Summertime

by Elizabeth Rigbey

  Back to the deck and this time, far to one side, beyond the house and almost at the dirt road, I see motion amidst the dappled shade of the trees. Probably a man, probably running. He must have crouched under the deck, right underneath my feet, with the old lumber and machines until I went back inside the house. Then he escaped. The shadow is at the edge of my vision and in a moment it is gone. I wait, my eyes fixed on the spot where he used to be, but I am staring at the stillness of an empty landscape.

  I jump down from the deck and retrace the intruder’s route. There are some large footsteps in the dirt which could be his, or they might belong to the police or to Larry. I skirt around the house and then walk right over to the dirt road. There’s a gap in the foliage where he must have escaped.

  I turn back to the house. I stop at the sunken garden, looking, listening. My heart still fills my ears with its thumping. The garden is sheltered by arching trees and half-blanketed by ivy. Nothing has been disturbed here for a while. And then, I miss a breath. Peeping between the shrubs is something alien. The colour is wrong, the angles are wrong. It shouldn’t be there.

  I brush aside the foliage and tread cautiously on the stone steps. I lift my hand as I descend and feel feathery leaves slip between my fingers. Propped against one wall, I find a gravestone. I am so astonished by this that the stone seems to leap at me, its words flying out in jumbled letters like an explosion. At first I take it for some very late, overblown monument to Mother’s dog, who was buried around here. But when I have stared at the words long enough I read: ‘Remember me. Remember death. Eric Schaffer.’ I read them over and over until they echo inside my head. Remember me. Remember death.

  The headstone is grey and its face is rough, rougher than the stone I saw at Joe Zacarro’s and, although the words are so similar, their style is less ornate. There is a gap at the bottom for dates. It sits, with an absurd suggestion of jauntiness, askew on the uneven rocks which line the sunken garden.

  I walk carefully back to the steps. Daddy built this garden from the same round, smooth rocks he used for the drive. Beneath it is buried Nickel Dog, a brown mutt adored by Mother which Jane discovered poisoned one day, probably by someone intending to poison coyotes. If you could forget about the Nickel Dog’s unhappy fate, then the sunken garden should have been a good place to do your homework but it never was because the sun, trapped like a bear here, was doubly aggressive. I don’t remember ever sitting on the stone seats.

  The old swimsuit Scott returned to me is in the car. I pick it up and am locking up the house, sliding shut the doors to the deck, when some instinct pulls me, like gravity, outside again to stare over the valley. The farm where I walked with Lindy. The tracks where the farmer drove us home in his pick-up with the dirt blowing a storm behind us. The place where Robert Joseph’s car turned over. The long, grey, straight road which leads to the intersection and along which, tiny, silently, a toy tow truck is now travelling. It points right to the heart of the valley and then, with the flash of bouncing sun, it turns north. I watch it until it is out of sight. Then I leave the house for Joe Zacarro’s.

  22

  Joe is out. There is no reply to my ring at the bell or my yell and the car with the padlocked trunk is missing. The pool is empty except for the plastic armchair, moored by the steps. I walk right over to his headstone. Remember death. Joe Zacarro did. Different script but probably chiselled by the same craftsman.

  I change into my swimsuit and the pool unrolls before me, a flat, bright rectangle of water. I climb in to my waist and feel its cold embrace while the sun batters my face and shoulders with its heat. I walk further and the iciness moves up my body. I am breathless when it grasps me like a ring of metal around my heart. I lift my feet and roll forward and in that moment I have changed elements. Now my movements are water movements, my thoughts are fish thoughts. I no longer feel the cold.

  I swim rapidly, cutting a line through the pool’s calm surface, turning and cutting again, like the scissors of a busy seamstress. Up and down, up and down, the water streaming each side of my face, holding me, caressing me, a calm parent as I kick and twist in its arms. My senses dulled, my mind lulled by the rhythm of my swimming, I continue, I have no idea how long, until, abruptly, I stop, mid-pool.

  I climb out. I have washed away hours and perhaps days. I wrap the towel around me and watch the drips from my body make strange, dark shapes on the tiles around the pool edge.

  ‘You sure needed that,’ says a voice. Under an umbrella, in a swimsuit, sits Mr Zacarro. He pushes an iced coffee towards me. ‘It took me a while to make this, I didn’t think you’d still be swimming by the time I finished.’

  I sip the coffee and enjoy its sweetness. Joe rests his short leg up on a chair. I tell him about the intruder at Daddy’s house and he listens and thinks and finally says: ‘You came right over here. You did good. You’re safe at Joe’s, you remember that.’

  ‘But. the intruder may still be around. He went through the hedge into the dirt road.’

  Joe frowns. ‘He ran away,’ he reminds me. ‘If he’d wanted to hurt you he could’ve done it when you were alone in the house.’

  I nod. I’m pretty sure the intruder has already left in his tow truck.

  ‘Okay,’ says Joe seriously, ‘let’s get this straight. He used a key. Twice. Until you got the locks changed.’

  ‘Last night the police hid a couple of officers in the yard in case he came back to try again. But he didn’t.’ Jane called me earlier with this news. She sounded disappointed.

  ‘So he either knew you’d changed the locks, or guessed you would, or he’d found what he wanted. Except, today he walked right in from the deck, saw you and ran right out again.’

  ‘I guess he ran when he saw me. I don’t know why else he would run.’

  ‘So he’s not planning on introducing himself.’

  ‘I think he wants something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Something in the den.’

  ‘Well, what’s in there?’

  ‘Just Daddy’s papers.’

  Joe gets up and walks distractedly into the pool. There’s a huge crash and water explodes everywhere. It leaves dark patches on the paving and wet patches on my legs. I stretch them out into the sun to dry.

  Joe swims a couple of strokes underwater with a natural, easy grace and then turns over on to his back as if that’s natural too.

  ‘Gotta get in the water if I want to think,’ he explains as swimming-pool cascades down his face. He tilts back his head and, a lot further down the pool, his toes appear. He floats. He closes his eyes.

  ‘I also have a theory…’ I begin hesitantly. ‘I think he drives a tow truck.’

  Joe opens both eyes.

  ‘This guy who keeps coming to the house? You seen him drive a tow truck?’

  ‘No. I don’t even know where he leaves it. But on the two occasions when I sensed he was around, I looked down into the valley, ten, maybe fifteen minutes later, and I saw a tow truck.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Driving east. Then it turns north at the intersection.’

  Joe closes his eyes again.

  ‘If you only saw it twice then it’s probably a coincidence,’ he says.

  ‘Did Daddy know anyone with a tow truck?’

  The water is almost calm now. The waves Joe created have just enough movement to turn his body through a few degrees.

  ‘I’ll have to think about that,’ he says at last. ‘I mean, if you drive a goddamn heap of garbage like Eric did, you’re going to need a number to call when it breaks down on the freeway…’

  ‘I’ve already looked in his address book but there’s nothing obvious.’

  ‘Hmmmmm,’ he says. ‘I gotta think.’

  He doesn’t move or speak for such a long time that I suspect he’s been thinking so hard he’s fallen asleep. I don’t know anyone else who can fall asleep in water without some kind of flotation aid but probably Joe can. It’s time to go, even though I h
aven’t asked him the very question which brought me here. I am gathering up the iced coffee glasses, quietly, without clinking them, the way Jane and I used to wash the dishes when Mother was very sick, when Joe opens one eye.

  ‘Hey, Lucy,’ he says, ‘don’t go.’

  ‘I thought you were asleep.’

  ‘Nah, like I said, I was thinking.’

  ‘There’s something else I wanted to ask you.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘I found Daddy’s headstone.’

  He opens both eyes and sits up in the water, shattering its calm, creating small waves all over the pool.

  ‘You did? Down in that pit in your yard?’

  ‘The sunken garden.’

  ‘Fancy garbage name.’ He pulls himself up and, as he scrambles into the floating armchair, curtains of water run down his skin.

  ‘So you knew the headstone was there?’ I ask.

  His legs dangle beneath the surface looking paler than the rest of his brown body. He puts his head back and closes his eyes. ‘Sure. Didn’t Eric mention it in his will? You’re supposed to tell in your will and then your relatives are real pleased you saved them the trouble and expense.’

  ‘I don’t think he mentioned it anywhere.’

  ‘Well, you probably noticed it’s sort of like mine. Adam Holler’s too. That’s because we all got our stones from the same place, me and Eric and Adam.’

  ‘Were they on special offer? I mean, three for the price of two or something?’

  Disconcertingly, Mr Zacarro flings back his head and roars with laughter and the armchair bobs around in the water.

  ‘It wasn’t a joke,’ I tell him when he’s through.

  ‘Economics didn’t come into it, Lucy. We all wanted our headstones that way so we figured we should get them carved ourselves to make sure.’

  ‘Remember death? Isn’t that kind of strange?’

  ‘Not so. People have been saying that for centuries. I mean, it’s a modern, industrialized nation sort of thing to ignore death and think it’s never going to happen to you. But if you remember that you’re going to die some day then you live your life in a different sort of a way. Not necessarily better, but probably better. Different, that’s for sure. We believe that. We all agreed on it, me and Eric and Adam.’

  I look at him uncertainly.

  ‘Be a nice gal and get me a beer and have one yourself if you’d like.’

  I trot over to the porch and get Joe a beer. It feels icy in my hand.

  I say: ‘I don’t recall Daddy ever talking about his own death.’

  ‘Didn’t mean he wasn’t aware of it.’

  I swallow. ‘Was he scared to die?’ I ask.

  Mr Zacarro sighs and I see the sigh slip along his whole body. ‘Oh sure, he was scared as any of us. We don’t know how death’s going to come or how much it’s going to hurt and that’s frightening. The only thing we know for sure is that it will come.’

  There is a new quality in his voice. It has thickened. I look at him quickly. ‘Are you okay, Joe?’

  ‘I got interviewed this morning,’ he tells me. ‘Nice gal from the police department, long dark hair.’

  ‘Long?’

  ‘Kept messing with it. Wanted to know if Eric had an enemy or any reason to be scared of someone. In other words, do I know who killed him?’

  ‘What did you say?’

  His face is big and sad. ‘The very dumbfool idea made me laugh.’

  ‘What else did she ask you?’

  ‘Well…’ he pauses. The surface of the pool still dances from the waves I made. He watches the moving pattern of sunlight and shadow but his face is untouched by its gaiety. His jaw lengthens suddenly, his mouth turns down and he rubs an eye as if an eyelash, at this very moment, fell right into it. ‘It was just the damnedest thing,’ he says.

  I wait for him and finally he turns back to me and I see that both eyes are red and there was no eyelash. He swallows. In a voice that is creased and used as an old rag he says: ‘She asked about Lindy.’

  ‘Lindy!’ I echo. And for a moment I feel angry with the detective, playing with her imaginary hair, smiling her cold-eyed smiles, stabbing at people’s pasts with her pen, slamming all the soft places with her notebook.

  Sobs shake Joe Zacarro’s big, brown body. I see the muscles clench and the flesh shiver as pain twists inside him like a fish on a line.

  His face and chest and belly are soon wet with tears. He leans over and scoops up some pool water then pulls it across his cheeks like a towel and drops more water on to his body.

  I reach out for his arm and he immediately puts a hand over mine, both trapping and protecting it.

  ‘She asked me how Lindy died. I told her they already got a file marked Lindy Wardine Zacarro somewhere. The police came that night and asked a lot of questions. I told this dark-haired gal maybe they still have the file somewhere if she’s interested and she said she’d go look for it. Then she asked me everything anyway. Everything I could remember about the day Lindy died. As if I ever could have forgotten one goddamn second of it.’

  He looks up at me and his eyes are still red.

  ‘I guess that’s me finished for a few hours.’ His chest heaves and he snatches at breaths when they come. He presses my hand tighter against him. ‘Do you remember? Do you remember when my Lindy died?’

  It was summer vacation and all the neighbourhood kids were playing hide-and-go-seek. There had been some kind of argument. I don’t remember why or what it was about, a trivial, childish difference probably, but my friendship with Lindy had cooled. Despite this, we still sometimes joined in with the other kids on the hillside during vacations. When it was Lindy’s turn to hide no one could find her. We looked and called and finally it felt late and we just drifted off home in our different directions. Mrs Zacarro hadn’t been too worried at first: it was hot and the mothers mostly sat around fanning themselves. But when Davis and Carter got hungry and there was still no Lindy, Mrs Zacarro knew something wasn’t right. She took the car and drove around the neighbourhood, looking, calling Lindy’s name. She came to our house. She asked for Mother but Mother, who had been ill, was resting and Daddy was out. We could see that Mrs Zacarro was angry with Lindy but now her face was starting to hollow with worry. She didn’t know that the whole time Lindy was right there in the trunk of the car and had scratched off her fingernails trying to get out. The police said that the temperature in the trunk was so high she would have died within a half hour. When I used to think how Lindy was lying dead without fingernails in the car her mother parked right by our barn, I’d feel nausea all over my body and salt in my mouth.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ says Joe. ‘Why was this woman asking about my little girl after all these years?’ He scatters more water over himself.

  I pause. ‘I’ve been thinking about Lindy a lot since I came back here.’

  His face breaks into an indulgent smile. ‘Yeah, you two were big pals. Remember how you used to play with your little toy horses and plait each other’s hair and stuff?’

  ‘Joe, did Lindy ever get a real horse?’

  ‘Slim! He was a beautiful chestnut, I bought him from a cowboy in the mountains and we kept him at Tannerman’s down in the valley and Lindy thought he was just great. When she died… I couldn’t look at Slim. I couldn’t even think about him. I just left him over at Tannerman’s and I guess they took care of him, I don’t know, I never asked. I sure hope he wasn’t neglected. Finally someone called and said they wanted to buy him and I said, have him, we don’t ever want to see him again. I feel sort of bad about that now. None of it was Slim’s fault. He must have wondered what the hell was going on.’

  ‘I remember seeing Lindy ride that chestnut horse,’ I say. I’m relieved that it’s a real memory and not a memory of my own dreams or of Lindy’s.

  ‘Wait,’ Joe instructs me. He gets up and limps slowly into the house and when he rolls back out he is carefully cradling something against his body. As he gets clos
er I see that he is carrying framed photos. Lindy, looking pretty with bobbed blonde hair, on the chestnut horse. A younger Lindy, fuller-faced, longer-haired, posing shyly in her Brownies uniform. Lindy laughing at the camera in a manner which makes me draw back a little. I remember that laugh. It wasn’t always kind.

  ‘Cute, huh?’ says Joe. ‘I mean, wouldn’t she have grown into a lovely young woman? Like you, Lucy, just beautiful like you.’

  Lindy was my friend but there was some kind of an argument. After that she became an expert in playground politics. She was always surrounded by the other girls in the class while I recall myself alone, on the edge of groups but never part of them. Sometimes I had friends for a while. I dreaded the day they or their mothers would invite me home. The friendship would start to end right there because I never could invite them back.

  Joe sets off on his laboured journey to return the photos leaving me sitting, thinking, in the shade of a big umbrella.

  23

  When I walk down Joe’s drive I look for the sticky-leaved plant with the pink flowers. I’m going to brush right against it and fearlessly allow it to transport me back to my childhood with Lindy like some kind of time machine. But today I don’t see it and nothing which touches my leg has the same viscosity.

  Inside Daddy’s yard I go right to the sunken garden and stare at the headstone. Remember me. Didn’t Daddy know that he occupied a place in the lives of those around him as solid as this big slab of grey rock he chose for his headstone? Didn’t he know that we’d always remember him? I run my hands over the stone’s surface and, because it has retained the heat of the day, it feels good. The pads of my fingers trace the words. Remember death. Remember Eric Schaffer.