Summer Of Fear (14 page)

Setting the mail on the step beside me, I leaned my head against the porch railing and refocussed my thoughts. If only it were possible to go back to yesterday and start over! But what was done could not be altered. At this point I could only pray that Professor Jarvis would recover. If Julia could channel her mind force to produce illness, I vowed that I would push mine as hard as I could to combat it. Perhaps a volley of positive thoughts all surging toward him at once would help the professor to hold out against the pressure Julia must be asserting from the other side.

I closed my eyes and concentrated.

“Get well!” I cried silently over and over in my mind. “Please, Professor Jarvis, get well! You must get well! You just have to!”

By the time Mother came up the walk I was still at it and completely exhausted.

“I got hold of the professor’s daughter,” she said, “and she and her husband are coming. It’s a four and a half hour drive so they should be here the latter part of the afternoon. She was terribly upset and there was so little I could tell her.”

I opened my eyes and let my mind relax.”

“Should we call the hospital and see how he is?” I asked.

“Mrs. Gallagher’s with him. The Gallaghers have been his next door neighbors for so long that she feels almost like a relative. Shell call us as soon as there is anything to report.” She glanced at the pile of letters. “Is that today’s mail?”

“Yes,” I said, handing it to her. “Dad has a letter from a law firm.”

“It’s probably about the estate,” Mother said. “Ryan named Dad the executor of his will and Marge’s.”

“What does that mean?” I asked. “Everything goes to Julia, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, but there’s a lot of red tape connected with settling an estate, even if there’s only one person to inherit. It takes time to get things ironed out.”

“Will Julia be rich?” I asked.

“Well, people’s ideas of what constitutes ‘rich’ differ. She will be well enough off so that she can do pretty much as she pleases in regard to college and travel and things like that.” She thumbed through the mail. “Here’s something for Peter from U.N.M. It must be about pre-registration. A check from Discovery Magazine—that will be for those Halloween pictures. Why, here’s a letter for Julia!”

“For Julia?” I snapped to attention. “From whom?”

“Somebody named Mary Carncross in Boston. It must be a friend from her school. The letter was mailed to Pine Crest and forwarded here.”

“She’s never talked about any friend by that name,” I said.

“I’ve never heard her talk about her school friends at all. Still, she must have them. She attended that boarding school for several years. It’s nice to know that one of them—”

She broke off in mid-sentence at the sound of the telephone ringing inside the house.

“Do you think that’s Mrs. Gallagher?” I asked, getting quickly to my feet.

“I hope so—with good news.” Mother was only one step behind me as we hurried into the house.

It was indeed Mrs. Gallagher, but the news was short and inconclusive. In the opinion of the doctor who had examined Professor Jarvis, he had suffered a stroke. How serious it was could not be determined because he was still unconscious. Mrs. Gallagher was prepared to remain at the hospital until Bonnie Chavez arrived from Clovis and wondered if one of us would go next door and leave a note on the refrigerator for Mike and Mr. Gallagher.

“I’ll take it over,” I offered.

“All right,” Mother said and then frowned. “Wait—didn’t Dad say you were supposed to be grounded?”

“Only till noon,” I said. “Besides, he didn’t know there was going to be an emergency. I’ve already been down to the professor’s house, so this won’t make it much worse.”

“You’re right, I guess,” Mother said. “Go ahead. Put the time on the note so they know when it was written.”

I went across to the Gallaghers’ yard and around to the back and in through the kitchen door. I knew their house almost as well as I did my own. Mrs. Gallagher kept a pencil and pad of paper next to the telephone. I tore off a sheet and wrote out the message and attached it to the refrigerator door with one of the little magnets she kept there for this purpose.

Once inside the house I could not seem to get myself out again. I had not been over since the morning after Mike had taken Julia to the dance. Now, standing in the quiet of the sunny kitchen, I was besieged with memories that went back to a time long before Mike and I had started dating.

The cookie jar in the corner was the one Mike and I had raided when we were so little that we had had to drag a chair over to stand on to reach it. The pot holders on a hook by the stove were ones I had woven myself. The plant on the windowsill was the result of a Mother’s Day shopping trip we had made together; in our own kitchen at home there bloomed another plant just like it.

Past the kitchen lay the dining room where I had sat as a guest on many occasions. Beyond that was the living room where Mike and I had spent evenings doing homework.

Knowing I had no right to, I walked slowly through the rooms that had been so much a part of my childhood. In the den was the footstool Mike had made in woodworking class in junior high school. In the hallway at the foot of the stairs was the spot on which I had been standing almost a year ago the night when he first kissed me.

“You’ve got a smudge on your nose,” he had said, and reached out with his forefinger as though to rub it off. And then, as I had stood there looking up at him, the teasing look had gone out of his eyes. His hand had moved from my nose to rest against my cheek.

“You’ve grown up an awful lot all of a sudden,” he had said softly. And then he had kissed me.

Afterward neither of us had known what to say, We had stood staring at each other, only half hearing the sound of the television in the next room mingled with the voices of his parents.

Finally he had said, “Was that—okay?”

“Yes,” I had answered. “Very okay.” And suddenly we were laughing and his arm was around my shoulders, and it was like a beginning but also like a continuation of something that had really begun a long time ago.

“Mike says you were just good friends,” Julia had told me. “That you’ve always been like a little sister to him.”

That was not true. Standing in the hallway, remembering the look in Mike’s eyes after that first kiss, I knew it was not true.

I paused, and then, knowing there was no excuse for the thing I was doing, I went up the stairs and down the hall to Mike’s room. I stood in the open doorway and looked in at it. His bed’ was made, but only just barely, with the spread yanked up over the lumps in the blanket. His swimming trophies stood in a row on the bookcase—I had been there when he had won most of them—and a batch of sports magazines were piled on the floor by the side of his bed along with a ragged pair of tennis shoes with socks still in them and some empty coke cans and an open bag of potato chips.

I turned my gaze to the bureau. There, to my surprise, was my class picture, the one I had given him in exchange for his, plus a couple of snapshots taken the summer before on a picnic at the lake. In one I was standing on the bank in my last year’s swimming suit, skinny and freckled and laughing, my eyes squinted against the glare of the afternoon sun. In another Mike and I were together, wearing silly sailor caps and making faces at the camera.

So he had kept the pictures. It was something I had not expected, but when I thought about it there was no real reason why he would have thrown them away. They were part of a time that he might someday enjoy remembering. He had probably not yet gotten around to transferring them to a scrapbook or to the back of a drawer.

I turned away from the room, both glad and sorry that I had looked into it. The pain of loss was more acute than ever, but there was something reassuring in the fact that Mike himself was the same as he had always been, that he still munched potato chips while he was reading and dumped magazines on the floor and left his socks in his tennis shoes.

Perhaps someday, I thought, I’ll be able to feel sisterly toward him. I’ll be fond of him in the same way I am of Peter. Perhaps someday—but not yet. Not for a while.

I was halfway down the stairs when an odd thing occurred to me. In all his room there had not been a single picture of Julia.

That afternoon I spent moving my things into Bobby’s room. Not that it took all that long to transfer my clothing and a few personal belongings; what held things up were the constant confrontations with Bobby who was not at all receptive to having a sister for a roommate.

“You’re a girl, Rae,” he kept exclaiming. “My gosh, you’re a girl!” And to Mother—”Rae’s a girl, Mom!”

“So I’ve noticed,” Mother said dryly, “and I can understand your feelings, but there doesn’t seem to be an alternative. She can’t get along in the same room with Julia, and she has to sleep somewhere.”

“She could room with Peter,” Bobby suggested.

“You know that’s impossible. Peter would have a fit. Besides, his room has only one bed.”

“Then put her in the garage,” Bobby said. “Or let her go move in with her friend Carolyn.”

“Rachel’s your sister,” Mother said, “and as difficult as she is being these days, we can’t shove her off onto other people. If it’s your privacy you’re worried about we can hang a curtain down the center of the room to act as a partition.”

So a good hour was spent in rigging up a kind of frame to hold the curtain, and another half hour at least in deciding what the curtain should consist of. We finally used a bed sheet, and by the time the room was divided to Bobby’s satisfaction and he had decided which side of the closet I could have, it was almost time for dinner.

On my last trip to my old room I removed the needle from the stereo and took the photograph of Mike off the top of the bureau. Mike might not still be mine, but his picture was, and I didn’t plan to leave it behind to be enjoyed by Julia. I took the posters off the walls and rolled them up and put them under one of the beds, and I took my pink dress off its hanger and wadded it up and put it in the Goodwill bag in the laundry room. My books I had to leave on the shelves because there was no place in Bob’s room to put them, but I did take with me the witchcraft books which I put in a drawer with my underwear and night clothes.

Standing in the doorway, giving the room one last once over, I could not help but notice how empty it was with my own things removed from it. How little Julia had brought with her when she made the move from Pine Crest to Albuquerque! I had not really noticed this before because my own belongings had filled the room with so much clutter, but with their removal there remained almost nothing to show that the room still had an occupant.

It’s funny, I thought, she doesn’t even have a picture of her parents. There were no mementos or trinkets, no snapshots or scrapbooks, no favorite books or stuffed animals or wall decorations. It was as though the girl who lived here had come to us without a past, had materialized out of thin air on our doorstep with no link at all with another time or place.

The only thing that was Julia’s was the letter that had come that morning, which she had tossed, unopened, onto the bureau.

Good-bye, dear old room, I thought gloomily.

If there had been a way I could have escaped the family dinner table and eaten alone in the kitchen I would have done so. I knew however that there was no sense in even bringing up the question. My parents considered the dinner hour a time for the family to be together and catch up on all the events of the day. And so I sat and poked at my food while Bobby gave Dad and Peter a full and exaggerated account of the morning’s excitement, playing particular attention to his own part in the drama.

“I pushed the lawn mower down to his house,” he said, “and rang the doorbell. When nobody answered I got this feeling like something terrible had happened. I don’t know how I knew it, I just did. So I opened the door and there right in front of my eyes was Professor Jarvis with this rope—”

“What?” I exclaimed, jolted into speech.

“Well, not exactly a rope, but the way he was lying I couldn’t tell about that. So I said, ‘Professor, what happened?’ And he didn’t answer. So I rolled him over and listened to his heart—”

“Bob ran home and told us,” Mother said, taking over the story. “It was a stroke, poor man. I guess at his age that sort of thing is to be expected, but it’s still a shock when it occurs. I saw him just the other day out working in his yard and he looked so fit and healthy.”

“I wish you wouldn’t talk about him as though he were dead,” I said. “He’s not, you know. He can get well again.”

“We can certainly hope so,” Mother said. “After dinner I’m going to phone the hospital. There may have been some change since Mrs. Gallagher called this afternoon.”

“You won’t have to do that,” Julia said. “I’m going to the hospital later this evening. I’ll bring back a report on how the professor is doing.”

“You’re going to the hospital?” My heart caught in my chest, “Why should you do that?”

“Mike’s driving over to pick up his mother,” Julia said pleasantly, “and he asked me if I wanted to ride along.”

“How nice!” Mother said. “I’ll cut some flowers for you to take with you. If the professor isn’t well enough to enjoy them, at least they may make the room a little less depressing for his poor daughter.”

“But why should Julia go to the hospital?” I demanded. “She isn’t a friend of Professor Jarvis’s. She hardly knew him and besides that—besides that—” I let the sentence trail off weakly. The words I wanted to speak burned on my tongue, but I could not say them. Besides that, I longed to shout, Julia is the one responsible for his being in the hospital! Whatever purpose she has for going there has to be a bad one. She’s planning something—something terrible!

Instead, with a violent effort, I brought my voice under control.

“I want to go too,” I said.

I thought I saw a flicker of irritation in Julia’s eyes.

“We’re not going to stay,” she said. “We’re just going to pick up Mike’s mother.”

“That’s all right,” I replied. “I don’t plan to stay long either.”