Summertime

by Elizabeth Rigbey

  ‘Jane,’ I say. Softly. Then louder. ‘Jane.’

  And Mother’s whole body twists with distress.

  ‘Jane…’ I say. ‘Jane killed Nicky.’ The words come out so easily, so naturally, I wonder how it is that they’ve been choking me since I was four years old.

  38

  I sit outside by the parking lot where I sat with Sasha and the aunts, staring out across the expanse of unnatural green lawn. The sprinklers create a uniform pattern right across to the wall on the other side. When the nurse came in and Mother couldn’t stop crying he told me I should go. Mother clung to me tightly and then planted a small, sad kiss on my forehead. I promised her I would come back soon.

  Scott’s sweatshirt is so big I can put my knees up inside it and hug them to me, but the new coolness in the air cuts through my clothes as though I’m naked. The breeze blows clouds across the sky and when they cover the sun I feel the temperature dip. But I don’t care. I don’t care that I’m cold. I want to be colder still, until I’m completely anaesthetized. I’d prefer my brain not to function at all but it still thinks. It thinks as relentlessly as a machine.

  The dead baby was wrapped in a blanket in Daddy’s arms. Mother emitted high-pitched wails. Jane stood next to them, her face white. There was no remorse. Her fingers leapt over one another as though they had a life of their own. Daddy went to the porch. He was carrying the unmoving shape inside the blanket which was Nicky. He was going down the steps to bury him. He was going to the sunken garden.

  Rougemont said, when we were standing right by the grave, that it’s easy to confuse what actually happened with things you’ve been told. Maybe there never even was a Nickel Dog.

  Mother and Daddy had decided not to tell anyone what Jane had done. Their beautiful, clever daughter, it was almost impossible that she would kill her brother, inconceivable that she would commit such a crime again. They foolishly, lovingly, fatally, protected Jane.

  Eight-month-old Nicholas Schaffer was swept out to sea at Big Brim beach yesterday by a freak wave. Dr and Mrs Schaffer are being interviewed by the police. Detective Rougemont declined to comment on the case.

  It was a secret. Maybe Rougemont guessed but nobody else knew how Nicky really died. Except for Lindy Zacarro. When Daddy left the house carrying the small body in the blanket, I ran. I stumbled past the glimmering tow truck and through the yard, in and out of trees, by poison ivy, around pungent bushes, until I reached the den we’d made under some branches. Inside was a rug, a few toy horses, and Lindy.

  With Lindy, it wasn’t so easy to disguise the facts by creating family mythologies about dead dogs. No, Lindy knew, and it seems to me now that as we grew older her knowledge turned acidic inside her.

  I think of her curled in the trunk of the car, her blonde hair wet with sweat, her fingernails scratched right off her hands. I twist my whole body to avoid the thought but now Mother is emerging, hands fluttering like trapped birds, a strange new energy in her walk, from the Zacarro house. There is horror on her face.

  Faces around the blue crib, contorted with horror. Stevie’s body, motionless. Jane’s eyes burning in her face, her fingers dancing. Daddy’s eyes, full, brimming, slowly sliding off me. Off me and on to Jane, at my side. Daddy stared right at her. He knew. She’s done it again. She’s done it again. His tears, his roar. ‘The police! What do the police have to do with anything?’

  I moan softly.

  I can hardly breathe for pain. I can hardly breathe for wanting to feel Stevie’s soft body push itself up against me again. I am hardly large enough to encompass the magnitude of my grief. My howl seems to rip the green lawn like thin paper. I hear someone saying Stevie’s name over and over, crying it and then muttering it. That person is me. I am powerless to silence her. Tears without end, grief without limit.

  It’s my fault, she’s done it again.

  I leap up from the bench as though it’s on fire. There’s no one to hear me except a few people crossing the parking lot who expect this kind of behaviour in a clinic like Redbush, but one of them, a man, well-dressed, concerned, walks over to me.

  ‘Are you okay?’ he asks me uncertainly.

  I realize I have been gasping for breath. I stare at him.

  ‘Are you okay?’ he repeats.

  I run to my car. And then, I drive so fast I forget every stretch of road as soon as it’s behind me. I break speed limits, weave through lanes of traffic, irritate truck drivers, honk my horn. Along the freeway, through Lowis, half-glimpsing half-imagined boys on skateboards. Past fruit stalls. Past farmsteads. Past horses with their tails turned to the wind.

  The Marcello Gallery, the house, the flowers all slumber. Out of the wind, everything here is still. The big trees don’t move. High in one of them I register the dark shape of a treehouse. Daddy built treehouses here with Ricky. When he was here he could throw back his head and laugh and laugh. It was his other place, far from the stark, blistering hillside which was my home. It was his cool, green, secret place, a fairytale place. Destroyed forever if you tell about it.

  Inside the barn I see Martha look up from her desk in surprise as the gravel protests beneath my car tyres. I park right outside, blocking the drive, and jump out. There is a big fly sitting on the barn door in the sun. It’s too sleepy or lazy to move when I fling open the door.

  Martha isn’t pleased to see me. She stands and puts her hands on her hips with a deliberate slowness, silently demanding an explanation.

  ‘Where’s Ricky?’ I ask.

  ‘Out.’

  ‘Where?’

  She starts her spiel about how Daddy didn’t want us to have this kind of contact and I interrupt her.

  ‘He was right, Martha, Daddy was right, I have to warn Ricky.’

  She raises her eyebrows but her face does not soften.

  ‘I think he’s in danger. It’s my fault. Please, please, where is he?’

  She studies my face and sighs. At last she says: ‘He’s taken Jordan to Tigertail Bay.’

  ‘Tigertail?’

  ‘Whale-watching. A woman called Joni something called. She used to work for Eric.’

  ‘Joni? Joni Rimbaldi called you guys?’

  ‘You know her?’

  ‘She was Daddy’s secretary for years and years.’

  ‘Ricky recognized her name. She said that Eric told her all about us. Apparently he gave her some kind of folder with Jordan’s name on it.’

  I remember Joni at Daddy’s funeral, worrying that her jacket was too bright, surprised at herself for wearing it. Was Joni Rimbaldi nursing Daddy’s secret all the time she spoke to me?

  ‘She asked Ricky to go right over and collect the folder. She said to take Jordan because she lives by Tigertail and there’s a load of whales around the bay. She’s meeting them in a parking lot so they can watch.’

  My heart thuds.

  ‘Did Daddy ever say he told Joni? Did he ever say?’

  The barn’s high roof echoes. Before it has finished echoing I’ve remembered my conversation with Joni at the funeral. I’ve remembered that Joni’s in Maine. She’s not at Tigertail Bay. There are no whales.

  Probably I don’t even say goodbye or thanks to Martha, or maybe I yell these words mechanically behind me because I’ve been brought up that way. I’m back in my car within seconds and I’m reversing into the Cooper Road and then I’m driving again, driving with the breathlessness and energy of a runner. Behind me once more, shocked faces, angry gestures, honking horns.

  It seems a long way to Tigertail and as I roar along the winding road to the coast I feel the exhaustion and relief of a hunter who nears his quarry. I can see the rocks of the bay long before I can see the ocean. Then the Pacific is suddenly revealed as though it just blinked open one icy eye.

  I drive between the clifftop parking lots looking for the tow truck, the blue car with the white bandage, any car at all with Ricky and Jordan inside it. I drive from lot to lot. There are few cars today and mostly they are parked so their driv
ers can watch the sea without getting out into the wind. I see a couple of pick-ups but no tow truck. In one lot there is a lone ice-cream salesman. I drive right up to him and wind down the window.

  ‘Did you see a tow truck here?’ I ask.

  He nods.

  ‘Saw an old one pass a while back. Thirty minutes maybe.’

  ‘Which way was it going?’

  He can’t remember. He changes his mind twice. I thank him and resume my search. When I have passed the small town and the parking lots have become wild and empty I turn around and check them all again. No Ricky. No Jordan. No tow truck.

  Defeated, I park facing the sea. No whales either, but I was already sure of that. I watch the restless water throwing itself against the rocks, flinging spray into the air, sparkling suddenly when the sun emerges from behind clouds, its colour deepening in the shade like a secret.

  There is no beauty in the scene before me. The shifting ocean is no more than the massive expenditure of purposeless, fruitless energy. It seems now that my life could be described in the same way. Watching the water’s ceaseless battle with the rocks, I am overcome by fatigue. I feel tears sting at my eyes. I realize I wasn’t looking for Ricky or Jordan here, I was looking for Jane. It is her absence which now shows me where I must go and exactly what I must do but I am almost drained of energy, the energy for life.

  Just as I am leaving, the detonation of a massive wave makes me pause and turn. I glimpse a figure made matchstick by the hugeness of the surroundings. It could be Rougemont. The figure slides behind a rock. I do not wait for its reappearance.

  39

  By the time I reach Daddy’s house the sun is easing itself behind the hillside slowly, the way Daddy eased himself into his favourite chair after a long day. Night is already concentrating the air. The crickets are starting their chorus.

  The big barn door swings open with a high-pitched squeak. I wait for my eyes to accustom themselves to the dark then flick the old metal light switch. Avoiding the geologists’ lamps I select a pickaxe, a shovel, a bar. I carry them along the winding paths that lead to the sunken garden.

  I crouch down at the heart of the garden to examine the rocks I must remove. First Daddy’s headstone, which I walk slowly away on its corners. Remember death. Then I begin to work on the large rocks beneath it. They are set in dirt, not concrete, but they were set long ago and the dry earth fits snugly around them. I work at the gaps with my pickaxe. Soon I am wet with sweat. I take off Scott’s sweatshirt and dig further until at last the pickaxe propels a hard, metallic finger beneath the largest rock. Gradually, I lever the big, round rocks from the bed where Daddy laid them all those years ago. They offer little resistance to the point of the pick. Behind them is left a small, perfect impression of their time there. When I lift them, they feel smooth and almost uniformly round. Their weight is pleasing. The smaller rocks fit comfortably into my cupped palms. I stack them under a eucalyptus where the long, thin shards of bark lie rotting. The bass kiss of stone on stone pleases me.

  I begin to shovel aside the first layer of friable, sandy dirt. The physical labour feels good. The rhythm of my shovel, its gentle acceptance by the soil, the stretch in my arms as they lift the weight, all this anaesthetizes me against the fear of what I know I must find here.

  Beneath the layer of loose earth the dirt is impacted. I stand up and feel the freshness of the breeze cutting through my hot body. I raise the pickaxe high over my head, until my whole body is perfectly balanced, until it feels this heavy tool grew right out of me. As I sway forward I slide my palm down the handle. The point of the axe drops deep into the hard layer of dirt and small stones. I lever it up and the impacted earth is loosened.

  I continue until I hit a rock instead of the dirt. The rock does not break but the shriek of metal on stone sounds angry and the sparks that fly frighten me. I shovel out the dirt I have loosened. Occasionally I pause and rest on the shovel but the breeze, cooling rapidly so long after the sun’s retreat, soon slaps me into restarting.

  I jump into the hole to clear more loose dirt and some jagged, rotten pieces of wood along with it. I have pulled most of the wood free when I realize that the wood is an indication I am about to find what I am looking for. Daddy would have covered the body with something, put it inside some kind of a box. Coffin should be the right word but for such a burial normal semantics do not apply.

  Below me there is the sound of an engine and car lights pick their way slowly along the dirt road. I crouch, still and silent, until the car has passed. The tail-lights shine on the dust that follows them, turning it an unnatural red.

  I use the pick more gently now and scrape with my hands as well as the shovel. I can see a lot in this pearly light but I use the soft touch of my fingerpads to help me see more. There is already dirt packed under the nails.

  After a while there are more pieces of wood and then my shovel taps against something that does not sound like rock or wood or dirt. It had a soft resonance of its own.

  I peer into the dark hole and crouch to inspect the mottled object. It looks like old, dirty china and, ridiculously, I want it to be a doll or a small bowl but I know from its particular roundness that it is a skull and the knowledge comes so rapidly that it is more instinct than thought.

  I do not touch my find but gouge at the dirt around it, which trickles with a new liquidity between my fingers. Shovel. Dig. Now the digging is arrhythmic, fast, punctuated by my breath and the drum of my heartbeat. Nausea starts in my belly and then spreads to the rest of my body. Small balls of sweat catapult like shooting stars across my flesh. When I have uncovered about half of the skeleton I pause in the dim light to look at it.

  The bones are not a dog’s bones because there never was a dog. They are those of a tiny child. It lies preserved in small perfection. I know the human skeleton to be a complicated mechanism, but not here. Not in death. It is as simple and straightforward as a line of trees on the horizon.

  For a few moments, I pretend this is not my brother. It is an ancient body. The sunken garden was situated over a prehistoric cemetery. I should report my find to the university who will send teams of archaeologists. They will divide the yard into small squares and work methodically in the dust all through the long, hot summer. They will label their finds neatly. Each bone will bear a number. The dead child will be dehumanized. Its suffering, and that of the people close to it, will be so distanced by time and scientific inquiry that I will be able to stand over the tiny skeleton with an archaeologist discussing it in tones leached of emotion.

  It is my sobs that wash away the archaeologist. I can feel their force but I can’t hear them. The shovel handle is wet as I remove the rest of the dirt to see the child in its entirety. Then I reach down and gently brush the last, loose covering of earth from the bones with the same care that I would turn back a baby’s blanket. I bend down to the carcase, so small that even now I want to believe it is nothing but a bird or a lamb. I blow the dusty soil from it.

  A tiny ribcage, slender feet, the hands, curled slightly, the finger joints clogged with dirt. A boy, a small dead baby boy. I look away from the eyeless head, the two tiny teeth in the open mouth.

  Wearily I stand up. Dirt stains my clothes like blood. It clings to my legs, it discolours my shoes. Once, the shovel bounced off a stone on to my shin and a viscous line of blood has dried from the wound down my leg. It begins to hurt now. I become aware of the weight of my tired limbs. I try to recreate the comforting university archaeologists with their jeans and clipboards but I cannot, because I know that the child was laid in its grave during my own lifetime by my own father and that it is my own brother. It is Nicky but it might be my Stevie or it might be the Russian baby who died when his fleeing family left him behind.

  I stand perfectly still in the darkness and listen to the rustling of small animals and insects in the grass and the whispering leaves and, when I finally notice it, the high scream of the crickets. My neck aches. I arch it back until I can point my
chin at the sky. A clear night. A blanket of stars, stretching to infinity. Some are larger and brighter but this does not mean they are nearer. The rules of perspective are dwarfed into meaninglessness by the magnitude of space.

  I sit down on the edge of the sunken garden and listen to the approaching car. I hear it turn into the drive and park outside the barn. Nothing surprises me now, nothing frightens me. I wait quietly in the dark. I hear the car door. The front door. The slam of the screen door. Silence. The screen door again. Silence. Finally, footsteps.

  I am a butterfly pinned to a card by the fierce beam of Jane’s flashlight. It shines first on me and then on the pile of stones and then down into the hole I have dug and it ends on the tiny, birdlike skeleton that is lying there.

  Her voice is strange. It is cold.

  ‘Luce,’ she says. ‘Oh, Luce.’ Her use of my name is eloquent. Sadness, disappointment.

  I say: ‘It’s all been inevitable, ever since Daddy died. Everything that’s happened has been like those little toy soldiers we used to play with, the sort you stand in a line. You push one and then they all fall down.’

  ‘We never had any toy soldiers,’ she says.

  ‘Then maybe someone else did, I forget who.’

  The flashlight is on me again. I am shivering. I want Jane to come out from behind her light.

  ‘Okay, Luce,’ she says, ‘it’s time to go.’

  I stand up. I walk over to Jane. I am a dirty, shivering person with blood stains.

  We pick our way along the narrow paths and when we reach the drive, instead of turning up to the house, Jane steers me down towards the dirt road.

  ‘Where are we going, Jane?’ I ask. My tone is conversational. The answer doesn’t much interest me.