Birds of Summer (13 page)

Through the thin wood of the sliding door, Summer listened carefully to the conversation that followed—the Creep finishing a story he’d apparently been telling Oriole, something about a winning streak he’d had once in Las Vegas. And then Oriole questioning Sparrow about her day at summer school. Sparrow was comparatively untalkative. Afraid, probably, to say much for fear of saying something she shouldn’t. Poor kid. Summer had not only lied to her—about what she had seen when she looked in Marina’s window—but also had scared her to death with terrible stories about what would happen if she told about the midnight visit to the Fishers’. The strain of her effort to keep her tongue under control must have been obvious. “What’s the matter, baby?” Summer heard Oriole say. “Are you tired?”

“Yes, I’m tired. I’m very tired,” Sparrow said quickly in what was clearly a “that’s-a-good-idea” tone of voice. “I think I’ll go rest. I’m going to go in the bedroom and rest.”

The door slid open, and Sparrow came in looking pleased with herself. “I didn’t tell,” she whispered. “Did you hear how I didn’t tell?”

Summer stayed in her room until she heard the Creep leave. She had to come out then and pretend that she didn’t know that Oriole’s latest lover was not only a pot grower and drug dealer, which Oriole obviously knew, but also a blackmailer and terrorist, which perhaps she didn’t know. Trying to behave normally, Summer answered when spoken to and even volunteered a few comments, all the while watching Oriole and wondering.

Most of the evening she was very prudent, but at one point she couldn’t resist asking, “How are the Fishers?” Oriole’s phony answer, a crassly cheerful lie, brought justifying anger, so she went on to ask, “What do they hear from Marina? Will she be coming home soon?”

She threw the questions out like a baited hook, staring at Oriole, a surface smile hiding a bitter “this-ought-to-be-good” expectancy. But this time Oriole couldn’t rise to the bait. She lifted her eyes slowly to Summer’s. The phony cheerfulness was gone, and in its place was something so helpless and pathetic that the hard satisfying anger disappeared and in its place was, once again, the threatening shadow of the dark wave.

C
ROWN RIDGE WAS GLORIOUS
that morning. The breeze smelled of sunlit forest and distant ocean, and the wide stretch of lawn, bordered by flower beds and sprinkled with peacocks, was like a commercial photo, too rich in color to be believed. Sparrow squealed with delight and ran. Summer followed more slowly.

Sparrow was still fascinated by the peacocks. She’d given them all names—Princess Topknot, Prince Rainbow, Royal Mightiness—and made up stories about them. Fantasy-type stories about kings and queens and fairy godmothers, obvious spin-offs from her favorite fairy tales. She was so intrigued by the luxurious beauty of their feathered exteriors, she seemed never to have noticed their less enchanting qualities, such as their loud, raucous voices and their aloof, antisocial behavior. Slowing to a walk and then to a crawl, she managed to get quite near the panic-prone flock before she came to a stop. She was squatting, chattering away at the big dumb birds, as Summer approached.

“Hello, your Royal Mightiness. Have you had your breakfast yet? I’ll ask Nan to let me feed you. Would you like that? Would you like me to bring you some nice breakfast?”

The peacocks went on stalking across the lawn, their heads nodding to some weird reptilian rhythm, while Sparrow watched them, and Summer watched her. Her eyes wide and glowing, her mouth partly open, Sparrow was as completely out of the real world as if she were stoned. Miles away, floating somewhere in a dream of palaces and peacocks and princesses, she was entirely unaware that Summer had caught up and was staring at her. Living completely in and for the moment—that was Sparrow for you. A Chicken Little who would never notice that the sky was falling until it hit her, not if the sun was shining however briefly and there was something fun to do or pretty to look at. Just like Oriole. Just like Oriole in a lot of ways, including her looks—the fragile-faced, pliable prettiness that attracted everybody, especially the ones who were looking for easy prey.

“Come on, Sparrow,” Summer said. “We’ve got things to do.”

There was a great deal to do that morning, more even than usual, since Richard was due to arrive home shortly before noon with some special guests who were going to stay for lunch. The guests were business associates, Nan said, some of the new partners who were involved in the expansion and who had come out from New York to look at the California plant.

Elmira, the extra help who came whenever there was a party, arrived soon after Summer and Sparrow and set to work in the kitchen, while Nan made flower arrangements and set the table in the dining room. When the cleaning was done, Summer was to help in the kitchen and do part of the serving, since Elmira would be very busy with the souffles.

Richard and his guests arrived around twelve-thirty in two cars, Richard’s solemn blue Cadillac and a suavely silver Mercedes Benz. Summer and Sparrow watched from the kitchen window as five businesslike men and one even more businesslike woman got out of the car and Nan, cool and classy in a cotton lace dress, went out to meet them. A bar had been set up on the patio, and there were to be drinks there before everyone came in to lunch. As soon as they were all drinking, Summer in a white cap and apron, was to take out the tray of hot hors d’oeuvres.

She didn’t plan it ahead of time at all. It came to her suddenly while she was arranging the parsley around the edge of the tray—and Sparrow was still standing on tiptoe at the window with the sunlight making a coppery halo around her head. Picking up a paring knife, Summer sliced the stems off some bunches of parsley and then carefully ran the sharp blade over the end of her forefinger.

“Damn,” she said. “I’ve cut myself.”

Hot hors d’oeuvres can’t wait, the closest bandages were in the master bathroom, and Elmira was too busy with the souffles to put up much of an argument. A few moments later after a quick rehearsal, Sparrow, with the frilly apron tied around her tiny waist over well-worn jeans, was off to the patio with the hors d’oeuvres tray. On her way to the bathroom, with a paper towel around her bleeding finger, Summer paused by the French doors long enough to hear Sparrow’s clear little voice giving a Sparrowish version of what Summer had told her to say. “Summer cut herself with the parsley so I had to bring the horders”—and the chorus of ooohs and aaahs and questions and comments that followed.

It could have all gone wrong. Nan and Richard could have been angry. But they weren’t, or if they were, they forgot about it later because of the way things turned out. Summer stayed in the bathroom for a long time, and Nan and Sparrow had to do the serving. Apparently Sparrow was the hit of the party. Everyone made a big fuss over her, and when it was all over, Richard actually picked her up and carried her out to the driveway to say good-by. That afternoon when Sparrow gave Nan her usual good-by hug, Richard asked for one, too. And for once Nan had sense enough not to comment.

It was beginning to look as if a door that had refused to budge, in spite of Nan’s obvious pushing, had started to come ajar. Not a magical door that led to some wonderful daydream castle, but one that just might lead to a last resort umbrella for Chicken Little in case the sky fell before the summer was over.

On Monday, Summer began what was to be her last week of work for the Pardells’. Meg’s cast had been removed, and after a few days of getting used to her crutches, she’d be able to take over. At least, that was what she said. Alan didn’t agree. He wanted Summer to stay on for at least another two or three weeks. “Look,” he said to Meg while they were all having tea and Summer’s homemade oatmeal cookies on Monday afternoon, “if those crutches bring down your domestic efficiency rating by even a degree, we may get posted by the department of health.”

Meg laughed and said that he’d have to go back to getting along without oatmeal cookies and ironed handkerchiefs sooner or later, and the state of their checkbook suggested that sooner was a good idea. And Alan said, “Do you mean to tell me that you’ve found it?” And Summer asked, “Found what?” and Meg said, “Our checkbook. It’s been missing since Saturday. Since right after someone-who-shall-remain-nameless used it to pay the paper boy.” Alan was pleading guilty and throwing himself on the mercy of the court when Summer got up and got a checkbook off the sinkboard.

“Impossible,” Alan said. “I looked in that very same spot at least a dozen times last night.”

“Well,” Summer said, “that was before I found it under the cushion of your favorite chair—just this morning.”

So Alan said, “See, we can’t do without her.” And Meg said maybe he was right and she’d think about it and check it out with the checkbook, now that it had reappeared.

Summer hoped, hoped very much—hoped desperately in fact—that Meg would decide to continue the job. It wasn’t just the money. Important as it was, the money was a small part of it. A larger factor was having someplace to go every day to get away from the trailer and Oriole and the Creep. But there was another reason that was more difficult to define, something uncertain and nebulous, but that had to do with a feeling of restfulness. A feeling that she had at the Pardells’ and nowhere else. It made no sense because she worked longer and harder at the Pardells’ than at the Olivers’, and she often went home feeling exhausted—physically exhausted, at least. But while she was scrubbing the cracked linoleum in Meg’s kitchen or chatting with Alan over tea and cookies at the end of the day, something else rested. Something deep in the pit of her stomach and crammed into the dark corners of her mind rested at the Pardells’ in a way that it never really did anywhere else.

On Tuesday, Meg, who was beginning to get around quite well on crutches, went into Fort Bragg with Alan. While he taught, she would spend the day at the library and visiting friends. Summer was to have a half day off. In the morning she would do a little cleaning and keep an eye on Linda and Patrick Boyles who were coming to practice on Meg’s piano, since eight-year-old Patrick was the type one did not leave alone with a defenseless piano. After that, she was free to go. Since arriving home early was out of the question, she had promised Sparrow an afternoon at the beach.

At noon, after the practice had been supervised and Patrick bandaged following an ill-advised attempt to tease Odious, Summer was making sandwiches for herself and Sparrow when the doorbell rang. Sparrow, who got out of summer school at twelve o’clock, had apparently made it across town in record time. Summer called for her to come in and went on spreading mustard. When she looked up a moment later, Nicky was standing in the kitchen door.

When she first saw him, standing there looking uncertain, an entirely unexpected feeling made her begin to smile, before her well-trained sense of self-preservation sounded the alarm. How did he find out she was going to be alone in the house? She turned the smile into a threatening scowl.

Nicky looked at the knife in her hand and began to grin. “Don’t,” he said, “I’d die of mustard poisoning.”

The scowl and smile collided and produced something that wasn’t either one. “What are you doing here?” she asked.

Nicky’s grin suddenly disappeared, and he looked around cautiously. “I just wanted to talk to you.” With the smile gone, his face looked suddenly tense and drawn and strangely older. “I’ve got to talk to somebody,” he said. His shrug was somehow a gesture of despair. “It’s such a hopeless mess, and I can’t decide what to do. But if I don’t do something, I think something terrible is about to happen.”

Alarmed, Summer said quickly “Why? What are you thinking about doing?”

“Shh,” Nicky said looking towards the living room. “Where are they? The Pardells?”

So he hadn’t known she was alone! She told him then about the Pardells being away and what her plans were for the afternoon. And by the time Sparrow arrived, she’d finished making a third salami and cheese sandwich. Then she put Odious out, locked up the house, and the three of them started out for the beach.

Sparrow did most of the talking on the way to the beach. She had seemed to accept Summer’s explanations, that night at the Fishers’, but now with a new source of information it became obvious that her curiosity hadn’t been completely satisfied. Hanging on to Nicky’s hand—Nicky had always been a favorite of Sparrow’s—she skipped and trotted and asked questions.

“How come Jerry lets that man with the mean dog stay at your house?” she asked.

“I told you,” Summer interrupted before Nicky could contradict her story, “I told you, Jerry is on another bummer and he doesn’t want people visiting, so he got Bart and the dog to scare them off.” Even though Jerry Fisher certainly had had occasional attacks of social deficiency, it wasn’t the greatest explanation, but she’d thought it might wash with someone as naturally gullible as Sparrow. Apparently, though, it was too much for even Sparrow to swallow. She looked at Summer, not so much suspiciously as doubtfully, as if she thought Summer didn’t know what she was talking about. Then she looked up at Nicky and repeated the question.

Nicky gave Summer a microscopic twitch of a grin. “Well,” he said, “have you heard about the raspberry mob?” Sparrow shook her head, her eyes wide. “You probably heard Galya talking about how expensive raspberries are lately? Well, that’s the whole problem. There’s this rip-off gang who fence hot raspberries, and they’ve already tried to steal ours. So we just had to take precautions, that’s all. Only Adolph, that’s the new dog’s name, isn’t smart enough to tell our friends from raspberry pushers, so we just have to keep everybody away until the raspberry season is over.”

The rest of Nicky’s explanation was even more ridiculous, but Sparrow obviously liked it. Summer wasn’t sure whether she actually found it believable or just entertaining; but whichever it was, she seemed to be satisfied.

They ate their lunch in the same hollow behind the sand dune where they’d sat before, while a familiar-looking sea gull watched expectantly from the top of a neighboring dune. Waiting, no doubt, for another flying sandwich. And after they’d finished eating, Sparrow fell for another of Nicky’s tall tales. This one went that he had a friend who was in the market for seashells—any seashells—five cents apiece.