The Stranger

by Caroline B. Cooney

  The Madrigals were collected as if about to concertize. But it was horror that held them, not an audience. They, in fact, were the audience. They had aisle seats to the end of Anne-Louise.

  Anne-Louise, whose voice was not so beautiful when screaming in terror, was on the far side of the glass.

  The screams went on and on and then stopped. They stopped completely. The silence that followed was even more complete.

  Nobody attempted to go in after her.

  Nobody tried to rescue her.

  Were they too afraid? Or too smart to risk the same ending?

  Nicoletta had the excuse of an immovable leg, a helpless body. None of the others had an excuse.

  But Nicoletta had known what would happen. None of the others could have known. And so Nicoletta Storms was the one with no excuse at all, no excuse ever.

  Whose voice sent Anne-Louise tumbling forever into the dark?

  Was it me? thought Nicoletta. Did I shout Anne-Louise, you go first! I who knew what would happen to the one who went first? Did I want revenge that much? How sick and twisted I am, to destroy a classmate over a singing group.

  I’m sorry! thought Nicoletta. As if being sorry would change anything.

  Time stopped.

  The sun did not move in the sky and the teenagers did not move beneath it.

  Sound ceased.

  Nothing cried out within the cave and nobody spoke without.

  The glass wall broke.

  Anne-Louise, babbling and twitching, fingers curling and uncurling, eyes too wide to blink, staggered out of the cave.

  Still nobody spoke. Still nobody moved.

  They were like a group photograph of themselves. A still shot of Madrigals from another era.

  “It’s in there,” whispered Anne-Louise. “You were right, Christo. It’s in there! It picked me up. It caught me.”

  Anne-Louise addressed Christo but did not seem to see him. Instead she staggered away from the cliff, hands out as if holding a rope nobody else could see. On an invisible lifeline she hauled herself in Nicoletta’s direction. There was sand in her hair, as if she were a bride at some dreadful wedding. Her guests had not thrown confetti.

  “It’s there?” breathed Christo. Excitement possessed him. “It really exists? You saw it? You touched it?”

  “Don’t go in!” screamed Anne-Louise. Her voice was huge and roiling, nothing like a soprano’s. It was ugly and swollen. “Don’t go in!” she shouted. She did not let go of her lifeline, but kept hauling herself between the lakes, past Nicoletta. She fell to her knees, and Nicoletta saw that the kneecaps were torn and bruised from an earlier fall. Still Anne-Louise did not stop, but crawled, sobbing, trying to find the straight path and the way out.

  “She’s right, Christo,” said Rachel. She sounded quite normal. “Don’t go in there. What we’ll do is come back with a truck and ropes. Obviously it’s slippery and the cave falls off. There are people who go into caves for hobbies. I’ve read about them. They’re called spelunkers. We’ll get in touch with a club and bring a group that knows what they’re doing. We’ll—”

  “No!” said Christo. “It’s my find! I’m getting it!”

  Jethro saved Anne-Louise, thought Nicoletta. She wanted to call thank you! to him. She wanted to shout I love you! in his direction. She wanted to put her arms around him and tell him that he was good and kind.

  How many people had he saved in the past? Nicoletta had been horrified because Jethro let the hunters fall. But he hadn’t let Nicoletta fall. He hadn’t let Anne-Louise fall.

  He would let Christo fall. He would have to.

  “Fine,” said Christo in the furious voice of one who means the opposite. “Fine! I’ll take everybody back to the van. Fine! We’ll picnic at the lake. And then I’m coming back and I’m getting it.”

  Anne-Louise was walking upright now, a stagger to her gait as if something in her had permanently snapped. Rachel and Cathy were running to catch up and help her. The rest of the Madrigals, saying little, crept between the lakes, safely away from the stretching black elastic of the water, picked up the pace, and headed for the van.

  For a moment, Nicoletta thought they would abandon her; that half the curse would come true. She prayed they would, because if she sat long enough, Jethro would come to her. Her Jethro. Jethro with the smooth quiet features, the heavy falling hair, the dark, motionless eyes.

  But the boys remembered they had two burdens: a girl and a cooler. They hoisted her up, silently and with great tension, wanting to run, not wanting to admit it.

  “You’ll see, Nicoletta,” said Christo eagerly. I’ll get it.”

  He wants “it” for me, she thought. “It” will be his trophy to lay at my feet, a golden retriever laying the gunshot duck before his master.

  She knew now that Christo could never get “it.” “It” would always win, because “it” had greater, deeper, more ancient and more horrible weapons.

  She did not want Christo to fall, and not be saved.

  She did not want Jethro to have to face that moment. To know that he could rescue … and would not.

  She did not want coming here to be a hobby. She did not want to think of the collection that would lie at the bottom of the cave. Or, if Jethro were caught on the outside, the collection he would be in, the display he would make.

  The boys staggered in the snow, losing their footing.

  Nicoletta looked back. The cliff face was nothing but rock and dripping ice. The lakes were nothing but dark surfaces. The hole in the wall was not visible.

  And then part of the rock moved. Changed. Was light, and then dark. A dark wand rose upward. An arm. After a time in the air, like a flag without wind, the hand moved.

  It was Jethro.

  Terrible grief engulfed her. Was that his good-bye? Would she never see Jethro again? “Put me down!” she cried. “I have to go back!” Her heart was swept out of her, rushing like wind and desperation toward the last wave.

  But the boys trudged on.

  Chapter 20

  NOBODY WOULD RETURN ANYWHERE that night.

  The snow came down like a monster itself. It came in bulk, in dump-truck loads, smothering every car and bush and front step.

  At least school would be canceled. At least Christo would be unable to get his van out of his driveway.

  Long after Jamie had fallen asleep, Nicoletta raised the shades and sat up in bed, watching the beauty and the rage of the weather. The wind was not a single whooshing entity but a thousand tiny spinners. The night was dark with desperate clouds letting go, but yellow pools of streetlights illuminated the falling snow.

  Jethro came.

  She had not expected him. She had thought him gone forever. She had been in mourning, believing in his good-bye, sure that he had backed off for good.

  “Jethro!” she cried, and then twisted quickly to see if she had awakened Jamie. Jamie slept on. She put a hand over her mouth to keep herself from speaking again.

  When he moved, Nicoletta could see him. When he stopped, she could not. He was part of the landscape. He could have been a dark wind himself, or a heavy clot of snow on rock.

  She looked at her sleeping sister. Jamie’s mouth was slightly opened and in sleep she seemed glued to the sheets, fastened down by the blankets. She wouldn’t wake unless Nicoletta fell right on top of her.

  Nicoletta found her crutches, and slowly—far too slowly; what if Jethro left before she could get outside?—she made it down the stairs and reached the coat closet, wrapped herself tightly and hobbled to the back door to let herself out in the storm.

  The wind aimed at her face. It threw pellets of ice in her eyes and tried to damage her bare cheeks. The three back steps could have been cliffs themselves. The distance between herself and the garage seemed like miles. “Jethro!” she shouted, but the wind reached into her throat first and seized the words.

  “Jethro!”

  Nobody could have heard her; she could not even hear herself.

&nbs
p; She tried to wade through the snow but it was impossible. It would have been like swimming and the broken leg could not swim.

  Why was he not at the door, waiting for her?

  She gulped in snow, and put a hand blue with cold over her mouth. She should have worn mittens but she had expected to be out here only a moment before Jethro found her.

  She launched the tip of her crutches into the snow ahead of her and attempted to get through the drifts.

  There he was! By the garage door! She shouted his name twice, and he did not respond, and she shouted a third time, and he turned—or rather, it turned—and she waved the whole crutch in order to be seen.

  He seemed to turn and to stoop. As if he were on an errand. Carrying something. When at last she knew Jethro had seen her, he looked away. What is this? thought Nicoletta. What is going on?

  But she had been seeing things. Of course he came to her, white with snow. Snow purified and cleansed. Again he lifted her, and carried her this time into the garage, sitting her on the edge of her father’s workbench, her good knee dangling down while the white plaster tip of her cast rested on the top of her mother’s car. “You came,” she said. “I knew you would come.”

  He said nothing.

  For a frigid, suffocating moment she thought it was somebody else. Not Jethro. Some—creature—who—

  She looked and at least knew his eyes: those dark pools of grief.

  “Jethro, I don’t want you to live like this.”

  “No,” he agreed.

  She could feel no pulse in him, no heartbeat, no lifting of a chest with lungs. He was stone beside her.

  “You stay here and live. I will go down for you.”

  He did not smile, for there was no face to him that could do that. And yet he lightened and seemed glad. “No,” he said again. The thing that was his hand tightened on hers.

  “I don’t want you to suffer anymore.”

  He said nothing.

  “I’ve thought about it. It’s your turn for life, Jethro. I will go down.”

  The words came as from a fissure in a rock. “No one should suffer what I have. Certainly not you.”

  “Aren’t you even tempted? Aren’t you even daydreaming about what it would be like to be alive and well and normal and loved?”

  “Always.”

  “Well?”

  “Nicoletta, I will never be well and normal and loved.”

  “I love you!”

  He was silent for a long time. The storm shrieked as it tried to fling the roof off the house. The snow whuffling into deepening drifts. “Thank you,” he said finally.

  “There won’t be school tomorrow,” she said.

  He did not seem to know why.

  “Canceled,” she explained. “Snow is too deep.”

  He nodded.

  Oh, tonight of all nights she did not want his silence! She wanted to talk! To know. To understand. To share. “When school begins again, will you be in Art?”

  “No.”

  “Jethro, you have to come. Where else will I see you?”

  His silence was longer than ever. She was determined to wait him out, to make him talk. She won. He said, “This is only pain and grief.”

  “What is?”

  “Loving.”

  “You’re wrong! It can end well! I want you to stay.”

  “Like this?” Bitterness conquered him. “Why would I want to be seen like this? What do you think will happen? Christo will exhibit me in a cage.” He did not point out that if she had never come back to his cave, if she had never been followed by Christo, he would not be at risk. But they both knew it.

  His voice rose like the wind, screaming with the pain of his nightmare. “I don’t want anybody to see me. I didn’t want you to see me!”

  What would it be like, she wondered, to be so ghastly you did not even want the people who loved you to see you? What would it be like to look down at your own body and be nauseated? To be trapped—a fine soul; a good human—in such ugliness that another human would want to put you in a cage and exhibit you?

  Nicoletta was freezing to death. It was not just Jethro’s body in which she could feel no pulse, no heartbeat, no lungs. “I have to get inside,” she said. “I’m so cold. I don’t think I can move. Jethro, carry me inside?”

  He said nothing, but lifted her. Her skin scraped against him and she hoped that it was deep, and would bleed, and leave a scar, so she would have something to remember him by.

  He took her up the back steps and opened the door for her. He saw how she lived; the warmth and clutter, the letters and the photographs, the dishes and the chairs. The goodness of family and the rightness of life.

  “I love you, too,” he said, his voice cracking like old ice. “But try to see. I can’t risk anything more, Nicoletta. You can’t risk anything more. I can’t be caught. I can’t let Christo fall. He loves you. I care about anybody who loves you.”

  “You saved Anne-Louise,” she said softly. “You’re a good person. It isn’t fair when somebody good suffers! Let me rescue you. I know there must be a way out of this.”

  His voice was oddly generous, as if he were giving her something. “When your leg is better,” he said, “come to the cave. But don’t come before that. Promise me. I need your promise.”

  “No.”

  “Nicoletta! Why won’t you promise?”

  “I love you. I want to see you.”

  “Don’t come.” He set her down. The one side of her was flooded with the warmth of her home and its furnace. The other side was crusted with snow turning to sleet.

  She began arguing with him. Reasons why she must come, why they must get together, why they needed each other, and could think of some way somehow to save each other, because that was what true love did; it conquered, it triumphed.

  She thought it was a wonderful speech.

  She knew that she had changed his mind, that he understood because she had said it so clearly.

  But when she put her hand out, there was nothing there.

  A snowdrift pressed against the door and a snow-clumped branch from a heavy-laden fir tree tipped over the railing and tried to reach inside the kitchen. But no boy, no monster, no rock.

  No Jethro.

  He had left her, and she had not even sensed it.

  He had gone, and she had not even heard.

  “No!” she shouted out into the snow. “Who do you think you are anyway? Don’t you vanish like that!”

  Only the snow answered.

  Only the wind heard.

  “I don’t promise, Jethro!” she shrieked.

  The side door to the garage banged.

  Jethro had not come to see her. She had been right when she thought he stooped and carried. He had come for the dynamite.

  Tears froze on her cheeks but hope was resurrected. He had thought of a way out. He was going to use one of her suggestions. He would blow up the cave, and bury the curse, and when she came back to find him, they would be together!

  Chapter 21

  “NICOLETTA, DARLING,” SAID MS. Quincy.

  Nicoletta turned away, saw who was speaking, and very nearly continued on. How she yearned to be rude to the teacher she had once adored. She looked now at Ms. Quincy and saw not a friend, but a conductor who set friendship aside if she could improve the concert by doing so.

  Nicoletta did not even know what was fair, let alone what was right.

  In fairness, should the best soprano win? Or in fairness, should the hard-working, long-term soprano stay?

  What was right? What was good teaching? What was good music?

  Were the concert, the blend, the voices always first, and rightly so?

  Or did loyalty, friendship, and committee time count?

  She wondered if Ms. Quincy had wondered about these things, or if Ms. Quincy, like so many adults, was sure of her way? When she became an adult, would Nicoletta know the way?

  She thought of Jethro, who knew the way but could not take it.

&
nbsp; Of Jethro’s father, who knew the way once but lost the memory of it.

  Of Art Appreciation and Jethro’s empty chair.

  She said, “Hello, Ms. Quincy, how are you?” Manners were important. You always had them to go by. When you stood to lose all else, there were still manners.

  “Fine, thank you, darling,” said Ms. Quincy, relieved that Nicoletta was going to be polite.

  Politeness is a safety zone, thought Nicoletta. She thought of Jethro coming out of her garage. The dynamite that no longer lay in the box on the shelf. Had he done what he had set out to do? She must go! She must see what had happened. She must find him and know.

  Practically speaking, this meant she would have to get a ride from somebody. Who?

  “Anne-Louise,” said Ms. Quincy, “has let me down.”

  Down, thought Nicoletta. You have no idea, Ms. Quincy, what the word down means to Anne-Louise now. You have no idea how far down Anne-Louise actually went. “I’m sorry to hear that,” said Nicoletta politely. “But I’m sure it will work out in the end.”

  “No, darling. She has quit Madrigals! Can you believe such a thing?” Clearly Ms. Quincy could not. “And here we are in the middle of the winter season with several upcoming events!” Ms. Quincy was actually wringing her hands, an interesting gesture Nicoletta had never seen anybody do. “Nicoletta, please forgive me. Please come back. We need you.”

  Back to Madrigals.

  Back in the group she loved, in the center of things, the whirl of activity and companionship and singing. Back, if she chose, as Christo’s girlfriend, twice the center of things with that status.

  But never … if she rejoined Madrigals … never again to sit in Art Appreciation. Waiting. Gazing on the boy she loved.

  She knew Jethro was not coming back to school. He had said so quite clearly. And yet she knew she would see him again. She had to. A person you loved could not simply never be seen again. It was not fair.

  In the end, things—especially things of true love—should be fair.

  Three days of school since the roads were finally cleared, and each afternoon as she went to Art, her heart quickened, and a smile lay behind her lips. Let him come! Let me see that profile. The boy who was in darkness when they watched slides and remained dark when the lights came on.