“Who kisses someone’s foot?” I wanted to know.
It was time for a defense fund meeting, but I wanted to hear the rest of the story, so I tagged along when she headed toward the center of town. This was the only activity Rosarie bothered with these days; she wouldn’t go to keg parties at the lake, she wouldn’t shop at the mall in Hamilton. Money could be better spent, she told me, than on clothes that would be out of fashion before you could turn around twice.
“I don’t believe you’ve stopped shopping,” I said. “You love buying clothes.”
“That just goes to show how little you know,” Rosarie said to me as we turned onto Front Street. There were banks of black-eyed Susans on the median that ran down the center of the street, and the linden trees we passed by outside the post office smelled like allspice. It was all the same as it was every summer. It just felt different. My sister was wearing a white dress, and her black hair streamed down her back the way night spills across yards and lawns.
“I know one thing,” I told her. “He’s a murderer.”
Rosarie reached into her pocket and handed me a note. “Read this. Maybe then you’ll understand.”
Inside everyguilty man is an innocent one. Thank you from the bottom of my heart, Ethan Ford
“That is such bullshit.” I handed back the note. Frankly, I had the urge to wash my hands after touching something that had belonged to him. “That’s not even his real name, you know.”
On the day we’d been avoiding Gigi at the lake, Collie had informed me he had decided to use his mother’s family name, Solomon. He was going to have it officially changed and everything. He told me he didn’t even want to hear the name Ford; whenever he did, he felt sick to his stomach. It seemed especially unfair that Rosarie would be so quick to forgive Collie’s father when she still was so furious at our father for getting sick and dying. I wondered if she wasn’t as smart as I’d always thought she was, and right then and there I started to worry about her, in spite of the fact that I didn’t even like her.
Rosarie was meeting Kelly Stark at the corner of Front Street and Worthington Avenue. Kelly had the longest hair of any of the Stark girls, so long she could sit on her own braid. I had often wished Kelly was my sister. She was extremely brilliant, and had won a National Merit award, and sometimes I wondered why she hung around with Rosarie instead of the group of smart girls like Gigi Lyle, who were taking summer study courses in order to be prepared for the SATs in the fall. I guess Kelly was rebelling in some way, if going to rallies for a murderer could be counted as such, or maybe she was like me and simply couldn’t say no to Rosarie.
“Hey there.” Kelly grinned when she saw us. She looped one arm through Rosarie’s and the other through mine. Kelly Stark was much more tolerant than Rosarie. She had a kind heart that would probably get her into trouble, unlike Rosarie and me. I had to believe that being mean would save us both; it was our protection and our armor, or at least it had been until Rosarie started getting involved with Ethan Ford.
“Uh-oh. Brendan with the broken heart is here,” Kelly whispered when we turned the corner.
They both laughed when they saw him moping around outside the firehouse, hoping for a glimpse of Rosarie.
“I don’t think it’s funny,” I said.
“He’s just a child.”
Although she was busy putting Brendan down, Rosarie had the look that she always had whenever she was falling in love with somebody. Her face was flushed and her eyes were blacker than ink. the sure signs of her devotion. I watched Kelly and Rosarie walk right past Brendan Derry, and then I knew who my sister had fallen for. It turned my stomach to realize she was thinking about Ethan Ford that way, after what he’d done. I should have known Rosarie wouldn’t have given up so much of her time for a civic cause. There was always self-interest when it came to Rosarie, the selfish beat of her own cold heart.
The sheriff and two of his men had agreed to bring Ethan Ford, or whatever he was calling himself, to speak at tonight’s meeting. When he came walking along the sidewalk flanked by the officers, no one had to tell me what Rosarie was doing here or why she was wearing her favorite dress. I saw him wave to Rosarie, and I saw the expression on her face when she waved back, and even I could understand how somebody could make a mistake and think she was in love with him. Mr. Ford’s dark hair had been cropped close and he’d lost weight, but he was still the handsomest man in town. You could tell just by looking at him that he’d been caged and that he wanted his freedom. One look and it was obvious that there would always be women ready to fall in love with him. They’d believe in his innocence because he believed in it. His faith would give him power over them, and those women wouldn’t know what hit them. His smile would run them down just as surely as if he were a freight train, and it didn’t matter how smart Rosarie thought she was, she’d probably give up whatever he asked just to be near him.
For days afterward I tried to think of what I could do to show Rosarie that she was making a mistake. I was spending most of my time in the backyard, wearing my old bathing suit and running the hose over my head when I got too hot. By that time, I had stolen thirty-seven books from the library, thirty-eight including the one Collie had taken. It was like I was addicted to stealing, or to not getting caught, or something. I was getting good at it; I could do it in a roomful of people and they’d never even know I’d slipped the history of the Nile under my shirt or that I’d dropped a volume of poems into my backpack. But for some reason, all those books made me sad, too.
When Collie came up to my room and saw how many books I’d stolen, he looked worried. He looked the way he did whenever we sat close together, troubled in some way that made him seem older than he was.
I don’t want anything bad to happen to you, he told me when he saw the piles of stolen books in my room, and just the way he said it made me feel like I’d never be able to let him go.
I thought I’d have to beg Rosarie to listen to me, but on Saturday morning my sister put on her bathing suit and came to lie out in the sun beside me. She was going to the jail that afternoon, so I guess she wanted to look good, as if she didn’t look great no matter what she did.
“You’re surprisingly stupid,” I told her. I was reading a book of Russian fairy tales that I’d stolen from the children’s reading room the day before and wishing I was more like Baba Yaga, the old woman whose house ran around on chicken’s legs. You could bet that Baba Yaga didn’t care what anyone thought of her. She might have been mean, she might have been hideous, but she didn’t cry herself to sleep at night.
“Well, one of us had to be stupid and one had to be ugly, and I guess I got the better deal.” Rosarie piled her hair on top of her head. She was in extremely good humor as she slapped lotion on her dusky skin. Even though she was my sister, I wanted to kill her.
“Stupid as a mule,” I said.
“Ugly as one,” Rosarie shot back. She handed me the lotion and suggested I use some. “You’re burning,” she told me.
I had freckled skin that didn’t do anything right. I shrugged and told Rosarie it was pointless, but when she closed her eyes, I used some of the lotion. It smelled like coconut candy
“Ethan Ford is old enough to be your father,” I said.
“If he was my father he’d be dead.” Rosarie had an answer for everything. There was a little smile on her lips.
“And he’s married,” I reminded her.
“Really? Well, his wife didn’t even come to the rally. She hardly ever visits him in jail.” Rosarie turned to me then; she smelled sweeter than usual, and I wondered if she’d given up smoking. I wondered if she was still burning herself to try to feel something, or if Ethan Ford was like a match. “A person in his situation needs someone who will stand by him and see him every single day.”
“My God. You’re more of an idiot than I would have guessed.” Although the sun was strong, I had goose bumps on my arms and legs. For the first time in my life, I felt sorry for my sister.
“It’s not the way you think.” Rosarie’s cheeks were pink with the heat. “He doesn’t look at me the way other men do. He respects me.”
If Ethan Ford didn’t want her, then he was the only man in town who didn‘t, and maybe that’s what interested Rosarie most. “It’s because he kissed your feet. It made you crazy.”
“Oh, shut up,” Rosarie said, but she was smiling. She was thinking all sorts of things, but I was pretty sure the one thing she wasn’t thinking about was how Ethan Ford had taken the life of some girl in Maryland.
“I’ll bet he used his tongue.”
“I said, shut up!” Rosarie pulled my hair, but she didn’t deny it. “You think you’re so smart,” she went on, “but you don’t know anything. You think Dad was so high and mighty because he killed himself and supposedly spared us so much pain, but he was just taking the easy way out. Ethan Ford has lived a perfect life, he’s actually saved people. And he’s not the only one in this world who ever made a mistake.”
I looked at my sister and thought of how she must have felt the night she found our father. She had begged my mother to take her to the mall in Hamilton, she’d had a fit if you really want to know, and because of that our father had gotten the chance to be alone when my grandmother and I went up to unpack in the attic. I supposed you could see that as a mistake if you looked at it in a certain way You might think you have to pay for such an oversight for the rest of your life.
That night, when everyone was asleep, I went into the garage and lit a candle and begged my father to forgive Rosarie for her unkind words. She knows not what she says, I told him. Or what she does, either, when it comes right down to it. Our father was the sort of man who thought things over carefully and weighed his words before he spoke. He must have measured the length of the days he had left against the sorrow he would have caused us with each of those days. It didn’t really matter what Rosarie thought. Everything our father did, he did out of love. I’m sure of that. I didn’t need anyone to tell me that he would have showed true conviction if he’d forced himself to go on living. That might be true for somebody else, but it wasn’t true for him.
Some people needed saving, and I was beginning to realize that Rosarie was among them. That night I stayed awake, thinking of how I could set things right. Before I fell asleep I made a vow that I would complete three good deeds. I would choose the tasks that were the hardest for me, the way people always do before setting off on a quest. If it was easy, it was worthless, even I knew that. There were so many things that were hard for me, I could have had a ten-page list, but it came down to this: I would return the stolen books to the library; I would see to it that a stone was put up at my father’s grave: and I would make certain to protect Rosarie, even if that meant protecting her from herself
There was no law against taking care of the easiest task first, so I brought the books out to the garage, a few at a time, and piled them into an old wagon. I waited until dark before going down to the library, dragging the wagon behind me. It was the time in August when the crickets start going crazy, and in spite of the heat and how many sprinklers were switched on, anyone could tell it was the end of the summer. I started thinking about the things Collie and I had done together, and how I’d never felt like I needed another friend when he was around, and how Rosarie had said it would all change. I’d probably gone ahead and brought that change on myself when I kissed him out at the old house. He looked at me in a different way now, like he was trying to figure me out and having no luck whatsoever.
As I walked through town, I was worried about what excuse I could give if somebody stopped me and questioned me about the wagon of books, but a bomb might as well have dropped for all the people I ran into. Even though I’ve lived in Monroe my whole life long, I started thinking maybe someday I should move somewhere where there are people on the street after nine o’clock. It was so quiet you could hear the air make a pinging sound, and the linden leaves rustled like paper.
I went past Hannah’s without anyone seeing me; even Brendan Derry, who was at a window seat, sorrowfully drinking coffee and writing some sappy poetry for Rosarie, failed to notice when I went by. Kite’s Bakery was closing early these days, and there were no rallies going on at the firehouse, and the stores on Front Street were shut down for the night. I figured I was in luck. I felt so sure of myself I started to whistle, or maybe it was fear that made me do that, I don’t know. All I know is that when I turned onto Liberty and saw the library. I got a shaky feeling. Maybe I was thinking about my father, and how nice Grace Henley had been to let him take out so many books when he was sick, or maybe I just didn’t like the dark. I left the wagon beside some honeysuckle vines, but when I took the first bunch of books up to the library. I felt kind of exposed without the old apple tree to hide behind.
I slipped every book through the return slot, even though the edition of King Arthur was so thick I had to push, hard, until it fell with a clump on top of the others, just inside the door. That was when I glanced up and saw Miss Henley watching through the window. We looked at each other, and I felt like crying because instead of opening the door and screaming at me, she smiled. She’d known all along that I was stealing those books, she just never said anything.
I turned and ran. I grabbed the wagon and pulled it behind me so that it banged into my legs and left bruises. I ran so fast I thought my lungs would break apart, but I kept going long after I was past Front Street. I thought about the people in my life who were good, people who weren’t the least bit like me, the kind of individuals who never accused you of anything, even when they were well aware of all you’d done. I had overheard Grace Henley talking to Margaret Peck, who volunteered at the library, when Mrs. Peck brought up the subject of the books that seemed to be disappearing from the shelves. As it turned out, Grace Henley hadn’t been worried. I heard her say that in her experience, missing books often returned, sometimes after weeks or months, occasionally, after years; sooner or later, they usually came back, as if they’d returned of their own accord, drawn back to the library like sheep to the barn.
When I got home, I stood outside, trying to catch my breath. At this hour, everyone I loved was sleeping or already gone. I stood there for a long time and thought about my father and how no matter where I lived or how far I went. I would always think about him. I hadn’t known that before, not really, but I knew it now, It would be harder to get to sleep tonight without all those books hidden around my room, but as far as I could tell, it wouldn’t be impossible.
Mercy
THE LAST WEEKS OF AUGUST ARE ALways a time for family reunions and blueberry pie, the season when goldenrod appears along roadsides and the lilies that bloom in daylight lose their short-lived petals as soon as moonlight begins to spill from the sky. The process is so rapid that by morning there is often nothing left of these flowers but green stalks and the yellowing tendrils of leaves, as though summer were already ending while most people were safely in bed. Charlotte Kite, however, notices what happens to the lilies at night, because she can’t sleep. She is victim to her own racing thoughts, incessant, surging terrors that keep her up at odd hours, at two and at four, so that she is awake to hear the fluttering of the sparrows when they first stir in the bushes: she listens to the quiet cooing of doves. She is already at her window when the first radiant bands of light break open the leaden blue sky of morning, a witness to the hour when the fallen petals of the lilies are curling up in the grass like bits of paper, too thin and delicate to last.
For five years or more, unbeknownst to her, renegade cells have been finding a place in Charlotte’s body. Now that she’s had the tumor removed, along with several lymph nodes, her treatment will devour the next ten months of her life. Already, she knows that win, lose, or draw, nothing will ever be the same. There is a scar under her arm that aches, and her left breast is half the size of her right, but what keeps her up at night is the realization that everything she has at this moment can be lost in an instant. She doe
sn’t want to waste precious time with something as prosaic as sleep. Every second is a second that belongs to her, one she understands could well be her last.
The illness and the intricacies of dealing with treatment are actually far easier to handle without Jay around. Everyone knows Jay has never been the sort of man to see anyone through hard times, though he has the best intentions. He’s called several times, which is sweet of him, always with the tentative greeting of someone who can’t stand to be around illness. Charlotte remembers that Jay often found excuses not to visit his own father at the nursing home; he has always turned away from the scene of an accident. He wants to hear good news, or nothing at all. She can’t picture Jay walking through the doors of the hospital in Hamilton, let alone being there waiting for her to snap out of the anesthesia or holding her hand while she suffers through treatment.
Charlotte has no second thoughts when she hires Barney Stark to act on her behalf in her divorce proceedings. Although she’s more than willing to give Jay whatever he asks for, Barney gently lets her know it will most probably take the best part of a year to complete the divorce, considering the complicated financial arrangements of the bakery. Well, what does that matter to Charlotte? Her treatment will take nearly as long, with radiation sandwiched between the cruel months of chemotherapy: she might as well throw in the divorce proceedings along with the rest of the mess.
“I know this is bad timing,” Barney said before she left his office. Clearly, there wasn’t a soul in the village who hadn’t learned of her illness, Barney among them. He had an apologetic look, as though he was the one who had failed her.