A Knot in the Grain (21 page)

She got up and dressed, and went outdoors. But even the garden held no peace for her today, and she went on down to the restless river, and turned right, away from the town, and then turned again and retraced her footsteps, stepped over the low wall, and wandered down the main street. It was late enough now that the shops were opening and there were people on the streets; she knew a few to say hello to from her parents'
NO HIGHWAY HERE
group, and one young mother surprised her by asking if she'd like to baby-sit. Annabelle remembered her; she had one of those really passionate voices, and her posters were better than anyone else's. Annabelle, with an armful of delightedly thrashing two-year-old, said, “Oh—sure. I guess.” She'd liked baby-sitting, back in her old life; she'd found the self-absorption of little kids a kick, and had a good time with them—so long as their mothers came home again after a few hours and rescued her.

She walked on, feeling a new little sense of warmth: something she could do besides hoe and read. Something to do with people, something she understood, changing diapers and keeping little hands away from stoves and closing doors—unlike writing bold angry words she didn't believe on pieces of paper to be looked at by government officials she couldn't imagine about the fate of a town she was a stranger to.

She went to the library and into the young adults' room and, without thinking, found herself in front of the
L
's. The
Orange Fairy Book
was in; she'd been waiting for that one, before she started
The Mayor of Casterbridge
. She pulled it down and stood looking at it. It wouldn't hurt, reading another book of fairy tales. What was she afraid of? She was staring down at the book in her hands and not paying attention to her feet, which had begun moving again; and then the sudden sunlight startled her as she came out from the shelves into the muddle of rec room chairs. She stopped.

There were only four of them this time. She could feel her face freeze again, but behind the frozenness she felt the longing: someone to talk to, a friend. A friend. And just as suddenly the silence was hovering.
Please
, it said. And they stood there, she and it, and the four kids looked at the one kid, and Annabelle looked back.

No, she said to the silence. I'm sorry. But not this. And it went away from her, and she felt the old sadness draw back too; she knew, clearly, at least for that moment, what was hers and what was not. And with that knowledge came a sudden rush of confidence. She stepped forward. “Hi,” she said. “My name's Annabelle.”

“Yeah,” said one of the boys. “We know. I'm Alan. My older sister Nancy's on that
NO HIGHWAY HERE
committee. I'm sorry I missed the corn, though.”

“There's more,” said Annabelle. “All you have to do is stuff a few envelopes and hang around looking hungry. My mom likes feeding people.”

“My mom too,” said one of the girls. “Everybody but her family.” There was a ripple of laughter—this was obviously an old joke—excluding Annabelle, who suddenly wondered if she should have said what she did, so quickly, and to a boy too.

But before her little bubble of confidence burst into nothing, the other girl spoke over the end of the laughter: “You're reading Andrew Lang.” It was the girl Annabelle had seen twice before, the one who'd smiled.

“Oh … I …” began Annabelle, floundering, but the girl went on: “I love the old Lang books, and
Wind in the Willows
and
The Borrowers
and stuff. I saw you that day in the library bringing back all my favorites, but Mary was in a hurry or I would have said something. I'm Nell.”

“Nell's gonna be a writer,” drawled Alan. Nell scowled.

“When we were all in fourth grade, Nell wrote a story about a lavender unicorn that sucked nectar out of flowers with its horn, like a bee, you know, and Alan stole it and we all read it,” said the girl who had spoken first.

“And I've
never
forgiven you,” said Nell.

“She has a word processor now, the stuff's harder to steal,” said Alan, unrepentant.

“You're starting school with us in a week, aren't you?” said Nell.

“Yes,” said Annabelle in a voice much smaller than she'd have liked.

“You'll be glad to get out of your house, I think,” said the girl who had the mother who liked to feed everyone but her family, “now that
NO HIGHWAY HERE
has taken it over.”

“Yeah, well, I'm glad somebody's doing something,” said the other boy, who had been silent till now.

“So am I,” said Nell.

“Lavender unicorns for peace,” murmured Alan.

“Let's get out of here before some librarian comes and snarls at us,” said the second boy.

“If they didn't want anybody to sit around here talking, why did they set it up to look like a place where you can sit around and talk?” said Nell, reasonably, but she got up. “You busy?” she said to Annabelle. “We'll probably go over to the Good Baker. You can sit there forever for the price of a cup of coffee.”

“Sure,” said Annabelle.

“Say, you have a car, don't you?” said Alan. “You bought Pat's old clunker.”

“That's right,” said Annabelle.

“Be careful,” said Nell. “Alan's an opportunist. Alan O. Poole, that's him. You've already invited him to dinner, although you may not be aware of it.”

“I have a car,” said Alan, with dignity, as they threaded their way through the shelves.

“You have a chassis on four wheels,” said the other girl. “There's a difference.”

“Hush,” said Nell, and they went through the library lobby, where the one librarian on duty looked at them warily over her spectacles.

Annabelle went home in the late afternoon, her mind in a whirl. She knew she liked Nell—besides the fact she almost had to like anyone who would admit in public that she still reread
The Borrowers
the summer before her junior year of high school—and she thought she liked Diana, the other girl. Alan was cute, but he knew it, which Annabelle didn't like, but Nell seemed to think he was a good guy anyway. The other boy, Frank, seemed to see the worst sides of things—but she kind of understood that, and it wasn't as if he was making any of it up or anything. He was the one who told her more about
NO HIGHWAY HERE;
she supposed she'd heard it before, in snatches, at least, at home, but it was different when someone was explaining it specifically to you, and telling you in such a way that you believed that it was important to him that you paid attention and understood.

For the first time there was a tiny thread of feeling under her breastbone that said: It would be a pity if the highway came here. If six lanes of hot noisy tarmac crossed just behind the main street, if it cut down all the trees along the river for half a mile, if those meadows and farmers' fields—even if the farmers were reimbursed, which they were supposed to be—were ruined forever as meadows and farm fields. If all those rabbits and skunks and raccoons and porcupines—even grey squirrels, and she didn't like grey squirrels—went homeless. And if the air, even at midnight, smelled faintly of exhaust. No. She didn't want the highway here either. Even if she left this place the day after she got her high school diploma and never came back.

She lay awake a long time that night, watching the moon through her window, turning on her side to keep it in view for as long as possible. She was meeting Nell and Diana and Mary, whom Annabelle had seen the once several weeks ago, the day after tomorrow. They were going shopping for winter coats, and anything else they might see.

And a few days after that was the town meeting. Nell and Alan were going, and some of their friends she hadn't met yet, Linda and George and Kate and some other names she'd forgotten, and Annabelle was thinking about going with them. Then Frank telephoned her that afternoon and asked if she was coming. Of course, she found herself saying, and then Frank said, “Um, well, I'll look for you there, you know I could tell you who everybody was and stuff. You know, the businessmen who think it would be a good idea, and the green guys who know better.”

Frank was short, no taller than Annabelle, and he walked funny, kind of crouched and tense. Nothing like Bill. “Sure,” said Annabelle. “Sounds great.”

Her elation lasted till about halfway through the meeting, when it became obvious to everyone that
NO HIGHWAY HERE
was losing. The people on the other side were smoother, and they knew how to talk about “helping the economic profile of this rather depressed area.” They made the highway sound like a slight inconvenience for a good causes—what were a few meadows and trees one way or another? It wasn't as if this town didn't have lots of meadows and trees. In fact, that was its whole problem, that it didn't have much else but meadows and trees, and small family farms, well, everyone knew what was happening to small family farms all over the country these days. Local farmers hereabouts were lucky the highway people were interested. When a few of the
NO HIGHWAY HERE
people began to get angry, they only looked silly. Even Mr. Webster's facts and statistics—read out as gravely as anyone could read—didn't make enough of an impression. Not as much of an impression as the sleek leather briefcases and designer three-piece suits of the fellows who murmured the magic word
jobs
.

Annabelle lay awake that night too, but she was restless and irritable. Why can't anything be simple? she thought. Why did my parents have to decide that this was the small town they wanted to move to? Why did I decide to get involved anyway? Who cares? Who needs friends anyway? But she knew better, and the anger drained out of her. Where she was was here, and what she was was involved. She did care. It had happened. And now they were going to get a highway. Her parents had trailed home as silent and depressed as the kids; that was how she knew. If Mr. Webster had said anything to them afterward to give them hope, they would have been grim but not oppressed. Not silent and exhausted, the way they were.

And then she thought of the box in her closet. She'd been unaware of it since the afternoon in the library when she'd met Nell and the rest. No wonder, she thought, it was all your imagination anyway, you just made something up to keep yourself from being quite so lonely, like a little kid makes up an imaginary friend. I should have named it, she thought. Bess. Or Song of the Wind, or something: a kind of lavender-unicorn name. Well, I'm glad I didn't give up about my shoes without trying, even if I tried for the wrong reasons.

She turned over and tried to go to sleep—school was only two days away now, but she thought of it with a much pleasanter sense of alarmed anticipation than she had done a week ago—but sleep refused to come. Instead she fell into what she assumed must be a kind of waking dream: She was dreaming about the box in the closet. I have something for you, she told it. But I'll need help. Can you get Clunker to start silently, just once?

She sat up. Nonsense! she said to herself. I'm
awake
! But she got out of bed anyway, and went to her closet. She could see the cracks around the door, because they were … not quite dark. She opened the door, cautiously. The light was very faint, and grey, almost furtive: pleading. It was the marks on the box that were glowing, almost like tiny crooked windows with the end of twilight coming through. Or the beginnings of dawn. Okay, she murmured. We'll try.

She put her clothes on, tucked the box under one arm, and crept downstairs. I'll know in a minute, she thought. When I try to start Clunker. But what am I going to tell my parents if they see me in the driver's seat at two in the morning with a box with funny-looking marks which may or may not be glowing on it in the passenger seat beside me? She turned the key, and Clunker started at once, as it always did; but with a kind of low purring hum, so faint she could barely hear it, and knew the engine was running only by the vibration through her feet. She put it in gear, and they rolled gently down the driveway.

I'm sure there's a right way to do this, she said to the box, but I don't know what it is. She drove in a wide, ragged circle, depending on what roads there were, and which ones she recognized, all around the town. And every now and then, when she felt that she'd been driving long enough, she stopped, and opened the box, reached in till she touched something, picked it up—all the things were smallish, hand-sized, lumpy, roundish, and very faintly warm to the touch—carried it to the roadside, scrabbled a little in the earth with a screwdriver out of Clunker's glove compartment, put it in, covered it over, said, “Thanks,” out loud, and went back to the car. The first time she'd put her hand in the box she'd hesitated, remembering that eerie tingle; but nothing of the sort happened this time, except a curious kind of contentment in the touch of the thing against her palm, a sense of cradling, as you might do with a kitten. She remembered a description she'd read somewhere of one of those breeds of hairless cat; the journalist said that she'd thought they were really ugly, but then had held a kitten in her hand, and thought better of her first reaction. It felt like a warm peach, she wrote. The things out of the box were a bit like faintly knobbly warm peaches.

It took her several hours. She was settling the last one under leaf mold when she suddenly thought: I have one more favor to ask you. The attic-over-the-attic: Could it no longer be there? Somehow. I mean, if there's more of you up there, I don't want to have to deal with it. I'm an ordinary girl, you know. I want to go on being ordinary.

And she heard the silence for the last time.

When the new superhighway went in, there was a great round bow in its elegant engineered sweep north and west: a very odd-looking, out-of-place bow, shaped a little like the way grains of wood spread out and then curl in around a knot, giving wide berth to a tiny town of about five thousand people out in the middle of nowhere. The town was beautifully centered in the bow, so beautifully that even an engineer had to admire it, however badly it twisted the handsome strong lay of the highway. The ecological reports, everyone said vaguely. Something about the ecology of the area. Don't really know; somebody must have had an in somewhere. There isn't really any reason at all.