Come In and Cover Me (9 page)

Ceramics filled with parrots.

The sun dropped out of the sky just as they all stepped off the slope and onto the main road. An early owl hooted, close by. They scattered when they reached the screened porch, headed for showers and toilets and changes of clothes.

Propping her flashlight against a wooden shelf, Ren stepped into the outdoor shower first. The concrete floor had soaked up the day's heat, and she curled her toes against the rough surface. The pine walls came up to her nose, leaving a clear view of the house, the yard and the path to the shower, and the mountains. The floor was cooling, slick with water, and her skin was cooling as well. She closed her eyes, leaning forward and bracing her hands on the shower wall, the lukewarm water hitting her shoulders, her arms, her face. When the chill bumps started rising on her arms, she adjusted the temperature knobs and got down to the serious business of cleaning. The water ran brown, opaque, down the drain. Digging left a coat of grime—gray dust covered her skin and her hair, had worked its way into her nostrils and ears and the corners of her eyes. She could taste it, dry and bitter, in her throat.

She washed her hair twice, and her eyes slid closed again as she ran her fingers along her scalp, sluicing out the water. When she opened her eyes, she saw Silas walking toward her, headed toward the sink by the shower. She rinsed once more, and when she opened her eyes again, he was turning on the sink faucet.

“Feel good?” he asked, looking straight at the sink. He filled his hands with water and splashed his face.

“Good,” she said.

“You ready to talk?” he asked.

“Talk?”

“You can parrot things back to me all you want—no pun intended—and I'm still going to ask you questions.”

It was difficult, Ren thought, holding a serious conversation while naked, separated from him by a pine wall. She wondered if he could see only her eyes or if the view included her whole face or bare shoulders.

“Questions?” she said.

“Funny.”

“I'll talk, Silas,” she said. “I'll answer your questions, for whatever good it does. I'll come find you after I've put my clothes on.”

“Clothes?” he asked.

She watched him leave as she wrapped a towel around her hair. He would ask her about the feather apron, and she would tell him about the parrot woman. He would not believe her because seeing ghosts was crazy. But she would still tell him the truth, because it was the only explanation she had, and some part of her—a part she didn't want to probe too much—wanted to share it with him. She would tell him the truth about the parrot woman. Other things she would keep to herself.

Sometimes her mother used to send Scott to wake her, and that was always less pleasant than her mother's tentative “Good morning” from the bottom of the stairs. On the morning of the accident, her mother called once, twice, three times—a hint of a threat in the final call—before Ren rolled out of bed, landing on her knees. It was October 5, 1984, the first date ever push-pinned into her brain instead of floating away like all the days before it. It was two months before she turned thirteen. She rested her head on the edge of the bed. One eye open, the other one closed. She thought of it as half sleeping. She pushed herself to her feet finally, stumped to the bathroom, and clomped down the stairs to the kitchen a few minutes later. She heard the Sex Pistols screaming in Scott's room as she passed it.

“You left your music on,” she said to him as she walked past the kitchen table. He was slumped over his cereal.

“No, I didn't,” he said.

“Did. I heard it.”

“You were dreaming.”

“Mom, he left his music on.”

Her mother pretended not to hear her.

They ate cereal silently. She was pouring a second bowl when he stood and grabbed his book bag, kissing their mother's cheek. He said “Bye” to them all as the door swung shut behind him, and she didn't answer, although her mother and father did. She heard the door slam. She did not see him get in his car, arrange his book bag on the front seat, or drive away. But she knew he must have done those things.

That afternoon, she didn't see his car when she walked up the driveway. That was normal: He usually hung around with his friends after school and got back home long after the bus dropped her off at the end of the block. She opened the front door and walked into the den to see both her parents sitting on the couch. They weren't touching at all. Her father sat perfectly straight, both feet on the floor, his chin touching his chest. Her mother had her hair twisted up like she wore it for work, but she had on jeans. Her mascara was smeared down her cheeks. They were slow to look up when Ren asked why her father was home so early.

When they did look at her, she could see the mascara tracks went all the way to the collar of her mother's shirt. She had the sudden thought that one of them had cancer. Her music teacher had cancer the year before and wore a butterfly scarf around her head. Her parents must have planned to tell her about the cancer together, she thought, but it didn't make sense that they would tell her separately from Scott.

“We have to tell you something, honey,” her mother said. “Come over here and sit with us.”

Ren watched her mother's wet face and thought her father probably had the cancer.

When she got to the sofa and sat on the very edge, her mother laid her hand on Ren's head, too heavily, oppressively. Ren fought a flinch. Her mother didn't say anything, just left her heavy hand on Ren's skull.

“Harold,” she said finally.

Ren heard her father swallow and felt the couch shift as he leaned toward her. “It's Scott,” he said. “He had a bad accident on the way to school.”

She was so surprised she couldn't make her brain work. They should be at the hospital if Scott had an accident.

Her father put his hand on her shoulder, and she slumped with the weight of both parents' hands. She wanted to stand. She did not move.

“He was. He was.” Her father started and stopped. A third time: “He was. He never felt anything probably. He just went to sleep and never woke up. The other car ran a red light and hit him and it was very, very fast.”

He kept talking, but the sleep part confused her.

“Is Scott dead?” she asked.

Her mother started crying, and her father said “shhhhh,” but Ren didn't know which one of them he meant.

“He is,” Ren said, answering her own question softly, in case her father had been talking to her.

People came over that afternoon and night—aunts and uncles and grandparents and friends from church. Some handed over things wrapped in tinfoil and then left, but some stayed. Her grandfather wanted to build a fire, because fires were comforting, even though it wasn't cold enough. Her grandmother dusted the shelves.

Her mother kept her hands on Ren for a long time. On her head, on her back, through the crook of her elbow. She escaped the weight of her mother's hand eventually. When she walked to her bedroom, she could hear the whir of Scott's tape player running wordlessly. She had told him so. She considered turning it off but didn't.

They had left her at school all day thinking he was still alive.

That night her grandmother sat on the edge of Ren's bed and pulled up the blankets. Her grandmother had squishy, wormlike veins on the tops of her hands that Ren liked to flatten—they sprang back quick as sponges. She experimented with the veins as her grandmother told her that it always took time for people to understand when someone was gone. She said that Ren's feelings were frozen and they would start to thaw out later. She heard her grandmother whisper to her mother at the doorway, “She doesn't understand. She doesn't know it's real yet.”

It did not feel real. It was not a death—it was a vanishing. She never saw his car again. She never saw his book bag again. They didn't think she should go to the funeral, and she believed them when they said she would feel better if she remembered Scott alive instead of remembering his coffin. During the funeral she stayed with Allison Shum and played Frogger.

For a little while Scott's room remained with its treasure trove of music, and she would visit the treasure. She liked to look at
Born to Run
: Scott had been trying to do that Springsteen thing with his hair for a year, and he'd never gotten close. His hair was perfectly straight and always fell neatly into place no matter how much he wanted it wild and disheveled and curly. She had told him he needed to use curlers, and he wouldn't, but she thought they should have curled his hair for the funeral, because he would have loved for everybody to remember him looking like Springsteen. She wished she had thought to tell her mother that.

She couldn't believe that a plastic cassette tape could last longer than a human being.

They did not like finding her in his room. It was not healthy, they said. It was a few weeks, a month, maybe, after the accident—“the accident,” that was what her parents said when they spoke of it at all—when they found her there for the last time. She heard them whispering in the hall. The next day her mother carried empty boxes and garbage bags into Scott's room, and bit by bit his room was broken down. The boxes and bags with bits of his room in them were carried to the attic. The next day, a large white truck came and collected his bedroom furniture. It would go to people who needed it, her mother said. Her father came home with a desk the next day, and Scott's room became an office. A strange, bare office that no one ever worked in. There were no pictures on the wall. There was a typewriter on the small wooden desk. Next to the desk, a round end table tilted to one side. The wheels of the desk chair snagged in the carpet and would not roll.

So Scott's room vanished. They gave her his tapes in three big boxes. All the little hard cases, tapping and sliding against each other, unimaginable riches. She had never wanted anything more than she wanted Scott's music. They told her she could sort through them and keep the ones she wanted, but she couldn't stand to throw out a single one. She spent an entire afternoon unpacking them and arranging them into towers, skyscrapers of cassettes lining her wall just as they had lined Scott's.

By the next day, the tapes made her sick. Looking at them, she felt her stomach shrivel and knot. They were alien things in her room. When she tried to slide
Born to Run
out of its slot in the stack, she could not stand the sounds the cassettes made rubbing against each other, talking to each other in clicks and clacks that she couldn't understand. They did not belong to her. She still could not throw them out, but she could not listen to them and could not look at them. She climbed on her desk chair and hid them one by one on the top shelf of her closet. Stacks from the shelf to the ceiling. Then she started lining them along the back of her middle shelf. She buried them under two old T-shirts, a pair of matronly shorts, a robe her grandmother had bought her, a black-and-yellow sweater her grandmother had knitted for her, a raincoat she'd never even considered wearing. She hid the extras under her shoes, in the dark recesses of the closet floor, where belts and scarves and single socks had fallen and where no one would want to explore.

Sometimes she wondered if Scott ever knew she had his tapes. He probably did. Because after he died, another unexpected thing happened: He did not go away.

The day after the funeral, he woke her up, singing “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts.” Face smushed in the pillow, T-shirt bunched above her hips, she was struck first by the fact that he wasn't tickling her feet. That was always how he woke her up, and he wouldn't stop until she'd twitched and seized her way off the bed. She slept on her stomach, arms and legs stretching to the four corners of the bed like she was being drawn and quartered. He had always made fun of her for that. But he didn't touch her feet at all this morning, just sang, which made her frown as she pushed her hair out of her face and stretched, still belly-down. Then she remembered why he couldn't touch her anymore.

He sat on her bed, one leg on the floor and one tucked under him.
“Lily was a princess, she was fair-skinned and precious as a child . . .”

She sat up, fully alert. It was the most awake she'd ever felt in the morning.

The wreck could have been a dream, she thought. She pushed herself farther against the headboard, blinking at him.

He kept singing.

“Scott?”

“Morning, Renny-ren-ren.”

The wreck had not been a dream. She knew it had not.

She could still be asleep. This could be the dream. She scooted closer to him, raising her hands to press her palms to his cheeks.

He pulled away slightly.

“Are you a ghost?” she asked, because if this was a dream, then it didn't matter if she sounded stupid. “If I touch you, will my hand go straight through you? Can you walk through walls?”

It took him a moment to answer. “You can touch me.”

She did, both hands firm and focused on his upper arms, testing. It was the only time she could ever touch him after he came back. When she was grown, she wished she'd touched him differently. Touched his hair. Hugged him. She wished she had used the touch for affection instead of fact-finding.

“You were having a nightmare,” he said.

“I was?”

“You were making that whining sound in your sleep. The scared-cocker-spaniel sound.”

“I was not.”

“Were, too.”

She considered. “But the nightmare wasn't that you died?”

“No. That really happened.”

She moved closer to him. She had a vague, fading memory of being chased. Claws and wings. “I don't remember,” she said.

“You don't have to remember,” he said, and he started singing Dylan again.

The water in the shower ran clear; soap and suds and dirt and grass vanished down the drain. Scott belonged to her. She had the right to share him or not, and she had never wanted to share. But the woman in the feather apron belonged to this canyon. Ren could not claim her for her own, and she did not feel that it was her right to keep her from Silas, who had lived and breathed the canyon for much longer than she had. She had screwed everything up by not keeping her distance properly—if she disliked him, if she hardly knew him, she could have avoided his questions. She could have sidestepped and deflected until he backed off, like everyone else always did. But she couldn't do that now—it would be unfair. It would be a lie. She would tell him what he wanted to know, and that would be that. She would be a freak. And he would be gone.