Into the Darkness (26 page)

“Well, maybe now you can invite him to our house to dinner. He can eat with us every night if he wants until his mother can come home.”

“No, he came over to tell me he would be gone for a while.”

“Oh. You mean he’ll be with his father?”

“He just said he had to stay close to his mother. Maybe there’s a place for relatives at the clinic or something nearby, or maybe his father set something up in a motel for him. He didn’t say, exactly. He just said he had to be with her, near her.”

She nodded. “Well, he sounds like a very devoted and mature young man. I look forward to meeting him as soon as he and his mother do return. I am sorry we have ignored them until now. Not very neighborly of us and not like us.”

Seeing how sympathetic my mother was, I was tempted to tell her what I had done, how I had gone into Brayden’s house and gone through it and up to the attic, and what I had seen. I wanted her to understand how seriously ill Brayden’s mother really was. I was thinking now that she would be even more sympathetic, and, contrary to what I had feared, she would not be upset about my seeing him.

“We’ll talk about it later,” she said as two more customers entered the store before I could say anything about what I had done. I started to go to help her, but she waved me off. “You’ve still got the rest of your weekend to enjoy, Amber. Go on,” she said firmly. “We’re doing fine.”

I looked at Mrs. Williams, who had finished with her customer and, with a much more comfortable expression on her face, was moving to help Mom. I nodded at her and left the store. Our village was busy. The traffic was much heavier than usual, and the bells on the shop doors were ringing so much it sounded as if Christmas had come in July. I suppose with the added business, other store owners, like us, felt it was like Christmas.

For a few moments, I stood on the sidewalk looking in both directions. Now that my short, bittersweet romance with Shayne Allan was over almost before it had begun, and Brayden was gone for I didn’t know how long, and I wasn’t working with my parents, it occurred to me how much of a loner I had become. My choices looked so limited. I could repress my intelligence and wallow through the day with Ellie and Charlotte and other girls like them, doing inane things and swimming
in the gossip that would most assuredly center on my aborted relationship with Shayne, or I could take a ride myself, maybe go to the mall and look at some new things for myself. But shopping alone was never satisfying for me. I thought about calling someone, but then I thought that it was just the wrong time to seek out classmates to do anything. I was confident that there would be quite a few girls who would go somewhere with me, but it would be primarily to pick up some erotic, smutty little detail they could exploit.

Feeling defeated, I started for home.

When I reached Mrs. Carden’s house, however, I smiled to myself, recalling how Brayden had characterized her as interesting because of the way she spoke to her clothing, her “errant children.” Many of the things he had said to me rolled through my mind. Right now, I wondered if maybe he wasn’t better off than I was when he was made to travel and hop from one school to another. If he didn’t make any satisfactory relationships in one place, he probably just shrugged and looked forward to another. Maybe it never bothered him to feel like a loner, and that was why he wasn’t so enthusiastic now about getting to know more people our age in Echo Lake. Was that sort of independence good or bad? Surely there was a point where you needed close friends. You had to feel you belonged to something, somewhere.

When I reached his house, I paused and looked up at the bedroom window that had had a shade raised when I left for town. I stared up at it, surprised. It wasn’t raised now. Had I seen that because I was closer when I was looking up at it? When I had seen it before, had it been
only an illusion caused by reflecting sunlight? Had the sun been that high by then? I couldn’t remember, but how could it have been up then and be down now? Had his mother come right back for some reason? Had her breakdown been less severe than it seemed? After seeing the portrait she was painting of Brayden, I couldn’t imagine it being less severe. What should I do? Go up and knock on the door again? Open it and call for him if no one responded? I certainly didn’t want to go exploring for myself again, not in there.

In fact, every time I looked at Brayden’s house, something about it seemed different, whether it was the way the shadows played on the windows and the walls or the way birds, except for an occasional black crow, seemed to stay away from it, even away from the trees and the yard. Looking at it now, I could understand why Brayden wasn’t happy about staying there by himself. Even with the condition his mother was in, she was company, and of course, she was family. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to go through many days without either of my parents right now. Why was his father’s work so important to him, so important that it took precedence over his own family in what might be their greatest time of need?

Sometimes, even with the silly little things I witnessed between my classmates and their parents, I felt that I lived on an island. There was so much that separated me from other girls my age, and boys, too. For some, my devotion to my parents wasn’t only not cool, it was bizarre. If anything, they accused me of being the immature one. I should be more self-centered, less responsible, and more daring. Who went through all these
years without ever having seriously annoyed or disappointed his or her parents? It was as if because of that, I couldn’t be trusted. There were many times, like now, when I seriously wondered if I was too much of a goody-goody, if I enjoyed being Prudence Perfect after all.

I paused in front of Brayden’s house and continued to debate what I should do. I did feel silly being frightened of a house.
At least go up and knock on the door, Amber,
I told myself. Otherwise, I would seem indifferent. I approached the house slowly, hoping that if they were really back, Brayden would see me and just come out, but the door didn’t open. I stepped up to it and knocked. I waited and then knocked harder. There was no sound within. I looked at the handle.
Don’t do it again,
I told myself. No one was home. He would surely have come to the door. Convinced that he wasn’t there, I turned and walked off his front porch and hurried up to my house, as if the horrid vision of that portrait in the attic was pursuing me.

After I had been home for a while, I began to receive some phone calls from other girls at school who were friendlier to me than most, some of whom I had thought I might call. In every case, however, they were fishing for details about my dates with Shayne, hoping to learn more about the stories Wendi had been spreading. Only Marilyn Myers came right out and asked me if I’d had sex with him.

“Is it true?” She quickly followed with, “I really wondered if you ever would with anyone.”

“When I do,” I snapped back at her, “it won’t be just anyone, and it certainly wouldn’t be someone who puts
making love to me on the same level as scoring a basket in a basketball game.”

She giggled. “You sound like you did,” she said, “and now regret it. Right?”

“Think what you want, Marilyn, but you’re right about one thing. If I did have sex with him, I would regret it.”

“No one’s going to believe that.”

“I don’t care. Look, I’m busy doing things that have some meaning. Thanks for calling with your concern,” I told her, and hung up before she could even think of a way to protest her innocence.

I wasn’t really on any island, I told myself. That was another illusion I had created for myself. If I were on an island, I would be beyond the reach of all of this. Never before did I regret living in a small community as much as I did at that moment. The best thing about living in a city was that you could be anyone you wanted and anything you wanted, because you were constantly surrounded by strangers who didn’t know whether you were lying or telling the truth about yourself. You could find new friends just by crossing the street.

I tried to calm myself by doing some reading, but that didn’t work. I couldn’t concentrate on anything I read. I was much too fidgety. I had to find something satisfying to do. Finally, I decided that I would prepare dinner for my parents and myself. I called my mother and told her I was going to the supermarket. “What would you two like?”

“Oh, Amber, this isn’t why I wanted you to have free time. I don’t want you to be concerned about us or the house. I want you to have fun.”

“I know, but right now, this would be fun for me,” I said as strongly as I could.

She was silent, and then she asked my father what he would like for dinner. I could hear him in the background.

“Amber Light is preparing it? Tell her to make what she made for my birthday.”

“Did you hear that?” Mom asked.

“Yes.”

“If you continue to spoil him, what am I going to do when you leave for college and after you get married?” she asked.

She was joking, of course, but maybe it was part of my problem that I couldn’t see myself leaving home to go to college. Like every other junior last year, I was told I should be considering schools. Some were looking for the colleges that were farthest away. Once going to college was mentioned, it was almost expected that you would say, “I can’t wait to get out of this place.” I never said it. Actually, I never thought of college as a form of escape.

The only colleges I took seriously anyway were colleges in Oregon, especially Portland.

“I’ll send home care packages,” I told her, “instead of you sending them to me.”

She laughed. “Knowing you, you probably will. Okay. You know what to do,” she said.

I set out immediately for the supermarket. I would be preparing blackened salmon with chipotle squash puree and mango rice. I thought I would make some brownies, too. Dad loved them. Having this to do kept my mind
busy, and for a while, I really was happy. Unfortunately, when I turned the corner of an aisle in the supermarket, I ran into Megan Thomas, who had made the word
ostentatious
hip the year before. I could wait forever for her new word, but the moment she saw me, her eyes widened, and I would soon learn it. She looked so pleased at the sight of me. It was as if she had won the lottery. She stepped away from her mother quickly and literally turned my grocery cart around so that our backs would be to her.

“Oh, I’m glad I met you. I, for one, never dreamed you would be so promiscuous,” she began. “In fact, I would have bet my college fund against it. I would have said
promiscuity
wasn’t anywhere near your vocabulary.”

Before I could respond, she attacked me with machine-gun speed.

“Tell me. What did he do to get you between the sheets? Were you always hoping he would be the one? I bet you were. Is it true he had to get the sheets washed before the maid saw it and told his mother? Oh, was it painful making love for the first time? It was a little painful for me the first time,” she added, looking back at her mother.

“I imagine it would be painful for you all the time,” I said when she turned back to me.

“Huh?”

“I hate to disappoint you, but you’ve been abused.”

“Abused? What do you mean?”

“Your ears have been filled with lies, and they’ve infected your brain and now your mouth. See your doctor or your dentist to have the word
promiscuity
extracted.” I spun my cart around sharply to walk away from her.

I saw her glaring at me a few times before I left the store. I’d never had any great affection for her, nor she for me, but there was no doubt that she would rush right to her phone when she arrived home and elaborate on anything she had been told, claiming that she had heard something from me or that her questions had pushed a button, forcing me to reveal things I never would have otherwise. I realized now that this was one of those stories that never went away. They just got fatter and fatter until they exploded.
Prepare yourself for more questions and stupid remarks like hers,
I thought.

I couldn’t wait to get home again and throw myself into the dinner preparations as soon as I unpacked the groceries. Mercifully, my phone didn’t ring again before my parents returned from the store. I had the table in the dining room set with our best china and glasses, a vase of wildflowers I had picked in the yard, and a bottle of Dad’s prize white Burgundy from France. When they arrived and saw it all, they were both delightfully surprised. Dad was already salivating over the aromas flowing from the kitchen.

“Is that brownies I see?” he asked, nodding at where I had them cooling on the kitchen counter.

“It is,” I said.

“Oh, honey, this is wonderful,” Mom said. She started to help out, and I stopped her.

“No, tonight you two sit, and I’ll do all the serving.”

“But . . .”

“You’ve been on your feet all day. Please,” I said.

“I’ll just change, then,” she said. “Gregory? Are you going to follow your marching orders?”

“Absolutely. I might even put on a tie,” he said jokingly, but he did come down to the dining room wearing one. Mom wore one of her prettier dresses, too.

The dinner went perfectly. Dad was in a great mood because they’d had one of their best days yet at the store, and the orders for some of his unique jewelry pieces were continuing to build. He even thought aloud about the possibility of expanding the store. The video rental store next door was struggling and could go out of business any day, he said. “We could have the wall torn down between us, and we’d have double the space.”

Mom was more cautious, but I could see the excitement in both their faces. Their energy, their joy, and our wonderful dinner did a great deal to drive the blues out of me. All of the gossip and cattiness going on around me suddenly seemed insignificant, but I was also wise enough to realize that when we’d be clearing the table, washing up the dishes, and settling into the remainder of the evening, all of it would come back at me for sure.

And it did, with a phone call from one of the girls, Evelyn Laskin, who sat next to me in two of my classes but rarely spoke to me. I made the conversation short, cutting her off immediately with “I’m on another call.” Lying to her didn’t seem wrong or weak of me. It seemed the perfectly right and normal thing to do.