B004XTKFZ4 EBOK (13 page)

“No I’m not.” I shook my head vehemently.

“What, you’re gonna stay alone all your life? Become a nun or something?”

“Maybe. But I’m not going to marry somebody like
that.”

“You will,” Lucy said confidently. “You’ll have kids, too, I bet.”

“I’m never having kids. I
hate
kids.”

I found an article in the magazine about Linda Ronstadt and read part of it aloud, but my mind wasn’t on it. Neither was Lucy’s. After a while I stopped.

“What’ll you do, then?” she asked me.

I thought about it, but I couldn’t imagine a thing: the future just seemed to be filled with empty space, cold, desolate. There was no way I could ever be a grown-up.

“I don’t know,” I said. “What about you?”

“I could get married,” she said, tilting her head thoughtfully. “I think I could. Someday.”

“To a
man
?”

She laughed. “Well, who do you think I’d marry?”

“And—” My face burned as I thought of it. “And—and you’d have
sex
with him?”

“Sure,” she said casually. “Why not? I bet it’s not that bad. I mean, people do it, don’t they?”

“Perverted people, maybe!”

“Franny…all the grown-ups we know have
sex
.”

“No they don’t.”

“Sure they do. Look at Mr. and Mrs. Lowther. They have two kids—where do you think they came from, the stork? Mrs. Petrie is married too. And I even heard
Dick Cox
say something about his wife once.”

“Don’t, Lucy. It’s too…
weird
to think about.”

But she was enjoying needling me. “Imagine,” she said in hushed, teasing tones. “Imagine Mr. Lowther naked, with a hard-on. Big as a cucumber and poking out.”

“Don’t—”

“And Mrs. Lowther spreading her legs open and him sticking it into her…”

“Don’t!”

“…and humping away on top of her, squirting
come
into her
pussy
and making
babies
…”

“
Don’t!
”
I covered my ears.

She laughed suddenly, her usual big bark, and threw a handful of pepper leaves at me.

“Spaz,” she said, without malice, smiling.

“Please stop talking about gross things,” I said, seriously.

Her face softened a little. “Oh, okay. Forget it. Hey,” she said, “you don’t even know from gross, anyway. Wait ’till you get your period.”

I looked at her. “Have you gotten yours?”

She nodded. “Since last winter.”

“What’s it like?”

She glanced at me and, I could see, made a decision to spare me the gruesome details. “It hurts,” she said, “but it’s not that bad.”

“You get it every month?”

She nodded. “It’s no fun. But don’t worry about it, Franny-Fran. There’s nothing you can do about it, anyway. It just comes. You’ll be okay.”

I was aware that she was sparing my feelings. “I hope I never get it,” I said, but even as the words came from my mouth I knew they weren’t entirely true. On one level I
did
hope I’d get it. It would bring me closer to Lucy, make me a little more like her, give us one more thing to share. But it also seemed the passageway into another world, a dark, frightening one from which there was no return. Lucy got her
period,
I thought. That means she could have a
baby.

I felt lonely then, as the sun dropped behind the house and we were enveloped in shadows. Lucy inhabited a different world from mine. I didn’t like that thought. I didn’t like it at all. I started to cry softly.

“Franny-Fran, what’s wrong?”

“Just—can we please talk about something else?” I was embarrassed, but I couldn’t seem to stop. “I don’t want to talk about—about naked men and—and—and periods—and stuff…”

“Franny, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to get you worked up.” I felt her hand on mine and I grabbed onto it, held it tight. “C’mon,” she said gently, cajolingly, “cut it out. You cry too much, Franny. Why are you crying?”

“I don’t know.”

But I did. All the talk of grown-up things had made Lucy seem distant, beyond me. She was going places I wasn’t ready to go, not yet.

“Lucy?” I said. “Please don’t…don’t go away. From me.”

She looked at me, puzzled at my sudden emotion. Then she tousled my hair playfully. “What are you talking about, Franny-Fran? I’m not going anywhere. You’re my sister, remember? Blood sisters.”

There was surprisingly little talk of the Maria Sanchez case in Quiet, but it may only have been that adults were circumspect in what they said around children. Too, there was an assumption on the part of many people, even law enforcement, that this was something personal: a family member, a boyfriend whose mind had gone haywire. Tragic, horrifying, but most likely nothing of any further importance. Anyway, Maria Sanchez was a Mexican; her mother worked as a cook and her father as a gardener. That shouldn’t have made a difference but, I understand now, it did. When the victim’s boyfriend was arrested, that seemed to slam the matter shut forever.

Everything changed with the Trista Blake case. Maria Sanchez’s boyfriend was in custody when Trista Blake’s body was found in the same riverbed, a mile north of the first location. Her body, what remained of it, was fresh; she’d been killed within twenty-four to forty-eight hours of the discovery of her dismembered corpse. Trista Blake and Maria Sanchez had gone to the same high school, but they inhabited different worlds. Maria Sanchez had been quiet, unobtrusive, her English less than fluent; she was chubby, not notably attractive; she had mostly hung out with the handful of other Hispanic students in the school. Trista Blake, on the other hand, was the daughter of the man who owned the grocery store downtown; she was a junior varsity cheerleader, she was in drama club, she was on the staff of the school newspaper. She was pretty, a willowy blonde with feathered hair. She was one of the popular kids.  And now she was dead.

I wasn’t much aware of these events then; I wasn’t interested in TV news, and the headlines in the paper caused me a momentary sinking sensation, no more. To be
killed,
I remember thinking. To be
murdered.
But it was impossible to visualize; I knew no details of the cases, only that girls I’d never met, never even heard of, had disappeared and then their bodies had been found in the riverbed. There was an unreal quality to it, as if this were a movie, not life. It wasn’t something I thought a lot about.

But the impact in the town was immediate. Lucy and I rode across the bridge one afternoon, staring with fascination at the numerous police cars and dozens of uniformed men a hundred feet below. And suddenly policemen seemed to be everywhere on the streets of Quiet, not talking, not interacting with people, just strolling the sidewalks, cruising Main Street in their vehicles. It created an odd, uneasy atmosphere.

Aunt Louise was nervous, pensive. “When you come home,” she told me at dinner one night, “come straight in. Don’t go to your friend’s house. I want you home.”

“Why?” The situation was still unreal to me. “I’m just as safe at Lucy’s house. Nothing’s going to happen, Aunt Louise.”

“You’re
not
as safe at Lucy’s house. That woman, her mother, is never home.”

“Well, then, let Lucy come here,” I said.

And, to my surprise, that was what happened. Aunt Louise couldn’t in good conscience argue that a child, even one with a mother she despised, should be left alone in a house by herself at night, not in these days of girls turning up dead in riverbeds. And so Lucy began coming to our house.

Those were some of the finest times we had together, even though we didn’t have the run of the place the way we did across the street. We couldn’t charge through the hallway, toss Nerf balls at each other, gorge ourselves on ice cream. These occasions were quieter; it was a quiet house, after all. Even funereal. Lucy and I stayed in my room, chatting, doing homework, drawing, and listening with the lights off to the nightly
Mystery Theater
(together! together again! I thought joyfully), my own brushes now making their way through Lucy’s ever-tangled hair, the two of us enraptured by the suspense stories we heard and then drowsy afterward.

Once we were inspired by a story Mrs. Petrie had read to us in class. Somewhere in the Midwest a company had been excavating a former school site, preparing to build a shopping mall there, when they discovered a metal box under the ground. On opening it they found that it was a time capsule. Placed there as a class project during World War II, it was filled with relics of thirty years before: photos of the students in the class, contemporary news magazines, a baseball glove, a food rationing coupon, a Captain Midnight secret decoder ring, and much more ephemera from that lost era. With all of it was a letter from the class that began:
Hello, People of the Future. We are burying this time capsule on March 3, in the Year of Our Lord 1943.
Newspaper writers had made much of the find, looking up students at the school from three decades before who had memories of the project (and of the school, which had closed twenty-five years earlier). Mrs. Petrie suggested that Soames Elementary should do something similar, and for a few days there was considerable excitement about the idea, but for some reason it never materialized.

Lucy and I didn’t forget about it, however. Alone in my bedroom at night we decided to make our own time capsule, fill it with the things that mattered to us, and bury it somewhere—maybe in the back yard, maybe at the school.

“But what’ll go in it?” I asked.

“Oh, stuff,” she said, considering. “How about my Math book?”

I smiled. “You can’t do that.”

“Oh, well. Um…Some of your drawings, Fran. The ones of the dragon eating its own tail. And the ones of angels that you draw. We should show the people of the future what
real
talent is.”

“Lucy, I’m not that good.”

“Oh, and some
Tiger Beat
s. Ones with good pictures of John Travolta.”

“I don’t want to make the time capsule for just anybody, though, like that school did.” I had an idea. “We should make it for us. Just for us, for us to find, in the future.”

“You mean, like, when we’re old?”

“Sure. We’ll agree to come back to where we buried it twenty or thirty years from now. We’ll set a date. We’ll go together and dig it up.”

“Yeah, that’s cool. But we can’t tell anybody.”

“No, definitely not.”

And for weeks we found ourselves thinking about items that could go into the capsule and things that had to stay out. We decided to keep it small, thus making it easy to bury, but also canceling the possibility of full-sized magazines and things like that. (Lucy did, however, insist on clipping some individual photos of John Travolta for inclusion.) We’d use one of my aunt’s Mason jars, tightly closed, reinforced with my uncle’s electrician’s tape, and then placed into a strong cardboard box with lots of cushioning. The digging wouldn’t be a problem; my uncle had a couple of shovels. We considered and rejected dozens of potential locations for the burial of the thing.

In the meantime Ms. Sparrow and my aunt and uncle came to some sort of arrangement regarding pickup times for Lucy. Sometimes she would come knocking at our door, other times Uncle Frank would walk Lucy over to her house at night, always with me along. And at times, when Ms. Sparrow was there, we would still spend evenings together at Lucy’s. I was amazed that my aunt was working together with Ms. Sparrow on all this, but the fear of what the TV news was now calling the
Riverbed Killer
was strong.

But Lucy was becoming restless during our nightly visits, and once, when we were at her house and her mother had gone to bed, she suggested something truly daring.

“Hey Franny-Fran,” she whispered, though we were in her room and far from any possibility of her mother hearing. The room was dark. The
Mystery Theater
had concluded a long time before, but it wasn’t a school night, so I was allowed to stay later—until midnight. We had just remained together on the bed after the show had finished, listened to the news, listened to music, drowsing. It was late. “Let’s go outside. I wanna show you something.”

“Outside? We’re not allowed to go outside, Lucy.”

“So what? Are you a fraidy cat?”

“No. But my uncle will pick me up in an hour.”

“We won’t be gone an hour. We’ll be back in plenty of time.”

“Lucy, no. We should stay here. What if he finds out? What if your mom does?”

She made a sour face. “When Mom’s with one of her boyfriends in the bedroom she doesn’t come out until morning,” she said. “And your uncle never picks you up early. Come on.”

“What do you want to do? Can’t we just do it tomorrow?”

“Uh-uh. This is something secret.”

“Lucy…I don’t know. We better not.”