Criss Cross

by Lynne Rae Perkins

  “Where does she hide the food?” he asked.

  “There isn’t a lot,” said Debbie. “I don’t think she eats very much. She eats a lot of jelly sandwiches.”

  “That sounds good,” said Peter hopefully. It didn’t sound good long term, but it would do for right now. “Where’s the bread?”

  Debbie produced it from a metal box on the counter, and Peter discovered that a ceramic pitcher in the refrigerator had orange juice in it. He made three jelly sandwiches. It being ten o’clock. More like brunch time. He was just tucking into his meal when his grandmother entered the room.

  She moved slowly and unsteadily, and she seemed unsettled to find people in her kitchen. She looked from one of them to the other and back, as if she were trying to figure something out.

  “Morning, Grosi,” said Peter pleasantly. He added, “Hot enough for you?” because he noticed that she was perspiring. Her face was shiny with moisture. It didn’t feel all that hot to him, but it was probably something, another thing, about being old. Hot weather was probably harder to take.

  His grandmother looked at him, or through him, and muttered something. She sounded angry. It almost sounded like she was cursing at him, though he couldn’t be sure because her speech was unclear. And she was speaking in German. He recognized Dummkopf. He stopped chewing, puzzled, and saw as she turned away from him that she was going to lose her balance. She might have fallen to the floor, but Debbie and Peter rushed to her, one from each side, and helped her into a chair. The skin of her arms felt damp and clammy.

  Their eyes met over her head.

  Peter’s eyes asked, What is happening?

  Debbie’s eyes said, I don’t know. Something weird.

  Peter sat down next to his grandmother.

  “Are you feeling okay, Grosi?” he asked.

  She didn’t answer at first, then she mumbled a few words, but again in German. To Peter’s surprise, Debbie responded to her, also in German. She seemed to be asking his grandmother questions. When Grosi tried to answer, her voice was weak and upset.

  Peter felt helpless. He couldn’t tell if what was happening was a big or a small thing. He looked at Grosi and at Debbie, searching for a clue. Debbie appeared to be thinking. Which she was. She was thinking about a recent episode of Like Ships in the Night. Also about the small bottles of insulin inside the door of Mrs. Bruning’s refrigerator.

  Mrs. Bruning was diabetic. So was Ridge’s father, Cliff, on Like Ships in the Night. Debbie didn’t have the first idea of whether or how to administer insulin, but when Cliff had exhibited these same symptoms on the show, Ridge had saved Cliff’s life by dumping some sugar into a glass of orange juice and making him drink it. Cliff had missed eating his breakfast, just like Mrs. Bruning had. That’s what Debbie had been asking her. “Did you have any breakfast?” To which Mrs. Bruning had responded, “I keep telling you, I’m not hungry. Nincompoop.”

  Debbie didn’t know if the sugar in the orange juice was a real thing to do, or something made up for TV. She didn’t think they could show it on television if it were completely made up.

  Peter watched her as she took the lid from the sugar bowl, poured sugar into his orange juice, and fed it to his grandmother, saying more German words. Explaining something. In moments Grosi had revived somewhat. Immediately she started to insist that she was fine. She seemed more herself, but she didn’t look fine.

  Debbie told his grandmother she was going to use the phone. In English, then German. Debbie went to the phone and put the receiver to her ear. She listened, she jiggled the silver hook, and listened again. She picked up an envelope from the counter and looked at it. Through the glassine window, she could see today’s date, and a notice in red letters. Mrs. Bruning hadn’t paid her phone bill. The line was dead.

  The neighbors weren’t at home. The neighbors’ neighbors weren’t at home, either. The street was deserted. It would have been a great day for breaking and entering, thought Peter. He ran from house to house, banging on doors, shouting hello, peering through windows, going around from the fronts to the backs. He began trying the doors to see if they were unlocked, thinking he could go in and use the phone. He was surprised at how locked they all were. Where was small town America when you needed it?

  Debbie moved between Mrs. Bruning and the back door, the door Peter had gone through, running, to get help. What was taking him so long?

  Finally he returned, breathless.

  “I can’t find anyone who’s home,” he said. “I’ve been up and down the street. There’s no one anywhere. It’s like Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”

  Drifting strains of trumpets and tympani bounced into the yard and floated past the screen door, and Debbie remembered that it was Seldem Days. Everyone was at the parade. Then her eyes fell on a set of keys hanging from a key rack. Car keys.

  “Can you drive?” she asked Peter.

  “No,” he said. “I get my permit next month, though. Then I—” He stopped abruptly as he realized she wasn’t saying it to make conversation.

  Mrs. Bruning needed to see a doctor. Debbie didn’t know how soon, but she thought it had to be soon. Ridge had taken Cliff immediately to the hospital where, unfortunately, Cliff’s beautiful young ex-wife, with whom he was still in love, was on duty, and he had a heart attack.

  Debbie’s mind raced. The hospital itself was too far away. Two towns away. But it was a straight line, almost, to the fire station. That’s where the ambulance was, and someone would be there. Prospect Hill Road, like Pine Street, should be empty.

  “Okay,” she said. “I guess I will, then.”

  Peter looked at her. “Do you know how to drive?” he asked.

  “Sort of,” she said. “Enough to get to the fire station. I just have to check something.”

  She ran over to the garage and disappeared through the side door. She needed to find out whether Mrs. Bruning’s car had a stick shift. It did. That was good, because she didn’t know how to do the other kind.

  Peter waited for her on the shady porch.

  “This is bizarre,” he said aloud.

  He looked at his watch. Only forty minutes ago he had been sound asleep. Now he found himself stranded, thousands of miles from home, in this backyard that felt both familiar and foreign, alone with a grandmother he didn’t know all that well. A grandmother who was suddenly frail and ill, and in need of help.

  He wasn’t alone, though. He watched Debbie as she ran the short distance back to the house, pushing a sunbleached strand of hair behind her ear, just like Julie Christie. She seemed to know how to do things. All kinds of things. In the current situation Peter found that appealing. He found himself thinking that she would be an interesting girl to hang out with. Maybe they could hop freight trains or depose dictators or something.

  “Okay,” she said, reaching the patio. “We just have to get her out to the car.”

  She wasn’t even aware that she was smiling, a small, enigmatic smile. It was a reflex action. It was enigmatic because her mind was busy freaking out at what was happening, at what she was about to do. What if it was really stupid to do it—what if Mrs. Bruning really was fine? Maybe they should wait half an hour and see if she felt better.

  But when the two of them went back into the kitchen, she was fairly sure that Mrs. Bruning was not fine.

  She pressed in the clutch and turned the key, but nothing happened. No engine, no radio, nothing. She tried it again. Still nothing. And nothing once more. She tried to think whether she was forgetting something, but she didn’t think so.

  “The battery,” she said, suddenly remembering Lenny’s dad’s truck. “Maybe the battery’s dead.”

  She looked around the dark garage as if it might tell her what to do, then over her shoulder at Mrs. Bruning, pale and spent from their journey to the car. Through the rear window, the bright opening of the garage doorway buzzed with leafy green summer life, oblivious to them. The driveway dropped off almost immediately and sloped down to the street. It wa
sn’t a long hill. But it might be enough.

  “I think we have to try to pop the clutch,” she said.

  “Do we know how to do that?” asked Peter.

  “We have to push it,” said Debbie. “I can help you at first, but as soon as it gets close to the hill, I have to jump in. I’ll wait for you at the bottom.”

  She was sure there was some other really sensible thing they should do instead. But she didn’t know what it was.

  “Let’s just try it,” she said. She thought she could do it if she didn’t think about it too much.

  The car felt even heavier than she had expected. It was monolithic. It wasn’t budging. Instinctively she turned around, sat on the front bumper, and put her feet against the wall.

  “Okay,” she said. “Now try.”

  After three times there was a slight movement, but the car moved instantly back into place.

  “Do it again,” said Peter. “Rock it back and forth.”

  Each time they pushed, the car went back a tiny bit farther, until finally it broke free of the rocking movement and began to roll, just a little, without rolling back.

  “Keep going,” said Peter. “It’s moving.”

  Debbie pushed against the wall with her feet until her legs were straight and the tips of her toes could no longer reach. She slipped from the bumper onto the gritty garage floor, then scrambled to her feet, ran for the car, jumped in, and gave the engine some gas. The car was rolling, it was rolling backward down the hill, but the engine wasn’t starting. She didn’t know if she should step on the brake, if that would mess up the procedure.

  The car was veering to the left; she overcorrected and went rolling out into the front yard. She overcorrected again, the other way, and zigzagged into the neighbors’ yard. And still nothing was happening. Her face was hot, her skin was hot all over, and she felt trembly. This had been a really huge mistake. It was going to be a disaster. But she could stop the car. She could always just stop.

  She tried the gas one more time. A little touch. Just a little, little touch. And just as the car rolled over the sidewalk, over the patch of grass and the curb, thunk, down onto the street, the engine turned over and came to life. She stepped on the clutch and shifted into neutral. She put on the brakes, then gave the engine a little more gas. It was running. Debbie was sweating. Her heart was pounding. She realized she was holding her breath, and she let it out.

  “Keep breathing,” she said to herself. She looked back at Mrs. Bruning, who she had momentarily forgotten all about. Her eyes were, amazingly, or maybe frighteningly, still closed. Debbie saw her chest rise and fall. And again.

  Peter Bruning was running down the driveway toward the car. His blond hair flopping, his wire rims glinting, a big grin on his face.

  “That was exciting,” he said as he jumped inside. “Are you sure you can get us to the fire station? I mean, in one piece and everything?”

  He was teasing her. Normally color might have risen to her cheeks, but her circulatory system was completely discombobulated by events and threw up its hands. Rose-colored blotches blossomed and faded in random arrangements on her skin. The back of her arms blushed, and her kneecaps. Her throat, and one of her shins.

  “I do better when the engine’s running,” she said.

  It was true. She drove the old car to the fire station with as much concentration as if she were guiding a fat piece of thread through a skinny needle. Slightly but not much faster than that. When they arrived, she said to Peter, “Can you slide over and, if anyone asks, we’ll say you drove the car? I’ll go in and get someone to help.”

  “Why?” asked Peter.

  “Because we need help. That’s why we’re here,” she said. She couldn’t believe he was asking such an obvious question.

  “No. I mean, why do you want to say I drove?”

  “If my mother finds out I drove a car, she’ll kill me,” said Debbie. “I don’t even have a permit yet. I’m not supposed to know how.”

  But instead of sliding over, Peter got up on his knees, turned around, and looked back at his grandmother. He wanted to do something for her, but he didn’t know what he should do.

  He decided that holding one of her hands would be something good. He took it in his own left hand and covered it with his right. Then he put both of his hands beneath her hand and sort of massaged the top gently with his thumbs. It felt clammy, boney, and limp, but he persevered. He tried to remember the German words Debbie had said to her. There was a good chance, he thought, that if he spoke the words as he remembered them, they would come out either as nonsense syllables or as one of those embarrassing or insulting mistakes you heard about, like when you think you’re saying, “What a delicious cake” and what you’re really saying is, “Your mother is a dairy cow.” He didn’t know what she had said, anyway. It might have been, “Your telephone isn’t working.” That wouldn’t be very comforting.

  “I love you, Grosi,” he said softly. “You’re going to be okay.”

  “Meine Hand, die du da druckst, ist nicht ein Klumpen Brotteig,” she murmured back to him. “Du Schwachkopf."*

  He was pretty sure she was speaking affectionately. He was pretty sure she had called him her little dumpling, something like that.

  At the hospital they told what had happened over and over. To the admissions clerk, to doctors, nurses, Peter’s parents, aunts and uncles, to anyone who asked. They left out the part about the car. It was amazing how easy it was to leave it out. No one asked, everyone assumed the ambulance had come to the house. By the time the doctors had decided that Mrs. Bruning should stay at the hospital for a few days, she had stabilized back to her normal cranky, belligerent self. But when she overheard one of them telling Peter’s father that ornery behavior was one of the symptoms of her illness, she immediately shut up

  Once the urgency of the day had subsided, Debbie began to want to get out of there and get home, somehow. Out of the tiny half-room packed with Brunings. She leaned up against the windowsill, trying to make herself small, and looked at the parking lot below. She was thinking she would call and see if anyone was at home who could come and get her, when she saw the Seldem ambulance arriving again, its light flashing. Dave the driver and Jim the other guy hopped out and headed for the back.

  She eased her way around Mrs. Bruning’s bed as inconspicuously as she could, which was not very, and told Peter, who had ended up on the other side, that Dave was downstairs and she was going to ask if he would give her a ride back to Seldem.

  “Me, too,” he said. “There’s way too many of us in here.”

  So they did.

  It turned out that Mrs. Bruning’s car had not been driven long enough to charge the battery. It was dead again.

  “I don’t know how to do this,” whispered Debbie, waiting in the car for Dave to return with jumper cables.

  “It’s okay,” Peter whispered back. “He’ll tell you what to do.”

  Debbie’s emergency adrenalin action self was giving way to her don’t-get-in-trouble self.

  “What if he notices that I don’t know what I’m doing?” she said. “What if someone sees me?”

  Peter looked at her face to see if she was serious. She was. After all that had happened that day, he thought it was funny that she would worry about this. He spotted a pair of sunglasses in the visor and he set them on Debbie’s nose, in front of her own glasses.

  “Here,” he said. “This can be your disguise. No one will recognize you now.” He adjusted the earpieces behind her ears, lifting out the sun-lightened strands of hair that had been trapped beneath them. His fingertips lightly and unintentionally grazed her face and her ears, and Debbie’s don’t-get-in-trouble self felt itself making room for her alert-alert-something-new-is-happening self. But then Dave returned and signaled to her to release the hood, and she had to stop tingling. Mostly.

  “Pay attention,” said Peter, leaning toward her. (alert, alert) “This is a skill you need to have if you’re going to steal people
’s cars and save their lives.”

  “That’s not who I am,” said Debbie. “I don’t do things like this.”

  “Yes, you do,” Peter said. “You do them all the time.”

  Back at Mrs. Bruning’s house, they brought in the mail and the newspaper. Peter washed the dish, butter knife, and juice glass he had used for breakfast while Debbie wiped the counter and put away the bread and the jar of jelly. It was late afternoon. Evening, really. She ought to head home. Still, she looked around for something else to tend to or tidy up.

  “My parents are going to stay here while my grandma is in the hospital,” said Peter. “Because it’s closer for them to visit her from here. I’ll go, too, sometimes, but I’m thinking sometimes I’ll just stay here and work on her house, like I was going to anyway. Do you think you could come by and—you wouldn’t have to actually help, but you could show me where things are, maybe?”

  “I can help,” said Debbie.

  *“That is my hand you are kneading, not a lump of bread dough. Nincompoop.” and retreated to being silently imperious. Which she was very good at. She was the champion.

  CHAPTER 25

  Meanwhile

  Down at Seldem Day(s), chicken dinners were being served up by the truckload. It had been a busy day, starting off with the parade in the morning and moving right on through with the sidewalk sale, the slo-pitch tournament, the Miss Seldem pageant, and every other event anyone thought up and was willing to organize.

  The “History of Seldem” musical revue was popular. Significant historical events were paired up with musical offerings from local performers. A brief account, for example, of the construction of the power plant down by the river was complemented by a performance of “Smoke on the Water” by Billy Novick’s garage band. The arrival of the A&P grocery store was accompanied by the cast of the high school’s spring production of Oliver! singing “Food, Glorious Food.”