Ferris Beach (11 page)

We were supposed to get our tree the next day, and I couldn’t wait. My dad didn’t believe in killing a tree either, so we always got one with the roots bound in burlap and then set it out in the backyard down close to the property line. Our Moravian star, simple and white, was my favorite of all decorations, but we had not even gotten it out yet; that night I welcomed the loud and lively lights up and down Misty’s side of the street. I needed something dancing busily in my mind. I stepped into the middle of the road and just stood there, the streetlights stretching in either direction, glowing in the damp chilly air. I could see my breath, could feel my own warmth as it formed there in front of me. Behind me, our house looked dark, faint lingerings of
I’d walk a million miles,
and I wasn’t even sure if it was really playing or if I was imagining the familiar, the same way a bright light will remain when you close your eyelids, the way I imagine the sight of an eclipse would burn its image into your eyes forever.

The street was completely still, empty; it was one of those times when I told myself that I would remember this moment forever and needed to do something that would later remind me. I had picked up a piece of coal on my last day at Pine Top Elementary School and still had it in my jewelry box. It was just that important. I saw Misty run through their living room and put a package under the tree. Then she was getting her coat from the closet. They would be outside within five minutes; they would be looking for me, blowing the horn to go. I looked around, walked quickly back up our driveway where it was dark, the slight glow of the kitchen light coming off the side porch. My own room was dark, the sleeping porch faintly lit by the upstairs hallway. I turned quickly towards the tall stone gates of Whispering Pines and felt a sudden chill, a sudden dare issued to myself. “Come on already.” Dean Rhodes was standing in their carport and leaning in the side door. “Kate isn’t even here yet.” It was in that split second that I took a deep breath and ran in, eyes straight ahead as I went midway up the first small path to the large monument
that said McCarthy, and then on, farther, until the bare branches of the large oak creaked and whined over my head. I reached and felt in the darkness, there around the large gnarled roots, looking for something, a rock, plastic flower, lost marble or penny. I could feel the thick damp clay on my hands, the dead grass brushing against the legs of my jeans. “Kate? Katie?” Misty’s voice was like she had a megaphone, and I could imagine my mother’s ears perking with the sound of my name in spite of Al Jolson and cars on the interstate and spaghetti sauce gurgling and spitting.

I felt something cool and hard and lifted it to see in the haze of the distant streetlight a petal from a hard plastic flower. It was a pink fake rose petal, caked in clay, and as I held it there, I would have sworn that I heard something move just on the other side of the path. I froze, waiting, knowing that I’d see Oliver playing there, but then it got quiet just as suddenly as I’d heard the rusde. Mr. and Mrs. Rhodes were coming out of the house now, and I had no time to linger. I heard the rustle again, this time caught a glimpse of something white, and in a sudden rush, I turned and ran as fast as I could, down the path and through the gates. “Coming!” I yelled in response to Misty’s calls, and grabbed my bag where I had left it at the corner of the house. My heart was beating so fast it felt like it was in my neck and my ears. The petal was in my coat pocket, and I squeezed it until it hurt my palm.

“Where were you?” Misty was standing there with her hands on her hips. She had her eyes all made up and was wearing her new crushed-velvet pants and jacket. “Your mama said you were waiting on the porch.”

“I was looking for Oliver.” I slowed down, released my grip on the petal. “Why are you so dressed up?”

Misty nudged me and glanced over at Dean, meaning she didn’t want him to hear what she had to say. He just glared at me the way he always did. When he climbed in the backseat, she grabbed me and whispered that his friend, Ronald,
you know the tall guy,
was going to come over later to spend the night. Misty
was always in hopes that one of these nights one of Dean’s friends would fall madly in love with her. We got in the backseat and, as Misty usually planned it, I was sitting right beside Dean, rigid for fear that my leg would accidentally touch his. Mr. Rhodes backed out of the driveway too fast, and it threw me in that direction; I tried to sit up but when I did, I felt Dean’s hand on my forearm, holding me off balance. I turned suddenly, to look as we passed the cemetery, to see if there
was
someone out there, to see if I could see the exact spot where I had been, but when I turned, Dean was there looking at me, his dark-blue eyes almost black. His face softened as he pushed me back into my spot in the center and then with his arms crossed, fingers safely hidden, I felt him squeezing my upper arm. I wasn’t sure what to do so I just sat there, Mr. Rhodes and Mo in the front seat pointing out these or those decorations, Misty talking about how thejbur of us
kids
could sit up late and watch “Shock Theatre,” how we could fix popcorn and milkshakes and so on.

Misty’s favorite song of the week was playing on the radio, “Have You Seen Her,” and she rocked back and forth while she sang along with The Chi-Lites. Misty had a good voice and was the only white kid in school who could get away with singing Jackson Five or Supremes or Chi-Lites songs without
sounding
like she was
trying
to sound black. As a result she had befriended several black girls that other people were scared of and spent a lot of her time in front of the warped bathroom mirrors singing backup to Lily Hadley, who had an Afro that would’ve put Jimi Hendrix to shame.

“We’ll see about the sitting up late,” Mo said, but not once did Dean say no and that was so unlike him. Before we got to Hardee’s, he had worked his hand over to find mine and held it against the cold vinyl of the seat, carefully hidden by his fur-lined denim jacket. I began thinking that Misty and Dean had
planned
this and that she had conveniently forgotten to tell me; I wasn’t sure how I felt about Dean. He was not and never would
have been my choice for a boyfriend, and yet, I had never really had one so what did I know. I sort of liked the way his hand felt, fingers curled around mine, our hands probably the same size, but I couldn’t help but wonder if I would feel this same way in the daylight, face to face with him. Misty kept singing along with the radio, never even elbowing me, so I knew that she had no idea what her brother was doing. Don McLean was singing my favorite song of the month, “American Pie”:
Did you write the book of love. . . .

“Okay. Here we are.” Mr. Rhodes pulled into the bright parking lot and just as discreetly as it had found me, Dean’s hand disappeared. I clutched the plastic petal in my pocket and tried to think of some topic to start with Misty that could get and keep her talking. “Do you remember the name of that real sad movie we watched where the black girl who had been pretending to be white was chasing after her mama’s funeral at the end?”

“Imitation of Life,”
she said, eyes eager as always when she talked about movies. Her favorites were the tear-jerkers, anything from
Stella Dallas
to
Old Yeller
to
Splendor in the Grass;
she read
T.V. Guide
faithfully.
Stella Dallas
was my favorite, and if I ever felt like working up a good cry, all I needed do was picture Barbara Stanwyck in those old clunky shoes as she hung on the iron fence and peered in the window at the daughter she’d let go. It sent a sudden chill through me to imagine myself as the daughter, Angela coming to our house to see
me.
And you’re finally going to meet your cousin, my dad had said that day we went to Ferris Beach; she’s going to
love
you. /
remember that day well,
she had just said about my birthday.

“Madame X
is a good one. So is
Backstreet,”
Mo said, and pushed open the door. “Misty, get me a Huskee Junior, some fries, and a chocolate shake,” she said. “Thomas, what do you want?” Mr. Rhodes gave us his order too, and then the two of them went to sit and wait at a table. They picked a big one in the corner of the room, so we had windows on both sides and could see all the cars that circled the building.
Madame X
was the one when
the mother was forced by the evil mother-in-law to leave home, never to see her child again, but to be thought of as dead. Suddenly there were so many possibilities and I wanted to pull Misty home and into the solitude of her room that very minute and start slowly at the very beginning, telling her everything I knew, and then the two of us would sit there and put it all together.

Dean sat across from me, and two times I felt his foot press down on the toe of my boot, and I wasn’t sure if it was intentional or not. In the fluorescent light, he looked very pale, his long dark lashes making him look fragile, almost feminine like some kind of little foreign doll. His eyes were the shade of Mo’s, that deep blue that almost looked violet in the right light, Liz Taylor eyes, my father had once remarked, to which Mrs. Poole had huffed and puffed and looked around in disbelief. My eyes were dark like my father’s; my hair looked auburn in certain lights.

“Kate?” Mo was looking at me with those dark-blue eyes. I felt the pressure letting up on my toe as Dean leaned back in his chair and waved a french fry back and forth through ketchup. “Does your cousin visit often?” She was sitting with her legs apart, hands on top of her thighs, while Mr. Rhodes’ arm rested on her shoulder; he toyed with the material of her collar. “I’ve never seen her visiting y’all before.”

“No, she doesn’t come often.” At the risk of making Dean mad, I pulled my feet up close under my chair. I could not concentrate on him touching me and Mo talking about Angela at the same time. “But you do know her?”

“Well, I’ve seen her,” Mo said. “I don’t really
know
her.”

“What’s her name?” Mr. Rhodes asked and toyed with the chain around his neck. It was one of those broken charms that tells how you’ll be reunited with one another one day. Misty had told me that her mother had the other half in her jewelry box, that they had given those to each other when they got married. Mo’s stomach moved and Mr. Rhodes’ attention went there instead.

“Angela,” I said. “Angela Burns.”

“Angela.” He stared down at Mo’s stomach and then shook his head. “I don’t know. How do
you
know her?”

“I don’t really,” Mo said, and gently lifted Mr. Rhodes’ hand from her stomach. “I’ve just seen her around, talked in the grocery-store line or something. I always assumed she was married?” She looked at me for an answer, and I shrugged, said that I had never heard if she was; I was embarrassed by my ignorance of my own relative. It seemed to me that Mo was relieved when I said that Angela had already left, but I couldn’t tell for sure because she quickly changed the subject. I told her that if she or Mr. Rhodes
did
remember knowing Angela to tell me, and she said oh yes, she sure would. We had only ridden about three blocks when she said she wasn’t feeling very well and thought we better get home. Peter, Paul, and Mary were singing “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” and all I could think about was Angela; I could see her singing that song, leaving someone behind. Maybe on this very night that’s what she had done; maybe she had come to tell my dad that she was leaving. Maybe she had left me. Maybe that’s why my mother and I weren’t close like Mo and Misty. Maybe she wasn’t really my mother; the thought made me feel both guilty and exhilarated. I felt Dean’s hand groping around my right side, thumping my ribcage like I might be a melon.
Hold me like you’ll never let me go.

Before midnight the Rhodeses went to the hospital. The last thing Mo said before leaving was that we should not sit up all night. She didn’t say that Misty and I should go over to my house rather than stay there unchaperoned; she just said to think of her, they’d call soon with a Buddy or a Holly, and then she went into her old joking of Maybe Baby, That’ll Be the Day, Well Allright. “Unplug the tree lights and the reindeer before you go to bed!” she called, and they were gone. Misty and I stood in the picture window and watched them drive off, Mr. Rhodes not even stopping at the stop sign at the corner there by the cemetery.

“Hot damn,” Misty whispered, her eyelids still all glittery
green to match her crushed-velvet outfit. She had lately read that redheads should wear lots of green, and though I hadn’t told her yet, I’d already heard at least one person in school refer to her as the Leprechaun of Samuel T. Saxon. “Now we can go watch movies. Ronald has been giving me the eye.” I didn’t tell her that Dean had been giving me the foot, the hand, and the eye. Instead I started talking about Angela, trying to work my way up to this new thought I’d had, this whole theory of my birth and adoption, but Misty kept interrupting, turning on the radio, then off, TV on and then off; she was so excited that she couldn’t even look at me for more than a couple of seconds before she was up and moving all around.

“We’re going out,” Dean called, and Misty ran into the other room. They were going out the side door.

“Where? Where are you going?” She stood there, hands on her hips. “What if Mama calls? What if they need us?”

“She ain’t gonna have it right this second.” Dean looked at me, then looked down. “We don’t want to hang out with y’all anyway. What’re you gonna do, play on the telephone?” He made his voice high and girly sounding, one hand held limply in front of him. I was relieved. I had tried to imagine sitting in the dark living room with the glow of the Christmas lights, holding hands with Dean while Misty and Ronald watched TV in the other room.

“We might go with you,” Misty said, but finally just shooed them away, locked the side door and turned back to me. “What do you think?” she asked. “Does he like me or what?” I shrugged, shook my head. I had not heard Ronald utter one word other than a quick “bye.” “Well, let’s think of what we’ll do when they get back. I know.” She clasped her hands and laughed that hyena laugh. “Let’s short-sheet their beds.” It was clear that with all the excitement, Misty was not going to be in the mood for any graveyard talk.