Summer Of Fear (9 page)

Julia did not come in until close to dawn, and when she did I lay quiet with my back toward her, feigning sleep, because there was nothing I could say to her that would help in any way, and I knew if I tried to speak I would start to cry.

When I think back, I don’t think I slept at all that night. I was aware of all the soft night noises—a tree rustling outside the window, a lone car passing along the street in front of the house, Julia’s heavy, even breathing in the bed across from me, for she fell asleep at once and never stirred again.

I did not sleep—and yet, I think I dreamed. Is that possible? No, of course not, and so I must have slept a little without realizing it, for in the dream I was running along the edge of a winding road. There were stark, red cliffs on one side of me and on the other there was a dropoff into a deep valley. My legs ached and my breath was coming in gasps, and I cried to Mike who was running beside me, “Will we get there in time? Can we get there before it happens?”

He said, “Are you crazy, Rae? If you’d only explain—”

“I can’t!” I cried. “There’s no time!”

Up ahead, far far ahead, a tiny reflection of the bright noon sunlight signalled the approach of a car coming directly toward us down the road.

“Stop!” I screamed. “Stop!” And in the dream I ran straight into the middle of the road with my arms outspread. The car came roaring toward me, and I was able to look directly into the eyes of the driver, wide, familiar eyes that recognized me as I did them.

Then, as with most dreams, before the ultimate climax occurred the dream was gone, and I was lying stiffly in bed, watching the sky outside the window lighten and turn pale and soften into pink and brighten into orange and burst at last to shining gold as the sun appeared above the ragged edges of the Sandia Mountains. Birds began to sing in the trees outside the window as though someone had suddenly pressed a button to bring them to life, and I thought, it’s morning. The long night is over, and it’s morning, and I haven’t slept at all.

I lay there a while longer, until the sun had risen into the branches of the elm tree. Then I got up and dressed. The face that looked back at me from the mirror over the bureau was my normal face, no longer splotchy and bloated. The hives were gone as though” they had never existed. I was Rachel again.

I went down the stairs and through the silent house and outside into the backyard. Trickle was still sleeping in the grass beside the hydrangea bush. I could see him there, a soft shadowy mound, curled just as I had left him the night before.

I crossed into the Gallaghers’ yard and went up and rapped on the kitchen door.

Mrs. Gallagher opened it. She was a bright, cheerful woman, a little on the plump side, with Mike’s blue eyes.

“Hello, Rae,” she said with a smile. “You’re up bright and early for a girl who was out most of the night. Does your mother need to borrow something for breakfast?”

“No,” I said, trying to smile back at her. “She and Dad aren’t even up yet. I just wanted to speak to Mike before he left for the pool.”

“I’ll call him.” She held the door wide and called back over her shoulder, “Mike, Rachel’s here!”

“I’ll be down in a minute,” Mike’s voice called back from somewhere in the upper region of the house.

It was a good deal more than a minute. In fact, it seemed like hours as I sat at the kitchen table in the Gallaghers’ pleasant kitchen, sipping at the glass of orange juice that Mike’s mother had forced into my hand and trying to make polite conversation.

When at last he appeared in the doorway, Mike was wearing his swimming trunks and his T-shirt with “Coronado Club” across the front, and he had a towel draped around his neck.

“I’ve got to run,” he said. “I have to hose down the sun area and set out the deck chairs before the pool opens.”

“You might say ‘good morning,’” I said.

“Good morning, Rae,” He spoke the words in my direction, but his eyes flicked past me, unable to focus on my face.

“I’d like to talk with you,” I said, “before you go.”

“I don’t have time,” Mike began, and then—”Okay, but it’ll have to be fast. Why don’t you walk out to the car with me?”

So we walked out to the car, side by side with our arms swinging but not swinging together, our hands not touching, with the bright morning sunlight warm upon our shoulders and the back of our necks and the birds still singing away in a joyful chorus high over our heads.

Neither of us spoke until we reached the car, and then Mike said, “I guess you want to know what happened.”

“Yes,” I said. “I think you ought to tell me.”

“I would if I could,” Mike said. “I just don’t know myself. I never had anything like this happen before.”

“Are you in love with her?” I asked. I knew the answer, but I had to ask.

“It happened so fast,” Mike said. “We didn’t plan it or anything, Rae. It just happened like—well, like being hit by lightning.”

“The way it was with us?”

“No, not that way at all. You and I—we just sort of grew into the thing. I mean, we’d known each other so long, and it was a friendship thing first, and then it got to be more. But with Julia and me it was like an explosion the first time I put my arm around her to dance. I’m sorry, Rae.” He did look at me now and those honest blue eyes were wide and bewildered and guilty and happy and worried and sad, all at one time. “I never wanted to hurt you. I wouldn’t have hurt you for anything if I could have helped it. You’re—well, you’re a great girl.”

“Sure,” I said. “Thanks a heap,”

He stood there by the car with his hand on the door handle, looking down at me uncertainly. “Can we still be friends?”

“I’ve got plenty of friends already,” I told him. “I don’t need another casual friend.”

“You don’t have to be nasty.”

“I’m not the one who’s nasty,” I said, my voice trembling. “I’m not the one who goes around snatching other people’s boyfriends. It was my pink dress she was wearing—my new dress!” It was a stupid thing to say, but I could see her there in my mind’s eyes as she must have been at the dance with her face lifted to Mike’s and that thick black hair falling rich and soft over the pink fabric over which I had worked so long and hard. “I ran a sewing machine needle through my finger making that dress!”

“Now you’re being silly,” Mike said, sounding relieved because I suppose he had been afraid that I would cry. “The dress had nothing to do with anything. Hey, what happened to the hives you were supposed to have had last night? You look just like normal.”

“They disappeared overnight,” I said bitterly. “That’s one thing hives and boyfriends seem to have in common.”

It was a wonderful parting line, and I turned quickly and walked back across the lawn to my own yard, hoping it would ring in Ms ears all morning. I did not feel like crying. I was far too angry to cry. I wanted to scream and stamp my feet. I wanted to go upstairs and haul Julia out of bed and yank all that black hair out of her head. I wanted to untie my dog and take him up to the room where Julia lay, vulnerable and defenseless, and dump him on top of her and let him bite her. Or, if he didn’t do that, he could at least growl and scare her. Anything he did would be better than nothing.

Well, why not, I asked myself. It’s my room, isn’t it, and Trick’s my dog. I guess I can have my own dog in my own room if I want him there, and if Julia doesn’t like it she can move out!

“Trick,” I called. “Hey, Trickle! Here, boy!”

He was still lying there in a little hollow of grass at the edge of the bush. When he did not move I went over to him and knelt down beside him and touched his back. There was a strange rigidity about it.

I rolled him over on his side, and his head flopped limply, and I knew that he was dead.

Dead!

I had never known anything that had died before. Oh, I had seen dead birds lying on the lawn, tiny ones that had fallen out of nests and once a larger one who had flown into a plate glass window. Back when Bobby was little and had kept turtles, they had all died at once because of some strange turtle disease, and I had once seen a cat that had been run over in the street. But there had never been anything of my own that had died, never anything I had loved, and for a while I could only kneel there numbly stroking the soft white coat, unable to accept the fact of death.

“I’ll take you to the vet tomorrow,” I had told him. I would never take him anywhere now. Not to the vet. Not to the park for a run. Not to my room to He patiently beside the desk as I studied. There would be no more use for the red plastic dishes that held his food and water or for the blue collar with the name tag that read—
TRICKLE
, I
BELONG
TO
RACHEL
BRYANT
, 1112
DAKOTA
NE.

He’s gone, I thought incredulously.

I knelt there a long time, and finally I got up and went into the house.

There was a pot of coffee on the stove which meant that Mother was up and about, and an empty cereal dish on the table which meant that Bobby was also. From the den I could hear the television blaring out the awful Saturday morning cartoon shows that Bobby loved now as much as he had when he was the right age for them. There was no sign of my father, so I knew that Mother had left him sleeping and was probably trying to get some film developed before she had to come in and fix breakfast.

I went out to the garage and rapped on the darkroom door.

“Don’t come in,” Mother called from inside. “I have film exposed.”

“Trickle’s dead,” I told her through the door.

“What?” There was a pause, and then Mother’s voice said, “Oh, honey!” There was the sound of a locker opening and closing as the film was shut away, and then the door opened and Mother emerged with a look of shock on her face.

“Are you sure?” she asked.

“I’m sure.”

“Oh, honey, how dreadful!”

She reached out to put her arms around me, but I pulled back, not wanting to be touched.

“You made me tie him out in the yard,” I said. “You and Dad made me do that. He died of grief because he thought nobody loved him any longer.”

“I can’t believe that,” Mother said. “He must have been very sick. That would explain why he bit Julia. That seemed so strange—so unlike him. He was always such a friendly little dog until then.”

“He’s out in back, still tied up,” I said.

“Oh, dear.” Her forehead crinkled into worry lines as she tried to decide what to do. “I suppose we should cover him with something.”

“I’ll do it,” I said. “I don’t want anybody handling him but me. I’m the only one who loved him. All the rest of you hated him because he bit your precious niece, your sneaking, two-faced, darling Julia!”

I felt the tears trying to come, and I fought against them.

“Rachel, dear,” Mother said, “I know how upset you are, but you mustn’t say such things. Julia has been through grief too, you know, a far worse grief than this. She’s a brave, wonderful girl—”

“She’s hateful!” I spat out the word. “She’s a horrid, hateful witch! I bet she killed Trickle herself by—oh, doing something. Maybe she put poison in his water bowl!”

“Rachel!” Mother’s face went white.

“She could have done it!” I cried. “She’s bewitched all of you—Pete and Bobby and you and Dad and Carolyn—and Mike. Even Mike! That’s why Trickle bit her! Dogs can judge people better than anyone—they know when somebody is horrid!”

The storm broke within me and the flood of tears came, pouring down my face, running salt into my mouth, and I turned and started back into the house, planning to run up to my room and throw myself across the bed and weep it all out until I could think clearly again. Then I remembered that the room was no longer my own. I could not possibly go into it with Julia there, and where else was there? I was locked out of my own house as truly as Trickle had been.

Whirling on my heel, I stumbled blindly in the other direction, out the garage door into the yard, and flung myself face down in the grass beside the body of my dog. I did not touch him now, for the shape that lay beside me was no more the real Trickle than a stuffed animal, and I buried my face in my arms and let the sobs come until I was too exhausted to cry any longer.

I don’t know how much time passed before I heard Bobby’s voice saying, “Rae?”

I lifted my head, and he was standing over me, his light brows drawn together in a solemn look that might have been, funny in another time, under other circumstances.

“Rae,” he said, “do you want me to bury him for you?”

“No,” I said sharply. The finality of placing Trickle in the ground and covering him over with dirt was more than I thought I could bear.

“We’ve got to,” Bobby said practically. “It’s summer, and you know how it is in the summer. We could have a funeral—remember the way we did for my turtles?”

“I don’t want a funeral,” I said. “I’ll bury him myself.” And then, seeing Bobby’s face, I realized that he was almost as upset as I was. Next to me, he had probably loved Trickle more than anybody in the family had.

“You can dig the hole,” I told him.

So he got a spade and dug a grave in the corner of the yard out by the rose bushes, and I went in and got a box which had once contained darkroom equipment. It wasn’t a real funeral, but as he covered over the box Bobby said, “Don’t you think we should say a prayer?”

“I guess so,” I said, so we recited the Lord’s Prayer very softly, and then I broke a rose off the bush nearest the grave and sprinkled the petals over the loose earth, and it was over.

When we went back to the house the whole family including Julia was in the living room. They seemed to be having some sort of conference, for I could hear Mother saying something about “—terribly upset, of course—” and Dad saying, “—has to learn to face these realities, no matter how distressing they are.”

I passed the door without pausing and went up to my room. Even when she wasn’t in it, the room held the feeling of Julia’s presence. Her bed was neatly made, as compared to mine, still a shambles from my restless night and early rising.

On impulse I went to the closet and pulled open the door. My pink dress was there on a hanger on Julia’s side of the closet. Angrily I snatched it up and transferred it to my side, but it looked bright and strange and unlike any of my other clothes. I knew that I would never wear it. The essence of Julia clung to every fold of the material; somehow in one wearing she had claimed it for her own.