“How much?”
“I don’t know. I need a flashlight and batteries.”
“What for?” said Jonah.
Christina studied him.
She saw nothing new. Jonah was incomprehensible. Why would he keep asking her to that dance when she was so mean to him? Was he a pipeline to Mr. Shevvington? If she said things to Jonah, would the Shevvingtons be told, line by line, betrayal by betrayal?
Jonah Gideon Bergeron, of graveyard names.
Was that what it meant to be friends with Christina Romney? Graveyards?
Christina took a risk. “The Shevvingtons are trying to hurt Anya and me. I need a flashlight because we’re isolated up there on the third floor in the dark and we’re not safe.” She stared at him, her eyes hot. Her own mother and father had not believed her. Her own mother and father had listened to half an argument and cut her off. Why would Jonah believe?
“I believe it,” said Jonah slowly.
Christina’s hair prickled, silver and gold.
Jonah wet his lips. He leaned toward her, his eyes darting like minnows in shallow water. “The Shevvingtons — there’s something about them, Christina. Nobody knows what it is. The parents think they’re perfect, but — well, like, there was Robbie’s older sister. And everyone thinks that Anya is next.”
Christina felt herself grow lighter, as if she might float on fear. “Next what?” she breathed. “What is the end of it? Where are the Shevvingtons taking us?”
Jonah shook his head. “I don’t know. Nobody knows. Robbie’s sister just disappeared.”
“You mean, like murdered?”
“No, no, she’s there. Her body is there. She’s just not — nobody knows, Christina. She doesn’t have a personality anymore. It’s like the Shevvingtons took it away, and now his sister is nothing. Vacant. Only the bones, but no soul.”
Christina thought, What is a flashlight compared to the power of the Shevvingtons?
“Listen, Christina, tell somebody. You have to have help.”
“Like who?” Christina was perilously close to crying, right here in the school cafeteria, with Gretch and Vicki watching. How they would love to tell Mrs. Shevvington that they had made her cry. “Did anybody help Robbie’s sister? Has anybody offered to help Anya?”
“They don’t see,” said Jonah. “Only the kids see, and they don’t do anything. They watch, though. They’re like jungle animals. They watch the predator take the weak.”
Christina felt Gretch and Vicki watching.
“But maybe a teacher …” Jonah’s voice petered out. He knew no teacher would take a side against the principal. They’d never believe anything awful about Mr. Shevvington. All grown-ups thought he was so wonderful, so kind — caring — careful — and that disgusting phrase all grown-ups adored, such a good role model.
“Miss Schuyler? In math? She’s not too bad,” said Jonah.
If my own parents don’t believe me, thought Christina, if Michael and Benj don’t believe me, why would Miss Schuyler?
And yet, and yet … only Miss Schuyler had ever asked if Christina was all right.
Jonah said, “I’ll get you the flashlight.” They were not Jonah’s eyes looking out of his face anymore, but the eyes of somebody older and tireder. Had he aged, thinking about her danger?
After school she met Blake and Anya. She was their chaperone now, their stage manager.
Anya began whistling, face puckered up as if her lips were stuck in a Coke bottle. She whistled no melody, but a steady note, like the wind playing cello through the ropes of a high-masted ship.
“Stop it,” said Christina.
Islanders never whistled. Whistling called up a wind. But you don’t want a wind, it’s Weather; nobody wants Weather.
“We’re going for a walk,” said Blake firmly.
That’s what it is to be almost eighteen, thought Christina, full of awe. I can say I’m granite, but a person like Blake really is granite.
Blake took Anya’s arm in his right arm, and Christina’s in his left.
“Talk,” said Blake. “I want to know. I know you’re not crazy. Tell me what’s wrong.”
“I quit high school today,” said Anya. “I’ll show you where I’m working. You can visit me there if you like.”
“Quit high school?” echoed Blake. “Mr. Shevvington let you? But Anya, you’re first in the class! You’re going on to medical school someday, remember? Remember your dreams?”
But Anya’s dreams were no longer of school. Christina knew her dreams; dreams of the bottom of the sea. What kind of job? she thought. It will kill Anya’s parents if she’s really quit! She is the light of their lives.
And her own parents. What would they say? Would they blame Christina? And Michael and Benj, whom she hardly knew, and they were only three weeks into school — it was still September — still autumn. The longest month, she thought, in the history of the world.
Down Breakneck Hill they went together, feet sideways to keep from falling. By the bottom, gravity was making them run. Blake held the girls’ arms to keep them with him.
Christina fell in love with Blake.
It happened in an instant, and she was no longer their escort, their advisor, their little sister. She loved him.
Oh, no, no, a thousand times no! thought Christina. He’s Anya’s! Anya loves him, he loves Anya and he’s old, old, old. I’m only thirteen, and Blake is eighteen, it’s impossible.
His arm linked in hers was heaven.
His scent was of men and wool jackets.
His shoulders were higher than hers. Wind blew Christina’s tri-colored hair over his jacket. Ribbons of silver and gold danced over his shoulder and then blew gently onto his face. Blake smiled down at her. A ribbon of her own hair made a mustache over his lip.
Kiss me! thought Christina.
She tried to kill the prayer — for it was Anya he should kiss. Anya with whom he must have his romance.
But she looked at his lips anyway and dreamed.
She could have walked forever, hanging onto his arm, dreaming of him, pretending Anya was not on the other side.
“Here,” said Anya happily. Her voice was warm and cuddly.
Blake let go of Christina’s arm. “Anya, this is a laundromat.”
Anya’s bright smile was like gauze over her face, a bandage over her craziness. “See how safe the water is!” she told him. “It’s trapped behind little glass doors. All the waves in here are under control.” She spread her arms to embrace the laundromat.
Dreary people sat mindlessly staring at the clothing through the little glass doors of the washers and dryers. Lint lay on the floor and a few abandoned socks were pushed in a corner. A tired woman with seven baskets of laundry was struggling to fold sheets by herself.
Blake controlled himself. “Anya, you’re an honor student. Like me. You’re going to college. Like me. You’re going to be a doctor.”
“Folding,” Anya nodded, hearing nothing he said. “It’s clean and neat. You can keep track of things here.”
Blake dragged them out of the laundromat. The humid, linty air stayed inside the building, along with the dirty linoleum and the broken change machine. It seemed to Christina he was crying, but that was impossible. People like Blake — men like Blake — did not cry in laundromats.
He’s crying for Anya, she thought. He knows she’s gone. She’s already in the washing machines. The Shevvingtons, or the poster of the sea took her. Anya knew all summer they were coming for her. It was just a matter of time.
Christina did not know where they were going. Blake no longer held onto her; he needed both his arms for Anya. “Talk, Christina,” he ordered her. “Anya can’t.”
Christina nodded. She flicked the switch on her cassette recorder. Benj had bought her blank tapes; it was time to use them. She would record it for Dolly at the same time. Then there would be two who knew. She began with the strange glassy weather the day they were given the poster of the sea. Anya said nothing, b
ut nodded and nodded, as repetitively and as meaninglessly as the waves of the ocean. Christina finished with Michael catching her on the stairs.
Blake said, “The poster is just a poster. Maybe there is more than one. Maybe Michael or Benj thinks it’s funny to put up new ones, or substitute different ones.”
Christina knew they had not. Their lives were not interlocked with hers and Anya’s; you could not tell that Michael and Benj occupied the same house. In some strange way, the Shevvingtons had housed them on the same floor, fed them at the same table, and yet they were not together.
“And the tide is just the tide,” Blake said. “All this puffing of candles is famous. People visit this town just to hear that. That’s why Schooner Inne will probably succeed — people who want to wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of Candle Cove. The house has the same foundation as the cove — the same rocks, Chrissie. You live in that building and you feel the same slap of the wave, the same cannon of sound. There’s a pattern, but I can’t see it. I’m going to, though, Christina.”
A pattern, she thought. Like my mother’s quilt: flying geese or feathered star pattern. This is an evil pattern. Not cloth, but paper and sound. But who? Only people make patterns? But who cuts this one, and why?
Anya said, “I feel the tide coming. I know because my fingers are on fire.” She held out her hands. Long, slim, white fingers without polish, without rings. Christina took one of Anya’s hands and rubbed it. “There,” she said. “Does that put the fire out?”
Christina heard the hum of cars on the Singing Bridge. The more we talked of the sea, she thought, the closer we had to get to it.
Standing on the dock that summer people used for their yachts and power boats and cabin cruisers was the brown wet suit.
Beckoning.
“Blake,” Christina breathed, tugging at his arm and pointing. “There it is. The brown wet suit.”
Blake saw. He let go of Anya and began running. “I’ll get him!” he screamed back at the girls. “Then we’ll have answers!”
A storm had come up. It had not yet burst, but the air was full of electricity and salt wind. Black clouds against a pink-and-gold sunset swept in from the sea, fighting to see who got rain, who got thunder, who lightning.
The wet suit left the narrow gray painted dock. It ran lightly up and over the cliff opposite the Cove from Schooner Inne. It ran to one of the rickety ladders that led to the mud flats below. It began the descent into the cove.
Blake ran after it.
The wind came up, stronger than before, and the black clouds closed in. Christina shouted after Blake, but he didn’t hear her.
“I could watch the waves forever,” said Anya dreamily. “What I do is pick out one and follow it all the way in. Look, look!” she cried. “Look at the one I picked out. It’s running away, breaking against the rocks, trying to get to safety.”
Christina gasped.
The tide was coming in. The wet suit was going right into it. Blake was following right after him.
“Blake!” she screamed. “Blake!” She turned to Anya, pushing her onto a tourist bench flanked by yellow chrysanthemums. “Stay here, Anya.”
“No,” said Anya sadly, “the wave didn’t make it. When my time comes to run, I will break against the stones, too.”
“Anya!” screamed Christina. “Shut up. Be sensible. Just sit here!” She turned and ran after Blake, screaming his name, screaming for other people to help. But there were no other people. How could a town whose livelihood came from the sea, from these wharfs, from the tourists who usually sat there painting and photographing and absorbing local color — how could it be empty?
The storm gathered above Christina, so low in the sky she felt she could throw a basketball into it and break the clouds. It prickled with electricity. She could feel the lightning coming. “Blake! The tide is coming in! Don’t go down the ladder!”
Christina did not know how she could have run so fast, over the outcroppings, over the crevices and cracks, to reach the top of the ladder.
But she was not fast enough.
Blake was halfway down. He turned to see, not Christina, but the water: a tidal wave, larger even than normal because of the storm. A great green blanket, eager to smother him, and carry him to the mattress below where he would sleep forever.
He seemed frozen on the ladder.
Instead of racing up to Christina and safety, he clung to the wood and stared at his death.
The tide slammed into Candle Cove like cannons going to war. It attacked the rocks and crashed against the crags. Its whitecaps reached like fingers to take Blake.
“Blake, Blake, Blake!” screamed Christina, reaching down. The water was so high it drenched her.
Blake looked up at her. The last thing she saw of Blake was his fear: the terrible knowledge of his fate written on his face as clear as print.
Chapter 11
“THE POSTER,” SAID CHRISTINA for the third time, “was torn into pieces. Blake ripped it off the wall. Now it’s together again. That’s why Anya dropped out of high school. That’s why she’s working in the laundromat.”
Christina’s father jammed his hands into his jeans pockets and stared out the window. Christina’s mother began crying quietly.
Mr. Shevvington said, “Thirteen is a vulnerable age. There is often borderline behavior. I think we can be grateful that your daughter is not into drugs or alcohol. I think her personality can be saved.” He paused. “I’m trying to think of a way to phrase this gently. But there is no gentle way. Island life is very isolating. Ingrown. Naive and unsophisticated. When a young emotional girl, full of hormones, full of dreams, finds herself facing reality for the first time, with classmates who are better prepared, more in touch with the times, better dressed, and so forth, it isn’t surprising that there’s a collapse.”
Christina’s mother had buried her face in the crook of her elbow. Christina’s father had now turned his back completely. Mrs. Shevvington was smiling. Neither of the Romneys saw it. Mr. Shevvington’s soothing, serene voice droned on and on. How much he was able to bring into it! Drugs, violence, “the times in which we live,” “teenagers today,” even the entire twentieth century.
Christina interrupted him, for which her parents scolded her. She said, “I have thought about it and thought about it. The only people who could have put up a new poster are the Shevvingtons. And they could have put a bit of seaweed on the inside of the window, and they could have told Anya story after story about the sea captain’s wife stepping through the cupola and they could have — ”
She stopped. She was frozen like a Stone Tag statute by the look on her parents’ faces. “Do you seriously believe,” said her father, through gritted teeth, “that a high school principal is going to do silly, childish things like switch posters in the middle of the night in order to frighten a vulnerable seventeen-year-old girl?”
Christina stared at him. That was exactly what she believed. She had said it over and over now. Why weren’t they listening to her? She could make the facts no clearer.
“I feel so guilty!” Christina’s mother burst out. “I thought we were doing so well by our daughter!”
“And you tried,” said Mr. Shevvington sympathetically. “I believe that all parents do the best they can. Unfortunately, as in situations like this, the best is sometimes not enough.”
Mrs. Shevvington had set the table in the Oriental dining room, amid the golden peacocks and the black gardens. She served a wonderful meal. She had a standing rib roast, with a delicious, smooth, dark brown gravy, and oven-gold potatoes. She had yellow squash, green beans, and brown bread and, even if you didn’t like vegetables, the table was colorful and smelled delicious and looked thankful, like November, like harvest, like love.
The room gave off an aura of love, the way only a feast and a family can do, and only Christina knew it was false. Her parents thought it was kind and thoughtful, full of effort and preparation.
“Mr. Romney
,” said the Shevvingtons gently. “Mrs. Romney.” They sounded as if they were addressing an election crowd. “Although we do not wish to jump to conclusions, it looks as if Christina has always been very jealous of Anya. They were unable to share a room and had to be separated. Soon after that Christina even felt she had to take away Anya’s boyfriend. Now it would be nice to think that Christina just flirted, but evidence is that Christina tempted Blake to show off. To save a life, supposedly. Some man in a wet suit that nobody else saw.”
“Blake saw him,” said Christina. She felt like a piece of wood. They could have nailed her to the front of a sailing vessel now and used her for a figurehead, and she would last through any weather. She felt varnished and she thought, That souvenir woman with the leathery skin. Anya said if she touched her she would turn to leather. I’ve turned.
“Blake,” Mrs. Shevvington reminded them all, “was whisked away to boarding school the moment he could be taken out of the hospital. According to Blake’s poor parents, the boy hardly knew what he was talking about.”
“He knew,” said Christina. She could not bear thinking of Blake and yet she could think of little else. He seemed to be beside her, talking to her, touching her. The Shevvingtons were right about one thing — she had had a crush on Blake. A crush that began as they ran down Breakneck Hill and lasted only that short, terrifying afternoon. Blake had been badly bruised, his shoulder dislocated when the summer person — some birder with binoculars — had jerked him to safety. Christina had not been allowed to see him. Anya had not been allowed to see him. When they telephoned the Lathems, Blake’s parents hung up on them. “Don’t harass us,” they said. They told the Shevvingtons (or at least the Shevvingtons said so) that those two island girls were such a terrible influence and so dangerous that they had to move their son immediately. And they did.
Move him where? Christina thought constantly. Where is he living? What school is he going to? Does he think about us? Is he worried about Anya? Does he remember he was chasing the brown wet suit? Or does he truly, actually, think that I talked him into a suicidal run down the cove ladder?