Tide King (43 page)

She looked at Calvin. He sat slouched in a new undershirt and his jeans, his hands clasped between his legs, looking at the floor, and his attempt to look small and harmless belied the powerful fulcrums of his knees, which seemed to reach Heidi's shoulders. His girth sucked the couch toward him, and her by extension, his thigh touching hers, the warm of him seeping into her skin. Would Ms. Webster understand how their short time together had already made everything monstrous and unfair and off-kilter in her life seem insignificant, had blown Shauna and Oliver and Mt. Zion High away like dandelion spores? She had spent so much time fighting the tide of a sea that had only been in her imagination, and now she was free.

“I can leave, Heidi,” Calvin said finally. “I don't want your friends worrying about your safety.”

“Why would you leave without me?” she asked, and looked at Ms. Webster. “Calvin is my boyfriend. We're leaving this place.”

“Don't be silly, Heidi.” Ms. Webster paced back and forth with her arms crossed, cradling the revolver in her hand like a baby. “You're going to get scholarships. You're going to Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr, or NYU. That's all you're going to be deciding. You're going to have a great life.”

“I'm going to have a great, lonely life. I want to be with Calvin—haven't you been in love, Ms. Webster?”

“You're not in love. There's plenty of time for that. You need to take advantage of the great opportunities afforded you. You're going to bloom in college, Heidi. Trust me, I was the same as you. I had a terrible time in high school.”

“I have a hard time believing that,” Heidi answered. “You're beautiful. I'm hideous…a freak.”

“You're not a freak, Heidi.” Calvin turned and took his hand in hers. “I love you.”

“I love you, too.” Heidi craned her neck and kissed his cheek. He took her face in his hands and kissed her on the lips, lingering for a second before turning away. She thought she would pass out from the lightheadedness. It may not have been a real kiss, performed at gunpoint, but it was her first.

“Well, I'm glad you two lovebirds have figured this out.” Ms. Webster said. “But this still doesn't answer any of my questions.”

“The truth is, I shot myself, by accident.” Calvin stood up, sending Ms. Webster into a ready position, gun pointed at him. He pulled up his shirt, where a raw wound the size of a fingertip poked through his hair. “It was a flesh wound, but I bled like a stuck pig. I was opening the magazine to take out the ammo, but one must have gotten stuck in the chamber. That's why I was upstairs, trying to rest a little. Heidi's been so upset about the whole thing it—all the blood makes it look worse than it really is.”

“I thought he was going to die,” Heidi added.

“And Heidi's father?”

Heidi looked at Calvin, who looked back at her. Like a stick in a bike tire, their easy, shared conniving grinded to a halt, planting their faces into the asphalt. It happened to the best of liars, she figured.

“My and Heidi's fathers were in the war together,” Calvin began, and Heidi dug her nails into the palms of her hands. “She and I have been penpals for years. She called me and said her father died in his sleep and that she didn't know what to do. She needed the Social Security checks so she could eat and pay the bills, and she was worried they'd put her in a foster home and sell the farmhouse. She just wanted to hang on until college, you know? I told her I'd come and help her figure something out. So I got here, and we weren't thinking clearly, I guess. He was dead, so we buried him—who could afford the funeral?”

“Jesus, you expect me to believe that?” Ms. Webster's face seemingly had aged decades since she arrived. Her right eyebrow had begun a slow dive into her right eye, a skepticism that narrowed her eyelids and drew her lips tight. She sighed, taking almost all the air in the room into her lungs, it seemed to Heidi, who held her breath. “All right, let's see this body.”

Calvin, Heidi, and then Ms. Webster left the house. Calvin pulled a shovel out from under the crawlspace of the porch. He stuck it into the mound, fresh and fly-infested, and threw the dirt off the side.

“Are you sure you want me to dig him up?” He paused, looking at Ms. Webster, then Heidi.

“Heidi, go inside.” Mrs. Webster nodded at Heidi. “You shouldn't have to see this.”

Heidi went into the house. She took the bag with the herb off the table, along with her father's diary, and shoved them between the waistband of her pants and the small of her back. She pulled on her hooded sweatshirt and left it billowy, unzipped. Then she went to the living room and got Calvin's backpack. She went out the front door and put everything under the passenger side of the truck seat and hurried back. She glanced out the window and saw that Calvin had dug a shallow hole the length of the tomb. She ran back upstairs and threw some toiletries in her backpack, underpants, an extra shirt. She put in her own journal, a few paperbacks, and went back outside, stuffing the backpack under the dashboard of the truck.

As she got back into the kitchen and sat at the table, Ms. Webster appeared. Her face was pale as she struggled against the convulsions of impending vomit. Her right hand rested on the edge of the kitchen sink as her left rose to her face. She breathed deeply twice and then looked at Heidi.

“Calvin is reburying your father.” She reached into her right front pocket, where she had briefly parked the revolver. “And you're coming with me.”

“Why?” Heidi ducked as Ms. Webster reached for her hand.

“Come on, hurry—before he has a chance to finish.”

She thought to overpower her, but Ms. Webster grabbed her by the arm, her grip strong. Maybe she could explain everything to Ms. Webster in private. Maybe her determination would waiver as Ms. Webster calmly explained the dangers of going away with a man she had known little more than a day, and she didn't know him, really. Ms. Webster had lived longer and knew more, and she would know what exactly to do next.

“Hurry.” Ms. Webster nudged her into the passenger seat of the Squareback and hurried around to the other side. She missed the slot for the key. When she tried again, pinching the key tightly between her fingers, Heidi could see her hands shaking.

“He won't hurt you,” Heidi said. “He didn't hurt me.”

The engine roared, and Ms. Webster yanked the clutch into gear, shooting down the road in reverse until they were out of view of the house before turning. Heidi hoped Calvin would get to the truck on time to follow them. The orange dragon was no match for the calibrated purr of the Volkswagen, which Ms. Webster eased up to 75 on the highway.

“Why didn't you say anything to me earlier, Heidi?” Ms. Webster lifted her hand off the clutch and patted Heidi's palm. “You knew you could come talk to me.”

“I don't know…it happened so fast. I don't want foster parents and to go to college in some strange city and it'll be just like high school except I won't even have you or my father.”

“Oh, Heidi, I know it feels like that. It feels like that to everyone—don't you think it'll feel like that to Oliver and Shauna and any other kid at school? And for them, it will be even worse. They're used to having status. Then, all of the sudden, they'll be lowly freshman, and no sophomore or junior or senior will care about their social status at their old school. But, for you, that will be a blessing. You can make a new home, a new history.”

Ms. Webster pulled into a two-story apartment complex. The brick and siding structure looked grimy and old. The siding was weathered gray, and the bricks, crumbling. Tricycles and toys and garbage paraded in the grass. Ms. Webster guided Heidi to an apartment on the second floor. Inside, it was small, a layer of exotic oils and perfume almost covering the sourness of tenants past. Heidi sat on the couch, and Ms. Webster locked the door and looked out the peephole.

“We have to figure out what we're going to do.” She walked into the living room and sat at the other end of the couch. “Even if I take your story as true, the truth is you didn't alert the authorities when your father died. And you could be charged with social security fraud if you don't. I don't know whether you'd go to jail, but this could keep you from going to college for a little bit.”

“I know…which is why you should let me go home and not get involved.” Heidi wrapped her arms around herself.

“Oh, Heidi, no—I would never do that.” Ms. Webster curled her feet up and fished a cigarette out of her purse. “We can figure this out without implicating Calvin in any of it. He can go home and no one would be any the wiser.”

Heidi looked at the bookshelves at the other end of the apartment, filled with the books she had imagined. No cat. She wondered what Ms. Webster did on the weekends, aside from inviting lonely girls like herself out to the movies.

“Do you have a boyfriend, Ms. Webster?”

“No.” She exhaled. “I haven't really met anyone here. But I have friends. I travel. I know that you don't want to hear this, Heidi, particularly since you struggle with it so much yourself, but people are lonely a lot. Even if there is someone. There's always a loneliness that people can't fill, that pets can't fill. And you have to make peace with it because you come into the world alone and you go out the same way.”

“Have you made peace with it?”

“Sometimes.” She stubbed out the cigarette. “I've been in long-term relationships, and I've been alone. I'm just saying that I don't want you to think Calvin can save you from it.”

“But why be with anyone at all, then?”

“Because it's fun and we procreate and that's what we do. But it doesn't mean anything unless you're comfortable with yourself. And you can go with Calvin or you can go to college, or you could go into the Peace Corps, but you have to find the home in yourself because everything else is so much window dressing.”

“Calvin isn't attracted to me,” Heidi blurted. “I'm sure it's obvious. I have something…of his father's. He came here for it. That's all. He didn't have anything to do with my father dying. We can go to the police tomorrow and tell them everything.”

“I think the truth is the best way to do it. I'm so sorry about your father, honey. I'm so sorry you had to go through that all alone.”

Ms. Webster reached over and touched her knee. Heidi felt rocks in her chest, in her stomach, begin to break away, a raw, soft loam beneath them. The grief would come now, she knew. Ms. Webster boiled water in the kitchen as Heidi dug her chin into her chest, trying to blink away the memory of her father's body, the dirt brushing his eyelids, mixing in his hair, his nostrils, as she heaved it from the pile into the hole.

“Ms. Webster, do you think they'll let me stay with you?” she asked when Ms. Webster returned with two steaming mugs of chamomile tea.

“I don't know, honey.” Ms. Webster sat back on the couch. “I don't think it's appropriate, being your teacher. But I'm sure we can hang out. We could go the movies, dinner.”

Heidi sipped the tea. This seemed the right thing to do. It would seem foolish otherwise. Even her father, she reasoned, would advise her against going with Johnson, the man with whom he shared his foxhole.

Ms. Webster folded a sheet and blanket over the couch, brought her out a pillow. Heidi took off her sneakers and slid under the sheets, thankful that they smelled like detergent and not bar soap, that they were soft and cool and that Ms. Webster's apartment, although smelling faintly of mold, the memory of residents past, felt homey. Perhaps, even if she could not stay with Ms. Webster, she would stay with a family who would make sure she was clothed and fed and loved. Even if she wound up in jail, she reasoned, she would be fed three times a day, and the shower water would be hot.

“Heidi, I'm not going to call the police now,” Ms. Webster said. “But I can't stay up all night. So I trust you that you'll still be here in the morning. We'll go to the police and what happens will happen, but I will be here for you every step. It'll only be worse if you decide to go with Calvin.”

“I know.”

Ms. Webster bent over and hugged her. Heidi's life receded into the thick waves of Ms. Webster's apple-scented hair. If she could be Ms. Webster's conditioner, she reasoned, she would be content.

In the dark, she thought of Calvin, smelled his sharp, earthy musk, felt the pistons on his fingers pressing against her waist, her back, her shoulders. He had kissed her earlier that evening. Perhaps he hadn't been faking all of it. Their lips had fit together like skin on bone. Because of his relationship to her father, he was almost family.

And he was not human. She had seen it with her own eyes. But she was, awkward and frail and bumbling. She imagined him going to New York, perhaps saving Kate, and they would march, superhuman, divine, in the sunset ever after. And Heidi would curl up in the library of some large university on the East Coast, anonymous and destined to inherit the earth after they tired of it.

She slipped out of bed and tiptoed across the room with her shoes in her hands. As she got to the door, she listened for Ms. Webster. She wondered whether she was letting her leave, make her own decision. Maybe the secret of the farmhouse grave would die between them. She slipped out of the door and padded down the concrete stairs to the parking lot, wondering how she would find her way home, to Calvin. But she did not need to wonder long, for she saw the rusted orange truck at the end of the parking lot, the dark shape of Calvin's body behind the wheel. She pulled on her shoes and ran over.

“How long have you been out here?” She climbed into the passenger side of the truck.

“Since you've been inside.” He flicked the butt of his cigarette out the open window. “Where's Teach?”

“Asleep, I think. Look, I just wanted to find you so that I could give you this.” She crouched between her legs and felt along the seat of the truck, pulling out the sandwich bag with the herb in it. “You're free to go back to New York.”