an awful thing!” To plead, “Help me, Mom! Tell me what I should do!” seemed at that moment the closest thing to heaven.
But she did not do it, stopped as much by the vulnerability of her mother’s face as by the memory of the pact. This was a woman who had borne enough burdens. The responsibility was Julie’s, not her mother’s, and pain shared in this case would not be pain lessened.
So she merely said, “I’m tired, I guess. Exams and everything, and the excitement about being accepted at Smith. Do you want me to start fixing dinner? Did you have something special planned?”
“I thought we’d just microwave something frozen,” Mrs. James said. “With home-baked bread, what more do we need?”
The telephone rang.
Bud’s voice said, “You must have been talking to somebody pretty fascinating. I’ve been getting a busy signal for over an hour.”
“There must be something wrong with the line,” Julie told him. “We have trouble like that sometimes. A couple of months ago our phone was out for three days and we didn’t even know it.”
“Well, I’m glad I finally got you,” Bud said. “I thought you might want to go to a movie tomorrow night. You’ve been studying too hard. A little R and R might be good for you.”
“Only if it’s a comedy,” Julie said. “Something heavy and dramatic would finish me off.”
They talked for a few minutes, and Julie agreed to a date the following evening. By the time she came back to the kitchen, she had control of herself again.
Though her mother kept glancing at her w
orriedly during dinner, their conversation was normal, and that one instant in which the whole story had almost come rushing out was securely behind her.
CHAPTER 13
The woman in the crisp, white uniform set the vase of carnations on the window ledge and looked at the card.
“This one’s from Crystal,” she said. “She says, ‘Get well fast, it doesn’t seem the same without you.’ ” She glanced up and gestured to the other containers of flowers crowding the sill and the bedside table and lining the wall along the far side of the room.
“This place is like a hothouse. How many girlfriends do you have, anyway?”
“Enough,” Barry said shortly.
This was his least favorite of the nurses. She was young, hardly older than he was, and pretty in a crisp, efficient way. She was the sort of girl he might have made a play for if he had met her somewhere else, coming on strong with the football hero routine and knocking her off her feet. The fact that she should have him here at her disposal, flat on his back, helpless, was infuriating.
He turned his head and shut his eyes, pretending that he was going to sleep, and after a moment he heard the swish of her skirts as she left the room.
It was Wednesday. They had told him that this morning. At first he had refused to believe it—what had happened to Tuesday? And then bits and pieces of Tuesday had begun to come back to him: the ride on a gurney down the long corridor, the transfer onto this bed, his father’s lined face looking down at him. The latter part of Tuesday came into sharper focus. His mother weeping. A needle in his arm. A needle in his hip. The doctor with the white hair. The doctor with the black hair.
Surprisingly, he did not recall a great deal of pain.
“He’s sedated,” the doctor with the black hair had said when his father bent over him, trying to ask him questions, but he had not been so doped up that he had not known what the questions were.
“It was Helen,” he had said, and his father had been satisfied.
“He says the call was from Helen,” he had told someone behind him, and Barry had heard his mother’s voice exclaiming, “It would have been, of course. I knew that girl was trouble the first time I saw her.”
This morning his mind had been clearer, and he had been able to take things in: the pile of cards on the bedside table, the flowers on the sill, the identity of the nurses as they changed shifts. He was terribly weak; he discovered that when he reached out his hand for the Get Well card on the top of the pile and found that it was shaking so much that he could not open the envelope.
But the pain was less than he would have expected, considering a bullet had gone practically all the way through him.
“I can’t feel my legs at all,” he had said to the doctor, the white-haired one this time, who had come in to change the dressing.
“They’re there,” the doctor had told him crisply. “Two of them. Were you maybe looking for a third?”
The sweetheart roses were from Helen. “With all my love,” the card said, and she had signed it, “Heller,” his own private name for her. It was exactly the way she had signed her junior class picture, the photo that was lying back at the fraternity house facedown on top of his dresser.
He wished there were some way for Helen to know he turned over that picture. He wished she could know that he was through with her before this shooting ever took place. It was one thing to reach the decision that it was time to break up with a girl who was getting to be a drag. It was another thing entirely to find the decision made for you, to discover that the girl you had supposed to be honest, clinging and all-adoring had in reality been two-timing you.
“Helen has called to ask about you several times,” his father had told him this morning.
“And she and a friend came down to the hospital Monday night,” his mother had added. “I think that was in questionable taste. They got the news from a TV report.”
“She came with a friend?” Barry had asked. “You mean with Julie?”
“No, with a boyfriend. Dark-haired. Not too tall. Collie Something-or-other she called him. They seemed to know each other very well.”
His mother had reached over and taken his hand.
“I know this isn’t the right time to tell you this, dear, but is there ever such a thing as a ‘right time’? I just don’t want you to lean emotionally on a relationship that apparently is unstable.”
“There isn’t any ‘relationship,’ ” Barry had told her grimly. “Helen’s free to date anybody she wants.” But the revelation had knocked the breath out of him.
Of all the lousy tricks, he had raged silently. Two whole years of the faithful, loving, I’m-yours-forever bit, and all the time she’s had some other guy on the side. The lying bitch! And then she had the nerve to bring him to the hospital with her!
If only he had gotten there first. He should have been the one to break things off, standing straight and firm on his own two feet with some other girl on his arm, while Helen cried and pleaded and begged for another chance. But, no, he had been too worried about hurting her, and he had missed that opportunity. Now here he was, flat in bed, unable to take even a flimsy poke in return, while his mother brought him the news and enjoyed every minute of it.
“Take those roses and shove them,” he had told the stout, red-faced nurse who had been on duty when the flowers arrived,but she had not done so. She had placed them instead behind some other vases, and he could see them now, peeking out in all their pink innocence, from the far side of a shaggy, green plant. If it had been possible for him to have gotten out of bed and crossed the room to reach them, he would have smashed them to a pulp.
But he could not even do that. He could only lie here and fume and hate everybody—Helen, the boyfriend, the doctors, and the whole damned world. Which included his mother. She had him down at last, and there was no way of getting away from her ministrations. It was not so bad when his father was here too, but this morning, after a brief look-in and a “How are you feeling today, son?” he had gone on to the office and left his wife behind. She had settled into the chair by Barry’s bed with the satisfaction of a mother hen hopping into its nest, and after two full hours of her chatter he had been ready to shout for a shot, a pill, anything that would shut off the sound of her voice.
“We’re getting your old room ready for you to come home to,” she had told him. “I thought I’d have the walls painted a pale green. Don’t you think that would be a nice, restful color? And we can put the portable TV in there, and your computer. Dad’s going down to the University tomorrow to pick up your things. Your friend Lou is going to have them all packed for us, so they’ll be waiting at home for you when you get there.”
“You make it sound like I’m coming home forever.” Barry had tried to conceal the panic that came with voicing the thought. “I’m not, you know. As soon as this hole in my stomach heals up and I can eat solid stuff again and get my strength back, I’ll be up and out. I’ve still got Europe in mind for this summer, though I guess it will have to be the end of the summer now.”
“I know, dear,” his mother had said, and there had been a funny note in her voice. “Still, while you are at home with us, it will be nice to have a pleasant room to stay in, won’t it?”
She did not argue about the proposed European trip, nor did she repeat her earlier suggestion about the family car trip to the East Coast. This omission in itself was disconcerting and, in a way, almost frightening.
Aside from his parents, Barry was being allowed no visitors, and that was how he wanted it. Having his mother constantly there was strain enough without adding a troop of frat brothers and a barrage of weeping females. As the irritating little nurse had commented, enough of them had sent flowers to open a flower shop. He could imagine the scene with all of them—Crystal and Madison and two-faced Helen and the rest—drifting in and out in a never-ending stream, wringing their hands and bringing him books to read and having to be introduced to each other as they met across his bed.
&
nbsp; Even Julie had sent a plant with a note on it saying, “Get well fast. We’re thinking about you.” Who “we” was he wasn’t sure—herself and Helen, perhaps, or Ray or somebody else. He couldn’t care less.
“Hey, Barry?” The voice was an echo of his last thought, a familiar voice but one that he had not heard in a long time. “Are you asleep?”
Barry jerked open his eyes.
“What are you doing here?”
“I came up the back stairs,” Ray said, “and just walked down the hall and in the door. I passed some nurses but nobody stopped me.”
“They should have. Don’t you know I’m not supposed to have visitors?”
“Yeah, I know, and I’ll probably get thrown out in a couple of minutes. How’s it going?” Curious despite himself, Barry studied the face of the boy who stood at the end of his bed. In the months since he had last seen him, Ray had changed tremendously. He looked broader through the shoulders and chest and, somehow, older. He was very tan, and the beard gave character to a face that always before had held a not-quite-finished look, like a portrait by an artist who had not been able to decide what to do with the mouth and chin. Now the face was done and, young as it was, it was a man’s face.
The eyes were steady and direct and they softened with sympathy.
“It’s going great,” Barry said sarcastically. “I was needing a nice vacation. How are things with you?”
Ray came around and stood by the side of the bed, looking down at him. Crazy, Barry thought. He’d never had Ray look down at him before. He had always been the one to look down. He knew the top of Ray’s head by heart.
“God, Barry, I’m sorry,” Ray was saying. “I’m sorry as hell. This is a shitty thing to have happen. Are you in a lot of pain?”
“It isn’t exactly a picnic,” Barry said. “What did you come here for?”