Authors: Drusilla Campbell

Wildwood (13 page)

BOOK: Wildwood

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If commitment’s what counts in life, Liz had screwed up big time. She hadn’t managed to commit to anything or anyone except herself. Until Gerard, home was wherever she built a bookcase and ate the local food. No deep bonds, few responsibilities. And for most of her life she had been comfortable living that way.

Into her mind came the man in Belize City who delivered bananas every week, a refugee from Haiti with skin black and shiny as Italian leather. He drove an ancient Cadillac painted two shades of pink. On Monday mornings she heard him coming from blocks away when his horn sang the first bars of Beethoven’s Fifth to warn other drivers that his brakes barely worked. Parked in the sun in front of the guest house, the old Cadillac’s chrome acreage blinded her eyes. So wonderful on the outside, the interior workings and the very bolts and screws that held the thing together had traveled their limit. Liz too had gone as many miles as she could manage without an overhaul. She was worn out and cul-de-sacked into the unavoidable conclusion that until she understood what happened that day at Bluegang, her life was on blocks, going nowhere. But it looked like she would have to do it without her friends’ help.

She walked to the end of the bridge and climbed around the cement piling and slip-slid down to the creek. Close up, there was more litter. Cigarette butts and cups and condoms. Was there anywhere people wouldn’t fuck if the mood struck them? Liz wished for a plastic garden bag and a stick with a nail on the end.

She followed a well-trodden path up the creek toward Hannah’s. In some places there was no litter at all, just manzanita and scrub, rocks and poison oak and she seemed to be walking into the past through a wildwood caught in a net of sunlight.

Now with the steep slope of the wooded canyon to her left, the dry creek bed widening on her right, she looked across to where a bit of frayed rope dangled from a sycamore branch. She remembered the Bolton boys and Jimmy Mesa and his crowd swinging way over the water and dropping into the deepest part of the creek. Some of the girls did it too on those summer days when the town pool closed and Bluegang was crowded with kids; but Liz never had the courage. Hannah jumped and Jeanne, of course. She had the nerve to climb way up the bank and push off hard so she swung far out like the boys did. Liz thought about the varieties of courage and how in her own way she was braver than either of her friends.

In the drought the wide flat boulders where she and Hannah and Jeanne had sunned themselves like pinups stood up in the dirt and sand like gray whales beached. She looked down at her feet and then up the hill at the great California live oak and its saddle of roots. Billy Phillips had fallen to more or less where she stood now. And that’s where they left him; that’s where the little boys with fishing poles found him the next day.

At breakfast that morning, her father forgot about their special appointment to talk. Instead he and her mother talked about who would be the next president, Stevenson or Eisenhower. They were enjoying themselves and Liz knew better than to interrupt them. As she was washing the breakfast dishes, the phone rang. From the next room she heard her mother’s hushed voice; but not the words she said except, “Oh, my God.”

Dorothy Shepherd pushed the swinging door between the dining room and the kitchen so hard it banged against the wall. “That unfortunate Billy Phillips is dead,” she said. “Apparently he fell and hit his head on the rocks at Bluegang.”

Liz had been afraid to speak.

“He didn’t come home last night and his mother didn’t know what to do. Finally she called Father Whittaker and he got the police out looking.” Dorothy Shepherd looked at the wash water in the sink. “Run fresh water. Hot as you can bear. Look at the grease scum.” She reached into the sink and pulled the plug.

“That was Hannah’s mother on the phone.” They watched the dishwater drain away, leaving a few dishes stranded in the sink. Liz crammed her hands deep in her pockets to hide their shaking. “She thinks—and for once I can’t fault her logic—you girls shouldn’t play down there again.” She fixed Liz with her pale blue eyes, and it was obvious she expected an argument. Liz looked away. She ran steaming water and poured in soap as if the work fascinated her.

“I never did like that place and now I know my instincts were right.” Dorothy Shepherd looked out the window over the sink to the backyard where her husband sat in a lawn chair correcting blue books in the shade of a wide-brimmed straw lifeguard’s hat crammed down on his head. “This is going to upset your father.”

That morning her parents talked outside until almost noon. After lunch Arthur Shepherd called Liz into his study. He took her hands and said, “I want your word of honor that you won’t go near that place again, Elizabeth.”

“I won’t, Daddy.” She loved him more than she did her mother. He was no more interested in her than Dorothy was, but in a father remoteness seemed normal.

“Your mother and I are very busy people, and we have to be able to trust you.”

“You can trust me, Daddy. I won’t go there again.” She added, fearing her willingness might betray a guilty conscience, “If you don’t want me to.”

And until now she had kept her word. What had she expected, revisiting the scene of the crime? A white-light epiphany or a purging grief? A boy had died, a mother had been orphaned, a part of Liz, of her possibilities, had died too. And she felt nothing. Flatline.

He was buried in the town cemetery on Casabella Road in a plot purchased by St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church because everyone knew Mrs. Phillips had only Social Security and her husband’s Army death benefit. Hannah’s father officiated at the ceremony with his assistant, Father Joe. Out of pity and respect for Mrs. Phillips (whose husband had been a hero, Liz heard her father say, at Guadalcanal), everyone along the road went to the graveside and heard Father Whittaker’s homily about children being nearest and dearest to God. During the service, Jeanne and Hannah and Liz stood far apart not looking at each other, and for days afterwards they remained apart. Two weeks elapsed before they talked on the phone and rode their bikes to see a Judy Garland movie on Saturday afternoon. Liz couldn’t remember the name of the movie but she did remember this: In the dark of the theater and without speaking, they reached out and held hands.

Saturday

T
he clock beside Jeanne’s bed indicated it was not yet 6:00, but she knew the cooks were already at work in the school kitchen. Because it was Saturday, breakfast would be pancakes; and because it was October, there would be applesauce. In less than an hour, the housekeeping staff would punch in, and by noon the sitting room and hall of the main building would be full of the fragrance of freshly cut roses, and sometime during the day she knew Edith White would turn to her and say, “End of season blooms always smell the sweetest.”

Saturday lunch: make-your-own sandwiches from cold cuts and cheese and—because it was October—bowls full of Pink Lady apples. Intramural or league, all through October and November there were Saturday games Jeanne could count on. If she felt blue, watching the little boys play mayhem soccer almost lifted her spirits. On Saturday nights the senior school had a social exchange with another school or games and movies while the junior school crowded the common room to play board games, watch movies and eat big sticky handfuls of caramel popcorn. In the early days, when the school was short-staffed and struggling they had taken a few boarders as young as six and seven, boys marooned by parents gone off on world cruises, parentless boys put out to board by overwhelmed grandparents. Jeanne was touched by the bravery and stoicism of these abandoned boys who deserved to be at home with siblings, a messy room and a big gallumphing dog. She looked forward all week to the time in her Saturday night schedule when she read aloud to them. For the occasion she dragged out books Teddy told her no kid read anymore—
Dr. Dolittle, The Jungle Book
and
Just So Stories;
and when she looked up from the pages at their intent faces she imagined one of the boys was her own son returned to her by the whim of a perverse god, and that the story of Mowgli encouraged him.

After her brother died and her parents started killing themselves with drink and work, it was Jeanne’s salvation that a cook came before six to make the morning meal and see that the sitting room roses were fresh. She couldn’t control her mother’s condemnatory silence or her father’s subtle forms of abuse, but she could depend on the school cook—Billy Phillips’s mother at one time—could depend on dinner being served in the big hall at precisely six and there was never any doubt that in the fall there would be apples for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Are you happy?

Obviously Liz was. Hannah worried she had AIDS or cancer but Jeanne didn’t think there was a chance of that. She glowed with good health and seemed more confident than she ever had. And Jeanne didn’t have to be an expert on the emotions to see the way Liz looked when she spoke of Gerard. She loved him not in some intellectual, theoretical or practical way but . . . powerfully.

Just wait until she was actually married and a few years had gone by.

Jeanne had never spent more than a few moments thinking about what it meant to be happy. Maybe in a philosophy course there had been some determined argument between herself and a professor; it was the kind of thing one talked about in college and then forgot. She lived. She got up in the morning and ate and breathed and worked and did her best and then she went to sleep. She had always been perplexed by the line in the Declaration of Independence about the
pursuit
of happiness and didn’t know how a person would do this. She wasn’t sure she would recognize it if she saw it running up ahead, taunting her, daring her to chase after it.

She expected to work, to take charge, to be responsible and sufficiently disciplined to control her environment. And whatever resulted from her efforts . . . well, if it was happiness then good.

Liz’s question was typical of the emotional thinking Jeanne expected from her and felt compelled to put down. At the same time, if Liz had changed, Jeanne would have felt the loss keenly. Her friend’s peculiar observations could jolt Jeanne’s thinking in a way she did not like but recognized as, at least theoretically, good. Liz was in many ways a foreign country to Jeanne; and often their time together made her feel as she had on the walk to the flume—defensive and slightly third worldish. The years of friendship, the fights and making up and deep confidences, had never completely dispelled this sense of impoverishment. The sky-ey Land of Liz had resources of imagination and emotion absent from Jeanne’s gravity-bound world; and though she tried to believe this lack made her at least Liz’s equal and probably her superior, she never convinced herself for long.

She squinted at the clock beside the bed: 5:45. Too early to get up. She lay on her back, legs straight, arms at her side and imagined she was lying on the lion-footed bench in the rose cloister on a hot summer day. The sun would heat her skin and the smell of the flowers, the drone of the bees, would drown out whatever was in her head she wanted to ignore. She thought of her brother standing over her, shaking down rose petals and the sun behind him made a penumbra of gold around his handsome head. She wished she could believe in angels. It would have comforted her to know that Michael hovered nearby, watching over her.

In the spring of his last year at Stanford he and two other football players, drunk on a Saturday night, had become disoriented, bumped over a median strip and drove down an off-ramp onto Bayshore Freeway. Going north in the southbound lanes by Foster City they’d rammed a pickup truck head-on. Everyone died. Five people altogether.

Jeanne turned in bed and her hand grazed Teddy’s back in silk pajamas. They cost more than two hundred dollars a pair and he had a drawer full of them in maroon and navy blue and black with silver piping. Jeanne didn’t begrudge him the luxury of silk pajamas and Italian slacks and cashmere sweaters. Hilltop was a financial success in large part because Teddy was good at managing money and brazen about asking for it. Hilltop’s endowment, bank accounts and investments had soared on the Silicon Valley boom. But his gimme-gimme shamed Jeanne sometimes.

She remembered Simon Weed’s pudgy dimpled hands. Touching her they would be warm and soft as fresh bread. Almost dreaming, she remembered his kindness like a kiss. It stirred her to think of how he loved his son, and she wanted to touch herself, but she didn’t dare with Teddy sleeping beside her. Once he’d caught her, and his teasing shamed her for weeks afterwards. She did not tell him; he would not have understood that some mornings there was a valley of ache in her and she needed to be touched. She reached out and lightly stroked the muscular line of Teddy’s hip and thigh. Somehow he found time to go to the gym four days a week.

Jeanne moved her hand around to caress his stomach under the shirt of his pajamas. “Want to?”

“I’m asleep.”

“Let me wake you up.” Her fingers traced the line of curling hair from his navel to his groin. “Please.”

“I said I’m asleep.”

“Teddy, it’s been weeks . . .”

He hunched off to the far side of the bed. Jeanne laid her palm on the warm place where his body had been.

Her father would say,
Happiness isn’t the point.
There were good and bad times, disappointments and victories. Trade-offs. To expect more of life was romanticism, wind in the eaves with no storm behind it.
Get on with business, Jeanne Louise.

Liz’s talk about Bluegang, that had been a surprise; and now, of course, details of that day rose to the surface of Jeanne’s mind like the plague of jellyfish that ruined her last visit to Hawaii. The boy’s brown blood on the rock and his startled mouth, the space between his two front teeth. Hannah’s bright toenails. Liz had brought these memories with her.

Jeanne had never second-guessed their actions on that day. For girls so young, they had behaved with laudatory pragmatism. Silence had protected both Hannah and Billy Phillips’s mother. If Hannah had told her story not only would she and her family have suffered, poor Mrs. Phillips would have been shamed and hurt. They had done what was best for everyone.

The school phone rang.

Jeanne reached out to answer it.

Edith White said, “Jeanne, I’m sorry to bother you early but I thought you’d want to know . . .”

“It’s okay, Edith.” Jeanne swung her legs over the edge of the bed and stood. “I’m up.” She carried the phone to the window and watched a pair of mourning doves pecking in the unplanted garden. She wondered, as she always did, if it was true they mated for life.

“It’s that new boy. Adam Weed.”

Jeanne’s back stiffened.

“I was just getting started this morning when I saw him coming across the field.”

“Before first bell?”

“Oh, my, yes. Way before. It was just barely getting light. I watched him walk across the soccer field and back into the dormitory.”

Jeanne’s feet on the hardwood were blocks of ice.

“Did you speak to him?”

“I didn’t think it was my place. Not at this stage anyway. Him being new and all.”

“He has some learning problems. Maybe he doesn’t understand the rules yet.”

“What boy doesn’t know it’s wrong to leave his room in the middle of the night and go wandering all over heaven-knows-where?” Edith asked. “That’s more than learning problems, if you ask me.”

From her bed in the guest room on the second floor Liz watched a pair of doves side by side on the phone wire, chic in their black-and-white and pearl gray ensembles. They seemed fond of each other. If she said this to Gerard he would laugh and say she was anthropomorphizing. But he would not try to change her thinking, nor would he be critical in an unkind way. He let her think as she wanted, do as she chose. Once she had believed this tolerance meant he didn’t really care for her. It had taken time to realize that Gerard believed in her in a way she did not believe in herself. He assumed she would do the right thing or as close to it as she could manage at the time. He did not think she needed him at her elbow directing and admonishing. What freedom had come with this? To say what she wanted. To do what she thought best. To make mistakes and to ask advice or not.

She shifted her position, trying to get comfortable. Her pregnancy barely showed but internally her body had changed and there were times like now when she felt possessed by an entity that meant to do her harm. This baby was a freak occurrence that never should have happened. Gerard said it was the evolutionary drive of the body to reproduce itself before too late. As if labeling a disaster made it any less a disaster.

She folded her hands over her stomach. Sometimes she woke in the middle of the night and thought she felt the baby move but the feeling passed so quickly she could not be sure it wasn’t just gas, what Hannah’s mother used to call cobby-wobbles. She was grateful movement hadn’t yet begun. She knew herself. When the bucks and rolls began she would imagine communication, personality, a life would unspool in her mind and she would not be able to stop it.

She wished Gerard were beside her now. After less than a week she missed him and this was unexpected. Without noticing it until now, her affection for him had settled at a deeper level, like rocks and sand and soil at the end of a long subsidence.

Rap reverberated through the wall between Liz’s room and Eddie’s. The house throbbed and sang with the sound of piped water.

Family.

Saturday morning.

In the big double bed, she stretched her long legs and like a little girl tried to make her toes reach all the way to the end of the mattress. They didn’t and her right foot cramped.

Middle age.

She sat up and bent her toes against the cramp until it released. Gingerly she let them go; gently she massaged them. Her fingers touched the poison oak rash. It was dry and harmless now. A dab of Dan’s wonder drug had done the job. In the mirror across the room she saw herself and thought, not bad. She might be cramping up like a beached starfish, but for fifty, she looked okay. From across the room she couldn’t see the creases around her eyes or the tiny lines around her mouth. If she squinted she looked pretty much as she had the last time she slept in Hannah’s guest room.

But I’m still too old to have a baby.

A tap on the door. “I brought you a latte, Aunt Liz.” Ingrid held out a paisley printed coffee mug.

BOOK: Wildwood

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