The Accident Season (3 page)

All the rest of the day I find it hard to concentrate. When the three-o’clock bell rings, I follow Sam and Bea to the doors of the PE hall, but instead of going inside to get changed, I plead with Mrs. Smith, the PE teacher, to let me off class because of my sprained wrist until she agrees to allow me to go home. Bea, who would clearly rather not have to halfheartedly run laps in the sweaty, smelly hall, waves morosely at me as I leave to walk home alone slowly in the afternoon light.

Our house is a couple of miles outside town, down the
main road past shops and houses and housing developments, past fields and farms, and farther, down a smaller country road lined with hedges and whitewashed houses. Mostly, though, to get home from town, we follow the river. A little way off the main road, there is the river walk, which is sometimes no more than a rough track and sometimes a proper area with picnic benches and bridges to take you to the woods on the other side.

The place I like to sit is close to the smallest of the bridges—really just a wooden placeholder across the water waiting for the council to build a proper bridge of stone. Instead of going straight home, I climb down and sit on the riverbank and take out a cigarette. The ground is hard and gritty beneath me. Across the river everything is yellow and red, the fallen leaves dry and crackly and inviting. There’s something about autumn leaves that just begs to be stepped on. I can hear them whispering in the breeze. I take off both pairs of gloves so the cigarette won’t singe them and I sit there for a while, a splash of color on the duller bank, smoking and trying not to think about Bea’s cards.

Since I was little, since long before Elsie started with the secrets booth, I’ve come down here when there’s no one else around, to tell my secrets to the river. Sometimes I almost think I can hear it whispering them back at me.

I open my mouth to talk about what Bea said and how I’m afraid this really will be a bad one; the worst one, if
that’s even possible—although I can hardly imagine what could ever be worse than the one four years ago we so often try to forget—when suddenly I think I see a shape between the trees. When I squint my eyes against the sun to look closer, it’s gone. I stand up and come right down to the river, the toes of my Docs almost touching the water. I could have sworn I saw a flash of mousy brown hair moving between the trees.

I take a last drag of my cigarette, put the end in the bin by the bench, and hurry over to the bridge. I’m halfway across when it begins to creak. I stop. I’ve crossed this bridge a thousand times. It was built before I was born, but it’s sturdy; it has weathered the years. I take a careful step. Another creak, louder this time. Then, in a rush of wood and water, the bridge collapses.

I grab the hand rail and hold on for dear life as the bridge plunges toward the river. It’s a short drop. The middle section of the bridge hits the water and stops, caught between two rocks. Water whooshes over my legs to my waist, but I’m still standing, leaning against the rail in the middle of the river.

I’m shaking all over, but not from the cold.
I’m okay,
I tell myself sharply.
I’m okay
. I breathe deeply until I can move again. Carefully, hand over hand, legs heavy in the water, I make my way across the rest of the fallen bridge to the other side of the river.

I climb up onto the opposite bank. Still breathless, I
edge toward the copse of trees where I thought I caught a glimpse of Elsie. Moss and bits of twig stick to my boots. They squelch as I walk. I part a row of branches and peer into the little clearing behind them. Everything is dark here, shadowed by trees. The light is watery and weird, full of whispers.

“Hello?” I feel like that girl in the horror films, the one who makes you scream at the screen, telling her to turn and run away. My heart does a little flutter dance. “Elsie?”

I think I hear a tiny noise coming from a clump of bushes at the far side of the clearing. Everything else is strangely silent. I can’t hear the leaves crunch or the river flow behind me.

“Hello?” I say again. I tiptoe toward the bushes. The leaves rustle as I approach.

“Elsie?” I reach forward and part the branches quickly, like ripping off a Band-Aid. There’s nothing there. Nothing except a small box squirreled away to the back of the bushes. I get down on my hands and knees and stick my head in under them. The branches catch in my hair. I blow at the leaves to get them out of my way, and that’s when I see the mousetrap nestled in a pile of dusty moss.

For a minute I scan the ground, worried that I’ve gotten too close to a rodent’s nest, but then I notice what’s on top of the trap and it’s not (thankfully) a dead mouse, nor is it a piece of perfectly holey cheese like in
Tom and Jerry
cartoons. What it is, is a doll.

It looks like it’s been made of cardboard and wire and cloth, like the Guatemalan worry dolls my mother keeps in a little pouch hanging from the rearview mirror in her car. Only this one looks exactly like Elsie. It’s got mousy brown woolen hair and pale cloth-skin and it’s wearing a tartan skirt that looks like our school uniform and a shapeless red sweater of the kind Elsie always seems to wear outside of school. It even has the Peter Pan collar of a tiny shirt coming up from underneath the sweater’s neck. I back away and stand up slowly.

“Elsie?” I call. “Elsie!” No one answers. A little breeze whistles through the clearing and my legs break into goose bumps underneath my wet layers. Or at least I tell myself it is the cold and the wet, and not the little cardboard doll set out like the bait in a trap.

W
hen I get home, Sam’s and Alice’s bags aren’t in a pile in the hall covered with hats and gloves and autumn leaves, so I assume they’re either still in school or on their way home. I dump my own bag next to the stairs and take off my still-damp boots.

In the living room, my mother is curled up on the couch like a cat, chewing on a lock of long purple hair and sketching in a notebook. She barely looks up when I come in.

“Hi, Mom.” I perch on the side of the couch and knock on my mother’s boots with my knuckles. They are big green walking boots that look like they’ve trekked through oceans.

She shuts her notebook with a snap and smiles at me. “Hi, darling.” Her voice is rough. There’s a strange aura of sugary sadness about her this evening. She’s still wearing her coat.

“Are you okay?” I ask. It’s unlike her not to insist on driving us home from school if she’s not working.

“The presses broke just after lunch,” she says. “Both of them, at the same time. Figures.” My mother is an artist. When she’s working on prints or etchings, she uses a little studio in the middle of Galway City that she rents with some of her friends because we don’t have room for a press in the attic of our house, which is where she works the other half of the time. The attic is cluttered with canvases and paints and always smells strongly of turpentine.

“So,” she says, waving her sketchbook in the air, “the rest of the day was a bit of a write-off, so I went for a drink with the girls instead. I just got home five minutes ago.” Then she frowns, as if she’s only just noticed I’m here. “Why are you all wet?”

I don’t want to tell her that the bridge collapsed, so I make something up about a pipe bursting in the girls’ bathroom and drenching my uniform, reassuring her that nobody got hurt in this fictional accident.

My mother nods absentmindedly. “Is your brother home too?” she asks, pushing the hair out of her face and swinging her legs to the floor. Then she says: “Christopher called this afternoon.”

Suddenly I understand. Her eyeliner has smudged a little at the edges and she looks so much younger than she is. I try to make my voice light, but it comes out as kind
of teasing. “So it was
that
kind of drink ‘with the girls.’”

My mother makes a face. “Don’t you ‘with the girls’ me, young lady.” She’s smiling, though, and she swipes the hat from my head and ruffles up my hair. She says softly, “The accident season is hard enough to handle.” I nod to let her know I understand what she means, but hearing my mother talk about it makes the sinking feeling in my tummy come back.

Christopher is Sam’s father. We haven’t seen him since he left four years ago. He calls maybe once a year, but Sam never calls him back. My mother keeps her ex-husband informed of his son’s well-being, but every time she gets off the phone with him, she goes out for “just one drink with the girls.”

“Where did you say your brother was?” she asks me again.

“He’s not my brother,” I remind her. “He’ll be home soon, I’d say. He had to suffer through PE last class, which thankfully I didn’t have to do.” I hold up my bandaged wrist by way of explanation.

My mother sort of laughs and says, “Well, I’d take a sprained wrist over PE any day,” and I agree.

Sam is three months and twenty-four days older than me, which means we’re in the same year at school, which means we take most of the same classes. Sam and I are alike in many ways, but if PE weren’t compulsory, I’d never go within half a mile of the sports fields, while Sam was on our school’s soccer team for almost a year—until he broke
his nose during a game one accident season and my mother made him quit.

My mother flaps her arms at me to send me toward the stairs. “Go get changed,” she says. “Shoo! You’ll catch your death in those wet clothes.”

When I come back downstairs in more suitable (and drier) attire, my mother and I go into the kitchen and put a pizza in the oven. Because it’s the accident season, my mother’s got padding on the edge of every counter. She installed an electric oven a few years ago, but because the burner still runs on gas, she has disabled it, so everything we cook is either oven-baked or microwaved. The floor tiles are covered in knock-off afghan rugs. Our kitchen looks like a cross between a padded cell and a nomad’s tent.

My mother hands me a bottle of beer. (My mother decided when we turned sixteen that if she drank the occasional beer or glass of wine at home with us, we wouldn’t feel the need to get drunk in fields and have liver damage by the time we’re thirty. I think if she knew about the parties we went to over the summer, she wouldn’t be so sure.)

“Let’s celebrate,” she says.

“What are we celebrating?”

My mother thinks for a moment, then she says, “We are celebrating because you didn’t have to go to PE, and I got to take a half-day.” She’s smiling, but something in her voice is off.

“We’re toasting the last week of the accident season!” she says grandly. I think she means we’re celebrating that it’s almost over for another year, but there’s something in her toast I find unsettling. Like the accident season shouldn’t be acknowledged so openly. Like if we call it by name too often, it’ll become even more aware of us. Like it’s actually some creature that wants to do us harm.

But my mother is sad-smiling and trying to hide it, and her eyeliner is smudged, so I raise my bottle to meet hers.

“To the accident season.”

***

When Sam and Alice get home, the whole house smells of melted cheese and I’m that type of tipsy that’s a little like a wineglass, where everything outside it is slightly distorted, and I’m singing the sad, lonely folksong Bea played for us by the train tracks. Sam sits up on the table in front of me and knocks his legs into mine and sings along. His voice is scratchy and deep and he knows all the harmonies.

Alice grabs a beer and disappears into her bedroom. My mother looks after her sadly, then takes her own beer into the living room.

When they’ve left I remember Christopher’s phone call and I’m about to mention it to Sam, but just then the slice of pizza I’m holding falls apart, splattering me with tomato sauce and melted cheese. Sam laughs at me, then darts forward and licks a drop of sauce off my chin.

I move back, surprised, then make a silly little
pfft
noise at the look on his face. “Yuck, Sam,” I say, rubbing my chin with the back of my hand. “That’s gross.”

“No, it’s delicious.” He grins and steals the rest of my pizza slice. Sam’s smile is wide and warm and real; it’s not lost like my mother’s or strange and watery like Alice’s and I don’t want to change that, so I decide not to mention Christopher right now. Instead, we stumble upstairs to my bedroom, where I put a record on the turntable that used to be my father’s, and Sam and I lie side by side on our bellies on my bed. I show him one of the old photo albums I was looking through last night and finally tell him what I’ve noticed about Elsie.

I turn each page carefully, like if I turn it too quickly, each little Elsie in every photograph will startle and fade off the page. I am about to tell Sam about crossing the river earlier, and the little Elsie doll I found on the mousetrap, but I change my mind at the last minute because I’ve sort of convinced myself that I’m overreacting; that all I saw was a piece of fabric or a stick of wood. Sam touches each picture lightly with a fingertip.

He shakes his head. “It’s so weird,” he says. “I don’t know how this is possible.” He turns the pages of the album slowly. “Do you even know anything about her?” he asks. “I never really see her around.”

“She stays in the library between classes, mostly.”

Sam turns another page. “The secrets booth, right.”

“Right.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever actually talked to her,” Sam says. He looks at me for a second. “Apart from, like, to type up a secret.”

“You’ve left secrets?” I don’t know why I’m surprised. The secrets booth is a good way to get things off your chest, when they’re things you wouldn’t necessarily want to say out loud. I leave secrets too, every once in a while. Type them up on Elsie’s antique typewriter and post them into the big wooden box she keeps them in. At the end of the school term Ms. Byrne, the art teacher, sets up an installation through the halls of the school. She pins up all the typewritten secrets on lengths of clothesline so everyone can read them. It gets a lot of attention from the local press, but Ms. Byrne says it’s all about catharsis and community. You read the secrets and you don’t feel so alone. You read your secret up there, among the hundreds of other anonymous secrets, and you know you’re connected, if only by a thin length of clothesline through the school halls.

I badly want to ask Sam what he’s typed up on Elsie’s typewriter, but I know he wouldn’t tell me. I know I wouldn’t say if he asked me.

“Yeah,” Sam says. “Sometimes.” He shrugs, as if to say it’s no big deal. The question tingles my lips. Sam’s hair falls in his eyes. It’s thick and wavy, closer to black than dark
brown, and there is a single streak of blue dye in it that he jokingly says is to make him look like more of a rebel. Not that he needs it. I’m fairly sure some of the stares he gets from girls at school aren’t just because we’re considered a little bit weird.

The bedsprings creak when he shifts his weight. “Do you?” Sam asks me. “Ever leave a secret?”

“Sometimes.” I stare resolutely down at the pictures in front of me. I can’t stop wondering what Sam has written. I can picture him at the secrets booth, hidden from Elsie and the rest of the library by the little privacy screen she puts up, his bitten fingernails clack-clacking words he’d never say to anyone, not even to me. I bring the subject back to Elsie. “And you never talk to her when you leave a secret?” I ask him.

“No,” he says, frowning like he’s trying to remember something. “I guess not.”

“Me either,” I say, thinking. “I guess there’s something furtive and kind of . . . embarrassing about it, maybe.”

Sam nods. “You don’t really want to stick around and chat.”

I think it’s kind of sad that Elsie probably sees so many people every day but doesn’t really speak with any of them. I wonder if she’s lonely. Then I wonder why I never wondered that before. I haven’t spoken to Elsie in years, not really, and she’s sort of faded into the background.

We used to spend a lot of time together when we were little. When my father died, it was just me, my mother, and Alice. Bea hadn’t moved to town yet and my mother hadn’t met Christopher, so we didn’t know Sam either. My father died during the accident season when I was eight, one of the worst ones, when we all ended up with multiple stitches and broken bones. A van hit his car coming off the highway when he was driving home from work. After that, I pretty much stopped talking, for a long time. And although most people in school understood, the longer it went on, the more of them lost interest in trying to get through to me.

Except Elsie. I remember there being something so reassuring about having someone who seemed to understand; someone who wasn’t trying to make me feel better but who was happy to just let me feel.

My mother met Christopher two years later, when Sam and I were both ten and Alice was eleven. They were only married for three years. After Christopher left, Sam went through what my mother calls a rough patch. He got sad a lot, and angry. Everybody kept talking at him and bringing him places and trying to get his mind off things, but I knew even then that that doesn’t always help. So he and I would shut ourselves in my room and listen to music and not say anything for hours. Sometimes days. Then we’d stand on my bed and shout every swear word we knew (and it was an
impressive number for a pair of thirteen-year-olds), and we’d throw things on the floor: nail polish bottles, pencil cases, photograph albums. Sam and I were always close, but it was after this that we became best friends.

I guess I didn’t need Elsie anymore, once I had Sam. Just thinking that makes me start to feel really, really bad about forgetting her.

“And now she’s in all my pictures,” I say to Sam. I lie on my side facing him and prop my head up on my hand. “Do you think she’s following me?” I ask. “Do you think I’m crazy? Do you think I’m imagining it? Do you think I’m maybe following her?”

“Are you?” Sam asks.

“I mean, without realizing it. Maybe I’m shadowing her. Maybe it’s not her that’s following me. Is it possible to unintentionally follow someone?”

Sam pauses at a picture of us at the seaside with Alice, Christopher, and my mother. It was taken on vacation in the south of France a year before Christopher left, back when things were almost normal for a while. Sam and I are grinning identical grins. We are sandy-haired and sunburned and the same height, and we look like twins. I’m wearing my first two-piece bikini, but I still look like a little girl playing dress-up. My mother looks like a 1920s model. She has buried Christopher to the ankles in sand, but he still towers over her. They have their arms around each other
and you can see by the pinch in the flesh of his chest how tightly she’s holding him.

Alice stands a bit apart. My uncle Seth, who took the picture, kept trying to get her to come closer, but Alice has always thought that family vacations are extraordinarily uncool. She’s the only one of us fully dressed, and her T-shirt and jeans seem strangely out of place in the summer beach scene. And behind her, standing at the edge of the water, is Elsie.

“Maybe her family just happened to be on vacation in the same place as us,” I say. I can hear the uncertainty in my voice.

But Sam isn’t listening. “I hate him,” he says suddenly.

I quickly cover the picture with my hand, ignoring the little voice in my head that says I should tell Sam his father called this afternoon. “He doesn’t exist,” I tell him. Then I smile and poke his arm to perk him up. “You can be part of our club. The no-dads club. With me and Alice. And Bea. We can have a clubhouse and a secret handshake.”

Bea’s father left three years ago as unceremoniously as Christopher, except Bea knows he’s living in England with his new, successful wife and new, young, adorable children who ride ponies and do ballet and won’t grow up to be eccentric tarot-card-reading teenage disappointments.