A Place Apart (16 page)

It must have been owner's pride in the car that made Frank ask Tom. I couldn't believe he cared much for his company. As far as I knew, no one in the sophomore class was especially friendly to him.

Tom glanced back at the Mill. “My friend is late, very late,” he said, mostly to himself. His friend. Hugh had stood him up, I guessed.

“All right, I'll come along,” he said, as though persuaded against his will. He got into the back seat, next to me, and coiled his scarf on his lap. He didn't look at me at all.

“We're off,” Frank said, and the car, which had been idling, jumped and began to move.

It was damp and cold inside, like the cellar of a deserted house. I sat as far away as I could from Tom. We didn't move; we didn't speak. In the front seat, Elizabeth and Frank muttered to each other, and laughed and hummed songs and paid their two silent passengers no attention at all.

I'm going to make a big scene, I thought. I'm going to ask Frank to stop the car and let me out, and when they ask me why, I'm going to say that I have better things to do with time than spend it with two idiots and one snowman. I didn't. But I felt a little better just imagining the scene. Frank asked Tom what he thought about New Oxford's basketball team and its chances against a neighboring village team. Tom replied he didn't know much about the chances because he wasn't much interested in basketball. I don't know whether he meant to be scornful, but he sounded that way, and I thought of Hugh's easy, indifferent dismissal of sports, of anything that didn't interest him.

“Yeah? Well, I'm interested, and so is everyone else,” Frank said in a challenging voice, and Tom said uneasily, “I guess so.”

We were out of the village now and on a blacktop road that went past several farmhouses.

“Isn't one of those houses where you live?” Elizabeth asked.

“No,” Tom said, and that was all. I saw Elizabeth and Frank exchange significant glances, and I felt as if I'd been slapped, even though their silent little conversation wasn't about me but about Tom. It was as if I was the one who wasn't giving the right answers.

“Runs like a dream,” Frank announced. Why did he leave out pronouns, like a television-commercial announcer?

“It's amazing,” Elizabeth said, “I don't know how you did it!”

“Had to hit a dozen places to find parts,” he said.

We suddenly veered sharply to the right and Elizabeth let out a small, very polite, scream. Tom was thrown against me and his elbow hit my rib cage. “Sorry,” he muttered.

“A little ice,” Frank said. “Notice how the wheels held?”

“Great,” said Elizabeth.

Tom and I rearranged ourselves, making sure nothing touched, not our coats or our scarves or our feet on the narrow floor space. Had he been given orders by Hugh not to speak to me?

Frank turned off the road we had been following, and at once, we began to climb. Frank and Elizabeth weren't murmuring now. He was hunched over the steering wheel, working the gearshift back and forth as the road grew steeper. On our right, the dark pine forest on the slopes I had glimpsed all the way from Autumn Street rose like a vast black cliff. Ahead, on the narrow road, I saw large patches of ice shining in the headlights. Then the road would curve in a hairpin turn and we'd be driving next to the mountain itself where boulders loomed over us and seemed, as we passed them, to be only momentarily at rest, ready in an instant to tumble down and silence the rattling little car and its passengers. I began to be scared.

“It's pretty icy, isn't it?” Tom asked anxiously. He leaned forward toward the front seat. “Maybe we'd better not try it,” he said. “We could take a bad skid.”

Frank said nothing, only bent closer over the steering wheel.

The cold was intense and I felt it to my bare, shivering bones. There were no street lamps; we could see only the road and the pale watery headlights. What could live in that forest? Everything, I imagined, was by itself and silent—a hunting fox, a snake beneath a rock coiled in winter sleep, a bird, half frozen on a branch, strayed off its course to a warmer place. I looked at Elizabeth, and she, too, looked frozen. Tom moved and fidgeted constantly, straining to stare out the window, sinking back, then rearing up.

“Let's go back,” I croaked.

“No,” Frank said. It was a no like a dropped stone.

“I think—” Tom began.

“No!” Frank shouted. “We're going all the way up to the top!”

We wound upward. I saw a broken wood railing, the jagged edges pointing out toward nothing, and I wondered what had crashed through it, and I shivered and my teeth chattered. When we skidded, Frank would turn and twist the wheel violently. Each time we went into a sickening slide I felt as though I were falling into a black ravine. I heard Tom gasp. Once he made a noise like a puppy—it was such a small noise, so private, I think I was the only one to hear it.

Then there were no more trees, only a sense of the earth falling away forever. We were nearly flying. We were in a frozen tin box, attached to the earth by Frank's hands on the steering wheel. I couldn't think what Frank looked like. I told myself he had a mustache and reddish hair, but he had become for me some senseless thing that drove on.

Suddenly we stopped. We were there, on the top of the mountain. Our deep-drawn breaths sounded as though we were lowering pails into a well for water. Frank laughed.

“We did it! The car did it! Come on! Let's get out.”

We were next to a parking area where people probably came in the summer to see the view. It was covered with drifts of snow, and as we walked through them, there was a sound like many candles being blown out. An iron railing circled the parking place, and when we reached it, I could see the earth far below us, a dark ocean with pools of light here and there like ships. One of those pools might have been New Oxford. Frank pointed to a haze of light at the farthest horizon. “That's Boston,” he said, so proudly you would have thought he was pointing at his own city.

We were looking at a great living map. The air was sharp and it crackled like a new bill. My lungs ached. Above us, the icy stars glittered; in the forest below, perhaps, a snowshoe rabbit was poised, listening to the echo of our racketing passage up the mountain, a sound as mysterious to it as the stars were to me. I was looking down at the world, and I felt such a wave of happiness I thought I would sail out into space.

“We'll have to go back,” called Tom. I turned and saw him standing close to the car. With one hand, he clutched a door handle as though he were teetering on the edge of a cliff. “It'll be worse going back,” he said.

“You don't skid any worse going down than going up,” Frank said scornfully. “Why don't you take it easy?”

“Much worse,” Tom said in that voice of his which didn't rise or fall, which didn't match up with the way he looked or the words he spoke. I could tell he was too frightened to take a step away from the car. Yet how strange it was that he held on to the car so desperately, held on to the thing he dreaded.

“Maybe you'd better walk down,” Frank said as he stomped through the drifts toward the car. Elizabeth stepped precisely in his boot prints. Her head was down and I couldn't see her face. “Are you scared?” I asked her. “Oh, Tory,” she exclaimed, not looking up. What did that mean?

Frank had already swung into the driver's seat, and Elizabeth and I were standing next to Tom.

“I will walk down,” he said in a low voice.

“It's miles,” I said.

“He'll kill us,” he said.

Elizabeth put her hand on the car door. “He won't kill us,” she said in a voice as cold as the air. “He's a good driver.” She got in and sat there, letting whoever cared to look at her calm profile. I suddenly remembered her face swollen with hives. Did having a boyfriend have to make a person so proud?

“We'd better get in,” I said to Tom. “You can't walk down. You'd freeze to death.”

He looked at me for an instant, then he opened the door and waited while I got in. I was thinking hard about the expression I had seen on his face and I forgot for a moment what might lie ahead of us. He had looked timid. Tom Kyle was timid. Did Hugh tell him what was important and what wasn't? Did he tell him what to do, the way he used to tell me what to do? I looked sideways at Tom. He was huddled in the corner of the seat, that long scarf wrapped around the lower part of his face. I wanted to say something to him—I don't know what. I wanted him to speak to me.

Frank started the car. It coughed and shook and he drove it in a circle until it was facing downhill.

“Okay,” he said. “Here we go.”

Everything was fine for a few minutes. Then we lurched forward and slipped sideways to the edge of the road. Frank stamped on the brake, and Elizabeth shouted, “No brakes! My father said no brakes on ice!”

“Shut up!” Frank yelled. “Everybody shut up!” Tom and I piled up like a football scramble. Elizabeth was flung forward against the windshield, and she screamed. Oh, my poor Ma, I thought. We'll all be dead soon! The car straightened out; the pale lights that felt along the road like an insect's antennae went off.

“Okay, okay …” Frank muttered. “That's the worst of it.” He started up and we inched forward in first gear. Elizabeth had her hands on her head. “Are you all right?” I asked. She just shook her head. I looked at Tom, and he had his gloved hands on his face.

“I can't stand this!” I said. “Let us out!”

Frank didn't stop. We went along with no skids for a while. I noticed a large boulder I'd seen on the way up and I knew we were close to the tree line. If we have an accident now, I thought, at least the trees will stop us from tumbling down the whole mountain.

We hit ice. The car spun completely around. Tom and Elizabeth and I all screamed together as if we were singing, but Frank was silent, bent over the wheel like a demon, his elbows straight out. The engine stuttered and stopped. We were facing up the mountain. We were still alive. I heard Tom Kyle gasping into his scarf. I realized he was crying.

“Listen,” Frank said weakly. We all listened. “We made it,” he said. “I'll just turn around. We're nearly down. Nothing can happen now. Listen … we're all right.”

We skittered a hundred yards or so and emerged on the main road to New Oxford. Frank was sitting up straight now, and I looked at him, my mind full of murderer's thoughts.

Elizabeth said, in a voice that trembled, “We shouldn't have gone up there.”

No one spoke.

As Frank drew up and parked in front of the Mill, I saw there were a few people inside, eating and talking. That meant it wasn't ten yet, when the Mill closed. How long had we been gone? The time that clocks measured might be uniform, but there was no measurement I could think of for what had happened to us on Mt. Crystal. Should I thank Frank for the ride and then hit him? He was opening the door for Tom and me. Why didn't Tom move? Why did he just sit there?

“Are you getting out?” Frank was asking. Suddenly I saw Hugh's face just above the plastic turkey in the window of the Mill. He was standing there, looking out at us.

I touched Tom's arm, and he moved very slowly. Just as he got his feet on the sidewalk, Hugh came quickly out of the restaurant door. Tom was holding his bunched scarf in his hands. He looked dazed, as though he didn't know where he was.

“I've been waiting for you for an hour!” Hugh said in such an accusing voice I would have been only a little surprised if he'd taken out a rope, tied Tom up, and led him away.

Tom said nothing. Frank was staring at him, at his trousers. I looked. I saw dark uneven stains like the shadows of tall grass.

“Where did you go—what were you doing with them?” Hugh shouted.

Tom's voice rose in a thin wail. “I waited for you …”

Hugh turned and walked away up the hill. Tom wrapped his scarf around his throat, letting one end of it hang down to hide the stains on his pants. He glanced once at Frank and said without any expression at all—as if he were talking about the weather—“You freak.” Then he walked down Main Street and I watched him until he vanished from sight.

“He wet himself,” Frank said. “He was scared out of his mind and he wet himself.”

Elizabeth rolled down her window and stuck her head out.

“What's going on?” she asked.

“I'll drive you home, Vicky,” Frank said.

“No,” I stated. “You won't.”

The Mill's display window went dark. Lights stayed on only at the back, where the kitchen was, and I saw the waitress lean against the wall and light a cigarette. Two men wearing similar plaid jackets stepped out the door and said good night to each other and walked off. I heard Frank sigh as he went to get in his car, and I heard Elizabeth roll up her window. They were shut away now. The street felt peculiarly empty, as though there was no life anywhere in it, only weather. The cold was suddenly unbearable. I started quickly toward home.

Our living-room lights were on, and I saw Ma bent over a book at the table in front of the windows. All at once, I knew why I'd had such trouble getting her to say I could go for a ride with Elizabeth and Frank. It wasn't what I'd said that had made her hesitate so—it was what I'd known, that it would be dangerous. It was what I concealed—that we were going to drive up the mountain. And she had heard in my voice something hidden.

“How was your ride?” she asked when I opened the door.

“Fine,” I said. I walked into the kitchen, dropped the milk carton getting it out of the refrigerator, and spilled cocoa in the sink. I gave up and put both milk and cocoa away.

“Tory?” Ma called. “How was Frank's car?”

“He's a wonderful driver,” I said, and I felt disgusted with myself. She couldn't know why I had spoken so mockingly. I couldn't explain anything now. “I'm tired,” I said. “I'm going to bed.”