Outside In (6 page)

At first, Marvin Road was a stretch of houses mixed with businesses that became fewer and fewer as Dave and I put distance between downtown and us.

The fence we ran past was painted red, but when I was little, it had been gray, with someone’s black graffiti:
SUCK EGGS
. Once when I asked what it meant, Mom had said, “It’s just rudeness,” and, “I feel sorry for people who have to express themselves that way.”

After the fence was the helicopter factory, with a sign with letters that changed like a movie marquee:
TAKE TIME TO SMELL THE ROSES. HAPPY JUNE!
I was always hoping Dad would convince someone to let me write the headlines, and I had good ideas. I wanted to see the sign empty and white except for one or two words:
PEACE
or
GO METS!
or
SUCK EGGS
or, just for fun,
CHÉRIE WITKOWSKI
.

Dave and I ducked into the woods between Marvin Road and the Little River. Dave turned his back and peed on a tree. “Pardon me,” he said.

I shrugged and said, “Glad I don’t have to go.” I knew how to go in the woods, and I figured my skirt would cover everything, but whenever I thought of trying, my insides seemed to clench up.

“You must be a camel,” Dave said disgustingly.

I smiled. It seemed like the first time I’d smiled in a week.

Dave grabbed onto a tree branch and swung himself up. I sank into the tall grass below the tree, out of view from across the river. Hiding, I felt powerful.
I know something you don’t know.

Last year when Dave had read
The Sword in the Stone,
we had gone through a period of playing that we lived in the woods like Wart, which is what they called young King Arthur in the book. Dave was Wart, turning into fish in the
river to learn how it felt to be something else from the inside. As Merlin I turned Dave into all kinds of things: rocks, frogs, a salamander. He was good at saying how it felt to be still, hard, wet, slithering.

Now I looked up at him in the tree and said in my solemn, mysterious Merlin voice, “How does it feel to
be
the tree, Wart?”

“I feel the wind,” said Dave, after a moment. I recognized his Wart voice. “But I cannot move. I’ll be blown over!” He let himself fall to the ground with a crash.

“Timber,” I said.

Dave stood up and asked, “How does it feel to be the raven?”

That was uncalled for. I was just playing. Why bring this horrible day into it? “Shut up about that,” I said. He sounded as if he was picking a fight, the way Pete would.

Across the river I spied Pete coming home from high school, which got out earlier than St. John Vianney’s. If he saw us, maybe he’d tell. Dave climbed the tree again. I felt like leaving him there.

“Pete made All-Stars,” said Dave from above.

“Did
you?”
I didn’t know what to hope.

“Yeah, and the idiots put me on his team,” Dave said.

“How’s he taking it?” I crouched in the tall grass, keeping an eye on Pete.

“You’re lucky, being the oldest,” Dave said. “And no brothers, even.”

“Not so far,” I said. Mom had said not to tell anyone yet, but suddenly I didn’t care. “My mom’s pregnant, you know.”

Dave threw a little stick at my head. “Liar,” he said.

“I am not,” I said. Another stick hit me.

“Aimée’s eight years old,” he said.

What did that matter? “It’s due on Halloween,” I said.

“That figures.”

I stood up out of the tall grass. I didn’t care if Pete saw me. Let him tell if he wanted to. “She’s probably having a boy,” I said. “That’s why she’s throwing up so much.”

A stick smacked into my back as I walked away.

I turned and screeched, “Stop it
now!”

Dave threw a stick into my face. “Oh, Miss Teacher’s Pet Poetry Pupil who cuts class wants to save the trees now?” It was something I’d expect Pete to say, not Dave.

“It’s you I don’t want to go on living.”

“So?” Dave said. “It’s a good day to die.”

“Go play in traffic,” I screamed, walking away. If he wanted to scare me, he was succeeding. But I was already scared. I’d been scared all day.

Dave caught up and stood beside me. “I’d like to go point-blank, like Bobby Kennedy.” He pointed a finger at my head.
“Pow.”
His fist was so tight the tendons on his hand stood out white. He was scared, too, I realized.

“I have papers to deliver,” I said stiffly. I could imagine the big mournful headline:
KENNEDY DEAD
.

“Miss Important,” he said. “Bet they’ll be nice and bloody.”

I ran across the street and left Dave at the side of the road.

“Hi, Davey. Hi, Cherry,” I heard Pete say. “Having a romantic walk in the woods?” I walked home as fast as I could, alone.

H
AD PETE FIGURED OUT THAT WE’D CUT SCHOOL?
He hadn’t liked it when I’d helped rescue the ball from the sewer. I was afraid that one day he might tell on Dave and me. But nothing happened.

At school I avoided Dave, afraid Mr. Bergstrom would put two and two together and guess we’d been together the day we went missing. But he didn’t.

At home I avoided the Ascontis’ house, wanting no part of their fights about the news.

Soon Mom told Aimée about the new baby, then took Pete and Dave aside and told them (Dave pretended it was news), and pretty soon the rest of the neighborhood found out, because of Aimée.

Dave didn’t say anything about my parents’ being living proof of health class theories. He came over and hung around the porch being Mr. Sweet and Delightful. One afternoon I had already helped Mom bring in her grocery bags and figured she’d be okay putting the stuff in the cupboards herself. When Dave appeared, I thought he was going to keep me company while I got ready for my route.
While I folded and banded papers, he jumped up and down, helping Mom. “Here, let me carry that, Aunt Mitch.… Get you anything, Aunt Mitch?”

Then he came out with a glass of lemonade and sat on the steps. By that time I was done with the papers. I heaved up an armful when I saw Dave coming and made myself busy packing Reshna’s baskets. “Did you get a tip?” I asked.

“Well, I’ve got to make some money somehow,” said Dave. He was fooling, of course. Our mothers never paid us money for anything we did.

Later Aunt Bonnie told me, “David needs to do things for people, mademoiselle.”

“Well, she’s
my
mother.”

Aunt Bonnie didn’t say, “Then why don’t you help her more?”

And I didn’t mention that I thought she was jealous, too—or that Dave came to our house to get away from his own. Instead I hung around Aunt Bonnie the way Dave hung around Mom. It wasn’t anything unusual, really. Aunt Bonnie had gone to art school, the way I wanted to. She had a little drawing table and an easel in the sewing room with the window that faced our house. I’d wander in there sometimes and get her to show me what she was painting.

Pete and Uncle Joe didn’t fight if I was there. Once Dave came and looked over my shoulder. “Why don’t you try, David?” Aunt Bonnie said.

I tried to invite him, too. “You’d be good, slugger!” I said in my corniest voice. I even nudged him with my elbow, right in front of Aunt Bonnie. She pretended she didn’t see. Dave almost laughed but stopped himself, shrugged, shook his head.

Other times he came and stood in the doorway until I looked up. “Hide-and-seek later on?” I said.

“Maybe,” he said. We both knew that meant if his parents were fighting.

More and more I went over when I knew Dave and Pete were at baseball practice and Uncle Joe was at his summer lifeguarding job, times when I knew Aunt Bonnie was alone in the house.

One afternoon, after school got out, I hung around so long that Aunt Bonnie got out an old box of pastels and showed me how to draw with them, drawing that came out like painting. Faux Pas slept under the table and snorted in her dreams, blowing hot breath all over our feet.

As I pasteled, I looked out the sewing room window at my house. I thought and thought of what I could ask Aunt Bonnie to get her to tell me what I knew she knew about my mom. Finally I said, “Can babies sleep with the light on?”

Aunt Bonnie laughed and said, “Sure!”

That’s what I thought she’d say. “Aimée does, too,” I said.

Aunt Bonnie picked up a piece of charcoal and sketched something at the edge of her painting. She wouldn’t tell me what it was, but she let me look. Grass and trees, so far, a dark sky, a square in the middle—a building maybe. And the moon, big and round and yellow-white. It was
abstract
—that was the fifty-cent word, Aunt Bonnie told me—without details, clues.

Now she said, “Is there room for a crib in Aimée’s room?”

I shook my head. Aimée’s room was hardly bigger than the bathroom. She and I used to share my room, before she started the lights-on-at-night thing.

“There’s not enough room in mine, either,” I said, thinking of all my shoeboxes.

Aunt Bonnie nodded and kept nodding, sketching along with the song on the radio downstairs. I didn’t want to think about space.

“What do you call it a sewing room for?” I asked. “It’s your
studio,
isn’t it?” I liked the elegant sound of that word.

Aunt Bonnie’s head came up and she laughed one of her elephant trumpet laughs at me. “Because it always was the sewing room,” she said. “A studio sounds too businesslike.”

“Why, is painting supposed to be a business?”

“No, that’s just the point.”

“What, making money?”

“Yes.”

This stumped me.

“Uncle Joe likes to think of me as an artist,” she said.

“Bight,” I said. “Artists have studios, don’t they?”

“Artists with
businesses
have studios.”

“But artists who don’t make money don’t?”

She nodded, looking down at her work again.

“So what’s wrong with making money?”

Aunt Bonnie just shook her head. “Maybe someday,” she said.

I don’t think Pete saw Mom after she told him about the baby until we went to cook out in the Ascontis’ yard on the Fourth of July. I saw him go to Mom and hug her very gently, afraid to touch her. It was almost sweet, but he walked away without any word I could hear. Mom saw me watching and shrugged, looking embarrassed.

Pete tried at the beginning of that summer, he really did. He went to Parks and Recreation and got a job as a
camp counselor, teaching fourth graders dodgeball and murder ball and medicine ball and arts and crafts (which was a big stretch for him). Unfortunately, it didn’t last, on account of his temper.

Pete and Sandy started playing football, leaving Dave out. When they were together, Pete was always blabbing away about joining the marines or the air force or something, and Sandy sat there and listened and laughed. How could he laugh? He was just a moron, that’s why, and everything he knew about the armed forces he’d learned from watching old war movies on TV.

I knew more than I wanted about war from the
Bell,
and Dave had read plenty of war stories along with his piles of other books. But we didn’t get into their shoot-’em-up conversations.

Dave and I, and even Lucy, tried getting up games of hide-and-seek, and Sandy probably would have gone along, but Pete always had something else to do. Maybe Pete just didn’t want to hang around with us anymore. He even yelled at Aunt Bonnie one time when I was over there drawing, telling her that if she’d wanted a daughter, she should have had a third kid, like my mom. But that wasn’t even the worst thing he had up his sleeve. He was saving that for the third week in July.

“Pammy!” Aimée yelled in her most boisterous voice. “Didn’t you bring the baseball gloves?”

“Just these invisible ones.” Pammy lifted her empty hand and pretended to throw something across the circle to Aimée, who pretended to catch it.

“Hey!” Aimée said, sounding like Sandy DeLuna, on purpose, I think. “Throw it
to
me, not
through
me!”

Aimée was terribly good at thinking up weird games.

Pete and Sandy and Dave came around from the back of Sandy’s house. “Come play invisible baseball with us!” yelled Pammy.

But Dave merely pointed a finger at me, yelled, “You!” and waited to see what Pete and Sandy would do. Pete ignored us entirely and went to shoot baskets in Sandy’s driveway.

“Me what?” I asked in a low voice. I looked sidelong at Dave, but he walked away to Sandy’s basketball hoop to be with the boys.

“How many balls have you got?” Pammy yelled to Aimée, as if she were the equipment manager.

Sandy snorted, startling me. I didn’t expect him to pay attention to us girls when he had Pete and Dave.

“Just one,” Aimée said, getting the joke. She hadn’t grown up with “brothers” for nothing. She pretend-threw a ball to me. “I like the way he says, ‘You!’ to you. …”

“Oh, please.”

“Here, Lucy, catch!” I pretend-threw the ball to Lucy, and wonder of wonders, Lucy stuck out her hand and pretend-caught it.

Aimée pretend-spat (Mom wasn’t all that far away) on the ground and said, “Batter up!”

“He does like you, Chérie,” said Lucy softly. I pretended she was invisible.