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Authors: Christopher Conlon

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Now, searching up and down Main Street, it began to come back to me. Nothing was familiar, but with the help of the map I managed to orient myself: turning left on Main Street, I saw, led to a branch called Bridgewater Avenue (it literally included a bridge) which connected finally to the housing tract where I’d lived. There it was: Riverfield Road. I even knew the number still: 319. In the other direction were more places I recalled—the library, the elementary school—but those could wait. The distance to my old house was only a mile, so rather than using the car I started to walk. Drinking problem aside, I try to keep myself in shape.

The map indicated that Quiet, California was “A Great Place to Raise a Child,” a “Thriving Community of Five Thousand and Growing!” I could remember the old sign at the city limits,
Quiet. Pop. 750.
Looking around at the bustling conglomeration of stores and stoplights the town had become I felt like a relic from another century, which of course is exactly what I was. It seemed a pleasant place really, clean, modern, clearly affluent, yet faceless, without character; it might have been a mid-sized village anywhere in the country. Only the tall palm trees lining the roadway betrayed its California setting.

When I reached Bridgewater Avenue, however, things changed. Here there had been almost no development—there was little I didn’t seem to recognize in approaching the bridge, and as I walked out onto its two-lane span, I realized that it was the same bridge I’d ridden across on the school bus, that I’d walked and run and biked over countless times. It hadn’t altered, hadn’t been widened or rebuilt. I knew it immediately. What an unsettling feeling to stand on it again, to look down at the dry riverbed a hundred feet below and see that it hadn’t changed either. No new housing, no business development; just a riverbed of dirt, rocks, and wild grasses where once, many years ago, millions of gallons of water had rushed headlong toward the sea.

A large truck swooshed past, its blast of air pushing at me like a pair of hard hands. At the same moment a memory stabbed into my mind, making me gasp. My breath came fast and shallow. I felt dizzy. Blinking rapidly, I leaned over the safety rail, fearful I was about to throw up.

Quiet, California. A Great Place to Raise a Child.

Was that line meant as a sick joke?

I inhaled deeply, slowly exhaled. I closed my eyes for a moment, regaining my balance. My head throbbed. There was a sour taste in my throat. I was hardly aware of the traffic passing by each way on the bridge.

A great place to raise a child.

Quiet, California held no terrors for me, I kept telling myself. No terrors at all.

 

I knew the house at once, though its color had gone from yellow to blue and the pitted asphalt of the old driveway had been replaced with smooth white concrete. There were perky green bushes lining the walkway to the door now, and the door itself was different, imposing polished oak. But these changes were trivial. It was the same long, low house in which I’d once lived, a California rambler much like many others on this street.

The neighborhood itself, like the town, had clearly undergone something of a renaissance. Each house in my range of vision seemed bigger, brighter, better maintained than it had been back then. Looking carefully I realized that many of the houses actually were larger, with additions in the back or on the side which I knew hadn’t been there in my time. None of the cars in the driveways were more than two or three years old. The lawns were immaculate. It was not a rich person’s neighborhood, but it had become comfortably well off.

Naturally it had crossed my mind to wonder whether Uncle Frank and Aunt Louise might still live here; I’d had no contact with them since the day I left the house forever, when I wasn’t yet thirteen. But it was unlikely. They’d been in their mid-fifties, and neither had seemed in robust health. I could hardly imagine that the two of them, well into their eighties, might be sitting in the house at that exact moment—Frank reading his newspaper barefoot in his shirtless suspenders and Louise watching her game shows on television with a Marlboro in one hand and a can of Budweiser in the other.

I stood staring at this house of remembered pain for a long time. Finally I mounted the walkway and moved to the front door, knocked.

No answer.

I backed away. Glancing about a bit nervously, making sure no neighbors were looking through their window curtains at me, I stepped across the lawn, around the side of the house, and looked quickly into the backyard. An unfamiliar patio was there now: smooth concrete, outdoor furniture, children’s toys, a grill. It looked, I thought, very pleasant, but it had nothing to do with anything I recalled. My eyes moved to the back of the lawn, near the fence. A small flowerbed huddled there; I was shocked to discover that the big old leafy pepper tree was gone, as if it had never existed. I had spent endless hours under that tree; it was a separate world from the grim one in which I lived.

Finally I looked at the back of the house itself, beheld the familiar rear window which led to what had been my bedroom. I was surprised at how small that window really was. I remembered sliding it open one spring night thirty years ago, climbing out of it. This was the window I’d used to run away. Not from home: 319 Riverfield Road was never my home. To run away, that’s all.

I stepped close to it, knowing I’d best move quickly; famous children’s author Frances Pastan didn’t need to get arrested for trespassing. The blinds were closed (blinds, I noticed, not curtains, as I’d had); I couldn’t see in at all. As I stood on the concrete that had once been grass outside what had once been my window, I touched the exterior window sill, passed my hand briefly along the wall. Here, I thought. I did it right here.

And she…she stood…

I wouldn’t think of it.

I made my way to the front of the house again, stepped back onto the public sidewalk. I stood looking at the house for a long moment, uneasy washes of emotion coursing through me. At last I turned to take in the house across the street: 320. I inhaled sharply when I realized that it wasn’t the same house that I knew from back then. What had been there was another rambler, not substantially different from my own house except that it was considerably more run-down, even dilapidated; no, what I was seeing now was a completely different structure, a large and lovely two-story home with big windows and a front lawn so velvety smooth that it looked like Astroturf. At some point in the past thirty years they’d demolished the old house. Literally taken a wrecking ball to it. Destroyed it. The thought made me sad, though I couldn’t have said why.

I walked a few yards along the sidewalk until I reached the spot that I recalled as the school bus stop.

I looked at the two houses, my own and the one that, once upon a time, had been a different building entirely. The sun was high and bright, just as it was all those years ago when I’d stood here filled with terror at the prospect of my first day at the new school; just as it was when I heard the door across the street slam and saw the big blonde girl in T-shirt and blue jeans come careening pell-mell across the way to catch the bus. The sun was high and bright that day, that first day when I learned that the girl’s name was Lucy Sparrow, two months before she was murdered.

 

—Two—

 

 

 

 

IT WAS MARCH. I stood in my pink cardigan and powder-blue skirt, clutching my lunch bag tightly before me in both hands and trying not to tremble. Hardly more than a week before I’d been home in Fresno, where everything was as usual; then the rain, the darkness, the eerie bus ride into the netherworld, where I was cut off from anything I’d ever known, everything I was.

Why do I have to go, Dad?

Mom, what did I do?

I had no memory of Uncle Frank or Aunt Louise, though in helping me board my mother had assured me I would remember these people as soon as I saw them. “You knew them when you were little, honey,” she said, which might have been the case, but I certainly didn’t recognize them when I got there. I wasn’t even clear how either of them was related to my parents.

That bus ride: a nightmarish succession of headlights slashing by in the rain, the blackness of open country followed by a small town’s gleaming lights which shone meltingly through the wet windows. It seemed endless, terrifying, though I was even more fearful of what would happen when it ended. Where would I be? How would I live? Would I ever find my way home?

These events had only just happened when I found myself standing one morning where I’d been told to stand to wait for the bus, holding desperately to my lunch bag as if it were a life preserver in the midst of tempest-tossed seas. I held myself rigidly still, thinking,
School, school, it’s time to go to school, I must go to school,
trying to forget that I was a stranger among strangers, that I had no idea where I was or why. What was Quiet, California to me? I couldn’t have found it on a map to save my soul. And yet school—yes!—school would make me normal again, give me an identity, it would make me a
person,
so unlike what I was now, which was nothing.

Just as the bus came rumbling up the street I heard the door across the way burst open and then immediately slam shut again. A girl about my age came charging into the road toward me, running recklessly in front of the bus as it braked to a stop. She wore a dirty black T-shirt emblazoned with the words
Bachman-Turner Overdrive
along with tattered blue jeans and sneakers. There was a backpack slung sloppily over her shoulder.

“Hi,” she said breathlessly, without looking at me. She was taller than I, bigger, with blonde hair that looked like it hadn’t been brushed that morning, perhaps for several mornings. As the bus door swung open she said, “You new here?”

I nodded wordlessly.

“Hm.” She looked me up and down dubiously, clearly finding fault with my cardigan and skirt. As she turned to mount the bus steps I heard the harsh voice of the driver instructing her to never run in front of the bus. “Aw, c’mon, Mr. Cox,” she said, stepping up into the vehicle, “you were stopping anyway, right? I knew you weren’t gonna run me over.” I followed her up the steps.

“Young lady,” he said—I could see now that Mr. Cox was a burly, graying man with pockmarked skin—“I have to tell your mother if you keep doing it. Stop it, now.”

To my surprise she turned back to me suddenly and whispered, “You gotta love a guy named
Cox
,”
then giggled and moved down the aisle.

The bus was mercifully empty, or nearly so. I dropped myself into the seat behind the girl’s and wondered how long the ride would be. As the bus pulled out, she again looked at me. She said, in conspiratorially low tones: “Guess what his
first
name is.”

“Whose?”

“The bus driver’s, stupid.”

I shrugged, shook my head.

She grinned. “It’s
Dick
,”
she said. “Can you believe that? The bus driver’s name is
Dick Cox
.” She laughed, a big, throaty laugh not unlike a bark. I smiled again, politely, unaware of why all this was so humorous. She scowled at me suddenly. “You get it,” she said, “don’t you?”

I squirmed uncomfortably in my seat. “Sure. I get it.”

“Then why aren’t you laughing?”

“I just don’t think it’s that funny.”

She looked suspicious. “Okay, then, what’s the joke?”

“The joke?”

“Dick Cox. What’s the joke with that name?”

“I—” I looked down, fidgeted with my lunch bag. “It—it sounds funny.”

I could feel this big blonde girl, heavyset, not pretty, studying me.

“‘It sounds funny,’” she repeated.

I stayed silent, hoping something would distract her attention. Please leave me alone, I wanted to say. Just leave me alone.

“It’s because they’re both names for a boy’s private parts,” she said finally, taking pity on me. “Dick? Cox? Get it?”

I didn’t respond. I was twisting the edge of my cardigan in my fingers, unable to stop.

“I don’t like that sweater,” she said, eying me critically. “It’s too girlie. Anyway, what are you wearing a sweater for? It’s not cold.”

“I—get cold a lot,” I said meekly, which was the truth.

“Yeah? I don’t get cold at all, hardly. Why do you wear your hair in bangs like that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Kinda nerdy.”

I stared out the bus window. We were heading across the bridge that separated the housing tract from the downtown. It was a long drop from the bridge to the riverbed below, I saw, long enough to kill a person if they wanted to jump.

“What’s your name?” the girl demanded.

“Frances.”

“What?”


Frances
,” I said, louder this time. “Frances Pastan.”

“Frances.” She considered it. “Fran.”

I shook my head. “Nobody calls me Fran.”

“Well, they should. Like Fran Tarkington. He’s a football player. You heard of him?”

I shook my head again.

“Well, you should’ve,” she said. “He’s a quarterback. Minnesota Vikings.”

BOOK: B004XTKFZ4 EBOK
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