“We need something for the top,” I told Old Gray.
Old Gray said he’d forgotten about that part, but we managed to dig up a tinfoil ashtray, and I cut it into a star shape and pinned it to the top of the tree with a paper clip. Then we turned off the lights and plugged in the tree so we could admire our handiwork.
“Pretty Christmassy, huh?” he said, beaming at me in the dim glow of the little lights.
“Pretty Christmassy.” I agreed.
“Ready for your present?” he asked, and from behind his back he brought out a big bag of butterscotch candies with a red ribbon tied around it. “Have one,” he said. “They’re your favorites. See how I remembered that? I know what you like, don’t I?”
I thanked him and took the bag from him and poked a hole in it with my finger. I pulled out one of the cellophane-wrapped candies, untwisted the ends, and popped it into my mouth. I sucked on it for a second, then pushed the smooth buttery candy into my cheek with my tongue so I could speak.
“Want one?” I asked, holding out the bag to him.
Old Gray shook his head and smiled. “Those are for you.” Then he put his arm around my shoulders, just the way he’d done that day I’d helped him hang up his lights.
Only this time he left his arm there a little too long, and when I started to feel uncomfortable and tried to move away, he tightened his grip.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“I want to be your friend, Jamie.”
But it wasn’t true. He didn’t want to be my friend. He didn’t want to be my friend at all. When I tried again to get away, he got his arm around my neck and pulled me in tight against him, one of the buttons on his shirt pressing hard into my cheek. His hair was gray, but he wasn’t an old man—he was strong. “I love you, Jamie,” he said. I must have swallowed the candy whole at some point as I struggled to get free, or maybe I spit it out. I don’t remember. All I remember is that I could still taste it. And I’d been tasting butterscotch ever since.
“Did you say butterscotch?” Audrey asked softly.
Suddenly I couldn’t breathe. I wasn’t floating anymore; I was drowning. I opened my eyes, and I wasn’t in the ocean or riding in the silver elevator. I was lying on Audrey Krouch’s dirty old couch with my shoes off, and I had just told her what I had sworn I would never tell anyone. I jumped up, knocking over the candle in my panic.
“Hey, watch it!” Audrey cried, grabbing for the candle, as hot wax spilled out onto the tabletop. “What’s the matter with you?”
“How could you do that?” I shouted.
“What are you talking about?”
“You tricked me. You tricked me into telling you.”
“I didn’t trick you into anything. You asked me to hypnotize you, so I did. I can’t help it if it worked.”
I picked up my shoes and jammed my feet into them, but my fingers were shaking so badly, I couldn’t tie the laces.
“If you tell anyone what I told you, I’ll break your neck, Audrey Krouch. I mean it, I really will.”
“But you didn’t tell me anything,” she said.
“You’re lying,” I said.
“No, I’m not. Your lips were moving the whole time, but the only thing you said out loud was ‘butterscotch.’ Why would I tell anybody that? It doesn’t even mean anything.”
“Swear it,” I said, balling my hands into fists and taking a menacing step toward her. “Swear that it’s all I said.”
“I swear,” said Audrey, quickly drawing an X over her heart with her finger. “Butterscotch. That’s it.”
I had never hit anybody in my life, but I wanted to hit Audrey Krouch. I hated her for knowing all the things she knew about me that I had never intended to tell her. But besides being mad, I was also confused. Mixed in with the relief I felt when Audrey swore I hadn’t told her anything was a devastating sense of disappointment. Nothing had changed. The burden of the terrible secret I had just so vividly relived was still mine alone to bear.
I’m glad I didn’t hit her—it would have been the wrong thing to do—but I’m not proud of what I did next. I snatched the glasses right off her face, and clutching them tightly in my fist, I turned and ran home.
16
THAT NIGHT I SKIPPED DINNER. I TOLD MY MOTHER I felt sick, and it was true. She opened up the couch and made up my bed for me early and brought me a cool washcloth to put on my forehead. I lay there by myself while she and Sapphy ate dinner together out in the kitchen. Later, after she had cleared the table, my mother turned on the radio so she could listen while she did the dishes. The dial was set to the Motown station I had been listening to that morning, but she began to turn it, looking for one of her golden oldies stations instead. All of a sudden, out of the static Frank Sinatra’s voice came floating out into the room.
“Boy, does this take me back,” said Sapphy. “Nobody sings like Old Blue Eyes.”
If the song had been “Mood Indigo,” I probably wouldn’t have been able to hold it together. I was that close to the edge. I would have cried, my mother would have come over and asked me what the matter was, and then who knows what would have happened? Luckily, though, Frank was singing “Fly Me to the Moon.”
Before she left for work, my mother came and sat on the edge of my bed.
“I need to get going,” she said. “I gave Sapphy her pill early, and she’s already tucked in. Get some rest, cowboy. You probably caught that bug that’s going around. If you don’t feel better in the morning, you can stay home from school, okay?”
Then she leaned over and kissed me right above the ear. I didn’t move. I lay there, holding my breath, afraid if I breathed in even the tiniest bit of her, a whiff of her hand lotion or the cigarette smoke that clung to her hair, I would break into a million pieces, like a jigsaw puzzle being lifted up by the edges.
After my mother left, I threw off the covers and got out of bed. Then I went and got Audrey’s glasses out of my backpack where I’d stashed them and walked quickly down the hallway to the bathroom.
I don’t know what I expected to see as I stood in front of the mirror and slipped those glasses on. Something that would explain how she knew about the cherry cans and the reason I didn’t walk on the driveway, I guess. But all I saw was my own pale, miserable self staring back at me, Audrey’s big black glasses sliding down my nose. I stood for a while, looking into the mirror. Then I took the glasses off and, holding them in both hands, snapped them in two.
Back in the living room I shoved the broken glasses under my pillow, took the cherry cans out from behind the couch, and began to set them up around my bed. When I had finished, I crawled under the covers and lay in the dark, listening for footsteps. Outside, the wind set the trees swaying, and the moon sent shadowy fingers from their branches dancing through the window and across the walls. After a while I finally managed to doze off.
In the middle of the night Sapphy woke up. She got out of bed and, groggy from her medication, got turned around, somehow ending up out in the living room. She stumbled in the dark, and I woke up, heart pounding wildly, to the terrible clattering I had feared for months would come.
“Get away from me!” I screamed. “Don’t touch me! Get away!”
“Who is that?” Sapphy whispered in the dark. “Who’s there?”
As soon as I realized what had happened, I got quickly out of bed.
“It’s me, Sapphy. It’s Jamie. I’m sorry if I scared you. Go back to bed,” I told her.
But Sapphy didn’t go back to bed. Instead, she fumbled around and managed to switch on the light. We both stood there blinking, in the glare, at the empty cherry cans scattered across the floor in every direction, some lying on their sides like fallen soldiers, others still bravely standing guard.
“What is all this?” she asked.
“It’s nothing,” I said, bending down and righting one of the cans. “It’s just something I have to do, that’s all.”
“Why, Jamie?” Sapphy asked, and as she looked at
me, she slowly tilted her poor bedraggled-looking head to one side, like a crow. “What’s happened?”
Later I would wonder why I hadn’t realized right away what it meant when Sapphy tilted her head like that. I guess I was too busy trying to hold myself together to notice. When I got down on my hands and knees and began to set the cans back up, Sapphy came over and got down beside me to help. When we had finished, she went and turned out the light. Then, careful not to knock over the cans, she lifted the edge of her robe, stepped over the barrier, and came to sit beside me on the bed.
“You can tell me,” she said.
It felt like one of those times when you spend hours turning everything upside down looking for your hat, only to realize it’s been sitting on your head the whole time. Sapphy was right—I could tell her. She was the one person in the world who wouldn’t hold it against me, because the next day she wouldn’t even be able to remember it.
“Tell me everything,” she said.
And so I did.
When I had finished, Sapphy was quiet.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
“You’ve got nothing to be sorry for,” said Sapphy.
“I shouldn’t have gone there,” I said. “It was dumb.”
“It’s not your fault what happened. It’s not your fault, Jamie.”
I cried then. The hard kind of crying. The kind that hurts on the way out and comes in waves from deep inside. It made my head pound and ripped my throat raw, but I didn’t try to stop it. I needed to cry, almost as much as I’d needed to tell someone the awful thing that had happened to me. In the morning Sapphy wouldn’t remember what I’d told her, and she wouldn’t remember what she’d said to me either, but I would never forget it. It was not my fault.
“Come here,” Sapphy said, her eyes glittering with tears as she opened her arms wide for me. The loose sleeves of her robe hung down, and in the dark they looked like giant wings. I laid my head against her chest, and when she folded her arms around me and began to rock, I closed my eyes and imagined that she was the bird from my dream, lifting me up and carrying me off to safety.
17
IT WASN’T OLD BLUE EYES WHO FINALLY GOT Sapphy’s memory to jump the scratch. It was me. Who would have guessed that what we hadn’t been able to find in the spice rack or the photo albums or the back of the closet would lie in the painful butterscotch-flavored secret I told her that night. If Audrey hadn’t made me wish I had talked, or if Frank Sinatra had sung a different song that night on the radio, things might have been different. But Sapphy heard me calling to her over the clatter of empty cherry cans, and she tilted her head to the side and followed the sound of my voice all the way home.
It was four o’clock in the morning when my mother came in and found Sapphy sitting on my bed, stroking my hair as I lay sleeping peacefully in her lap, a ring of empty cans on the floor around us. I had told Sapphy everything, and Sapphy had done the one thing I had counted on her not to do: She had remembered. I never had to see the look on my mother’s face when she heard what had happened to me, because it was Sapphy who told her, not me.
A whole lot happened pretty quickly after that. For one thing, the police came, and after asking me a lot of very hard questions, they took Old Gray away. My mom decided to take some time off from her job, to stay home with Sapphy and me. She even cooked a pot roast one night. We could have used Grandma Jeanne’s gravy boat, but we made do with a bowl and a spoon, and I don’t think anybody minded at all. Sapphy was sad to learn that she had broken all her dishes, but she talked my mother into unpacking our share of the bone china, and after that we used it every day.
I missed a week of school, and by then it was Easter vacation, so I didn’t have to go back for another two weeks anyway. Mostly I stayed inside except for when we went into town to meet with Mr. Uhl, the lawyer my mother had hired to help us when my case went to trial. Apparently it wasn’t the first time Old Gray had done something like this, but I like to think it was the last.
Sapphy’s memory was back for good, so Marge didn’t have to come anymore, though it would still be a while before she was completely herself again. My mom and I took some long walks together, and we had some long talks, too. We even talked about my dad. She told me he had called a couple of times and asked if it would be okay to come visit us. She said she was sorry she hadn’t told me about the calls; she hadn’t wanted to get my hopes up or hers either. The next time he called, she promised, she’d tell him it was okay to come.
One afternoon, the phone rang. It was the pound, calling to let Sapphy know they finally had a beagle puppy for her. Sapphy and that dog hit it off the minute they laid eyes on each other. After trying out a couple of names for him, she settled on Bert, short for Sherbert. While Sapphy talked to the people at the pound, I heard the mailman toot his horn down on the road, and for the first time in a long time I actually walked down the driveway. I ran into Audrey Krouch on my way back up.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey, yourself,” I said, and kept walking. I hadn’t seen her since the afternoon she’d hypnotized me, and I felt embarrassed about the way I’d acted in front of her.
“I heard about what happened. About them taking that creep away. It’s all anybody can talk about around here anymore,” Audrey said as she turned around and started following me back up the driveway.
“Are you mad at me?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t think so,” I said.
“Either you’re mad or you’re not. Which is it?”
“Not, I guess.”
“Good,” she said. “Now don’t you want to know if I’m mad at you?”
“Are you?” I said.
“That depends on whether you plan to give me back my glasses.”
I felt a guilty twist in my stomach. There was no way around it. I had to tell her.
“I broke them.”
“Why’d you do that?” she said.
“I’m sorry. I couldn’t help it. I was mad.”
I expected her to be angry, to insult me or yell at me or maybe even try to push me down, but I didn’t expect her to cry. I stood there uncomfortably watching her. I didn’t have a Kleenex to offer her, and I couldn’t think of anything to say to make it better. Finally she stopped and wiped her nose on her sleeve.
“They belonged to my father,” she said.
“Tell him I’ll pay him back,” I told her.
“I can’t. I don’t even know him. He left before I was born.”
“What about all that stuff you wrote about driving around in the car with him?” I asked. “Playing the radio and looking at the maps?”
“I made it all up.”
I was shocked. “I totally believed you,” I said.
“I’m sorry.”
“No, that’s okay,” I told her. “It was just all so believable, I’m surprised, that’s all. You could have told me the truth, you know.”
“I just did,” she said.
We started walking up the driveway again.
“Can I ask you something, Audrey?” I said after a while.
“Sure.”
“How did you know about the cherry cans?”
“All I know about cherry cans is that every day at lunch you either throw the whole can away or you open it, throw the cherries out, and keep the can,” Audrey told me. “And while we’re at it, I might as well tell you that I also know you don’t really read on the bus, you don’t like peanut butter, and for some reason you save gum wrappers.”
“You don’t have ESP,” I said. “You’ve been spying on me.”
“Not spying. Looking. It’s a free country. I can look at whoever I want.”
“But why do you want to look at me?” I said.
She blushed a deep pink.
“You figure it out,” she told me.
I had a feeling I just had, and I blushed too.
“By the way,” Audrey said, “I may not have ESP, but I sure hypnotized the heck out of you.” br />
“You did not,” I said. “I was awake the whole time.”
“Oh, yeah? Then why were you drooling?” asked Audrey.
“I wasn’t.”
“Oh, yes, you were, right down your chin. You came over to my house and lay down on the couch, and I hypnotized you until you drooled like a baby, and if you don’t want me telling everybody that, then you’d better just admit it right now.”
“Fine,” I said. “You hypnotized me.”
She grinned. “I did, didn’t I?”
We had reached the top of the driveway, and Old Gray’s office stood in front of us. The yellow police tape had been removed, but there was a heavy iron padlock on the front door.
“I have an idea,” Audrey said. “Let’s grab some rocks off that pile over there and break all the windows. Even if we get caught, nobody will blame us. Not after what he did.”
I will always have a soft spot in my heart for Audrey Krouch for having suggested that. And who knows, maybe it would have done me some good to hurl a few rocks through Old Gray’s windows. But when I looked over at the pile of stones Audrey was pointing to, something else caught my eye. A quick flash of red among the weeds. Audrey saw it too.
“What is that?” she said.
I knew what it was.
“It’s nothing,” I told her. “Come on, let’s go.”
I put my hand on her shoulder, but Audrey shook it loose, ran over, and bent down in the weeds.
“Come look at this! It’s a Christmas tree!” she called out to me.
“No, it’s not,” I called back.
“Yes, it is. It’s got Christmas lights on it. Come see for yourself if you don’t believe me.”
The bottom branches were dried up and had lost all their needles, and the dirt around the trunk was hard as cement, but the little tree was still alive. In fact there was even some new pale-green growth on the very top where I had once pinned the tin ashtray star. The star and the candy canes were long gone, but a few strands of tinsel clung to the branches, and the string of lights was still wrapped around it, a couple of feet of green cord with a plug on the end dangling out of the pot like a forked tail.