That was one of the last occasions when our parents hung out together. For reasons I didn’t know at the time, they drifted apart, but those words stuck with me for years. Even on that Sunday, as I waited for her to show up, I wondered if the world was still a joke to Fiona. Was that what her so-called birthday present was? A joke?
Luckily the afternoon was mild and calm and there were things to distract me from such thoughts. I raked the leaves. I kicked a soccer ball against the house’s one patch of exposed foundation. I sat cross-legged on the roof of our minivan and counted the cars as they passed.
Five more cars and she’ll be here.
Make that seven more.
Fifteen cars more and I go inside.
No Fiona.
MONDAY, OCTOBER 16
It was back to school the next day, and Charlie sat by me at lunch, which limited the social options. Charlie was tolerated more than liked. Kids had given up on teasing him back in fifth grade when it became obvious that you can call a guy Captain Catpoop all you want, but if he embraces the name by having it ironed onto his own T-shirt, he basically has you beat.
As Kelly Dubois walked past, her tray supporting a mountain of chicken nuggets, Charlie asked me, “You think she does it?”
“Does what?”
“It.” He pounded his fists on the table like he was demanding dinner. “Ba-dush, ba-dush, ba-dush. Wokka wokka wokka.”
I hate to admit it, but I smiled. One thing that Charlie possessed was a talent for making funny sounds, which didn’t exactly redeem his obnoxiousness, but tempered it a bit. He was eager to shock and eager to please, a combination that tugged sympathies in every direction. My sympathies, at least. Girls weren’t as conflicted.
So when a girl-shaped shadow swooped onto the Formica, I assumed Charlie was in for rolled eyes and a diagnosis of disgusting pig. I turned to see Fiona, brown bag in hand.
“Am I interrupting?” she asked, pulling out a chair.
“Not at all. We were talking about Kelly Dubois and her nocturnal proclivities,” Charlie said through a nasty grin.
It would take a lot more than that to scare Fiona away. She sat down and said, “Okay. Not sure what that means.”
“Whatever you want it to mean,” Charlie told her as he stripped aluminum foil off of his can of soda.
“I don’t want it to mean anything,” Fiona replied. “Why don’t you go over and ask Kelly what it means to her? I’m sure she’d be thrilled with your company. While you’re at it, you can tell her why you wrap your soda in foil.”
Charlie shook his head. “Keeps it cold, darlin’.”
“Something new every day.” Fiona smiled and dug deep in her sack to find a Ziploc of Oreos. She began twisting off the tops.
“Why are you here?” Charlie asked. “Don’t you usually sit with the Wart Woman and Fishy Fay-Renee?”
The unfortunate soul known as the Wart Woman was Kendra Tolliver, a tomboy who fielded a bumper crop of warts on the fingers of her left hand. Some kids claimed that if she touched you, warts would sprout at the point of contact. Some kids even believed it.
As for Fishy Fay-Renee, that was Fay-Renee Donleavy. She had braces and wore turtleneck sweaters. I have no idea why she had two first names. I have no idea why she was considered fishy. She probably ordered a fish sandwich once in the lunch line or something stupid like that.
Fiona sighed as she peeled the cream from one Oreo and placed it on the cream of another. “I will rejoin more refined company momentarily,” she said. “For now, I have business. With Alistair.”
I shrugged and hinted at a nod.
“Ooo,” Charlie crooned. “Risky business?”
“Hardly,” Fiona assured him. She stacked on another two layers of cream and put a lid on the super-cookie. She turned to me. “So. Are you in?”
Rehearsing my response hadn’t helped, because all I could say was, “I … Yeah … I think I am.”
“Good. I’ll come by after school.”
Charlie started to raise his hand, and I slapped it back for fear he’d make an obscene gesture. It didn’t seem to bother him, though. He was too busy watching Fiona lick her finger and then run it along the cookie cream until it was smoothed out and singular.
When she finished, she held the cookie up like a trophy. “Quadruple Stuf,” she said. “Can’t buy that in a store.”
Then she took it down in one bite and chewed it as she stood and set off into the rumble of the cafeteria.
* * *
Every girl who invites herself to your place has the same intention—that’s what Charlie’s older brother, Kyle, told me once. Kyle knew his share of girls, but obviously he didn’t know any like Fiona.
That afternoon she rang our bell, and I was quick to answer. “Hey,” I said, opening the door and motioning with my head down the hall. “This way.”
“I remember where your room is,” Fiona said. “We played Legos there once.”
“Oh. Hello, Fiona.” My mom, fresh from her after-work shower, stood at the top of the stairs, her postal uniform expertly folded and tucked under one arm. She looked down at us as she brushed her wet hair. Water dripped over her turquoise sweat suit.
“Hi, Mrs. Cleary,” Fiona chirped. “Alistair said he’d help me with some homework.”
“He did, did he?” My mom moved the brush over her mouth to conceal a smile. “Well, it’s … it’s been a long time.”
“It has,” Fiona said.
“And if we keep this up, we’ll have no time for the homework,” I interjected. “We’ll be done by dinner.” I tugged at Fiona’s sleeve and took off down the hall without saying another word to my mom.
Minutes later, Fiona was sitting on my bed, her back resting on pillows against the wall and her lap holding the tape recorder. “I’d prefer you in the tweed,” she told me.
“Excuse me?”
“The jacket I gave you. It was my grandpa’s. He’s dead. But he was a writer, too. It still has his library card in the pocket. As my grandma told me, it probably has some inspiration left in it too.”
I pulled the box out from under my bed and retrieved the natty old thing. The sleeves were about five inches too long, and my hands were buried up to the fingertips.
“Well, isn’t that civilized?” Fiona said.
Not true, but I played along. “So how do you want to do this?” I slumped into a beanbag chair that I kept in the corner.
“I talk and you interpret. Simple.” She pressed Record. “Kilgore here will keep the record straight.”
“Kilgore?”
“The tape recorder. I name things. If you name things, then you treat them better.” Fiona motioned with her chin to a poster tacked to the opposite wall. “Does she have a name?”
“She” was a bikini-clad model spraying a Lamborghini with a garden hose and, no, she didn’t—at least, not one I knew. I lowered my eyes.
“We’ll call her Prudence, then,” Fiona said. “Now whenever you wake up, you can say, ‘Good morning, Prudence, how’s tricks? Still in the car washing game, I see.’”
“‘How’s tricks’?”
“‘How’s things,’” Fiona explained. “Slang from the good ol’ days. Learned it from a kid in a newsie cap.”
“A newsie cap?”
“We’re getting ahead of ourselves.”
Yes we were, but I didn’t even know where we were supposed to be starting. Perhaps the obvious place. “You were born…?”
“Ah yes, chapter one,” Fiona said. “I was born on August 11, 1977. I was born in the sack, which means I came out with the amniotic veil still around me. Some people say that makes me a clairvoyant, but I’m no clairvoyant.”
She punctuated the point with a finger in the air, and then she moved the tape recorder and wedged it in between her feet, giving it the optimum angle to catch her voice.
“I was born here in Thessaly,” she went on. “Or if you want to be technical about it, at Rose Memorial in Sutton. My dad worked as an i
nsurance adjuster then. Mom didn’t work because she thought raising kids was work enough. There aren’t a lot of pictures of me from those days because I’m the third-born, and apparently cameras don’t work on the third. Maybe we’re vampires.”
She smiled, and I smiled back, because I could certainly relate. I was the second of two kids. Our bookshelves were stacked with photo albums of Keri diaper-clad in the garden, on the hammock, with her face in a bowl of ice cream. There were far fewer pictures of me, a mere year and a half younger.
“My first memory is from when I was two years old,” Fiona continued. “I was playing in our sandbox. Cody, our German shepherd, tried to steal my sand bucket, and I went to grab it back and Cody bit me on the arm and dragged me across the yard until my face hit the pole of a bird feeder and my nose broke and there was blood on my arm and my face. I remember the blood tasted dirty and hot. They put Cody down after that. I have this nose and this scar to show for it.”
As she rolled her sleeve up, the purple ghost of the attack revealed itself. It was like a centipede crawling toward her bicep. My reaction must have been swift and obvious.
“I know,” she said, and then launched into her best Valley girl impression. “Grody to the max.”
I had never seen the scar before, but I had often wondered why Fiona always wore long sleeves, even in the summer. I stumbled through my response. “I just … I…”
“Make a note,” she said. “‘A gnarly scar eats at her girly arm.’ Something like that. That’s what a writer would do.”
“Good idea.” I scooted the beanbag chair over to my desk, reached up, and grabbed a pencil and the mostly empty notebook I had reserved for Social Studies. Below a doodle of Abe Lincoln riding a skateboard, I wrote: Big scar. Purple. Somewhat gross.
She gave the scar a kiss and rolled her sleeve back down. “I remember other things from that time. Images and stuff. My mom in the driveway shoveling snow while wearing a yellow dress and a paisley coat. Me and my dad sharing a strawberry milk shake. Derek and Maria making a house of baseball cards. I’ve been told anecdotes from that time too, about how we used to do stuff as a family, but I think it’s best to stick with my memories.”
“Probably best,” I said, but what did I know? My creative endeavors amounted to a handful of stories, only a couple of which I had actually put to paper. I didn’t have the first clue about what it took to “pen” someone’s biography. Fiona’s faith in my abilities was flattering, but as the warmth of flattery dissipated, a spiny chill was all that remained. This girl actually expected something from me. It finally struck me how strange that was.
“My second memory is from a bit later,” she said. “I was four and I was in bed and I was listening to the radiators clicking. You know how they click? Well, the clicks were different this time. It was as if the radiators were talking to me, as if—”
“Fiona?” I stood up, though not as quickly as I would have liked. Beanbag chairs.
“Yes?”
I set the notebook on the desk. “Why are we doing this?”
Fiona pulled a pillow out from behind her back and hugged it. Tilting her head, she replied, “Because we’re weirdos, Alistair. We’re the aliens.”
“I don’t know what that … I am not a weirdo,” I said. “And that’s not what I’m asking.”
“What are you asking, then?”
“I’m asking … I hardly know you anymore. Why not write this yourself?”
Fiona looked at me straight and serious. “To say the things I’m going to say, I need someone who hardly knows me. I need a witness with an imagination.”
Sometimes I wondered if that was my problem, an abundance of cluttered rooms in my mind. She had me pegged, though, and she had me worried. “You’re only twelve,” I said. “Why do you need a biography?”
She shook her head and put it simply. “As I already told you, I’m thirteen. And tomorrow my soul could be gone.”
I didn’t know until later how literal that statement was. Or else I wouldn’t have said what I said. “I’m not sure I want to do this.”
Fiona considered those words for a moment, and then sighed and whispered her reply: “And we can’t do this if you have doubts.”
The recorder at her feet, the tape and its spinning reels. That’s where this all started. I reached down and pressed Stop. “You should take this back.”
She spread her feet and let the recorder fall. “No,” she said, getting up and brushing past me. “It’s yours. I don’t take things back.”
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 17
School again. It was only six hours a day, but those hours were whirlpools. Fight against them and I’d lose—swept up, sucked down, smothered by nausea. My best bet was to stand and endure.
Enduring usually meant daydreaming. I suppose everyone is a daydreamer, but I was better at it than most. I could appear attentive, eyes at the board instead of the window. I could even answer the occasional algebra question if called upon. But for most of the day, I was lost, exploring phantasmal worlds where I was starring in a movie or living on some tropical island with a beautiful girl.
Not this time, though. Fiona invaded every daydream, her face appearing from behind trees, her voice—metallic and pleading—crackling out from clouds and television screens.
By sixth period Social Studies, I gave in and opened my notebook to the scribble of words from the previous evening.
Big scar. Purple. Somewhat gross.
I wrote a few more.
Ten missing months? Soul … gone? Talking radiators?
Images of radiators with toothy mouths, chattering like auctioneers, brought a smile to my face, but it was an uncomfortable smile. I had opened myself up to someone who was obviously a bit … sick. That was the best word for it, sick.
* * *
“Fiona is nutzo, you know?” my sister said as we walked home from school that afternoon.
“She’s not my—”
“Girlfriend? She was in your room.”
“A school project. A—”
“I don’t care.” Keri tightened the straps and hiked up her backpack so that she could more easily handle her load of books. “Mom was asking about her.”
“Gawd…”
“You could have the wedding reception at the Skylark. Salt potatoes and helium balloons!”
“Shut up.” I reached for Keri’s ponytail. She knew what would come next.
Wriggling away, she teased, “I got a secret about your fiancée.”
I pushed her backpack and she stumbled forward but didn’t fall. “I said shut up!”
“I’m serious. One night I saw her bury something in the swamp.”
I stopped. “You’re kidding me.”
“It was, like, a few weeks ago,” Keri said with a shrug. “I couldn’t sleep, and it was surprisingly hot so I had my window wide open. I heard a banging sound and I looked out and I saw Fiona with a shovel by Frog Rock.”
Our backyard bordered a swamp, along the edge of which sat a giant boulder shaped like a bullfrog. If the moon was out, we could see it from our windows at night, standing guard in front of a wall of cattails.
“She wasn’t just out for a walk or something?” I asked. My suspicions were well-founded. Once, Keri told me there was a mouse in our attic playing a tiny violin. It turned out to be an old sock and a creaky hinge.
“I’m serious. She dug a hole. Dropped something in. Covered it up.”
“Which was?”
“Beats me.” Keri threw her hands in the air. “I’m not messin’ with Heavy Metal Fifi.”
“Who?”
“Something me and Mandy call her.”
Mandy was a fourteen-year-old with the haircut of a newscaster and a fondness for old movies. She was a frequent sleepover guest at our house, always arriving with a tin of chocolate chip cookies and something black-and-white she’d taped off of TV.
“And you never told anyone?” I asked.
“I told Mandy. I’m telling you. Tho
ught you should know before you invited her back.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m not inviting her back. Who knows? Maybe she’ll move away sometime soon and we’ll never see her again.”
* * *
There is another afternoon I remember, another barbecue. Our parents were busy with the hamburgers and sangria, while Fiona and I—maybe six years old, probably seven—had ventured into the swamp, to the edge of the cattails on a mission to capture things that squirmed.
“How ’bout the big daddy?” Fiona joked, pointing to the boulder.
“You mean Frog Rock?” I asked. “Keri says he keeps us safe. Keeps coyotes away.”
“Really?”
“Keri says so.”
“What else does the frog keep?” Fiona asked. “Does he keep secrets?”
“What do you mean?”
Instead of answering, Fiona pushed through the cattails and grabbed the notch in the rock that doubled as the frog’s right knee. Bouncing three times for confidence, counting it off, then pulling, shooting a foot skyward, trying to land a sneaker—rubber on granite—missing, slipping, trying again, and again, and then getting it right, she scrambled up the surface until she was face-to-face with the frog. She cupped her hands against the side of its head. She whispered to the stone.
“What are you whispering?” I asked.
“A secret,” she said. “Between me and Mr. Hopper.”
“I can keep secrets,” I told her, and I reached for the notch so I could pull myself up too. I wasn’t tall enough. Even jumping, I couldn’t grab it. Watching me struggle, Fiona smirked. I think she liked knowing that she could do something that I couldn’t.
“Prove it,” she said. “Prove you can keep secrets.”
“How?” I panted and wiped my palms on my shirt and leaned, defeated, against the stone.
“Tell me one,” she said. “A secret of your own.”
I’m sure that I had secrets, but I couldn’t think of any that quickly. So I looked down at my feet and said the first thing that came to mind. “If we ever move away, to another house, I mean, then I’m gonna bury something, right here next to this rock.”
The Riverman (The Riverman Trilogy) Page 2