We All Fall Down (14 page)

“She gave you the key to her house?” Buddy asked, unable to keep the disbelief from his voice.

“You’re not paying attention, Buddy. I said I told them she gave me the key. Notice the difference?”

Buddy nodded, sober suddenly, all wooziness gone, the pleasant drifting over, and a headache asserting itself, throbbing dully above his eyes.

“How did you get the key?”

“Simple,” he said. “Picture this: I’m in the Mall one afternoon and I see a girl pull her wallet out of her pocket. A key falls to the floor. She doesn’t see it fall. Because I’m such a gentleman”—and he leered at Buddy with such an evil grin that Buddy flinched—“I went over and picked up the key. Was going to give it to her. But she was walking away, into the Pizza Palace. I watched her go, holding the key in my hand. Looked at it. What kind of key was this? Didn’t look like a car key. What other key would a girl her age have? Locker key at school? Most lockers have combinations. No. Must be—
voilà
—her house key, the key to her home.” Harry paused and his voice grew dreamy. “Funny thing happened, Buddy. I thought: Here I hold the key to her house in my hand. This key can open the door to her house, to her family, to her private life. Christ, what a feeling. So I followed her into the Pizza Palace, made a few inquiries about her. And found out that her name was Jane Jerome and she lived in Burnside….” He waved his hand in the air. “The rest is history.…”

Then, turning to him, serious again: “Listen, how I got the key is not important. What’s important is the
effect
the key had on everybody at the police station. One minute everybody is ready to make all kinds of charges. Next minute, they say: Whoa, let’s take another look at this case. Her father pulls the cops aside. His face is the color of ashes in a barbecue pit. I know what her father is saying,
know what he’s thinking. He’s thinking headlines. Like: GIRL
AIDS
IN
VANDALISM
OF
HER
OWN
HOME. Her picture in the paper, on television maybe. See, Buddy? See why they had to believe me, why her father agreed to the lesser charges, accepted the restitution without making waves? Why the cops decided to believe I was alone? Everybody was suddenly glad to have it all over with.…”

It wasn’t until later, long after Harry had driven off and Buddy was crawling into bed, hoping the Pepto-Bismol would ease his nausea, that he thought:

But how about the girl?

Hey, Harry, how about the girl?

Seven hours and twenty minutes (she did not keep trade of the seconds). The longest seven hours of her life. She spent them all in her room. Did not open the door when her mother knocked and called her name. Did not respond when her father rattled the doorknob and pleaded with her to come out.

“Please, Jane,” he said, his voice strangled. “Please come out. Let’s talk about this.”

She did not answer, merely sat on her legs, knees crossed in front of her—like a wistful Buddha. “Hey, Jane,” Artie called once, after rapping his knuckles on the door, their secret signal to each other: three short raps, two long, when they used to try to outwit baby-sitters in the olden days when they were young. “Don’t be a sap, Jane’s Come on out.”

She did not answer Artie, either.
Don’t be a sap, Jane.
Where did he get that word,
sap,
anyway? Stupid word.

She did not like her room anymore. Missed her posters. Most of her small glass animals had been spared damage but she refused to put them on display again. They were tucked away in tissue paper in a box on the closet
shelf. She always carefully stepped over that spot near the door where the vomit had lain in a terrible puddle.

She sniffed, wrinkling her nose, seeking that foul odor under the surface of things. No odor now but she knew it lurked there, threatening to emerge when she least expected it.

“The key,” she muttered. “The damn key.”

She went to the window, looked out, surprised to find that rain was falling. She’d heard no raindrops on the windowpane. Soft, gentle spring rain, a melancholy rain, the street deserted, no children playing, no dogs in sight. Were trashers lingering in the woods?

She should have told her parents about the key immediately. As soon as she realized she had lost it. But she’d been losing things around that time. Her red leather wallet, a Christmas gift, that she’d somehow lost with twenty dollars in Christmas money inside. Lost it at the movies. Two days later, the theater called, reporting that the wallet had been found. It was damaged, torn, and money gone, of course. Next, she had lost a pearl earring, another gift from her favorite aunt, Aunt Cassie, back in Monument. Didn’t mention it to anyone. Her mother had found it in a corner of the kitchen floor. Which made it worse. “Didn’t you know it was missing?” her mother had asked. “Why didn’t you tell us?” Then to Jane’s father: “Know what’s happening, Jerry? Our kids are keeping secrets from us.”

All of which surprised Jane. Didn’t her parents know that all kids kept secrets from their parents? Hadn’t her mother and father done the same thing when they were kids? Or did growing up cause a kind of amnesia about stuff like that?

When she lost the key, she kept quiet about it. Did not mention it to anyone even though Karen and Artie probably would have helped her look for it. Actually, there did
not seem to be any serious need for a key. Most of the time, somebody was home when Jane arrived. The key was a pain in the neck. She had no other keys. No car key—she was taking Driver’s Ed. at school, did not drive her father’s car yet. Combination lock on her school locker; she kept her house key either in her pocket or in one of the slots of her wallet. Half the time she couldn’t find it. Sometimes it slipped out of her jeans pocket into the chair. When she discovered it was missing, she wasn’t sure when or where she had lost it. That was another reason for her delay in reporting the loss; she couldn’t have supplied any details. In time, she completely forgot about the key. Even when the trashing occurred, the did not connect it with her missing key.

“Jane.”

Her mother.

What Jane could not forget: the way her father had refused to look at her, had kept ignoring her, as if she had been barred from the family. When finally he
did
look at her, his eyes were the eyes of a stranger. An accusing stranger. Until that moment, she had not realized how the eyes contain the secret of who you are and what you are. Looking into her father’s eyes, she had seen a stranger, the man other people met on the street or at the office because the man in the front hallway was certainly not, for that blazing moment, repeat,
not
her father.
Her
father could never look at her that way, as if he, too, were seeing a stranger and not his daughter. A moment later, when he had uttered those terrible words, had asked that terrible question—
Did you give him the key?
—her mother had regarded her in the same way, her eyes like her father’s but with surprise and befuddlement mixed in with the accusation.

Or was she being fair?

She had turned away, so quickly, so eager to get away from those accusing eyes, scurrying up the stairs, a sob escaping her lips, that she thought maybe she hadn’t waited long enough for her father to offer an explanation for his behavior.

She looked at the clock. She had been in her room now for seven hours and thirty-two minutes. Had had no dinner—had not turned on her television set. Had not opened a book or played a disk on the CD. She had lived these past few hours like a hermit or a monk, fasting, keeping silent. In the first two or three hours, there had been no sounds from downstairs, not even a door closing or the muffled voices on television. The telephone did not even ring. Then, first her mother knocking and then her father. Taking turns.

Now her mother again:

“Know what you’re doing, Jane?”

She did not answer but her silence asked: What
am
I doing?

“You’re punishing us. For something you did.”

They were still accusing her.

“Jane.”

Her father’s turn, his voice:

“You didn’t give us enough time. I didn’t say I
believed
that boy. I was only asking you, to hear you say it in your own words.”

He hadn’t asked. He had told her what the boy had said—that she gave him the key. She would never forget those words or his eyes or the way his voice had sounded.

“We know you didn’t give him the key. We know you wouldn’t do a thing like that.”

And her mother: “You lost the key, didn’t you? And you were afraid to tell us because you’re always losing things. Right?”

She knew, of course, that her mother and father had been discussing the situation all this time, downstairs, in the kitchen, the living room, the way she had been agonizing here in her bedroom.

What she hated most of all was:

The trashing. The thing that had led her to this situation. Her friends Patti and Leslie gone, now her father a stranger and her mother his conspirator against her. How she hated them, those faceless trashers and that fellow, Harry Something-or-other, who had lied and tried to implicate her in the trashing.

They were the enemy, not her father or mother. They were the reason she was a prisoner here in her own room. The reason her mother and father were in such agony.

She went to the door, turned the key, opened it. Saw her mother and father, their faces filled with apprehension and concern as they peered tentatively at her. In a moment, they were embracing, arms tangled around each other, cheeks damp, her mother whispering softly
Jane, Jane,
like a prayer, as if she had returned from a long trip, her father pressing her close to him, as if he had to feel the contours of her body to be sure she was there.

She gave in to their ministrations, letting herself go, basking in the circle of their love and their warmth and their comfort, but in a small distant part of herself, wondering if things would ever be the same again.

“I’m sorry.”

A whisper of a voice, soft, distant, as if coming from a faraway country, another planet.

“Who is this?” she asked, puzzled, wary, wondering if she had misunderstood what the voice had said.
I’m sorry.
For what? “What did you say?”

She was alone in the house. After school. When the
phone rang she’d picked it up automatically, without any thought about who might be calling. Nobody called her these days. That’s why the ringing of the phone didn’t excite her as it did when she had that stupid crush on Timmy Kearns and the days when Patti and Leslie had been her friends.

“Is this Jane Jerome?” the voice asked. A boy’s voice, kind of breathless as if he had been running a long distance.

“Yes,” she said. “Who is this?” A slight quiver of fear now in her voice.
I should hang up.
Ever since the vandalism, fear had crouched under the surface of everyday events, whether it was the ringing of the doorbell or an unfamiliar face on the street or someone who seemed to be staring at her at the supermarket checkout line. Now this unknown voice on the phone.

She was about to hang up when a soft sigh came over the line, the kind of sigh a child makes at the end of a long weary day. And after the sigh, the same voice, tender now, saying: “I’m sorry about what happened.”

Big pause.

Caught by surprise, she looked at the phone as if the instrument could provide the answer to who was calling. Then pressed it against her ear in time to hear the line go dead, followed by the blurting of the dial tone.

Her hand trembled as she replaced the receiver on its cradle. She stood there a moment, indecisive, trying to straighten out her thoughts. Her thoughts were all jumbled these days, as if her brain had short-circuited. Silly thought, of course, but she did not know how to express what had happened to her, what
was
happening to her.

She went to the window, blinked at the streams of sunshine against her eyeballs. Rain should be falling to suit her mood. Her black mood. She turned back from the window,
hugged her arms around her chest, staring bleakly at each piece of furniture in the room. She found it hard these days to stay in the house at all. For a while, she found it difficult to be
alone
in the house and had fled the place. Now, she found it was almost impossible for her to be in the house even when her family was around. When her father glanced her way, she shriveled a bit. When he touched her shoulder and gave her a goodnight peck on the cheek, she could not respond even though she knew this was wrong. But what he had done, doubting her, was also wrong. I’ve got to get over this, she told herself. But found it hard to do. She kept telling herself that her father was not the villain. The guy whose name was Harry Flowers had lied, had made her father doubt her.

Harry Flowers. She wondered about him. What did he look like? Was he tall or short? Fat or thin? What kind of person was he? What kind of person would do such terrible, sick things? She tried to picture him in her mind but he was a terrifying blank. Terrifying because she might have already met him, on the street, at a dance at school, at the Mall, and did not know it. When she strolled the Mall, she looked curiously at the various fellows she met, wondering: Is this him? She decided at one point to stay away from the Mall and then said: no. She would not let Harry Flowers control her life. He had already damaged her—her house, her feelings for her mother and father, her life.

And now that phone call. That soft and gentle voice full of sorrow and regret. Someone out there who felt bad for her, who had tried to communicate how he felt. But why was he so mysterious? Why didn’t he identify himself, tell her his name? Was he—impossible—Harry Flowers? Calling to say he was sorry?

Harry Flowers seemed to have invaded her life, her
thoughts. The caller couldn’t be him. He could not have faked such an apology. Not the Harry Flowers who had wreaked such havoc. Harry Flowers, Harry Flowers, Harry Flowers, she thought as she headed upstairs for a jacket and then to be out of here, out of this house. To where? Anywhere except here. Harry Flowers, Harry Flowers, Harry Flowers, the name filling her mind. Harry Flowers, Harry Flowers, Harry Flowers. Opening drawers, the closet, unbuttoning, buttoning. Harry Flowers, Harry Flowers, Harry Flowers. Combing her hair, hand shaking, shoulders shaking, body shaking. HarryFlowersHarry-FlowersHarryFlowers. Maybe if she said his name long enough, fast enough, it would not be a name anymore, would lose all meaning, all power to threaten her. Harry Flowers Harryflowersharryflowersharryflowersharry-flowersharryflowers … as she bounded down the steps and out the door into the outside world with harryflowers-harryflowersharryflowersharryflowers … stop it stop it but could not could not harryflowersharryflowersharry-flowersharryflowers until his name passed out of existence and became only syllables, a dim sound in her mind, then, thank God, nothing.