I stood there for a moment, thinking, and then turned to Mrs. Camden and asked, “What did he do when my grandfather showed him pictures of Willie and me?”
“He became very sad. We could see it, so your grandfather quickly moved on to other pictures and his trophies.”
“Didn’t he say anything?”
“No.”
“Don’t you think it’s weird that he still won’t talk much after all this time, even when you’re being so nice to him?”
“There have been cases of prisoners of war who didn’t speak for months and months after they were freed. It takes a lot of tender loving care.”
“Yes, I know. Like easing him into a warm bath,” I said disdainfully.
Both Myra and My Faith scowled. I didn’t care. Maybe they would stop talking about him in front of me.
“We’re thinking of taking him for a ride tomorrow,” Mrs. Camden said. “Dr. Patrick thinks it would be a very good thing. New scenery might revive his memory. Would you be interested in going?”
“Didn’t you hear? I’m under house arrest,” I said, and walked out past her. When I reached Grandpa Arnold’s office this time and looked in, I saw that he was taking some of the models of his trucks off the shelves and showing them to the boy. He never let Willie play with those. He bought him different ones. I saw him put one into the boy’s lap. The boy looked up at him with admiration, and my grandfather smiled. When he looked toward me this time, he kept his smile.
It won’t be long, I thought, before he loves him more than he loved Willie and especially more than he loves me. Forget about trading even false acceptance for Grandpa rescinding his punishment, I thought. I wasn’t that good a liar.
The boy saw where Grandpa was looking and turned to me. Suddenly, he smiled, too. I believed it was a smile of self-satisfaction. He was showing me that he was winning his place in my grandfather’s heart despite me. But I was sure that Mrs. Camden, Dr. Patrick, and everyone else in this house would tell me that he was just reaching out to me, hoping that I would like him, maybe even love him like a brother.
Never, I thought. Someone had poisoned him, and now he was poisoning almost everyone in this house. But he wasn’t poisoning me. You’re all too stupid to see it, I wanted to shout, but I swallowed back the words and returned to my room.
I tried doing some of my reading for English class, but I was having too much trouble concentrating and found myself rereading the same pages. I hadn’t closed my door completely, so I heard Mrs. Camden and my grandfather bringing the boy up to Willie’s room. The two of them were laughing. I listened for the boy’s laughter, too, but I didn’t hear it. They took him into his room, and Mrs. Camden started to prepare him for sleep. While she did that, my grandfather came to my room.
“Dorian said she told you we’re taking William for a ride tomorrow. It looks like it’s going to be a very nice day. We thought after lunch, we’d go toward Richmond. Dr. Patrick thinks it would be beneficial to get him out for a while. She suspects he wasn’t permitted to go anywhere or do much before. So if you would like to come along . . .”
“I have too much to do for school,” I said. “I might just take a bike ride.”
“A bike ride?”
“Yes. I would like to get some air and exercise, or do you want me to end up like him in a wheelchair? If that happened, you’d get me a private nurse, too, wouldn’t you?”
He jerked his head back as if I had spit at him. “Don’t make it too difficult for me to be your guardian, Clara Sue,” he said, his voice full of warning.
“I don’t think of you as my guardian, Grandpa. I think of you as my grandfather. At least, I used to,” I added, turning away.
He didn’t respond.
When I looked back, he was gone. I lay there for a while, wondering how all this had happened. There was so much darkness now between today and all the wonderful yesterdays that Willie, my parents, and I had once enjoyed, wonderful memories like the sound of laughter or my parents singing some favorite children’s song they shared from their own youth while we drove somewhere. Willie would fall asleep against me back then. He was so little. I would put my arm around him like Mommy did, and when she looked back and saw us, she would smile brightly enough to light up a room.
All those memories were so distant. They were slipping away like smoke caught in the cold wind that had rushed in under the bruised and angry clouds of my great sadness. Reaching out for them was like reaching into wisps of haze, grasping nothing. I fell asleep like someone falling down a tunnel whose walls were lined with tears.
The following morning, I deliberately went to breakfast later than usual. By then, my grandfather had finished eating and was outside doing things with Jimmy on the property. Mrs. Camden was busy with the boy and his physical therapist. My Faith had left for her church work in Charlottesville, and Myra was in her room. They had left out the orange juice and my favorite cereal with a banana. I ate alone and then returned to complete my homework and pick out something to wear for my bike ride and my rendezvous with Aaron.
No one came looking for me at lunchtime. I was sure they were all preoccupied with the big adventure with the boy, but when I went down, Myra was there to make me a toasted cheese sandwich. She tried to talk about my behavior and my attitude, but I wouldn’t say anything, so she gave up. At one thirty, I left the house, got on my bike, and headed for the playground. I didn’t even tell her where I was going. I was angry at everyone. It felt good to get away from the house. I paused only when I was near the place where the truck had hit Willie and Myra. Then I rode faster.
Aaron had gotten Paulie to drive him there and pick him up in two hours. The park was busy with families, dozens of young children on the rides. Two teenagers drew some passing attention. Some of the parents knew who we were, but most weren’t interested.
“Now I know what Romeo and Juliet felt like,” Aaron said when we met. We started walking away, me walking alongside my bike.
“That didn’t end well,” I said. We had just read it in my English class.
He laughed. “You know the creek down here?” he asked when we made the turn south of the park.
“No.”
He led the way through an empty lot. When we reached a patch of woods, he told me to leave my bike, and then we followed a path for about half a mile to a hill that looked down on the creek. We sat at the top and watched the water flowing over the rocks and dead tree stumps.
Aaron played with a blade of yellowed grass and then took a tiny branch and held it with both hands. “See this?” he said.
“So?”
“My father’s got this expression. ‘A branch that doesn’t bend breaks.’” He demonstrated by bending it but not breaking it.
“What are you saying?”
“You have a little war going on at your house now.”
“No kidding, Dick Tracy.”
He smiled and shook his head. “I’ve been thinking about it all morning. My guess is that if you won and your grandfather shipped the kid out, you wouldn’t be all that happy, because you wouldn’t like how everyone at the house thought of you, including your grandfather. I’m not saying he’s done the right thing by giving him your brother’s stuff and putting him in your brother’s room so soon,” he quickly added.
I was quiet. He wasn’t saying anything I hadn’t thought. I just didn’t want to think about it now or ever.
“I have a selfish motive for bringing this up,” he added when I didn’t speak.
“And what’s that?”
“If you were a happy camper at home and your grandfather wasn’t on your case, I wouldn’t have to be dreaming about you so much. I could see you more. Get it?”
I nodded. I liked what he was saying. Right now, I didn’t think anyone was as happy being around me as he was. I hoped it was for the right reasons. Was I an easy target, or did he
mean it? Lila and the gossips had stirred up my natural paranoia. He saw how deeply I was thinking.
“I mean, you were suggesting it, too, when you said you might do a trade to get the chains off, right?”
“I thought I could do that, but I got angry again right afterward. Today they wanted me to go for a ride with them. They were taking him out for the first time, at the doctor’s suggestion.”
“Oh. Might have helped.”
“I wouldn’t have been able to see you right now.”
“But for sure next weekend, I bet.”
“You’re not going to tell me not to cut off my nose to spite my face or anything, are you? Everyone is running about spewing proverbs in my house. I feel like it’s feeding time at the chicken coop, and I’m the only chicken there.”
He laughed and fell backward to look up at the sky. I gazed down at him. What are you so worried about, Clara Sue? I asked myself. You’re going to lose your virginity someday, aren’t you? Isn’t Aaron the boy you’d really like to lose it to? You don’t have to have a ring on your finger first, do you? Boys don’t think like that. Why should girls?
It was like I was in the girls’ locker room listening to the great debate, only this one was happening in my head. Aaron must have been listening in, I thought.
“What would you have done if we weren’t in Audrey’s bedroom?”
“Done?”
“You know, if we were almost where we were when we were in Audrey’s bedroom.”
“I don’t know. You’re just going to have to wait to find out.”
He braced himself on his elbow. “What about now?”
“Now?” I looked around. We were far from any road, far from any house, and there was no one walking below beside the creek.
“What’s better than here? It’s like the Garden of Eden or something,” he said. “We’re like the only people on earth.”
“Like Romeo and Juliet? I told you, that didn’t end well, either,” I said, and he laughed.
He took off his jacket and laid it behind me, bunching it up into something of a pillow. I looked back at it and then at him. His eyes were electric with excitement. Was it too late to slow him down? Or myself, for that matter?
“Lila called me last night and told me that Audrey and Sandra actually inspected her bed after we left. Now they’re spreading stories about me not having been a virgin.”
“So let’s prove them right,” he said, and leaned in to kiss me. I didn’t kiss him back. “What’s wrong?”
“It feels funny out here like this. I feel like I did on the boat.”
“Taking a chance of being seen makes it even more exciting, don’t you think? A rabbit might see us and get ideas,” he said.
My mind reeled with words of refusal, of caution and reluctance, words I thought every girl my age certainly should have not only memorized but embedded in their brains. I’m too young. We haven’t been going together long enough. What if he breaks up with me a week later? How would I feel then? What if he tells his friends, and I end up with a reputation as bad as someone like Sandra Roth? What if my grandfather and Myra somehow find out?
Why hadn’t I thought of all these things when we were in Audrey’s bedroom? Was the embarrassment of losing my virginity the only reason I escaped from his advances and my own driving passion? Was that just a handy excuse helping me to avoid all these questions, an excuse I couldn’t use now?
He leaned in to kiss me again. “I’ve never felt about any girl like I feel about you, Clara Sue,” he said. Wasn’t that something he was supposed to say?
Once, when Lila and I were talking about such things, she told me she had heard that there was actually an instruction book boys could get, and it had a list of things they should say to get a girl to stop resisting.
But I didn’t want to believe that. I wanted to believe Aaron. I wanted to be closer to him than I had been with any other boy. For that matter, closer to him than with any other person since I had lost my parents and now Willie. He would be my lover and my family all at once, I thought. He wanted me even with all my baggage. I might never meet another boy like him. The other girls couldn’t be right about him.
Just knowing that my grandfather, Myra, and especially My Faith would be upset over my promiscuity also encouraged me. I’m on my own now, I told myself. I have no one but myself. I have to be in charge of myself. I have to be my own person.
I kissed him before he could try to kiss me again. It seemed to open the gate for both of us.
But then I heard laughter, and I sat up quickly. It was the laughter of young girls. It was coming from off to our left, and then they suddenly appeared, a group of about ten Brownies and their guide. They paused when they saw us.
Aaron groaned. “Great. That’s Mrs. Elliot. She was my third-grade teacher,” he said. “She once put me in the cloakroom for an hour because I threw a spit ball.”
Mrs. Elliot saw us, too, and quickly herded the troop in another direction. I recognized Mindy Cooper’s little sister when she turned back to flash a smile at us before they disappeared over the hill.
A few minutes later would have been quite a little disaster for us, I thought. I stood.
“Hey.”
“This isn’t the place or the time, Aaron.”
“You wanted to see me. I thought . . .”
“I want to be with you, but look how close that was. For both of us,” I added. “Your father would probably take your new car away permanently.”
He nodded and stood. “You’re right. I knew there was a reason I didn’t join the Cub Scouts.”
He took my hand, and we walked back slowly.
“Think about what I said,” he told me when we reached my bike. “Work yourself back into your grandfather’s favor. You don’t want to become the Lady of Shalott or something.”
“Who’s that?” I asked.
“A poem you’ll learn when you’re a senior, probably,” he said as we walked back to the playground. “It’s about this lady who was cursed and lives in a castle, where she weaves images of what she sees in a mirror. She never looks directly out the window at the world. Until she sees Lancelot, that is. Then she leaves her tower, puts her name on a boat, and floats down to Camelot. She dies before arriving.”
“How sad.”
“Right. So don’t miss out on reality,” he said.
“Or when you do after waiting so long, you’ll die?”
“Something like that.”
“Are you my Lancelot?”
“I’ll be anyone you want.” He smiled and kissed me.
Would he be?
And did I live under a mysterious curse, too?
14
We sat on one of the pinewood benches at the playground and talked until Paulie returned for him. Aaron revealed more about his family and his relationships with his father, his mother, and his older sister. I had the feeling he was telling me things he had never told anyone else—especially any other girl—about his sister. Stories illustrating how his feelings for her grew stronger as he grew older and he began to appreciate her feelings for him.
In my heart of hearts, I felt something special was happening between us. Gradually, the image of him that other girls were trying to impose on me was crumbling. I thought he was very sensitive and caring, and in some ways, he was as vulnerable emotionally as I was. Was I being too naive, gullible? Or was I simply desperate to be close to someone at any cost?
Now some of the adults who knew Aaron and his family and a few who knew my grandfather and me came by to say hello to us. Two mentioned Willie and how sad they were for me and my grandfather. Others avoided the topic, and I was grateful. One mother, Mrs. Willow, who had twin girls, talked to us the longest. I could see from the way she was looking at us, catching that we were still holding hands, that she was probably thinking about her own yo
uthful romances or maybe just one, maybe the most serious one that had gone in the direction we were heading. Maybe she thought we were already there. She had that know-it-all expression that made me blush when she talked about how cute we looked together. I even thought she was flirting with Aaron. I was happy when her children grew bored and she walked off.
Paulie barely looked at me when he arrived. He glanced at me, smiled when I said hello, and then looked away quickly, as if I was already someone forbidden and he didn’t want to be caught smiling at me. Maybe he’s just terribly shy, I thought. Aaron’s kissing me good-bye definitely embarrassed him.
“Think about what we discussed,” Aaron said before he got into Paulie’s car. To be sure that I knew what he meant, he added, “The Lady of Shalott.”
I watched them drive off and then got on my bike and started for home. When I reached the place where the truck had plowed into Willie and Myra, I stopped and stared at it for a while. A few rows of the hedges were still looking damaged. This area had become special now, almost a holy place. On this section of sidewalk, I had seen my brother alive for the last time. At that moment, he had been barely clinging to life, if I understood what had happened correctly. I couldn’t be sure if he had heard my voice when I called out to our grandfather. I hoped he had.
Suddenly, I wondered. What if he had lived but had been in a wheelchair like the poisoned boy? What if something had happened to his brain and he couldn’t remember us, just the way the poisoned boy couldn’t remember his family? Grandpa would have done all the same things for him as he had done for the poisoned boy, for sure. I would have been there for him every day, of course. And I would have cried for him every night. I wouldn’t be happy as long as he was ill, and maybe I wouldn’t have even gone on a date with Aaron or gone to a party or had any social life at all, for that matter. Maybe I would have been Mrs. Camden’s real assistant. I’d like to think that if that had been the case, I would have helped bring him back. The first time he would have said my name would have been like my birthday, Thanksgiving, and Christmas all rolled into one.