The Rainy Season (17 page)

“And there’s ice cream in the kitchen,” he said.

“Okay.”

“Do you need anything at all?”

She shook her head. Then she opened her luggage and took out two stuffed animal toys, Winnie the Pooh and Piglet. She made the two creatures comfortable on the pillows.

Phil liked that. They made the room a child’s room in their small way, something that it hadn’t been until that moment, and they were the first thing about the room that was distinctly Betsy’s. He felt an irrational element of hope in this small beginning, although the notion made him want to say something else—the right thing, whatever that was. It occurred to him suddenly that Betsy wasn’t necessarily avoiding anything at all with her silence, that this was just as likely her own attempt at quiet dignity. She rummaged in her unlatched suitcase, and Phil stepped toward the stairs. Just then the doorbell rang, and he headed down, leaving her to unpack. It was Elizabeth on the front porch, as he had half expected it would be. She was holding a basket with a bottle of wine in it and what looked like cheeses and crackers.

“This is for you,” she said when he opened the door and let her in. “It’s for being so gallant to me the other night.”

THE PRIEST STOOD
up again. He was stiff, and his knees ached. The aluminum frame of the chair cut across his back just below his shoulders, and he had to sit hunched forward to avoid being crippled by it. Clearly the chair was designed by a sadist. Still, it was better than no chair at all. He flexed his back and neck, loosening up. He looked out past the edge of the shed, keeping himself hidden, and checked the front of the house. A half-hour ago a second car had pulled into the driveway, and the car was still there. The last thing he wanted to be was a snoop, but he had thought he recognized the car, and for the entire half-hour he had been waiting for the woman who owned it to appear from within the house in order to have a look around outside. It might, of course, not be who he thought it was. In the darkness it was hard to tell. Cars all looked alike these days.

He smashed up the wrapper to the sandwich he’d just finished and put it into his pocket, then stepped out from inside the open shed and peered down into the depths of the pool. The moonlight that shone on the water was mere moonlight, and he saw nothing within the pool but darkness. He
felt
something more, though, felt it in his bones and joints, like winter weather. He knew exactly what it was, too: a ghost, a lost soul, someone long gone out of the world, awakened from its sleep by heavy rains and rising water. He focused his eyes on the wind-ruffled reflection of the moon.

BETSY SAT DOWN
on the bed—on her bed—and stared at the mason jar that sat on the windowsill. It hadn’t sat on the windowsill last time she was here; she would have remembered. Inside the wax-sealed jar lay half a dozen objects, including an old hatpin with a carved jewel on top, red like a cloudy ruby. There was a junky old pocketknife, a thimble with a red smudge on the side like a bloody fingerprint, a little horse made of dull metal, a small glass that reminded her of her inkwell.

It struck her that this was the first time she had thought about it as
her
inkwell, and not her mother’s or her grandmother’s. She remembered Uncle Phil referring to it as “Mrs. Darwin’s glass inkwell.” She wished she could tell him about it, about why Mrs. Darwin had wanted it, about Mrs. Darwin sneaking around the house looking for it, going into her mother’s room. But she wouldn’t tell him. She wouldn’t tell anybody about it, and anyway, Mrs. Darwin was far away now.

She glanced around, suddenly cautious. Did Uncle Phil know what these things were? As an experiment she pushed at the jar lid, careful not to tear the wax. It was twisted on solidly. The force of loosening it would break the seal for sure. She pictured scraping the wax from the lid, maybe into a pan or something, and melting it again to reseal the jar after she’d opened it. Perhaps she could cut a line around the wax right at the base of the lid, twist the lid off, and then press the wax back into place when she replaced the lid.

She set the jar down again and stepped away from the window, where she stood listening for a moment, barely breathing. The old stairs were creaky, and there was no chance of anyone surprising her, but even so she would have to be careful. A woman laughed downstairs; Uncle Phil said something.

There was a patch of moonlight on the sill of the adjacent window, and she picked up the jar now and set it carefully into the light, then bent over and looked at the contents more closely. They seemed to glow now, as if soaked with moonlight. The red glass of the hatpin was clear, and not the dull color it had seemed to be in the lamplight. It seemed almost to burn, and the red smudge on the white thimble wasn’t a fingerprint after all, but was clearly a miniature painting: the cross-hatched structure of a tiny roller-coaster. The spiral swirl in the marble seemed to be turning slowly on edge, like a rainbow nebula, and its colors were bright and clear. Her eye was drawn to the roller-coaster, and although the painting couldn’t have been more than half an inch high, it was perfectly and completely rendered with a three-dimensional clarity. She stared at it now, her eyes following the swerve of the tracks until she made out the little car, halfway down an immensely steep hill, and she was swept suddenly with the dreamlike feeling of falling, and then of wind blowing her hair back as she was swept upward on the rackety rails of an old beach-side coaster, straight toward an immense blue sky. …

She looked away, breathed deeply, and focused on the room around her. It seemed to her that if she had let herself go, she might have lost herself in that sky, that she might have flown upward until she was so far out of the earth’s atmosphere that she wouldn’t be able to find her way down again, and the realization both frightened her and thrilled her.

She moved the jar back out of the moonlight. The glow faded within the jar and the objects appeared once again to be old, weather-beaten, and dirty. Uncle Phil didn’t know what they were. She was certain of that. She stood looking through the window, at the tree beyond the balcony, at the way the heavy branches wrapped around the narrow ledge. It would be nothing to step out through the high windows, climb over the balcony railing, and make her way out into those branches. She picked up her book bag and then stood at the window, making perfectly certain that she was alone.

The voices downstairs had settled into conversation.

She pushed the window open and stepped out onto the narrow balcony, feeling the moist night air through her clothes, carrying her book bag and leaving the light on in the room behind her. After glancing back one last time and listening again for the sound of voices downstairs, she swung her leg over the railing and set her foot on a branch, which swayed slightly under her weight. The limbs of the pepper tree were gnarled, and there were bumps and depressions in the rough bark. It would be an easy tree to climb, even in rainy weather. She slung the bag over her shoulder and reached into the foliage to grab a branch overhead. Holding on, she walked steadily out into the center of the tree, the leaves brushing her face. The ground was invisible far below, the tree trunk half-obscured by shadow. When she glanced back she could still see the edge of the lit window through the feathery leaves. Lamplight from the interior of the room shone out onto the trunk a few feet below the limb she stood on. There, nearly hidden by the heavy scar of a broken-off limb, was a deep hollow in the tree. The hollow was deep, deep enough to hide the box.

She sat down on the branch and slid downward, leaning backward to balance herself, reaching with her toe for the branch beneath her. She tipped forward and slid, braking her fall by grabbing the trunk of the tree, and landed solidly on the limb underneath. Her balcony was above her now, and one of the kitchen windows directly below. She crouched on the branch, and felt inside the hollow. It was dry inside, sheltered from the rain. She took the box out of the bag and set it in the hole, tilting it against the back wall. The depression that it sat in would keep it from falling out, and there was no way in the world that anyone could see the hollow from the ground, let alone the box hidden inside.

Remaining there for a moment, she looked up through the branches at the moon overhead, which shone through a leafy window in the canopy of the tree. The night air was cool, but not as cold as at home. Home … Austin wasn’t her home anymore. She didn’t go to Jonas Salk School anymore, and maybe she would never see her friends there again. Where she had lived all her life was gone, and she knew that she would never go back. She found that she was crying, sitting on the limb now with her feet dangling, holding on with one hand. Her mother had been sick for a long time—off and on for years. Sometimes there were good times when she was well, but Betsy had learned that those were just the in-between times: sometimes as short as a couple of days, sometimes as long as a year. But things would always be bad again.

She stood up on the branch and wiped her eyes. It was time to go back in. If Uncle Phil came upstairs he probably wouldn’t like it that she had climbed out through the window, and she didn’t want him to start thinking about the tree and why she was climbing around in it—especially because of what Mrs. Darwin had told him about the inkwell, how she had lied about it. And now Uncle Phil probably thought that
she
was lying. He was just too nice to say so.

Betsy turned around and felt for a handhold above, realizing with growing fear that it wasn’t going to be easy to climb back up onto the limb above her. Getting down had been simple, but …

There was a noise now, a voice, and for a moment she thought it had come from inside the house, from the woman downstairs. She listened, but now there was silence. The noise hadn’t come from the house at all, but from somewhere below. She heard it again now—clearly a woman’s voice out in the darkness of the yard, and somebody trying to quiet her down. Was the woman hurt? Betsy’s heart sped up, and she found herself breathing too fast. She knew she was hidden from most of the yard, safely out of view, and she stepped down onto another, lower limb on the opposite side of the trunk, and then edged out along it, holding onto an overhead branch. She was level with the kitchen window now, and the foliage was thin enough so that she was clearly visible in the light from the porch lamp and through the window itself. Still, she had to see. …

She bent down, holding on tight, and peered through the branches where the leaves and twigs were scant, and there, across the lawn, beyond the edge of the tower, a woman in a long dress knelt in the moonlight. She was apparently wet, and there was water splashed on the stones of the well, as if she had just climbed out of the water. She stood up shakily, took two steps forward, and sat down hard, and then put her face in her hands as if she were utterly lost and miserable.

Betsy stood staring at her for a moment, struck by the dreamlike strangeness of her sudden appearance, dressed like this, as if she had wandered out of a movie, or out of the past. Why had she been in the well? She couldn’t have
fallen
in, not with the high stone wall around it.

Betsy dropped her empty book bag to the ground, turned around, held onto the limb as tightly as she could, and dropped, catching herself in mid-fall and then letting go. She landed hard and fell to her knees, and then, leaving the bag, she ran across the lawn and knelt at the woman’s side. She still hid her face, as if she couldn’t bear to see, and Betsy put her hand on the woman’s shoulder.

“Do you need help?” a man’s voice asked, the whispered question directed at Betsy. She gasped and stepped back, turning toward the tower. An old man stood some few feet away, his finger on his lips. He must have just now come out of the darkness from behind the tower. She could see from his clothing that he was a priest. She could also see that he was nervous, hurried. His eyes watched the distant grove uneasily, as if he expected that at any moment someone else might step out of the darkness.

Betsy glanced back at the house now, at the door into the side porch. She could see Phil sitting in the living room, the woman opposite, near the fireplace.

“Wait,” he said, as if he knew that Betsy was thinking of running. He smiled at her. “Help me with her first. Her name is Jeanette, and she’s come a long, long way.”

PHIL WAS SURPRISED
to see that it was Elizabeth at the door, although it wasn’t an unpleasant surprise. He took the basket from her and let her in, and she tossed her purse and jacket down on a chair by the door as if she felt at home there. She smiled at him and said, “I want to make amends—for the way I treated you the other night, when you were so gallant and all and I was such a crank.”

Inadvertently, Phil thought about Betsy, sitting upstairs in her room alone, and he glanced back toward the stairs.

“You’re not alone?” Elizabeth asked.

“No.” Here was another new puzzle for him to work out. The house wasn’t his anymore. “My niece is upstairs,” he said to her.

She looked at him blankly for a moment, as if she expected something more than this. “What are you suggesting?” she asked.

“I mean she’s living with me now. A lot’s happened since I saw you last. I’m suddenly an adoptive father.”

“Well, you’re that type,” she said.

Now he looked at her blankly.

“I mean you’re the father type. Your niece has come to the right place.”

“Thanks for saying so. I’ve had my doubts over the last couple of days.”

“Have
I
come to the right place? That’s what I’m wondering.” She smiled at him and raised her eyebrows. “Don’t answer that,” she said. “I shouldn’t have said it. I’d love to meet your niece. Find a couple of glasses, though. … Unless I’ve come by at the wrong time? Is that what you meant by your niece being upstairs? That this was a bad time? I should have called.”

“No,” Phil said. “It’s fine.”

“I’ve got gas in the car this time,” she said. “If I’m in the way, just tell me and I’ll scoot.”