Birds of Summer (4 page)

“That’s tomorrow. Galya goes for propane tomorrow.” Sparrow was headed for the table loaded down with bread and cheese and tomatoes, and Summer began automatically to clear a spot amid the debris. “Here. Put that stuff here,” she said. “And clean it up when you’re through.” She picked up her sweater and pulled it on. “I’m going out for a while.”

“Okay,” Sparrow said. “Where’re you going?”

“Down to the road to wait for Oriole.”

“Tell Galya I want to come visit. Tell her. Okay?”

“Okay,” Summer yelled as she ran out the door. Behind her the door banged a second time, and a moment later Cerbe was prancing beside her. They were nearing the road, walking fast, with Cerbe leading the way, when he stopped suddenly and sniffed the air. A low growl rumbled in his throat, and as she reached for his collar, she felt the coarse hair on his neck bristle under her hand. Hushing him, she pulled him off the path and pushed her way toward the road through the thick underbrush. A few minutes later, peering out through a large clump of rhododendron, she saw Jerry Fisher’s pickup parked beside the road. Oriole was in the cab and someone else whose face was not visible. But Cerbe’s growl told Summer who it wasn’t. Cerbe never growled at Galya.

The rhododendron was in full bloom, a deep burgundy red, and its great masses of bloom made a perfect blind. Crouching in the dim red-tinged light beneath the bush, Summer watched for several minutes before the door of the cab opened. As Oriole got out, the driver leaned toward her, bringing his face into view—a dark, narrow face with a thin moustache above a smile too full of teeth. Grabbing Cerbe’s muzzle to stop his growl, Summer backed away from the road. All the way home to the trailer she kept a tight hold on his collar, and every few minutes he stopped to look back and growl.

S
HE SAID SHE’D NEVER
met him before and he just happened to come by as she was on her way to mail a letter. So—when he offered her a ride into town she remembered she needed to buy some wheat germ, or something, so she said yes. His name is Angelo, believe-it-or-not, and he told her he was helping the Fishers build some new greenhouses. I asked her if she’d happened to mention the way he and the Frankenstein’s monster look-alike tried to scare Sparrow and me to death, and she said she did, and he explained that it was just a joke. A joke! Can you imagine? If Cerbe had gotten away from me, there wouldn’t have been anything funny about it. I told her that both of them gave me the creeps, and she said I shouldn’t be so negative and that, “Angelo seems like a very open and loving person.” God! Where have I heard that before?

“Hey, look.” Oriole’s voice was loud and clear through the thin wood of the bedroom’s sliding door. “I won.”

“No, you didn’t, you didn’t win yet. You have to throw the exact amount. Summer says you have to throw the exact amount.”

Oriole’s laugh was like a little girl’s, high-pitched and teasing. “No, you don’t. Not the way I play. We’re playing Oriole’s rules today.”

“Hey, you two,” Summer shouted. “Hold it down. I can’t concentrate.”

“’Scuse us!” Oriole shouted, and the voices became softer. Summer had locked herself in the bedroom to finish her homework, but the assignment hadn’t taken long, and for the last half hour she’d been writing to Grant. Now with the voices in the next room reduced to a murmur, she returned to the letter.

I’ve been feeling strange lately—tense and jumpy. I don’t know why exactly except that several things have happened that make me think that something weird is going on at the Fishers’. And now this Angelo character. I have a very strong feeling that this one is really bad news. I just wish …

She sighed, wrote something, scratched it out and began to chew on the end of her pen. Her eyes wandered, coming to rest on the mirror on the opposite wall. The mirror was one of her most treasured possessions. It was very old and the glass was blotched and darkened, but the round frame had been covered with peacock feathers. Carefully arranged to cover the cracked and blistered wood of the frame, the feathers curved out gracefully in a halo of shimmering color. In the old glass her own image was vaguely altered, transformed into someone intriguingly unfamiliar. A face from the past, perhaps, with mysterious, shadowy eyes and hollow cheeks ravaged by some great personal sorrow.

Behind her reflected face the blurs and cracks blended into shadowy vistas that, by squinting her eyes and using a little imagination, she could translate into a variety of interesting environments. To the left, a long blur could resemble a draped window and on the right a cluster of blotches might be interpreted as a stone fireplace. By adding a few extra details she could conjure up a complete room.

She had imagined the room before. It wouldn’t be large but it would be perfect: the walls, the floor, the furniture—it would all be exactly right. She’d planned and replanned it a dozen times, using ideas gathered from magazines and store windows as well as, in several respects, Richard Oliver’s study at Crown Ridge Ranch.

“Ha ha. I caught you. I caught you. You have to go back.” Sparrow’s noisy celebration, followed by Oriole’s loud, “Shhhh!” and then the two of them giggling brought Summer back to reality. And reality was ten by ten, flimsy, leak-streaked and curled around the edges.

Once, a couple of years earlier, Summer had made an effort with the bedroom. She had painted the walls, built a long, narrow counter, which served as desk and dressing table, and padded two small nail kegs to use as stools. But Sparrow went right on throwing her things around, and Cerbe went on shedding all over the patch of carpet, and the rain came in again and streaked the newly painted walls. After that she pretty much gave up—except for the half of the counter that was strictly hers, which Sparrow avoided on pain of a mysteriously terrible fate, convincingly promised without ever being clearly defined. On that sacred ground, neatly arranged, there were always the same objects: a man’s silver-backed hairbrush, several postcards under a sheet of window glass and a small wooden chest with a padlock.

The postcards were from Nan Oliver, mailed during trips to Europe and South America. The brush had been Grant’s—the one thing he left behind, except for the poems and, of course, Summer herself. And the chest was full of letters.

Getting off the bed where she’d been sitting propped against the wall, she picked up the box and climbed back to the same spot, rearranging the pillows more comfortably behind her back. Because of a tight turtlenecked jersey, it took a moment to produce the key from where it always hung on a chain around her neck. When the padlock was unfastened, she returned the key to its hiding place before she opened the box. Taking the new letter from her binder, she added it to the ones already in the chest.

The letters, dozens and dozens of them, went back to the year she started second grade. They were written on every kind of paper: real stationery, binder paper, scraps of paper bag. Some of the early ones were even printed in straggly manuscript on the kind of wide-lined newsprint used by primary classes. When she added the new letter, she had to press down firmly in order to close the lid. She had no idea how many there were now. It had been a long time since she counted them. Suddenly she opened the box again, took out the entire stack, and turned it upside down. At the bottom of the box, along with her first bank book, was the first letter she’d ever written to Grant.

Dear Father,

Today in school we are writing letters for Father’s Day. Everyone is writing what good things their fathers do, like playing games and buying things. I think you would have too if you hadn’t gone away to be a doctor. Mrs. Frasure says if I get an address she will mail my letter, but Oriole said you don’t have one. Maybe I can get one for you.

Love,

Summer

“What an idiot,” Summer said. She pulled out several more of the oldest letters and looked through them. They were about school and playing with Haley and fighting with Nicky. A couple of times they mentioned the money she was saving to get an address for Grant. She couldn’t remember what she thought an address was, but she must have thought it was something like an envelope.

As she leafed through the pile of letters, reading some and skimming others, she came across some that dealt with very private material—things she’d never told anyone else, not even Oriole. Or, in some cases, particularly not Oriole. There were, for instance, several mentions of Rif. Rif was a very handsome guy—a rock star, at least to hear him tell it—who had lived with them for a while after Danny left. Besides playing the guitar and singing, he made belts and wallets out of leather. He wasn’t too bad most of the time, but when he was high he sometimes got nasty. Sparrow was still a baby then, and if she cried when he was trying to practice, it drove him up the wall. One of the letters, a long one, told about the time Rif had beaten Summer for kicking him in the shins. Oriole had been out somewhere, and Rif had started slapping Sparrow because she was crying, and it seemed like, this time, he wasn’t going to stop. So Summer had kicked him hard. He’d beaten her with one of his handmade belts, and then he said that if she told anyone, he’d wring her neck. So she didn’t tell, and Oriole didn’t notice the bruises, so no one ever knew. Summer remembered that writing to Grant about the beating had made her feel better, even though she must have known by then about addresses and that Grant’s was gone forever.

The truth about Grant’s address was something she’d pieced together gradually over a period of years. Oriole’s original statement—that “he didn’t have one”—wasn’t exactly the whole story. Sometime later she’d explained that Grant had left his parents’ address in Chicago when he went away, and that for a time there had been an exchange of letters. But Oriole had stopped writing when she moved in with the Angel Tribe, and Grant had finally stopped, too. Then someone had stolen the bag in which Oriole had been keeping his letters. By the time Summer began to ask about his address, Oriole had forgotten everything except for the city and that the street name was some kind of tree. Once Summer had mailed a letter to Grant Wilson, Tree Street, Chicago, but it had come back marked “insufficient address.” But by then the letters had become a habit, so she’d gone on writing.

Many of the letters were about things like friends and teachers and books she happened to be reading. But as she got older they were also full of plans. Plans for college and medical school and, if everything went well, a career as a doctor. One particularly dealt with getting away from Alvarro Bay—to find out about other places and about herself—about who Summer would be if she weren’t Summer McIntyre of Alvarro Bay. That reminded her of a poem, and she began to look for it.

She found it a little farther down, among letters written during the eighth grade. She’d had Mrs. Simpson, who was a poetry nut, for English that year, and a lot of the letters she wrote that year included poetry—like the one she’d remembered.

When I see Rome,

And walk in ancient footprints,

It won’t be summer.

It may be winter,

When I tread the streets of long dead kings.

Bridges of heroes, and the halls of fame.

I’ll flee through bright new spring

And withering fall,

Without a name.

But if you want me then,

Don’t ever call

For summer

A great many of the letters mentioned the bank account—keeping Grant up to date on how it was progressing—if you call about fifty cents a week progress. In the days before she had a steady job, when she only picked up occasional baby-sitting and odd-job money, that was about par. It was only since Crown Ridge that the deposits had started to increase.

Among the more recent letters there were several about Crown Ridge Ranch and the Olivers. The first one, about a year and a half old now, told about the day Summer found the notice on the post office bulletin board. The letter started:

Guess what? I’ve got a real job. Last Friday I went in the post office to see if Oriole’s check had come and I saw this woman in English riding clothes pinning a card on the bulletin board. As soon as she left, I read it, and it said that the Olivers at Crown Ridge Ranch were looking for someone to do housework one or two days a week. The minute I read the notice I decided I was going to try to get the job.

I knew about the place. It’s a ranch where they raise Arabians, but all you can see from the highway is pastures with white fences and lots of beautiful horses. Way back from the road among the trees you can get just a glimpse of a house and some barns.

So I went out there on Saturday morning. There was a number to call on the card, but I thought it would be better if I just went. The bus driver let me out right at the gate, but for quite a while I just sat on the fence trying to get up my nerve to walk up the driveway. The thing was, the notice said that they preferred a mature person and that references would be necessary. I’d taken along the letter Mrs. Slater had given me about the good job I did at the day care center, so I wasn’t too worried about the reference thing, but I wasn’t sure whether the Olivers would consider thirteen, almost fourteen really, mature enough. But from the minute I started up the driveway I quit being worried. I don’t know why exactly, except I just knew I was going to get the job. And it wasn’t just because I threw away the notice card, either. It was more that I knew I could do it better than anyone else because—well, because I really wanted to, I guess.

That particular letter ended there, but the next three or four were mostly about Crown Ridge Ranch and Richard and Nan Oliver. There was one almost entirely devoted to the house—the long low house sheltering from the ocean winds under a heavy shake roof—and another describing the barn with its enormous hayloft and heated stalls. There was also quite a lot about the horses.

Before she’d started working at Crown Ridge, Summer had never even been close to a horse, and unlike a lot of kids she knew, she’d never particularly wanted to be. The way she felt was that anything that big ought to be more straightforward about its intentions. Like a dog, for instance, who lets you know right away how he’s feeling about you. But she’d been immediately fascinated by the Crown Ridge Arabians, with their high arching necks and delicate faces. So fascinated, in fact, that she had gone to work early one morning so she would have time to sit on the fence and watch them for a while before Nan got up. She’d arrived early that first time simply because of the horses. What had happened had been entirely unplanned, but afterwards she’d gone on doing it for more reasons than one.