A Place Apart (17 page)

In my room, I dug around until I found my old copy of
Robin Hood and His Merry Men.
I hadn't looked at it in a long time. When I was little, Papa had read it to me at night. I had loved Will Scarlet, and I had often fallen asleep imagining myself joining Robin's band in Sherwood Forest. But tonight, the printed words didn't have their old magic. It was not Will Scarlet I pictured; it was Tom Kyle and his misery.

Elizabeth phoned me in the morning. She kept saying how terrible our ride had been. Each time I would agree with her, she would say what a marvelous driver Frank was. So I stopped agreeing with her about how awful things had been, and she went on to talk about Tom.

“I couldn't see what had happened,” she said, “but Frank told me.”

I told her I'd seen the same thing happen to a little girl in the third grade in my old school in Boston. She was supposed to play Spontaneous Combustion in a school program about the causes of fire. “Right on the stage, in assembly,” I said.

“I'd die,” Elizabeth said. “I'd never get over it.”

“She got over it,” I said. “But it took a while.”

“Well,
I'm
not going to tell anyone,” Elizabeth said, as though I'd accused her.

The few days left before school started were long days for me, bound at either end by the winter dark. The winter felt like a hard shell, and I longed for it to crack, to break open. Whatever I thought of doing seemed pointless. When Ma was out, I watched television until I felt as if I'd stuffed myself with stale marshmallows. Then I'd look out the window. Then I'd eat crackers.

“Tory, wash your hair!” Ma said to me one morning. “You look like Medusa.”

I wanted to look like Medusa; I wanted to wear socks that didn't match, and shirts with missing buttons. Sherwood Forest would have been much too active and well furnished for me these days. I wanted to be a bum.

But I washed my hair, and while I was standing in the shower, half dreaming of I don't know what under the streaming water, I thought about Tom and how he wasn't wonderful or special or even more interesting than I was. I thought about how I'd been when we'd moved to New Oxford, jumpy and frightened and raw, and Hugh had taken me out of all those feelings. Papa's death had made me timid. I don't know what made Tom timid. But that's how we were alike. And I realized Hugh must have liked us because we both were timid and uncertain. I hadn't ever thought before that you could be liked for your shortcomings.

I knew that Hugh would drop Tom, just as he'd dropped me. He had to be the only person in your life—and when he thought he wasn't, he'd desert you. If he once saw you as ridiculous, he'd turn away from you forever. How would he ever find a human being who wasn't ridiculous sometimes?

On New Year's Eve, Ma and I stayed up until midnight. I heard one faint horn note somewhere at the end of Autumn Street right after the church bells rang in the year. It made us both laugh.

“Old Mr. Thames,” said Ma.

“More likely Benny,” I said.

I lay awake a long time after midnight, wondering what was going to happen in the next twelve months.

On January 3, I went back to school, and the first person I saw going up the path was Hugh. I waited until he went in.

I didn't see him again for a week, and then it was at a distance, as he walked partway down the hill toward his house. In that week, everyone heard about Tom Kyle. The kindest way I heard the story told was by a girl in my French class, who said, “I hear there was an accident
in
Frank Wilson's car, not out of it!”

I told her that if she'd been there, the same thing might have happened to her, that we'd nearly got killed. But she only laughed. What can you do against that kind of laugh? It threw a person right out of the world.

I heard the Drama Club had decided on a play for graduation, so I asked Mr. Tate about it and he told me they were going to do
The Mikado.
Even though I didn't want to know much about it, I asked him if everyone had agreed to that—Hugh? Lucille? Tom Kyle? He said Tom Kyle had resigned from the club saying he had too much to do, catching up on work he'd missed because of transferring from another school.

I saw Tom in the hall once, and on an impulse, I went over to speak to him. But he gave me such a terrible look I backed up and banged into the wall.

“I didn't tell anyone,” Elizabeth said, even though I hadn't asked her. “I guess you didn't. And I know Frank wouldn't.”

Was she lying to me? I couldn't bear the thought of it. When people you like lie to you, you crumple.

“I bet it was Hugh,” she said. “He was there. He must have seen what happened.”

All I said was that maybe Hugh hadn't seen.

I told myself that Frank must have told someone. There was no point in saying that to Elizabeth. She said it would all blow over anyhow, and we both smiled falsely and dropped the subject.

I felt so alone. Last year I'd been taken up with Hugh and I hadn't paid attention to the other kids in the school. Now they didn't pay much attention to me. For the first time, I was glad we were going to move back to Boston in June. I wanted to start all over again in another place. I felt the way I sometimes do about my room, when it's such a horror there doesn't seem to be anything to do except move out of it entirely and lock the door.

Ma spent quite a few days every week in Boston, taking her refresher courses. Also, she and Lawrence were still looking for a place for us to live. Pretty soon, she said, we'd have to put our house up for sale.

There was a mild springlike day toward the end of January, and I got on my bicycle and rode to a town four miles from New Oxford where there was a beauty parlor. I had my hair cut.

When I looked at myself later in the little Mexican mirror Elizabeth had given me, I hardly recognized myself.

“It looks good,” Ma said. “What made you decide to cut it?”

I couldn't answer. I didn't know.

By that time, jokes about the “accident” in Frank's car had died down. I saw that people forget even the worst things about other people. I suppose it's because their own lives gallop ahead and they have enough to think about just trying to stay upright.

Elizabeth told me that Frank had told her Tom was absent from school a good deal these days. I didn't even feel like guessing about Tom and his troubles. Hugh and I passed each other in the halls without a look, without one word.

How could that be? How could people never speak again? How could I not speak to Hugh Todd? And it was all I could do—not to speak to him, even if it was to say just one word—hello. Despite all that had happened, I wanted to break out of our silence. It smothered me like a sweater you can't pull down because the neck is too tight, and I felt caught, and breathless, flailing around, trying to rip the sweater off.

How could people who had spoken so privately to each other for so long behave as if they'd never known each other? Our silence was a kind of terrible lying. That's what it was. It shamed me more than anything ever had.

Each day as I walked home and came to the crest of the hill where one road turned off toward Hugh's house I'd think about that silence. One day in English, we had to write down what our idea of happiness was. I scribbled down something about a late-afternoon picnic at the beach, but when I passed Hugh's road that afternoon, I knew what my real idea of happiness was. It was feeling the way I had once felt toward Hugh. I had been happy then, I thought, without knowing it.

The truth was that I didn't miss Hugh any more. I missed, terribly, the way I had felt about him.

CHAPTER TEN

There was a blizzard during the last week of January and school dosed for a week.

After the snow had stopped, there were perfect clear days, the spiny shadows of the bare trees falling across the snow, and plumes of smoke rising straight up from the fireplaces and stoves of New Oxford, and all around the village the smooth glittering fields of winter. Every house looked inviting.

The snowplows were everywhere, pushing away the great heaps of snow from the roads. People rode their sleighs and skied down Main Street. Frank got work helping the snow-clearing crews and so I saw more of Elizabeth than I had for a while. She wouldn't eat sugar doughnuts any more. She said she was afraid of gaining weight. So I ate them by myself, and I took a contrary pleasure in her disgusted looks.

One afternoon, she and I went to the Mill. As we walked by the movie house, freshly boarded up, Elizabeth told me some boys had broken into it the night before and had drunk up several gallons of wine, and two of them had gotten sick enough to have to go to the hospital. A lot of things were always going on, even in a little village like New Oxford, and you always heard about them sooner or later.

We had grilled cheese sandwiches and hot chocolate, and it felt like old times. Elizabeth told me she was thinking of going to music school when she finished high school. Her face had a certain seriousness when she talked about the cello. I loved that. I told her I wished I, too, knew how to do something well, something not connected with ordinary school. At that moment, Frank Wilson burst into the restaurant, came over to us, and sat down next to Elizabeth. His reddish mustache was like a stroke of red crayon against the paleness of his skin.

Elizabeth smiled in that new cozy secret way of hers and I wanted to pinch her.

“Frank?”

“Tom Kyle's been in a car accident on Mt. Crystal,” he said.

Elizabeth pushed her plate away violently and it slid across the table. I caught it just before it fell. My chest had tightened so I could hardly draw a breath.

“Is he dead?” asked Elizabeth.

“Not yet,” Frank said. “The car he was driving was wedged between two rocks and they stopped it from rolling all the way down. One of the guys on the crew spotted the car when we were working on the road going to the mountain. They took him to the hospital in Regency.”

“Did you see him?” I asked.

“From a distance. When they pulled him out of the car.”

“I want to go home,” Elizabeth said.

But we sat there, not speaking, until, minutes later, Elizabeth took a dollar from her change purse and handed it to me. “Tory, will you—?” she began, then seemed to give up saying anything more. Frank took her hand and she stood and they both left, their arms around each other. The waitress padded over and I asked her for the check, paid, and went out into the cold.

At home, I lay on my bed staring up at the ceiling until Ma came to stand in the doorway.

“Tory?” she asked softly.

I told her. When I said that Tom had whimpered like a puppy, she put her hands over her face, and when I described how he had tried to hide his wetness with his scarf, she cried, “Such an ordinary, human thing to happen to a person!” After I had finished with Frank's news at the Mill, she came over and sat on the bed and looked into my face. I thought I could read in hers the grief she would have felt if something had happened to me in Frank's car that night on Mt. Crystal. She didn't reproach me; she didn't have to.

She got up and went to the phone and I heard her asking the operator for the number of the Regency hospital. When she came back to my room, she said, “Critical.”

Later, Elizabeth called. Frank had heard that Tom had been taken by ambulance from Regency to a Boston hospital. “He's broken like a smashed cup,” she said. “His ribs, his right leg, his left arm.”

I was afraid to go to school Monday for fear of what I would hear. There were only a few bits of information, and they were repeated over and over again. Tom's father had taken the bus to Boston. Tom's mother had seen Tom shoveling the snow from their driveway, then had seen him back out the car. She had thought he was driving into New Oxford. He was going to be in the hospital a long time. That was all.

Ma phoned the Kyles that evening, and she spoke to Mr. Kyle, who thanked her for calling and said they were managing, and Tom's condition was “uncertain”—he would live but they didn't know how damaged he would be—and he couldn't understand what had possessed Tom to drive up that mountain road before the road crews had gotten to it.

I knew what had possessed him. Humiliation.

After a while, nobody in school had talked about what had happened to Tom in Frank's car that night. It had kept on happening for Tom.

During the next few days, I saw how people make their feelings into thoughts, then turn those thoughts into facts that seem to have always been there. I met Frank outside the library, where he was waiting for Elizabeth to return some books.

“I've been thinking about the accident,” he said, “thinking about Tom Kyle going up there again to the mountain.” His tone was confiding, as if he and I'd been friends for years. I didn't want to talk about Tom with Frank and I started to move on.

“Wait a minute, Vicky. I know what happened. See, Tom would have got over all that—it was Hugh Todd who drove him to go back. Todd would've driven him crazy, probably. That's what he's like, Hugh, always has been mean, a lousy friend—that's why he
hasn't
a friend. A nasty little snot like that.”

“You don't know that. You don't know if Hugh ever said a word about it to Tom,” I said.

“He's always been rotten to everyone, above the rest of us,” Frank said angrily. “It had to be the way I said.”

I left him standing there, all smug and wrapped up in what he knew.

But in a couple of days, the kids in school I talked to were saying that what had happened to Tom was Hugh's fault. Nobody was saying “probably” any more. Hugh had tormented Tom, teased him into trying to drive up Mt. Crystal. So Frank's “facts” became the way people understood Tom's accident. I told everyone who spoke to me about it how Frank wouldn't turn back that night, even though Tom and I had begged him to. No one paid any attention. They seemed to have heard the story they wanted to hear, and nothing else they heard was going to change their minds. I hated the snarl of it all; I hated the way no one had any doubts, especially Frank Wilson. It wasn't even that I wanted to defend Hugh. I didn't like being a part of the gossip snowball that was gathering up debris as it rolled faster and faster through the school.