At some point, I lean forward. “Where are we going?”
“Anywhere we want.” Allegra holds up a credit card. “Scot’s. He just sold another house lot.”
Tyler turns around. “Niagara Falls okay?”
“I guess so.”
When we get there, Allegra and Tyler go down to the bottom of the falls for a boat ride. I stand in the viewing area and watch the thundering wall of water and think what a tiny life Grimshaw had and how little difference it makes that she’s gone. People keep going to Niagara Falls. House lots keep selling. Water keeps pouring over the edge.
Although my mother’s books on adolescence and grief counsel otherwise, I don’t go to school for a week. I do my physics and calculus at home and send it in with my mother. Scot treats me like a cancer patient. He’ll be watching a baseball game, yelling at the TV, and pounding the arms of his chair. I walk by, and he mutes the volume and looks sorrowful. He hopes I won’t talk to him. A lot of people are like that. They don’t want to feel inadequate.
When I do return to school, the kids leave a four-foot buffer zone around me, as if they’re afraid they might catch it. But then by day two, Grimshaw’s murder gets eclipsed by the prom. It’s an all-night, nonalcoholic, locked-in-the-gym affair, and the halls are abuzz with schemes for smuggling in alcohol. In the ten days since her death, I still haven’t cried, and of course Mom is worried. So she sends Pastor Don down to get me out of class so that we can “talk.” It means getting out of school before lunch on a nice day, so I go along with him in his car to the church.
“It’s too nice a day to be inside,” Pastor Don declares. “Let’s take a walk.”
“I know a place we can go,” I suggest. We drive in silence past the drinking places and all the former dairy farms. I show him a place to pull over, and we cross the road and thread through rusty barbed wire and walk up the edge of one of Mizerak’s alfalfa pastures. At the top where the woods begin is a deep little ravine cut by the same stream that runs behind Grimshaw’s. From here, it goes past all the party places in the gorge and on down through Colchis, and keeps going until it ends up in the Mississippi River. We stand at the top and look into the ravine. Down near the bottom, there’s still the crusty remnant of a snowbank.
“My goodness,” says Pastor Don. “Snow. In June! I had no idea.” We sit on either side of a big flat rock. A silence sits between us, like a third person that was already there before us. But he is here for me, and he needs to be talked to, otherwise my mother will send more specialists after me. I decide to make it easy for him.
“So,” I start. “Do you want to know how I feel?”
“Yes,” he says. “I do.”
“Okay, I’ll tell you. On one condition. Nothing you can say, no Bible verse you can quote, no heartwarming anecdote you can relate, will make me feel any different. So don’t bother. Agreed?”
“Okay,” he says doubtfully. He waits for a minute. “So,” he prompts, “how do you feel?”
“Guilty.”
“Is it…” He speaks carefully, holding his fingertips together the way he does on Sunday mornings when he’s making a fine theological point that he knows nobody will understand. “Is it guilt that you’re alive and your best friend is … dead?”
“No. It’s guilt that had I not done the things I did, my best friend would not even be dead.”
“I see.” His shoulders sag. Real guilt. He wasn’t counting on that. “Can you say more about it?”
“I could, but…” I shake my head. We watch a flock of starlings move across the sky. It moves like a single being, stretching out, then bunching up, then getting absorbed into a tree. “How’s Mrs. Grimshaw doing?” I ask after a while.
“Well, she actually feels somewhat like you do. She won’t talk, and she can’t pray, so I just try to be there with her.”
“She doesn’t like anyone in the house who’s not family. It makes her uncomfortable.”
“Well, the church has done a lot there recently, cleaning it up, hauling away the … stuff. She seemed to appreciate the help.”
A heavy bass booms out, and a minute later, Allen Mizerak goes by on the new John Deere, CD blaring, rear tires flinging clods of manure all over the road.
“The Mizeraks must be planting now,” I comment. The sight of Allen makes me think back to the day after homecoming, when Grimshaw and Angel and I did the milking together for Rack, and then did it again in the evening. We seemed wiser then, wiser than we are now. It seems to me that the real mistake we made wasn’t just mine, but all of ours, and that we made it right around that time, maybe that very day. It was so easy being together like that, then it was just as easy to throw it away. We didn’t value the best thing we had, which was each other.
“Serena,” Pastor Don says suddenly. “Can I pray for you?”
Asking my permission to pray for me? This is a new courtesy. “Okay,” I agree. “Not in my presence, though, okay? I always found that really rude.”
“Fair enough,” he agrees.
“I don’t understand prayer, anyway,” I blurt. “I mean, my mother prays when she ought to be paying attention. She just turns everything ‘over to the Lord.’ As if He knows her problems better than she does.”
“Maybe she prays so that then she can think.”
“Maybe,” I concede. “But I doubt it.”
“A wise man told me once that when he prays, he doesn’t ask God for any particular outcome. He just says thank you.”
“What would the point of that be?”
“Well,” Pastor Don says patiently, “for example, if you were moved to pray for your friend, you would just thank God for her. For her life.” In front of us, the same flock of starlings has reappeared. We watch them fly to the horizon, wheel around, and come back. “It may take you a long time to figure it out, Serena, but she was here for a reason. Whether or not you even do figure it out, her life was important. Just start there. That’s faith.”
I wipe my nose with my sleeve. “Are you trying to make me cry?”
“No, but I’d pray right now,” he offers. “With your permission.”
“Okay,” I say slowly.
He clasps his hands, hangs his head, and frowns. With no introduction, he starts telling God all about Grimshaw. Pastor Don tells God about her childhood and her long friendship with me, and then he goes on and tells Him about the rest of her family, too, each brother and her mom and the dead father, about whom I know very little. It’s as if God is sitting on a branch of the maple tree above our heads, listening to us, interested, hidden by the new leaves.
It’s a long prayer. My butt goes numb from sitting on that cold rock for so long, but still, I think it’s good somebody told God what was going on.
We’re pretty close to Versailles, and Pastor Don drives me home. Nobody’s there. As I walk through the front door, I hear a man’s voice on the answering machine. It’s the police chief of Colchis, telling us that Mike Lyle was arrested in Nogales, Arizona, for driving off from a gas station without paying. He’s being held in Nevada, without bail.
fifteen
AT THE FRONT DESK OF another motel, she explained her situation to another manager. She’d left her boyfriend, she had no money, nothing, but she saw the HELP WANTED sign in the window, and she was willing to work for a room. She was going to look for a job as a croupier tomorrow. Night was falling. Her feet hurt, and she was losing her voice. She had done this at least ten times so far today, but she couldn’t think of anything else to do.
While she was talking, this manager kept his attention on his computer screen. When she was done, he nodded. “Jobs all over the city.” He put a key on the guest book and moved it toward her. “Sign here.” She took the key, and he watched her sign her name.
“Friend of mine’s in personnel at the Alhambra,” he said.
“Really?”
He wrote a name on the back of a business card and slid it across the counter to her. She couldn’t read it because of the tear
s in her eyes.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
He shrugged. “No need to cry. Everyone needs a hand sometimes.”
* * *
The man in personnel was from Buffalo. He knew where the Minnechaug Valley was. He asked her if she could start immediately. They were short-staffed. He said there were opportunities for dancers, as well, but she wasn’t interested in that. Back at the motel, she borrowed an iron from the front desk and laid her clothes out on the other bed, the uniform she’d been given against her first paycheck and panty hose. The last thing she thought about before she fell asleep was the phone call she would make tomorrow after she started the job. She smiled and shook her head, thinking about her friend. No, maybe she wouldn’t call until she started a dance class, which she would do once she had some money. She would start to dance, finally, real dance. What was this feeling, though, this vibration in her chest? Maybe it was confidence. She had always been jealous of her friend’s confidence—what must it be like to walk around with that? It wasn’t really a feeling, it was more like a knowing. It was knowing that if you did one thing for yourself, you could do the next thing, and so on, until it got you where you wanted to go. And she had done it. And it felt good. People would help you, that’s what she’d never realized. Before she fell asleep, she got out of bed and double-checked the locks on the door one more time.
Tomorrow was hers.
She was so tired that she didn’t hear the knocking. It had to penetrate slowly into her sleep. Once she sat up, it took her a minute to remember where she was. She put on a sweater to answer the door. It was his sweater, because she had nothing of her own that was warm. It still smelled like him. She stood in front of the door. The knocking came again.
“Hello?”
“It’s me. Open up.” She leaned her forehead against the cold steel.
“It’s me, Mel. Open the door.” The door had a peephole and a sliding chain lock. She ran her fingers over the dents in the steel. “I just want to talk,” he said. “I’m on my way back to LA. I just wanted to say good-bye.”
She had just done her nails, and she watched them come up to the chain. He heard a small sound when her fingers touched the knob. He waited, but he didn’t hear the slide.
“I been doing a lot of thinking in the last couple days.” From the way his voice cracked, she could tell he was crying. “You don’t need me anymore. I know that. Shit, you’re on your way. I’m on my way, too. I just wanted to say good luck.”
She slid the chain out of the slide. He tried the door, but it was locked. “You gotta open it from the inside,” he said. “Mel? Open the door.” She turned the doorknob.
The force blew open the door. It knocked her on the floor between the beds. He lifted her up and threw her on the bed. She lay there, limp, expecting the worst. She wouldn’t resist. She held on to the thought of tomorrow. She didn’t want anything to get in its way. But nothing happened. She didn’t know where he was. It took her a minute to realize that he was next to her, sitting on the bed with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands.
He had left the door ajar. She rolled over and dove for it. With one hand, he caught the back of her sweater, and with the other, reached out and swatted the door. It closed with a quiet steel click. He held her by the collar like a kitten.
“You’re not going nowhere,” he said. “We gotta stick together, you and me. I’ve told you and told you and told you, but you don’t listen. You can’t just split off and go—this world will eat you alive. You don’t know that yet, because you haven’t been anywhere.”
He was breathing hard.
“For two days now, two whole days, I been riding around, visiting one motel after the other. I knew I’d find you, because we’re meant to be. You know what else I knew, though?” He chuckled in her ear. “I knew you’d sign your own name.” He was holding the collar on the sweater so tight she couldn’t get her fingers inside it. “I offered you mine, but you wouldn’t take it. You didn’t want it. But you’re no better’n me. You’re dirt. From nowhere. You’re nothing.”
“Mike,” she whispered.
“Say it,” he insisted. “‘I’m nothing.’ Say it once. Then we’ll forget this whole thing ever happened. We’ll start over.”
“I can’t breathe.”
“Say it.” He loosened the collar. “Say it.”
“Okay,” she gasped, sucking air back into her lungs.
“Say it.”
With one motion, she twisted around, grabbed the telephone by the bed, and hit him with it on the bridge of his nose. She sprang off the bed for the door. Her hand was on the doorknob, but in another second, she was on the floor again. His knee was against her throat. His whole weight was on her chest.
“Bloody my nose, you piece of shit.”
She tried to push him off, but it was like being under a building. He was just too heavy. A blow to her face, and she was choking on blood.
“You piece of white trash.” He hit her again. She heard popping, cracking noises in her head.
“I was taking you places.” He hit her again. Sharp objects cut the inside of her mouth. Her teeth.
“I was going to make you something.”
She started to cry. When he wrapped the panty hose around her neck, she didn’t resist.
* * *
Another night of horrible sleep. Toward dawn, I get up.
I put on my bathrobe, go downstairs, and make a pot of coffee. I go outside and wait for the sun to come up, but it doesn’t. It just gets paler and paler gray.
The framers of the new house come at seven. The crew offers me a donut, and I sit on the tailgate of one of their pickups. They take out chop saws and nail guns and air compressors, and set up sawhorses. They spread orange extension cords around the foundation, scratch the stubble on their cheeks, look up at the sky, and discuss when is it going to open up and pour, and whether it’s worth it to even start. After seven, Scot stumbles out of our house, tying on his nail apron. I have to get ready for school, so I go inside.
* * *
My uncle Hugh calls Sunday morning as everyone’s leaving for church. Allegra probably told him what happened and ordered him to talk to me. He called from his car.
“Everybody’s worried because I’m not crying,” I shout at him. “I feel kind of pressured by it.”
“Life will always provide opportunities to cry,” he shouts back. “You can count on it for that.”
“Hey, Hugh?” I holler. “Are we rich?”
“You need money?” he shouts.
“No. I mean, is there any, like, family money? I’m just curious.”
“I see. There was, but … Well, the fact is, your father gave it all away.”
“He did?” I shout. “Away to who?”
“To the people who he felt had earned it. It took him some work, a little time, but those were his beliefs, so that’s what he did.” Hugh and I are silent for a while. “So it’s all gone,” he says finally.
“All of it?”
“Every dime.”
“Wasn’t anyone mad when he did it?”
“Your mother was pretty irritable for a while. My family, of course, wouldn’t speak to him again. They wanted him to give it back to them, but he didn’t think it was theirs any more than it was his. None of us earned it. He was the oldest son, and the way trusts work, the rules were written a long time ago. The money owns you more than you own the money, and that’s not what your father was about.” Hugh’s voice thickens when he says that, and he has to stop talking for a few minutes. Then he clears his throat. “So he had a lot more than the rest of us. The girls got the silver, and the house. The stuff. He got the cash. I’m the youngest, of course, so I got the good looks. And the charm.” He laughs.
“The silver? Like … monogrammed silver?”
“That’s right.”
“You mean there are lots of little V’s somewhere, on sugar bowls and teaspoons?”
“That’s the idea, yes, on
ly they’re little P’s. My mother’s name was Pond. His father wasn’t around long enough to leave an impression on the silver.”
“Where—”
“She married five times.”
“Do you think he did the right thing?”
“Yes, I do, in the end. But he could have done it differently, I think. There was a way to handle it better than he did.”
“Was it a lot of money?” I ask.
“It was a fortune.”
“Wow.”
“It was after you kids were born. He didn’t want it to land on you three.”
“I don’t know what it would have done for us, anyway.”
“Well,” he says. “Money is opportunity. It could have sent you guys to boarding school, gotten you the hell out of—what’s the name again, the town you live in?”
Suddenly, I can’t speak around the huge lump in my throat. I have to swallow a couple of times. “Colchis,” I whisper.
“Right,” he says. “Not much to work with there. You could have made friends with people who had more going for them.”
Then we talk about my graduation from high school and the beginning of adulthood and what I want as a present. He asks me if I want to come out to where he lives. “I come and go,” he says. “You could hang out, do some thinking, figure out what your next step is.”
He tells me his plan is to be in Maine in the early part of the summer, so I can meet him there and go to Europe with him, if nothing better comes along, and after that he’ll stay in Europe, and I can check that out, too, if I want. Just like that, my future opens up. Easy. I thank him for his offer and then stand there on the front lawn for a long time after we hang up.
“Pond,” I say out loud. The word tolls somewhere inside my brain like an ancient, unused bell, and pronouncing it like that, the world shifts a little under my feet. Suddenly, I understand a lot that I never understood before. Hey, Grimshaw, I want to shout into the empty space she disappeared into, you were right; I am from a rich family. I remember what she said about the spaces between people. She was saying something about rich people that day, about the space between rich people and everyone else, something specific that I can’t remember, but it feels like it pertains to me. I get a powerful urge to get on my bike and go to the cemetery to wait for her, so I can find out what else she thinks about it.
The Spaces Between Us Page 22