Words of Stone (11 page)

“Come out!” she yelled, waving. “It's fun!”

Blaze opened the door and stepped onto the porch. It was pouring. He could see that Joselle was soaked already. He could see her bathing suit beneath her T-shirt and sweater.

“Come on!” she shouted.

Blaze hesitated, thinking. It was only a summer shower. Nova wouldn't mind. He took off his shoes and sprang from the porch, cringing from the shivery rain. He joined Joselle in a large muddy puddle.

Joselle put her umbrella down and grabbed Blaze's hands, pulling him into her dance. “I'm drenched,” she said, giggling, kicking her leg out playfully.

And then he saw it. His mother's name written on Joselle's thigh. He could see it through her wet, wet T-shirt which was plastered against her skin. And he could see parts of other words. All the words of stone curving around her leg in ink of various colors.

Blaze jerked his hands out of hers harshly. They stood face to face.

“What's wrong?” Joselle asked.

“I want my key collection back,” Blaze said between quick, shallow breaths, his voice shaking with anger. It was all he could think of to say.

Joselle didn't answer, her face uncomprehending. Blaze could feel the silence in his belly.

Holding his breath, Blaze tried to calm himself. He squinted and concentrated, his eyelashes becoming veils that filtered things and blurred them. But it did little good; he just kept seeing the words of stone as they had appeared on the hill. He felt ashamed for being such an easy target, someone so easily tricked.

“You wrote the messages on the hill, didn't you?” he asked. “You wrote my mother's name.”

“Oh!” Joselle said, glancing down at her transparent shirt, understanding. She covered the words with her hands and pulled her legs together. “No. I mean . . . yes.” She looked away. “I'm sorry,” she said. “It was just a joke. I didn't mean anything bad by it. And I stopped doing it once I got to know you.” She knitted her fingers nervously. “Really.”

“I thought you were my friend,” Blaze said. His voice cracked. His fingers were extended on both hands like the points of stars. They whirled around his legs as he spoke. “Just get out of here.” He gave her a hard mean look.

“You don't like me anymore,” Joselle whispered, turning sideways, hiding her face. “I'm
sorry,”
she reminded him, turning back, flipping a loose piece of hair out of her eyes. She still didn't look at him directly. “Please, don't hate me.”

For a fraction of a second everything became razor sharp to Blaze. The pores on Joselle's face, the liquid of her eyes, each strand of hair, each drop of rain. Everything was so clearly defined that it hurt Blaze's eyes to rest them on anything.

In that instant, Blaze rushed toward Joselle and pushed her down as hard as he could. He hit her once across her shoulders. “Get out of here,” he said. “Just get out of here.” And then he grabbed one of the round buttons on her sweater and pulled it off, thread trailing behind it like a fine tail.

He didn't see her face again. He watched as she rose from the ground, picked up her umbrella, and scrambled across the driveway toward Floy's house without looking back. And that's when he started to cry.

By early afternoon the rain had passed and the sun was shining. Birds chirped and skittered through the ribbons of water in Nova's garden. Barefooted and shirtless, Blaze spent the rest of the day tagging along behind his grandmother while she weeded, or sitting by himself in small spaces: his closet, under the porch, between a pile of bricks and the outside wall of Glenn's studio.

“You seem to be miles from here,” Nova said, cocking her head so Blaze could hear her. “Are you feeling all right?”

“I'm fine,” Blaze replied, gazing at a clump of nasturtiums until it became the sun.

Alone, resting against Glenn's studio wall, it occurred to Blaze that he had never pushed anyone the way he had pushed Joselle. He had never hit anyone, either. Or purposely ruined something that belonged to someone else. The button from Joselle's sweater reminded him of what he had done. Perhaps it always would.

But no one had ever made him feel so stupid before. No one had ever humiliated him the way Joselle had. No one had ever been so mean. He couldn't believe she had done it. And he couldn't believe that he had accused Claire in his mind.

He wished that he hadn't shown Joselle his scars. And he shuddered to think that he had nearly confided in her about the words of stone.

Now he felt as though he should have known. But how could he have known? Joselle had lied about when she had arrived at her grandmother's house. And when he had met her on the hill, she had told him that she had never been on the hill before. She'd probably lied a million times, he thought.

Or was there a part of him that suspected Joselle all along? If there had been, he just kept pushing it deeper and deeper inside himself until it virtually vanished. He had wanted to like her so much.

During the past couple weeks, Blaze had started to feel as though he had been friends with Joselle forever, but now he didn't know what was true. He didn't know what to believe.

Sitting alone, Blaze realized something else: he hadn't thought of Simon in days. Had Joselle taken his place?

Between his fingers, the button was as smooth as candy. He put it in his mouth and sucked on it.

“I
hate you,” Joselle said to her reflection in the living room window. “I hate you, 1 hate you, 1 hate you.” When she turned off the lamp on the end table, her reflection disappeared and everything was dark. Joselle remained by the window; it was past midnight, but she knew it was useless to try to fall asleep. By now she was beyond the point of crying. After dinner, in the bathtub, she had cried so much that her eyes were swollen and raw. So was her thigh. She had scrubbed the ball-point-pen tattoos with a vengeance so that the few remaining lines were as faint as thin spidery veins. “I hate you,” she repeated. Joselle pinched her arm right above her wrist until she couldn't stand it any longer and there were red dents from her fingernails in her skin.

She felt the way she did at school when she hadn't prepared for a test, only much worse. An overwhelming sense of panic and frustration would fill her head like a storm, making it nearly impossible to sit still at her desk. What was the best thing to do? she'd always wonder. Guess, and most likely answer the questions incorrectly? Or leave the lined answer spaces empty? She'd weigh the odds in her mind, nearly always opting for leaving the test completely blank except for her name—which she would spend most of the period working on, carefully printing each letter with decorative touches. That made things for her teachers more complex, more baffling. Most of her teachers regarded her with suspicion and wrinkled noses, as if she were some kind of specimen that was hard to categorize.

Once, when she had completely forgotten about a vocabulary test for Mrs. Weynand's language arts class, Joselle felt compelled to approach Mrs. Weynand with a sincere hug and explain how awful she felt. But she knew that that would never work; there was too much history between them for Mrs. Weynand ever to think of Joselle as anything but trouble. A constant inconvenience.

But this wasn't a test in school. This was more important.

Joselle needed someone to talk to. She hadn't told Floy about what had happened at Blaze's house, because Floy's patience was wearing thin. Upon seeing the wet, dirtied cashmere sweater—twigs and weeds sprouting from the sleeves—Floy threw her arms up in exasperation. Her eyeballs rolled back and her mouth popped open like a fish when she noticed the missing button. “You'll never be able to match that pretty button,” she said, yanking the sweater toward her to get a better look and releasing it with a snap, as though a mannequin were wearing it, not a person. “I'm not even going to ask what you've been up to. Just get yourself showered and cleaned and dried. And give me the sweater,” Floy added. “I'll try to fix it up.” Then she sighed heavily and shook her head. Joselle knew that she was fast becoming the same person in her grandmother's eyes that she was in the eyes of her teachers. Anyway, Floy was surely asleep by now. And Gary was little consolation.

Joselle needed her mother.

On the end table, resting against the lamp, stood a framed photograph of Joselle, Vicki, Floy, and Floy's mother, Alice. The photo was taken in the hospital on the day that Joselle was born. “Four Generations of Women,” Joselle had called the photograph once. “I'd call it ‘Four Generations of Fighting and Headaches,'” Vicki had retorted. Joselle thought it was odd that she had such a vivid memory when it came to Vicki's hurtful comments. She shrugged to herself.

Although Joselle's great-grandmother Alice died before Joselle had formed a memory of her, Joselle sensed a strong connection to her. In the photograph Alice's heart-shaped face was a lacework of grooves; Vicki's was flushed and young. Floy appeared stern and uneasy, and Joselle was a chubby bundle the color of a bruise. It was too dark to see the photograph clearly, but Joselle knew it like she knew the image of George Washington on a dollar bill.

The only information that Joselle had about her great-grandmother was from photographs and from stories Vicki and Floy had told her. When she was younger, Joselle had thought of Alice as a guardian angel, a bent, wrinkled woman who lived inside the crack in Joselle's bedroom ceiling. Someone who was able to see and know all things. Someone who would emerge upon request to rescue and comfort Joselle. As routine, Joselle used to say good-night and good morning to the crack every day. It didn't take Joselle very long, however, to come to the conclusion that the crack was only damaged plaster and that her great-grandmother could never, ever truly help her.

Once, when Joselle lost one of Vicki's favorite earrings and was sent to her room as punishment, Joselle called for Alice. “Here, Alice! Here, Old Grammy!” she cried. At first she waited patiently, sitting cross-legged on her bed, her head tilted upward. When Alice failed to respond, Joselle climbed onto her dresser and removed the curtain rod from the window frame. Using the curtain rod as a tool, she chipped away at the ceiling until bits of plaster dusted her bedspread like snow and she knew in the very bottom of her heart that what she was doing was not only pointless, but would only get her into more trouble.

In the moonlight Joselle wandered. From room to room she roamed without purpose. After she had walked through every room (except Floy's bedroom) several times, Joselle found herself back in the living room beside Floy's rocking chair, staring down at the telephone. With the telephone cord spiraled around her, Joselle dialed her own number. She wanted Vicki to magically answer the phone and say: “Hello, sweetie! Of course it's me. I'm having all the calls forwarded to me in California. Whatever it is you want, I'll do. I'll be on the next plane home if you need me.” But all she heard was the faraway sound of a dull bell in an empty house. Joselle let the phone ring and ring and ring. She pictured her mother and Rick running along the beach, the orange-and-pink sun dropping into the Pacific Ocean behind them. She pulled the cord across her face, placed it in her mouth, wove it between her fingers. She was all set to hang up, when suddenly she heard a sleepy, but familiar, voice bark, “Hello?
Hello?
Who
is
this?”

Joselle hung up the phone without saying anything. She fell into the rocking chair. After the initial shock passed, she cried in rhythm with the movement. Back, forth. Whimper, sniffle. She cried quietly at first, like someone at a movie. But then she began to rock faster and cry louder. When she thought that she might completely lose control, she sprang from the chair and barged into Floy's room.

“Grammy,” she sobbed. “Grammy, help.”

W
hile Floy talked on the telephone, Joselle sat on the floor behind the sofa. The longer Floy talked, the louder her voice grew. “I don't care if it
is
one o'clock in the morning,” Floy said. “What are
you
doing home? Your daughter and 1 were led to believe that you and your friend were somewhere out west.”

Twisting this way and that way, Joselle tried to hear better, tried not to hear, tried to see Floy's expression, tried to hide her own eyes so she couldn't see a thing. Joselle heard Floy say, “What do you
mean
, you've been home all along?” and “I don't care what you call it, I call it lying,” and “Too bad the word responsibility isn't in your vocabulary,” and “You'll never change,” and “Nothing's ever your fault, is it?”

By the time Floy slammed the receiver down, she was shouting. Her “Good-bye!” made Joselle cringe.

“Well,” said Floy, her face pinched with anger, “The Beautiful Vicki strikes again. She thinks her wishes are more important than your needs.”

Joselle hated talk like this; it meant nothing. She wanted facts. She gave Floy a searching look. “What are we doing?” she cried. “What's
happening?
”

“I'm taking you home where you belong.”

“Right now?”

“Right now. I won't be able to sleep. You won't be able to sleep. We might as well.” Floy bent down and kissed Joselle on each cheek. “She was home the entire time. The Pacific Ocean thing was just one of her stories.” Floy inhaled deeply. So deeply that Joselle thought that Floy might suck in the whole living room. She let out the breath slowly and steadily. “Come here, Joselle,” Floy said, her voice changing, turning lighter, almost airy. “Let me do your eyelids one last time.”

Within minutes after having her eyelids done, Joselle was packed and they were on the road. Floy was in such a hurry that she and Joselle kept their nightgowns on. Joselle wore a sweatshirt over hers.

Joselle's sweater was lying on a towel on the backseat. It was still wet. Earlier that afternoon, Floy had washed it by hand and sewn on a flat, mismatched, dove-colored button. “It's the best I can do,” Floy had told Joselle. When they passed a street lamp, Joselle turned in the car to look at the sweater. It was no longer a perfect thing. It was limp and dull. Now it truly belongs to me, she thought regretfully.