Death Wears a Beauty Mask and Other Stories (14 page)

The passengers released the Commissioner as the flight deck door opened. Tom stood there, angrily taking in the scene. “Carol, what the devil is going on?”

She went to him, shutting her eyes against the Commissioner's fury, and against the impact of her words on Tom. She felt sick, pained. “Captain—” her tongue was thick, she could barely form words “—Captain, I wish to report a stowaway. . . .”

•  •  •

She gratefully sipped the steaming coffee in the station manager's office. The past hour was a blur of airport officials, police, photographers. Only vivid was the Commissioner's demand: “This man is a
citizen of my country. He must be returned immediately.” And the station manager's reply: “This is regrettable, but we must turn the stowaway over to the Bonn government. If his story checks, he'll be granted asylum.”

She stared at her hand where Joe had kissed it before being taken into custody.

He'd said, “You have given me my life, my future.”

The door opened slowly and Charlie Wright, the station manager, walked in, followed by Tom. “Well, that's that.”

He looked squarely at Carol. “Proud of yourself? Feeling real heroic and dying to see the morning headlines? ‘Stewardess hides stowaway in thrilling flight from Danubia.' The papers won't print that Northern won't be welcome in Danubia anymore and will lose a few million in revenue because of you. As for you, Carol, you can head home and there'll be a hearing in New York but—you're fired.”

“I expected it. But you've got to understand Tom knew nothing about the stowaway.”

“It's a Captain's business to know what goes on in his plane,” Charlie shot back. “Tom will probably get away with a stiff calldown unless he gets heroic and tries to take the blame for you. I hear from the grapevine he did that once before.”

“That's right,” Carol said. “He took the blame for me last year and I didn't have the decency to thank him for it.” She looked into Tom's strangely inscrutable face. “Tom, last year you were furious with me, and rightly so. I was completely wrong. This time, I'm truly sorry for the trouble you'll have over this but I couldn't have done otherwise.”

She turned to Charlie, fighting tears. “If you're finished, I'm going to the hotel. I'm dead.”

He looked at her with some sympathy. “Carol, unofficially I can understand what you did. Officially—”

She tried to smile. “Good night.” She went out and started to walk down the stairs.

Tom caught up with her at the landing. “Look, Carol, let's put the record straight—I'm
glad
the boy got through! You wouldn't be the girl I love if you'd handed him over to those butchers.”

The girl I love.

“But thank God you won't be flying on my plane anymore. I'd be afraid to sit at the stick wondering what was going on in the cabin.” His arms slipped around her.

“But if you're not on my plane, I wish you'd be there to pick me up at the airport. You can hide spies and dogs and anything you darn please in the backseat. Carol, I'm trying to ask you to marry me.”

Carol looked at him, the splendid tallness of him and the tenderness in his eyes. Then his lips were warm against hers and he was saying again the words she'd wanted so long to hear, “Love you, Carol.”

The waiting room of the terminal was dim and quiet. After a moment, they started down the stairs toward it, their footsteps echoing ahead.

. . .
M
ichael clutched frantically at the dead tree branch, his small body suspended high in the air. He looked beseechingly at Marion for help, but she was holding a huge telephone receiver because she had to call a man to attend to the tree. Peter was jumping on the dead branch and it broke with a sickening crunch. Peter grabbed the trunk of the tree for support, and Marion stared spellbound as Michael's graceful little body fell swiftly down until it lay crumpled and broken on the terrace. Marion looked at the telephone receiver in her hand but it had turned into a dead branch. She dropped it and screamed, “Michael, Michael!” Her voice a thin, piercing wail . . .

She awoke with Michael's name still on her lips and with Scott's arms holding her tight. Scott's tone was tender.

“The same dream, darling?”

“Yes, yes,” she sobbed. “Just the same. Peter and I—we killed him.”

Scott shook her gently. “Marion, you've got to stop torturing yourself. Michael fell from a tree. It's happened before and it will again—five-year-olds are natural climbers and sometimes they fall. But blaming yourself or Peter for the accident won't bring Michael back.”

“But Peter told me about that dead branch. If anyone else had, I'd have done something about it, but Peter was such a little pest.”

She'd said it so many times before, just this way in just these words. She pulled away from Scott and got out of bed. “I'll be all right in a minute. It's just that today—”

“I know,” Scott said quietly. “He'd be starting kindergarten. I haven't forgotten.”

Marion closed her eyes against the pain. “Why not say it?” she asked tonelessly. “I robbed you of your son. You always told me I was careless about attending to things that needed fixing.”

Scott sat on the side of the bed and reached for his bathrobe. “My darling, Michael's been dead three months. It was a tragic accident. You didn't rob me of my son, but you are deliberately taking yourself from me. Each day you seem to escape me a little more. Can't we accept our loss together?”

Marion shook her head drearily. “If I'd only listened to Peter. He was always telling me what to do.” She laughed mirthlessly. “He was more like you than your own son.”

Scott pulled on his bathrobe. “Marion, until you forgive yourself and Peter you'll never get over losing Michael. Just as you shouldn't blame yourself, you've no right to hate Peter so. He's just a little boy, and God knows Michael loved him.”

Marion mechanically brushed her hair back. “If it hadn't been for Peter, he'd be alive today. If Peter hadn't started to follow him out on that branch . . .”

Scott stopped on his way to the shower. “When the real estate agent phones, tell him those people can have the house. Maybe if we go back to the city for a while, it will help.”

It was true. If Marion looked out the front windows during the day, she could see children playing in the street. The left windows looked out on thick trees and hedge, but a corner of Peter's house was still visible. The back windows looked over the terrace and the giant elm where Michael . . .

She went down to the kitchen and started breakfast.

Later, after Scott had left, she poured herself more coffee and went back to the dinette table. This was the time of day she'd once loved best, with Michael still in his pajamas, eager with the questions that seemed to store up in his mind during the night. It was the one time of day when he'd been hers alone, because right after breakfast the bell would ring and Michael would slide from his chair, joyously calling, “It's Peter!”

Marion glanced involuntarily at the kitchen door. She felt that if she opened it, Peter would be there—her son's friend Peter, with his sandy hair that had seemed so drab next to Michael's blue-black head; Peter, square and somehow squat-looking when compared with Michael's slimness.

The coffee grew cold as Marion wondered what on earth Michael had seen in Peter. From the day the child had come here to live with his great-aunt, he'd attached himself to Michael. Marion had felt sorry for him. He was surely a lonely child, orphaned and living with a sick old woman, and yet he could be so irritating.

Whenever he and Michael had been out playing and there was an accident, it was always Peter who brought Michael home with a cut or bruise. “We were playing and he fell. I happened to jump on him. I didn't mean to.”

Marion had asked him one day: “Peter, do you ever once land on the bottom?”

He had grinned at her, his hazel eyes shining, ignoring her annoyance. “Nope.”

On rainy days when he and Michael had played indoors she could always be sure that at least one of Michael's toys would be taken apart. Scott had refused to get upset when she told him about it. “Honey, the kid's an engineer,” he had said. “He's got to see what makes things tick. The trouble is he spends most of his time taking things apart. The next step will be to start putting things together. He'll do it—wait and see.”

Marion had replied, “In the meantime, Michael won't have a thing left to play with.”

Not that Michael had minded. He had adored Peter. Even though Peter technically went home for lunch, he was always back in no time and ended up having dessert with Michael.

If he hadn't been such a nuisance, Marion thought drearily. If he hadn't always tried to tell me what to do. Peter always noticed when something needed fixing. “Mrs. Blaine, your toaster cord is getting worn out. . . . Mrs. Blaine, you shouldn't tie Michael's shoelace in a knot when it breaks. You should get him a new one. . . . Mrs. Blaine . . .”

Inevitably, then, Marion recalled that Saturday in June when she'd been sitting on the terrace reading. The trees were blooming fully, gloriously, and Michael and Peter were playing in the backyard. They'd been getting excited about starting kindergarten in the fall and Michael had come over to ask her. “Are you sure they'll let us in? How will they know we're both five and a half?”

She'd smiled into his serious gray eyes and given him a special, cross-my-heart promise: She would take them both to school and tell the teacher to be sure to let them in. She was deep in the book again before she realized that Peter was standing next to her chair.

“There's a dead branch, you know,” he had announced.

“A dead branch?”

“Right up there.” He had pointed toward the elm that shaded the terrace. “See?”

He was right. One of the branches had no leaves on it. “Well, we'll have to see about that.” She had tried to go back to the book.

“You ought to call the man to cut that branch off. It might fall down and hurt us.”

Marion had felt her temper slowly warm. “Peter,” she had said finally. “I'll call the man when I get good and ready, but be sure of one thing—if that branch does fall, with your luck you'll be a hundred miles away.”

He'd smiled that accepting smile and had gone back to Michael. Afterward she'd glanced up. The branch certainly did look dry, and a local tree-surgery outfit was working across the street. She'd seen the truck. If she called them over . . .

Then she'd picked up her book firmly. No five-year-old was going to give her instructions. That branch had been dead all winter. If it hadn't come down when the winter ice was on it or in the March winds, it certainly would last a few days more.

And then the next day the branch had snapped from the tree when Michael climbed out on it.

She couldn't erase the scene from her mind: Michael's still form on the terrace; the branch sprawled beside him; Peter, his foot still on the part that hadn't snapped, clinging to the trunk of the tree.

It had been her fault, but Peter's too. Michael had climbed out on the dead branch, but if Peter hadn't followed him—Peter, who knew the branch wasn't safe—maybe it wouldn't have snapped. Maybe . . .

Michael was in a coma when they took him to the hospital. He opened his eyes just once and spoke. He stared at her and smiled and then said weakly: “Peter and I have a very good secret. Peter . . .”

Peter.
It was his last word.

•  •  •

Marion got up and mechanically began clearing the table and tidying the kitchen. Then she went upstairs and dressed. She'd dismissed her cleaning woman, hoping that the physical work of scrubbing and waxing and vacuuming would wear her out and help her to sleep at night. But without Michael the house stayed unnaturally neat.

She dressed slowly, but it was only quarter past eight when she finished. She twisted her black hair into a French knot and went downstairs.

She wandered out onto the front porch and then wished she hadn't. The neighborhood children—freshly scrubbed and combed,
miraculously neat in new clothes and shiny shoes—were hurrying past, excitedly discussing the opening of school. The ones starting kindergarten were obvious. They looked half eager, half fearful, and were clinging to their mothers' hands.

We'd be leaving too, Marion thought dully, and she gripped the porch railing. She didn't have the strength to walk the few steps to the door and go inside. She stood staring as the children passed, in twos and threes and larger groups, until at last they all seemed to be gone. All except one. He was coming down the block alone and was a little late. It was quarter of nine now.

Peter! She tore her eyes from him, looked down and saw the knuckles of her hands turn white as she gripped the railing. Then she forced herself to look back again.

She hadn't seen him since the day of the funeral. He'd been in bed for three days after the accident in deep shock. But when they had come back from the cemetery he was waiting. “Mrs. Blaine,” he'd said, “Michael . . .”

She'd heard her own voice—ragged, out of control. “Get him away from me! Get him out of my sight!”

And she had not seen Peter again all summer. He and his ailing great-aunt had gone to a resort.

Peter seemed to have grown taller. He hadn't seen her yet but was walking slowly, staring at his feet. He looked forlorn and alone. She kept her eyes on him, whispering to herself: “I hate that child.” But as she said it Peter looked up, met her gaze and smiled. He smiled as though he'd been expecting her but was afraid she'd be late. She could hear Michael's voice saying: “Peter is my friend.”

•  •  •