Collected Fiction

by Kris Neville

  “The man, that man who came here looking for you,” Jane said. “It was something about your real parents? I told Dave that he’d come to see you about your parents.”

  Don, Bettyann thought, yes, he came to tell me something about my real parents, only he wasn’t a man or a human. The twinge of fear was sharp. “Mother, Dad . . .” Her voice was an urgent plea for understanding.

  Bettyann was ready to explain. Don was his name, she prepared her thoughts, and he showed me that I was one of his race. It was the first time they’d been back to earth since they thought I was killed in the automobile wreck. They could feel my thoughts, and they sought me out. Don and Robin came to take me back with them. I didn’t know what to say, and then, then I said, Yes, yes, I’ll go with you. I thought they were my people. And Don and Robin took me to the spaceship that was off the coast of Mexico . . .

  Bettyann suddenly felt a strange, sad pride in the race that had conquered space before the race of man had conquered fire, the race that seemed as old as time and that was, in some respects, superior to mankind.

  And then, she thought, I talked to them; and they frightened me, in a way they frightened me, and I knew I didn’t want to go with them any more, and so, I—I—We were on the spaceship, and I went to the port, and there was no one with me, so I changed into a seabird, and I flew away.

  But then the still voice came and said, You belong now. Now you belong. Now only you know that you are not human.

  Her mouth was half open; she closed it. She bit her lower lip and drank hastily from the cup. “I don’t . . . not tonight.” She shook her head. “I don’t want to talk right now, please. I’m so glad to be home, I don’t want to talk about anything.”

  Dave waited a little while, then pushed his coffee cup away. He stood up. “We’ve got lots of time to talk. Jane, leave those cups and saucers until the morning. It’s late.”

  Jane stood, her hands helplessly at her sides. “I’ll lay the sheets on your bed,” she said, wanting to hold and comfort Bettyann, knowing that Bettyann was no longer a child and must face the world alone.

  They left her seated at the kitchen table; and when their steps were on the stairs, she put her head on her arm and cried.

  Dave and Jane lay in darkness.

  Jane said at length, “She had on a cotton dress. I’m almost sure she didn’t take that dress with her back East.”

  “If there’s one thing I’m sure of,” Dave said, “it’s that she didn’t travel nude from Massachusetts to Missouri.”

  Jane was crying silently against his shoulder. He slipped an arm around her. He wanted to tell her that Bettyann was all right, that she was not in any serious trouble. “It’s something inside of her,” he said. “Something she’ll have to figure out for herself. She’s home. There’s nothing to worry about.”

  He lay with his eyes open against the darkness. She had not taken the dress East with her? He remembered once when she had walked among a group of wild and shy English sparrows and picked one up without frightening it . . .

  She awoke to winter stillness. The predawn curtain of hush revealed, by its presence, the stage behind it composed of human habit and human necessity. In the town square at this hour (in the world at this hour) the buildings are vacant and the streets are empty. The world is composed of things, and the people, in their weakness and their companionship of lungs and hearts and bones and flesh and minds, have left their creations and, leaving, having taken meaning with them. A city devoid of movement and laughter, lying still in the darkness, is lonely and soulless. The standing steel and stone are pathetic before night’s infinity and a mechanical universe. But dawn comes, and day. Mankind stirs and the universe is solicitous once more and the vast fabrications of inert materials have purpose.

  Bettyann wondered if others had imagined going into the street one day to find all the people gone, to find themselves confronted alone by the terrible grandeur of space, time, and silence. How then would the world seem?

  She had never before thought of herself as being essentially different from anyone else. She felt that her very personality was the product of the countless people who had in countless ways touched her life: She could only understand herself when she could understand humanity at large. Now she knew intense isolation, for she was alone among aliens. Frightening thoughts rose in her as she sought to adjust to this changed reality. How different were her emotions and reactions and perceptions from a human’s? How could she ever be sure that she thought and felt the same things her neighbors did? Might she not be, with her new abilities, even further from understanding mankind? It seemed to her that the act of understanding was an affirmation of faith without which the world was useless and herself no more than a blank mirror.

  Don’t leave me, she thought. I want . . . I only want . . . to fit in, to do something in the scheme of things, to be useful, to understand what I should do . . .

  The sun met breaking clouds; the last snow hurried down. Distantly she heard the awakening sounds from Dave and Jane’s bedroom and then the bustle of breakfast. She heard Jane’s footsteps approach the stairs and Dave’s voice, muffled, calling, “No—let her sleep . . .”

  She remained, waiting. The opening and the closing of the door. The dry, protesting snarl and cough of the motor. The creak and roar of the car in the driveway. Silence.

  The clatter of dishes in the sink.

  Jane’s hesitant footsteps again, pausing at her door; the knob softly turning, the click. Jane was looking in. Bettyann stirred sleepily and pretended to wake up. “Good morning, Mom.”

  “I didn’t mean to wake you up.”

  “I was awake.” She sat up, throwing back the covers and hugging her knees.

  Jane felt her throat constrict, as it often did when she saw Bettyann use her one useful arm in a traditionally two-armed gesture; never noticing the use without a prayer of gratitude that she and Dave had chosen her of all the children available for adoption. Never without thinking: This is one thing we have done for which there need be no regret and apology; this is the best thing that ever happened to us.

  Bettyann laughed and nodded approval at the white, shining world of snow. A gentle wind rippled the curtain and she shivered deliciously. Her breath was frosty on the air. “I’ll be right down.”

  Jane thought: What about her parents? We’ll understand, Dave and I, whoever they are. She must know. She knows we’ll understand.

  “I’m coming right down,” Bettyann said.

  How red (Jane thought) her cheeks are. She’s sick. She’s caught a cold.

  Jane felt that somehow it was her fault: Bettyann was ill, and it was her fault. She crossed to the open window and closed it. “There,” turning, “now you stay in bed. Let me feel your forehead.” The touch was meant to reassure herself and her child. “It’s warm. You’ve got a fever.”

  “I’m all right.”

  “No. Cover up. Pull the covers up.”

  It was an obsession with Jane. Bettyann was sick.

  Here was something she could fight and conquer. Here was something she and Bettyann together could face. She patted the covers. “There, there . . .”

  “I’m all right. I’m going to get up in a second.” Between them lay a great unspoken void. Jane sought to reduce it to the commonplace.

  “Just a little cold,” Jane said.

  “I’m . . .”

  “I’ll have Dr. Wing stop in this morning.”

  “No,” Bettyann protested. “There’s nothing wrong.”

  “The fever. You have a little fever. It won’t hurt to have him look at you.”

  Bettyann was surprised at the intensity of Jane’s insistence. She realized that, for some obscure reason, the issue had transcended facts. She surrendered. “I do seem to have. Maybe it was the open window.”

  “I’ll bring you some breakfasts.”

  “Please don’t, Mom. I . . .”

  But Jane was already leaving the room. Bettyann bit her lip. She lay listening to
, Jane’s feet on the stairs . . .

  The postman came before breakfast was over. Jane carried Bettyann’s letter to her unopened.

  Bettyann took it. She wished site could explain why she could not show the letter to Jane. She could think of no explanation. Hurt, Jane turned to go. “Mom! Mom!”

  Jane came back and sat on the bed.

  “It’s all right,” Jane said. “It’s all right.” She tangled a hand fondly in Bettyann’s hair.

  “I was going to do something—and then I, I changed my mind. It was about my parents. I changed my mind.”

  “We understand,” Jane said.

  “Look! I’m all right. Let me get up. Let me help you with the house.”

  “Now! You stay in bed, hear me! Keep those covers up around you.”

  Bettyann was looking out the window at the snow and sunlight on the rooftops when she heard Dr. Wing’s car. She remembered during the quiet moment of waiting some vague and nearly forgotten girlhood spring moment or day or week during which—at the age of what? twelve? thirteen? —she had been deeply, profoundly, and everlastingly in love with him. She associated that time with music and lipstick and some nostalgic perfume—perhaps her first—and high-heeled shoes. He had come on a house call and for the whole day, or week, afterward she was able to sense his presence stamped indelibly upon every object in the living room. She smiled now at her former self, and the memory retreated and was gone. The confused emotions of home-coming crowded once more upon her conscious mind. Still, in some deep part of herself, she waited eagerly for him. And when he came into the room, she sat up, and suddenly conscious of her tousled hair, wished futilely that she had thought to comb it.

  “I didn’t expect you so soon,” she said.

  “Hello, Bettyann. What seems to be the matter this morning?”

  She compared his face with her last memory of it (the comparison that one always makes) and saw that he was no older than he had always been; she had last seen him shortly before leaving last fall for her first semester at Smith. It was a reassuring face. She had never quite taken it for granted as had, she felt, her parents taken his father’s. In childhood she glamorized him in secret for (she supposed) his self-possession and quiet authority, and consequently she always found something new to discover or to imagine about him. But now, while he had not changed, she had. Looking at him, still young, really, she felt almost his contemporary.

  “It’s just a slight cold,” Jane said.

  “Good time for it, eh, Bettyann?”

  She sniffled affirmation.

  He took out his thermometer. “Open up now. Any fever?”

  “Just a little,” Jane said.

  She took the chill thermometer. Watching him from around its uplifted shaft, Bettyann felt a mute and nonspecific gratitude for his presence. And knowing his life—or that is to say, knowing the fabric of common knowledge that one leaves as harvest to a thousand inquisitive minds in passings—she felt an irrational desire to reach out to him with her hand and feel his smooth hair, only slightly gray at the temples, beneath her finger tips. After his training and internship in the East, he had returned home to take over (during the accretion of time) his father’s practice, to marry a local girl, to see her (childless) and his father both die one cold and awful winter, and to see the bleak March rains upon the family plot in the cemetery pound withered flowers into clayey mud. An aura of loss, sadness, and knowledge surrounded him, and she wanted to say: I am like you. She, too, felt wisely mature. She wanted to do something for him in return for his service to others, as if it were in her power to deny the past and reconstitute the future. And as he bent over her, a year short of forty and handsome in a friendly and undistinguished manner, she studied his face: the clear blue eyes (slightly weary, she thought, from overwork), the sensitive lips, the smooth, bluish cheeks . . .

  She started to mumble something around the thermometer, but he wiggled a reproving finger.

  Bettyann concentrated on raising the mercury slightly above normal in the tube.

  She’s all right, he thought. She’s a nice kid.

  “How is Mr. Starke?” Jane asked.

  Dr. Wing shook his head.

  “It’s such a shame; he’s such a nice old man.”

  Was, Dr. Wing thought, having taken death for granted. Not really lifeless yet, but to Dr. Wing, dead. Dead now of morphine. In a week, in a month, of starvation. Metastasis and death. He had seen it in his wife. Radium and surgery and then, at the end, morphine when the pain was too great. No surgery for the old man, though, he thought. Unconsciously he rubbed his throat, thinking: Perhaps the old man was right, wondering if, with a similar biopsy, he would refuse surgery and cast away—what? —six months? a year?

  Weariness settled upon his body. Wife and friend and stranger all were interdicted by a force he could not control. How pathetically little he had done with his life, and now even the dreams were dead (for he had known dreams), and he was defeated in a deep and terrible manner that he scarcely understood. He hated the town for calling him back to it in his youth; he had a confused feeling that elsewhere he could have . . .

  Bettyann lay still. Old man Starke, she thought. I must go see him! Dying of cancer. I . . . I . . . I must go see him; today, I must.

  But suppose (she thought) suppose there’s nothing I can do, suppose I’m merely a freak, an oddity, suppose I have nothing to give, nothing to exchange.

  She felt she could not exist alone and without purpose. She felt that since she did not belong to mankind through the accident of birth, she must petition mankind for admittance. She felt that she would have to demonstrate her worth and prove that she was needed. She felt that one cannot receive without giving. She had to prove that she was . . . was . . . what?

  Dr. Wing looked at the thermometer. His eyes widened in surprise.

  Oh, dear! Bettyann thought. I raised it too much!

  Dr. Wing cleared his throat hastily. “Well, young lady,” he said. “Let’s try that over.” He shook the mercury down and checked the level.

  I’m getting careless, he thought. I must be getting old.

  Thinking of old man Starke, she watched Dr. Wing with a curious growth of emotion. His face in profile, the way his eyes crinkled at the corners, the curve of his neck . . . I want to be like you, she thought. You do so much, you have so much to give, you belong so deeply.

  He looked at the thermometer again. “Ah,” he said. “That’s more like it. How do you feel, young lady?”

  He reached for her wrist, and, as his finger tips touched her, a little unnamed thrill ran through her body. “I feel fine, Dr. Wing.”

  That afternoon Jane protested only mildly when Bettyann said she wanted to go out. Dr. Wing had found nothing wrong with her.

  “Let me give you some money,” Jane said. “In case you need to buy something. Powder, lipstick. I guess it’s all back at Smith, isn’t it?”

  Bettyann was uneasy before the implicit question: Why didn’t you even have time to pack a bag? She avoided Jane’s eyes. “I’d better write and have my roommate send me my things.”

  “I’ll get the money. Are you sure you’re feeling all right?”

  “I’m fine. I just want to go out and walk around a little.”

  Jane came back, holding her purse. She gave Bettyann ten dollars.

  “I won’t be long.”

  She left the house. Her summer coat was thin, and she walked quickly. Her breath was warm white mist before her. The sidewalks were clear of snow.

  She had thought of old man Starke at the instant she decided to leave the spaceship, and he seemed now—for reasons she did not fully understand—almost to be her justification for returning.

  She thought of her moving body as air uncertain and doubtful potential. And if she failed now, with old man Starke . . .?

  The world was so real and so immutable. She was so small and so weak. For a terrible instant she imagined herself and attraction in a carnival side show. It seemed that she wou
ld not be able to touch reality at all; that with her strange talent she was useless; that the world was fashioned by great, driving machines of steel and by forces generated impersonally and from afar.

  And deeply, the stirring of her basic question, formulated in the days when she still thought of herself as a human girl: How am I to fit into this sad-funny world, and what is my role?

  To reassure herself, she stopped beside the snow-covered bandstand in the park, knelt, and fashioned a hard snowball. Awkwardly, throwing like a girl, she cast it from her. She could still feel its cold tingle against her hand. It had been real, she had touched it and changed it.

  She looked across the park. The sunlight was thin and it glittered on the white crust of snow—beneath which, long ago, lay the bodies of the Civil War dead, North and South. But the town had grown, and the dead were grubbed out. The cemetery, changed by a goldfish pond, by circular plots of flowers, by gravel (and later, asphalt) paths, and by green slat benches, became a center for restrained Sunday merriment where children, Sunday school over, romped while parents were still in church. It also became the center of political oratory under the stars on alternate autumns, and the home of Saturday-night band concerts amid the restless gigglings of young lovers and the flutter of soft moth wings. The dead, betrayed somehow by events—equally as guilty as the survivors, no doubt, for having been human—were moved out of town and forgotten. The statue of General Lee (this was southern Missouri) was moved the year unity was demonstrated by the erection of a Memorial Hall in honor of the Spanish-American War veterans. General Lee went to the park across town, in a section no longer as respectable as it once had been. When that park, finally, by mutual and unspoken agreement, was surrendered to the town’s Negro population, the General’s statue was, one night, carted quietly away and—some say—sunk in Grenoble’s Mineshaft in Kendricktown. This shaft was now a small, still, and greenish swimming hole surrounded by huge boulders and chat piles and by decaying timber and mining equipment, and was, according to local legend, bottomless.