Rainy Season (16 page)

“Well, I won’t tell.”

“Oh gee thanks, considering you break it like every second …”

“I won’t—I mean … I want to hear it. A lot, I do.”

“Honestly, Lane. If Mom and Dad knew how much you broke it, even though you think you have it all worked out saying—”

“Do you want to tell me something or not?” I ask. My voice hurts my throat; I try to relax.

“I just wanted to ask you a question is all. Okay?”

“Fine.”

“Then okay, what’s the worst for you?”

I pull one leg up so that my foot rests on the edge of the bed and I balance my chin on my knee. Keeping my mouth shut, I snap my teeth open and closed and listen to the amplified click of my jawbone in my ears. I listen to the clicking for a long time; I try to pace it to my heartbeat.

“Tell me,” says Charlie.

“Well, I guess being the oldest now is worst for me. I’m not very good at it; I don’t know—maybe I can’t ever feel old enough.”

“You sure worry a whole lot. You’re old as an old granny,” he assures me.

“I’m getting better. About the worrying.”

“Yeah, well, you can’t get much worse.”

“I was worse last year, Dr. Forrest said.”

“Forehead—all that Forehead tried to do was make me cry. No thanks. I can use my eyes for better things than that.” Charlie’s voice is all tough, but I wonder.

“I think she was just doing the best she could, considering Mom and Dad are both pathological liars, with their rules about the accident and everything.”

“What’s a pathological liar?”

“It’s like a person who tries to make their lie the truth.” I hesitate. “It’s like a disease.”

“Well, the worst for me is—” Charlie offers, but then he’s quiet again for a long time before he speaks. “I think the worst for me is remembering those pictures over and over in my head, the ones from the insurance company of the ice on the side of the road and the tree and our car and everything. And I wonder how could Mom and Dad and you and me’ve all been in that same smashed-up car and be okay? And sometimes I wish, I mean, what I
think
I wish, is that it had been all of us, instead of one, just one, you know? Like the peaches.”

It takes me a minute to understand what Charlie’s talking about and then I slide closer to lie down next to him. My head rests on the edge of his pillow and our legs and waists and shoulders are even with each other. Not quite touching, but we are close enough so that the touch lies in the short space between us. He doesn’t say anything, but he stops knotting up the covers in his fingers. We lie quietly like that for a while.

“When you’d leave the room to look for her, when we were back in the hospital.” I am speaking so quietly it’s like I’m not speaking at all. “I’m sorry I couldn’t—I didn’t go with you.”

“It’s ’cause you
knew,
Lane,” Charlie answers. He keeps staring at the ceiling. “You were sitting right in the middle between us in the car, so you must’ve … and I really just … thought I’d find her and, you know, bring her back to our room to be with us. I guessed she was probably all scared, being by herself, or with some weird roommate, so I kept going down the hall, looking into other people’s rooms and they’d be getting shots or resting or whatever.” He smiles, remembering. “And that Nurse Fatty with the nose hair’d catch me and haul me back.”

“So you’ll remember what Jason McCullough looks like tomorrow?”

He turns his head away from the ceiling. The silver cup over his eye looks like a million tiny eyes staring at me.

“Aw, Lane. I just fell is all. I climbed too high in that stupid tree and I lost my balance. I kept thinking that if I climbed higher I’d find the dumb kid, that he was just outside my reach. Only the higher I climbed, the less I saw, and the branches got narrower and narrower, and then I fell.” He grins crookedly through his punched-out teeth. “So hey, I’m an idiot, right?”

“I won’t tell.”

“You never tell.”

Then I think back again to when Charlie dared me to eat the fire cracker, and I wonder if he really would have told everyone how I kissed my stuffed animals. “Hey Charlie, remember the time—”

“Listen,” Charlie says softly as he puts his finger against his lips. “I think I hear Ted.”

We’re silent and then we hear Ted’s too-loud self filling the hall. He starts up an energetic discussion with Marita and one of the nurses. I listen to the thick barrier of their Spanish, dented here and there by the words I know—
car, going, I hope—
not enough for me to figure out the conversation, although I try. A few moments later Ted bursts into the dark room.

“You guys know what time it is?” he asks. “Try four-thirty in the morning! Pretty good, wouldn’t you say? I know I’m getting a second wind—ready for a little road trip, in fact, if you two’d care to join?”

“Four-thirty in the morning,” I repeat with disbelief. “I don’t think I’ve ever been awake this late.”

“First time for everything.” Ted points gun fingers at me. “Okay, Charleston, heave-ho. I’m sure you’re the chief on crutches, but let me just carry you out to Dee’s beautiful Thunderbird which, I gotta tell you, is a strange beast to drive. Lane, you get the crutches?” He slides his arms under Charlie, folding him up against his chest. I stand up from the bed; my feet have pins and needles and I stomp around the room to get the blood rushing back through them.

Outside the hospital, a man is just starting to unload a truck full of pastries and dark homemade bread, setting up his stand for the morning. It’s the kind of bread Mom always buys from downtown, so with the rest of Ted’s change, I buy a loaf.

Marita stays with Charlie in the back seat as we drive out of downtown. Something about this time between night and day seems mystical and secret, probably because I’m never awake to see it. The purple morning light is just beginning to break through the darkness. I unroll my window and breathe in the clean morning mist, then lean back in my seat and close my eyes, lulled by the leisurely drone of the car’s engine. Midway home I hear Charlie at my back, snoring lightly.

The MP on duty gives us a brittle little salute and nod as we roll through the entrance gates of Fort Bryan. Ted salutes back.

T
HE HOUSE IS DARK
and messy and still. We whisper good night to Marita, who slips into her room. As she closes her bedroom door, Marita touches my cheek.
“Buenas noches, una niña bonita.
You are a good sister.” She pulls the door shut and I hear the click of its lock.

With Ted behind me holding Charlie, I pick our path through the stray pieces of furniture and discarded cups and dinner plates, up the stairs to his bedroom. But when I open Charlie’s door to the roar of the air-conditioner, I see a long body rolled up like a caterpillar under the blue-and-white-striped covers of his bed. I signal for Ted to stop in the doorway as I creep closer to get a better look.

“Mom?”

Her eyes lift slowly from their burdened sleep. I see a web of red veins mapped through them. “Lanie? How was the Davidsons’? Isn’t it still really early?”

“Why are you in here?” I whisper.

“Daddy was snoring. Is Charlie still at the Davidson’s?”

“Why aren’t you in the guest room?”

“Alexa’s in there.” Mom yawns and tries to prop up her head a little, but then she slowly sinks back into the sheets. “I’m just resting,” she yawns, then she squeezes her eyes tight.

“Mom, can you hear me?” I whisper louder, but she just smiles.

“I’m listening,” she murmurs, and then the smile fades away from her mouth as she disappears back into sleep.

I am still holding the loaf of bread which I forgot to put in the kitchen, and so I place it on the pillow next to Mom for her to see when she wakes up later in the morning. She lies on her back, and her sleep is solid and lifeless.

I walk back to Ted and Charlie. “Late night for the Duchess, eh?” Ted grins. “Let’s put him in your room.”

“Then where do I sleep?” I hiss, but he’s already down the hall and through the next door into my room, where he plunks Charlie on my bed. I lean the crutches in the corner. Ted brushes his hands together.

“Sleep tight,” he orders, looking down on Charlie. “I’m going home. I’m dead on my feet.”

“’Night, Ted,” Charlie mutters, half-asleep.

On the way out my door, Ted messes my hair with both his hands. I try to duck him off.

“Thanks for all your driving and help,” I say awkwardly. “You’re pretty cool to do all that.”

“Cool as Nancy Drew?” he asks.

“Well, no.” I smile. “But pretty cool.”

“See you later.” He laughs and winks at me. I watch the back of his head as he thumps down the stairs, and then I run to my window to watch him get into Dee’s Thunderbird, back it out of the carport, and drive away.

I click on my air-conditioner and sit on the edge of my bed, and look over to check on Charlie. His chest rises and falls in sleep breaths. He reminds me of a Frankenstein monster, with his heavy white cast and black stitches and that spooky silver eye cup. Tomorrow he’ll sure have some explaining to do, and Mom and Dad will be extra high-strung if Alexa’s eyes are present, feasting on the whole scene. Poor old Charlie. He always has some explaining to do.

Soon my room is frosted up with the Freon particles. I walk over to my desk and pick up my letter to Emily and then I carefully pull open my desk drawer and drop the letter into the pile of all my other letters to Emily, all sealed in their envelopes and addressed with only her name in my perfect calligraphy.

A thought clicks inside my head, restless; it makes me move before I can even really think it through. I lift my desk chair and tiptoe out of my room, down the hall, and through my parent’s bedroom, where Dad’s snoring like a sad giant. I move cautiously, although I know almost nothing wakes Dad up when he snores that way, and I open the door to the walk-in closet, holding my breath against the creak I know it makes.

I snap on the closet light with my shoulder, then set down the chair and climb on top of it, reaching my arms high above me, up to the shelf of sweaters and tennis rackets, my hands groping but knowing, until I grasp Dad’s old combat boot box. I pull it down. Carefully. Then I fold myself into a pretzel on the chair with the box resting on my lap, and I stare at the box, holding my breath, not moving, and all of a sudden a little scared.

Dad’s snoring rumbles in a rhythm. I stroke and tap the sides of the box, uncertain. But then my fingers move ahead of my brain. They unpeel the gummed layers of Scotch tape securing the top of the box to its bottom, and then they shake off the cover. And for a moment I can’t move, can’t even breathe from the shock of seeing my sister again.

So many pictures. Her school pictures, her summer pictures, her snipped halves and quarters of pictures, some are just the tiniest sliver where Mom trimmed Emily from a background or a corner. And as my eyes are staring so fiercely over images I have never forgotten, just buried, I remember back to another dark day, when Charlie and I came home from school to find Mom sitting in the middle of the living room rug with these same shreds of photos scattered all around her, scissors still in her hand. Her eyes were so blank and disbelieving that I called Dad at work and told him to hurry up and come home.

No one’s seen those pictures since that day; it was Dad who actually gathered them up and buried them in his combat boot box and started all the rules of no more talking and no more pictures. But now, looking over so many years of Christmases and birthdays, I’m just smiling and smiling and my memories fill to overflowing inside me.

I search and dig out my favorite. I’m lucky that Mom left this one in one piece, not just with me in the front with a cut of nothing behind me. I’d forgotten that Emily’s smile had that gap between her two front teeth and that her one hand—the one not holding the hair-spray bottle—is sort of draped around my shoulders.

“Dahling, you must stop by my saloon!” I read out loud. I soak up this picture for a long time and then I close my eyes, trying to feel the weight of Emily’s arm resting on my shoulders again. I stare and stare until I feel my nose and mouth get warm and salty and my eyes hurt from not blinking, only I’m happy; I really am, just seeing her again.

It only takes me a minute to decide. I slide the photograph into the pocket of my sundress and then I pause, thinking. In another moment, I have found a second picture, my favorite of Emily and Charlie. I’d taken it myself, of the two of them standing in front of the Fort Lowthrop pool. Emily is wearing her ugly lily pad pattern bathing suit that she loved. It’s an old picture, but I bet Charlie will remember it, because it was taken the day he got his Intermediate Otter swimming badge. He’d been pretty proud of himself that day. I unbend myself, replace the cover of the box and push it deep into its hiding place. I wobble slowly back down the hall with the chair, back into my bedroom with it, very slow, so as not to make any noise.

Mindful not to disturb Charlie, I hold my breath as I slide under the covers, but he doesn’t move, just sleeps on like a lunk.

“Good night, Charlie,” I say softly, placing my hand on his chest for a moment, just to make sure that he’s breathing okay. He is. I throw the bedspread over us and close my eyes but I don’t fall asleep all at once. My thoughts drift and settle like snow over all the different images now fresh in my mind. I tuck a corner of Charlie’s picture just under the edge of his cast, so he’ll be sure to see it when he wakes up. Then I sneak one more look at Emily and me, before I rest my own picture carefully over my heart like a shield to guard my memories. It feels good and solid there.
“Bonita,
” I whisper.

K
NOWN ALSO AS THE
“Big Ditch,” the Panama Canal measures approximately fifty-one miles from the Atlantic to the Pacific shoreline. Thousands of ships use the canal annually at a rate of nearly thirty-four vessels a day, making it a vital international throughway.

The territory of the Canal Zone came into existence in 1903 as a result of a treaty that, in exchange for a $10 million down payment and an additional $250,000 a year, gave the United States full power and control over the daily operations of the Panama Canal. By 1977, nearly 39,000 American citizens lived in the Panama Canal Zone; 9,000 of them were military personnel. Right from its inception, U.S. control of the canal became a symbol of imperial rule and a relic of the colonial era which was embarrassing not just for Panamanians, but for all Latin American countries.