“Try explaining that to Mr. Daugherty. I don’t think you’ll get very far.” Karen lifted her face expectantly for his good-night kiss.
His lips pressed down upon hers lightly, almost absentmindedly, as though his thoughts were somewhere else. She could not read his expression in the darkness, but she could sense that he was trying to decide about something.
“What is it?” she asked.
“What do you mean, ‘What is it?’ ”
“There’s something you’re wondering whether or not to say.”
“You really are a mind reader!”
The words were flippant, but there was something in the tone that gave them more importance than seemed necessary.
“You’re right,” Tim continued. “I was thinking about the American Lit exam. We’ve covered so much material this semester that Mrs. Ellsworth could throw just about anything at us on the test.”
“You know there’ll be Emerson, and there’s sure to be Whitman. She’ll probably ask for quotes from Leaves of Grass.”
“Or from something by Poe. Or by Emily Dickinson. Or she could decide to center the whole exam in the twentieth century with poets like Creeley and Rich and Ginsberg.”
“She could, I guess.”
“It’ll be a bitch to study for.”
“All of her tests are.” She wished she could see his face. “What are you getting at?”
“Well,” Tim said slowly, “I was wondering about this thing you do. Do you suppose you could use it to sort of… I don’t know… picture the test?”
“Picture the test?” Karen echoed without comprehension. “You mean, you want me to—?” Suddenly, she realized what it was that he was asking. “No, Tim! I can’t do that! I don’t know what the questions will be on the test.”
“How do you know you can’t? Have you ever tried?”
“No,” Karen admitted, “but I know I can’t do it. It’s people I tune into, not things.”
“You could tune into Mrs. Ellsworth. She’ll be thinking up the questions. If you were able to get into Carla’s mind when you’d never even seen her—when she wasn’t even alive—why can’t you get into the mind of a teacher you see almost every day?”
“I just can’t, that’s all,” said Karen. “And even if I could, I wouldn’t do it.”
“I’m only suggesting a scientific experiment.”
“It’s a parlor trick and it’s cheating! You call that scientific? You just want to get out of studying.”
“Aren’t you even a little bit curious about how far you can go with this?” Tim asked her.
“No, I’m not,” Karen said. “I’ve told you, it’s over. I’ve put it behind me. Bobby’s been found, Carla is gone, and the one thing in the world I want to do right now is to forget about both of them.”
“Karen, you’ve got to face the fact—”
“I don’t have to face anything,” Karen said adamantly. “I didn’t ask for this ‘gift’ or whatever you want to call it, and if I don’t want to use it, that’s my decision. The last few weeks have been absolute hell. I just want everything to go back to the way it was.”
“Okay! Okay! I was just throwing out an idea.” Tim lifted his arm from her shoulders and leaned across her to pull the handle of the door on the passenger’s side. “Go ahead! Go inside and study! Pretend you’re just like everybody else, if that’s what you want to do. But you know it’s pretending. If you can listen to a dead kid’s memories—”
“You said I was hallucinating!”
“I’m not sure anymore. I suppose knowing what a drowning girl was thinking is no crazier than the rest of it, when you come right down to it. It’s weird, sure, but then the whole thing’s weird.”
“And it takes a weird person to do weird things, that’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?” Karen challenged.
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to!”
“You’re the one who said it, not me.” Tim’s voice was sharp with exasperation.
“This conversation is getting us nowhere. Let’s call it a night, okay?”
“Fine.”
Karen shoved open the door and got out of the car.
“Don’t forget your purse,” Tim said coldly.
“I wasn’t going to.”
She leaned back in and groped along the seat until her hands closed upon the strap. She half-expected that Tim might reach out to her, that he might try to take her hand and draw her toward him in an effort to erase the animosity that had risen between them.
But he didn’t.
He was angry. Very angry. Well, so was she! Karen slammed the car door hard and walked briskly across the lawn to the house. Her parents had left on the outside light for her, and a cloud of moths swarmed around it, banging against the illuminated glass globe in a mindless frenzy. Their soft brown wings fluttered against her face as she fumbled through her purse for her house key.
In the street behind her, the engine of Tim’s car sprang into life. He wasn’t even going to wait to see that she was safely inside.
He’s going to leave me, Karen told herself numbly. Not just for tonight, but forever.
For one wild moment she considered turning and running back to him. “Please, wait!” she would call. “I’ll try to get you the test!”
Maybe she was able to do it. If so, would it really be so bad? It could be, as Tim had said, just a scientific experiment.
But the test was not the issue. Tim’s anger would usually blow over. They’d had arguments before, and she had finally come to realize that his bursts of temper never lasted. The fight they’d had at the Zenners’ the morning of Bobby’s disappearance had been far worse than this one, yet Tim had arrived for their date that evening as if nothing had happened.
No, this was different. This went deeper. Beneath the facade of anger there lay another emotion, one Tim would never admit to, but one that she could sense.
It was fear.
Fear of the unknown, of the unnatural. Fear of something or someone who was “weird.”
Karen found the key, thrust it into the lock, and opened the door. The sound of the TV came surging to meet her, just as it always did when she had been out for the evening.
She closed and relocked the door and went down the hall to the den. Her father was seated in his usual chair in front of the TV, his eyes fastened to the screen.
“I’m home,” Karen announced when it became apparent that he didn’t notice her in the doorway.
“Oh, hi!” He tore his gaze from the picture and gave her a nod of greeting. “Your mother’s gone up to bed already. She has another of her headaches. How was the movie?”
“All right, I guess. Not the best I’ve ever seen.”
“You had a phone call,” her father told her. “Somebody named Rob something or other. He left his number. He said he’d like for you to call him when you get a chance.”
“I don’t want to,” said Karen.
“Well, don’t, then. There’s no law that says you have to return a phone call.”
“He’s not somebody I want to talk to,” Karen said. “If he calls again, please tell him I’ve got nothing to say to him.”
When she slept that night, she did not dream at all. She woke in the morning feeling empty and untroubled, scooped out and washed clean of all emotion.
It was over, all of it was over. Gratefully, she realized that there were to be no more nightmares. If Tim had been lost along with them, then she would accept it. It was a hard-won lesson, but she had now learned it. Love meant losing. Joy meant pain. Investing oneself in others brought nothing but heartache.
Her cap and gown were delivered to her that morning. Too late, Karen thought when she saw them.
In the way that counted most, she had already graduated.
CHAPTER 10
As Karen had anticipated, within twenty-four hours the brunt of Tim’s anger had spent itself, and though she knew in her heart that their relationship had been subt
ly yet permanently altered, they clung to the formalities. There were events in May that could not be ignored.
First, of course, was the prom. They went with Gary and Lisa. Tim rented a tux, and Karen wore her first floor-length gown, a long black dress with a swirling skirt.
Her corsage was an orchid, which caused her mother to gasp with pleasure.
“I wore carnations to my own senior dance,” Mrs. Connors said as she fastened the flower around Karen’s wrist. “Back then we wore our corsages pinned to the shoulders of our gowns, but now it seems everyone wears strapless dresses. Three different boys invited me. One was the captain of the football team.”
They had a table to the right of the stage, and people kept coming over all during the evening to compliment Lisa and Karen on the decorations. The weeks of cutting and gluing and painting had not been wasted, for the gym had been magically transformed into a magical enclosed garden. Strands of flowering vines hung from the ceiling, and hedges dotted with paper blossoms nestled in the corners.
Senior Notables were announced during intermission, and Karen was more relieved than disappointed to hear two other names called for the Cutest Couple award. Tim was named Best Looking and received a plaque with a mirror in its center.
There was no time during the evening when they were alone together. After the dance, they continued on to an after-party given by a girlfriend of Lisa’s. From there they went to the senior breakfast at the Pancake House and yawned their way through heaping plates of blueberry waffles, which they washed down with as much coffee as they could stomach.
When they said good night at last, it was really good morning. Through the open toes of her silver sandals, Karen could feel the damp of dew-laden grass, and the sky in the east was streaked with crimson.
“Thanks. It was fun,” Tim said. “A really great night.”
“Yes, it was. One I’ll always remember.”
They smiled at each other self-consciously. Tim’s eyes were puffy from lack of sleep. His tie had twisted to one side, and there was a punch stain on the front of the rented jacket.
“Congratulations,” Karen said, “on your plaque.”
“Yeah, I can hang it in the bathroom and use it when I shave.”
He hesitated for an indiscernible instant and then bent to kiss her. His breath was sour from too much coffee, and both of their mouths were sticky with blueberry syrup.
Out in the street, Gary gave the horn of his car an impatient beep.
“Well, I guess I better get going,” Tim said awkwardly. “Get some sleep. I’ll see you at school on Monday.”
“Yeah, see you on Monday,” Karen echoed.
The porch light glowed wanly in the gray light of dawn, and the house seemed strangely silent without the sound of the television that usually greeted her.
Feeling almost as if she were an intruder in someone else’s home, Karen let herself in, relocked the door, and turned off the outside light. She ascended the stairs, moving as quietly as possible so she wouldn’t wake up her parents, and went down the hall to her bedroom.
Tossing her evening bag onto the bed, she crossed to the window. The streaks of crimson had grown brighter now, igniting the cloud bank above them, but the sun itself remained hidden behind the trees and houses that obscured the horizon.
A poem by Emily Dickinson sprang to her mind:
I’ll tell you how the Sun rose—
A Ribbon at a time—
Would there be a question about that verse on the American Lit exam? It was certainly possible, but the Lit test might cover any number of subjects. What they were, she would find out on exam day. If it was possible for her to make this discovery before the rest of the class, Karen didn’t want to know.
Pulling down the blinds to shut out the sunlight, she took off her dress and hung it carefully in the closet. The wilted corsage drooped dismally from its strap, the blossom already beginning to brown at the edges. She set it on her dresser.
Karen climbed into bed and slept dreamlessly until lunchtime.
As it turned out, the focus of the Lit exam was not on Dickinson at all, but on T. S. Eliot, and the only quote that Mrs. Ellsworth asked for was from “The Hollow Men”:
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
This is the way that love ends, Karen paraphrased silently as she sat staring down at the paper. With a halfhearted kiss on the doorstep and a “see you on Monday.” Of course, she didn’t write that down on the answer sheet. She got an A on the test, and Tim got a C.
Theirs was a small high school, and the graduation ceremony took place in the gym. The flowers and trellises were gone now, and the only indication that a dance had recently been held there was a tattered strand of crepe paper snagged on one of the basketball hoops.
As had been previously arranged, Tim and Karen marched down the aisle together, he in a purple gown, she in a white one, with unbecoming squares of cloth-covered cardboard centered on their heads and gold tassels dangling in their faces. After they received their diplomas, they dutifully flicked the tassels to the far side of the caps and joined their classmates in singing the alma mater.
It’s almost over, Karen kept thinking. It’s almost done. Four years of high school, three of middle school, five of elementary, one year of kindergarten, another of nursery, and all had been aimed at bringing her to this one triumphant moment.
Why don’t I feel excited? she asked herself without really caring. Why does this seem more like an ending than a beginning?
Her cap had slipped forward and was threatening to slide down over her left eye. She reached up surreptitiously and adjusted it. She glanced sideways at Tim, but he was gazing out across the sea of upturned faces, oblivious to her presence, singing lustily. His own cap was sitting exactly where it should sit, wedged down firmly on his head. His hair came springing out from under its edge in a fringe of dark curls.
Karen tried to recall what that hair had felt like beneath her fingers and was amazed to discover that she could not remember. Only weeks had passed, and she had disposed of the memory already. She had managed to block it out in the same way that she had other painful recollections—the image of a pair of sandals on a pebbled beach—a shiny bicycle propped against a cottonwood—the smell of slick wet rocks and fast-running river water.
I won’t let it hurt me, she told herself. I will not let it matter. Her relationship with Tim was already part of another lifetime.
A burst of applause snapped her attention back to the present. The alma mater had ended, and graduation was over. People were jumping up from their seats now: fathers and mothers, grandparents, brothers and sisters. Tim was gone without a word, swept away into the churning chaos. Karen caught sight of him a few minutes later, standing in the far aisle, being hugged by his mother.
Gazing out across the milling crowd, she saw her own parents. Her father, older and more distinguished looking than most of the other parents, was dressed in the same business suit he had worn to the office that morning. Her mother was wearing a blue dress that Karen had not seen before. They were trying to shove their way toward the front of the gym. Her father was greeted by someone he knew and stopped to exchange pleasantries, but her mother refused to be distracted. She kept plowing determinedly onward until she reached the aisle that ran parallel to the stage and began to work her way along it, pushing people gently but firmly out of her path.
She reached the stairs and had already started up them when Karen intercepted her.
“Mom, you’re not supposed to come up here!”
“Well, you weren’t coming down,” her mother said accusingly.
She put her arms around Karen and hugged her.
“I can’t believe it! My baby is all grown up!”
Karen forced a smile. “I don’t feel grown up. The truth is, I don’t feel much different from the way I felt yesterday.”
“But you are different! You’re a graduate now. You’re at such a wonderfu
l point in life! Everything lies ahead for you! Everything is possible!”
Her mother’s arms were thin and strong like bands of steel wire. They tightened convulsively, and for a moment Karen had the fleeting thought that she might be sliced in two.
“Oh, to be eighteen again!” Mrs. Connors continued. “Won’t you and Tim have fun at the university!”
“College still seems far away,” Karen said evasively. “There’s the whole long summer between now and then.”
“Only three short months, and those will pass quickly. There are so many things we’re going to need to do to get you ready. You’ll have to have a new wardrobe, for one thing. That dress was lovely for the prom, but it won’t be right for sorority parties.”
“There’s Dad!” Karen announced, relieved at finding an excuse to steer the conversation away from the subject of dating. “I don’t think he sees us. Wait, yes he does! He’s waving!”
“I thought we’d lost him for good,” Mrs. Connors said testily. “That man can’t go anywhere without finding somebody to talk business with.”
As her mother’s arms released her, Karen moved gratefully into her father’s less frenetic embrace.
“Congratulations!” he said, thrusting her out at arm’s length to get a better look at her. “My daughter, the sweet girl graduate! We need to get a picture!”
“I told you to bring the camera,” his wife interjected. “If you’d only pay attention…”
“I meant to bring it,” Mr. Connors said. “I had it all set out and everything, and then, just as we were getting ready to leave, I got a phone call. After that we were so rushed that I forgot and left the camera on the table in the den.”
“You can take the picture when we get back to the house,” Karen told him. “We don’t need the gym for a background.”
“There’ll be time enough for that tomorrow,” her mother said. “You don’t have to come home with us, Karen. There must be parties that you and Tim want to go to. This is a special evening for the two of you.”