Being Dead (2 page)

Danny and Dad walked into the kitchen.

"Not fair!" Danny squealed. "Here we are working our butts off, and Brenda's on the phone already."

"The phone doesn't work, honey," Dad told me.

"It rang," I explained. "There's some little kid." Into the phone, I asked, "Are you still there?"

No answer, and Dad was shaking his head. "It won't be hooked up till Monday. Someone from the phone company has to check the wires."

"But maybe ifs the old number," I said—that would explain, if the child on the other end was trying to reach the people who used to live here—but whoever was on the line wasn't talking or
brrring
ing that bell or anything. Still, I hadn't heard a click as though she had hung up. "Hello? Hello?" I jiggled the phone cradle. Nothing; not even a dial tone. "It rang," I repeated.

"Wishful thinking," Danny said. "Or the first symptoms of dementia."

"Maybe crossed wires," Dad offered.

That would explain the bell, I guessed. I put the receiver back down. I hoped the little kid reached whoever she was trying to get.

Lunch was lemonade from powder, and sandwiches Mom had packed the night before. Under the best of circumstances, Mom is not an enthusiastic cook.

After lunch the plan was that Mom and Dad would drive the U-Haul back to Buffalo to get the second load from our old house, and the second car. Danny and I were supposed to unpack the stuff for our own rooms.

"Don't worry about the kitchen and the bathroom closet," Mom told me. "I'll do that."

I shrugged. "I can at least start." It wasn't like I had anything else to do with my life for the next two years.

"I need to decide where things go," Mom said. "I can't make decisions this fast."

"Don't," I agreed with her. She was getting that frantic put-upon look she gets when she feels pressured by too many things needing to be done.

She looked around the kitchen. "You could clean out the cupboards. The rubber gloves and the cleaning supplies are in one of those two boxes."

Oh, boy. Cleaning.

"Why don't you stay?" I offered. "I can drive the Honda." That's the one they let me drive—when they let me drive.

But Mom shook her head. "I need to make sure the old place is presentable for the new people."

Heaven forbid that the strangers moving in should think poorly of us because of Mom's housekeeping skills.

"Don't forget to keep an eye on the water-bed hose," Dad reminded me.

Danny and I waved good-bye, then set to organizing our rooms.

With my walk-in closet I had so much room that it didn't take me long to get my stuff settled. And I couldn't make my bed until it finished filling.

Dad had bought an adapter so that the hose could be hooked up to the kitchen tap, filling the mattress real slowly with warm water so that I'd be able to sleep in my bed that night. We'd learned that trick when I'd first gotten the bed—when the heater that's under the mattress took about two days to heat up the water that came from the outside spigot.

No leaks, and Dad had it going so slowly I probably wouldn't have to turn it off until he and Mom got back. I definitely had a couple hours to spare, so I didn't have to start in on those cupboards this very minute.

"I'm going outside," I yelled to Danny.

"Lucky," he complained. Luck had nothing to do with it—if he didn't have so much junk, he'd be through, too.

I wanted to see the little backyard pond. I wondered if die old people had left the fish, or if we'd have to get our own. Was that the kind of thing covered by a purchase agreement? I mean, if you had a dog when you were moving, you wouldn't expect to have to leave the dog along with the doorknobs and the wallpaper.

As I walked out into the backyard, I could hear the feint
brrring bring
of a bicycle bell. I wondered if it was the same kid who had called, and if she lived next door, and if she'd solved her problem, whatever it was. But I couldn't see the house next door—too much yard, too many trees between. Probably all the kids out here had bicycle bells—to warn the cows away. This particular kid using this particular bell kept going and going. That would grow old fast.

When I got to the pond, it was, as Dad had said, about the size of a small wading pool. But it wasn't cheesy. It was surrounded by plants and had what I figured was probably the setup for a miniature waterfall to cascade down artfully placed rocks. It didn't exactly look natural, but it wasn't like something you'd see in Wal-Mart, either. The water-fell wasn't going, and I realized there had to be some sort of pump to circulate the water. Then it came to me: That would be the switch in the kitchen, the one with the little bit of masking tape over it that said PUMP. That was a relief. When I had seen that word
pump,
I had gotten an immediate mental picture of one of those hand pumps out in the front yard that you see in Westerns, the kind the farm wife in her apron stands next to as she tells the boys, "Time to stop herdin' them cattle and wash up afore supper."

The whole setup was pretty. Not as pretty as my friend Jennie's rose garden, but pretty in a wildflower kind of way.

It was hard to tell if there were any fish. There were lots of rocks and water plants, both in and around the pond, and I was trying not to trample anything.

Something splashed, though I wasn't quick enough to see what So there
were
fish. Or frogs. That was kind of neat.

Another splash, in the same area as before. I still couldn't see anything. I waited where I was, hoping that if I stayed long enough I'd see something.

The third splash came from exactly where the previous two had. All right. Apparently if I was to see anything, I was going to have to move closer. I stepped on some of the decorative rocks between the plants at the edge of the water.

Yet another splash. This time I caught a glimpse of something light colored. One of those fat pale goldfish, maybe, jumping into the air? Was it trying to catch something? Or was
it
caught on something and trying to wriggle loose? I hoped I wouldn't need to administer first aid to a fish.

I put one knee down on a rock and leaned over the murky water. I couldn't make out the bottom, couldn't make out any movement. "I bet you just waited for me to get here before you'd move," I whispered to the fish. It was only when I heard my own voice that I was aware the bicycle bell had finally stopped.

The water in front of me rippled, so I had fair warning that the fish was moving. I waited for it to come to the surface....

Except it wasn't a fish that flopped in the water—it was a hand.

I sat back with a startled yelp.

The hand clawed at the air—I could distinctly see the fingers—then it disappeared back under the water.

Jeez! Some kid must have fallen in and was drowning right there in front of me. "Hold on!" I yelled at the kid in the pond, even though there was no way a kid entirely underwater could hear me. I scrambled to my feet and waded in.

And found that the pond was only a foot and a half at its deepest.

How could any kid bigger than a baby drown in a foot and a half of water?

And there was no kid.

There I was stomping around on all those delicate little water plants—and no kid. Nothing that looked at all like a human hand. Whatever had been Hopping in the water wasn't flopping anymore.

I don't want to do this; I don't want to do this,
I told myself. But I had to, just in case. I forced myself to reach down with my hand, to feel in the dark water, to touch the mucky, slippery bottom.

I jerked back. Was that hair? Had I just touched someone's hair?

Or was it those wispy plant tendrils?

Clamping my teeth together to keep them from chattering, I once more reached into the cold water. Tendrils brushed my fingers, just tendrils.

I took a step forward to check that last corner of the pond.

Nothing.

Except that the pump suddenly turned on, which had to mean Danny was in the kitchen, watching me be a fool.

Setup,
I thought. There might not have been a drowning kid in the pool before, but let me get my hands on Danny....

I clambered out of the pond, squashing more of the plants and upsetting a little tower of rocks.

Gee,
I thought sarcastically,
maybe Mom and Dad won't notice.

I walked back to the house, my sneakers squishing rudely with each step.

No sign of Danny. Smart boy.
But he can't have found a good enough hiding place,
I told myself.

Going upstairs I tripped over the hose to my water bed, even though I thought I wasn't stepping anywhere near it The way things were going, I knew I'd better detour into my room to make sure I hadn't yanked the hose loose.

That wasn't the surprise I found in my bedroom.

The surprise was that the double doors to the closet were open and all my clothes were on the floor.

"Danny!" I yelled in fury.

"What?" he called from his room. That was not what I'd expected.

Still, "Get in here," I shouted.

"I'm busy."

I stomped down the hall to his room.

He looked up from arranging his action figures on one of his shelves and obviously took in that my shorts were wet and muddy. As though he hadn't already seen, he demanded, "What happened to you?"

"What happened to my room?"

The fact that Danny didn't have a snappy comeback, that he waited to hear what I was going to say, made his innocence more credible.

"Did you or did you not knock my clothes on the floor?" I asked.

"I did not," he said.

"And did you or did you not have a nasty little surprise for me in the pond, and then you turned on the pump once you had tricked me into going in?"

"You were in the pond?" he asked. "With all the, like, fish poop and frog slime?" For a boy Danny could be awfully prissy. When he saw that I was still waiting for an answer, he added, "I never left my room."

And whatever I'd seen in the pond, on second, rational thought, wasn't anything Danny could have had anything to do with—he'd been helping tote stuff indoors from the car and the truck, then he'd been arranging his room the whole while since. He'd had no time to set up a joke.

I would have preferred a Danny joke to just about any other explanation I could think of.

It had probably been a sick or mutant frog, I tried to convince myself, or some exotic fish. If there could be bottlenose dolphins and hammerhead sharks, who was I to say there was no such species as a finger-finned something-or-other? I hadn't seen what I thought I'd seen, I told myself.

And I kept telling it to myself all the while I picked my clothes up off the floor of the closet This time I made sure the clothes were securely on the hangers, and the hangers were properly hooked on the bar. And the feet that some of the clothes were damp only meant that I should have changed out of my wet shorts before starting.

I hadn't made up my mind if I was going to tell my parents about the weirdness of the afternoon—the big problem being
what
I could tell them—when they came home with the second vanful of stuff. It was nine o'clock in the evening.

Mom walked in complaining about the Honda. "Brenda," she asked, "did you notice when you were driving last night that it had a tendency to pull to the right?"

Hungry, and hot and tired from scrubbing the grease off the kitchen cabinet doors and from peeling off the Con-Tact paper that the shelves were lined with—Con-Tact paper that came off in one-inch strips—I demanded, "How come you immediately assume I did something to break the car?"

Hungry and hot and tired herself, Mom snapped, "I'm not accusing you of breaking the car. I'm asking if you noticed that the car was pulling to the right."

"No," I said.

I didn't add that I had been too miserable about seeing my friends for the last time to notice much of anything. Well, I had run off the pavement, then back on, but surely cars aren't
that
delicate.

Dad said, "It probably just needs to be aligned. I'll make an appointment next week."

No doubt ticked off by my tone, Mom muttered, "It didn't need to be aligned yesterday morning when I drove it" To my father she added, "She isn't even supposed to drive at night."

Here we go again,
I thought.

Dad, the peacemaker, said, "It's probably been out of alignment since this spring, when there were all those potholes. You just noticed it today because the car was riding low from all the stuff packed in it" Then he added—his usual complaint—"This family has too much stuff. Come on, let's unload, then we'll go out for pizza. We've got all of tomorrow to finish unpacking."

"Think Westport has a pizza place?" I scoffed, not willing to make peace that easily.

"No," Mom said, "I think you'll have to hunt down some elk all by yourself, shoot it, skin it, and cook it over an open fire, because we've moved to Westport just to torment you."

And she tells
me
not to be sarcastic.

By the time we got back and had our showers, I wasn't in bed until after 1:00
A.M.
I figured I'd be asleep in ten seconds. The last night in our old house, Dad had already drained my water bed, and I had to sleep on the couch. So, even if I hadn't gotten in at three—which was about two and a half hours later than I'd admitted to when my parents asked—I wouldn't have had a good night's sleep. But now here I was, exhausted from a long day's work, in my own cozy water bed, and I started to drift off right away.

I was so for gone I wasn't alarmed when I felt the mattress jiggle under me.
Traci's cat,
I thought muzzily. Then, right as I was about to drop off totally, I thought,
I'm not at Traci's house.

I came awake enough to open my eyes and see that there wasn't anything sitting at the foot of the bed. I closed my eyes.

Something moved.

I sat up and turned on the light.

The light revealed ... nothing.

The mattress sloshed around from my movement.
Just
an air pocket
, I reasoned. And by causing the mattress to slosh, I would have broken it up.