The Stranger (10 page)

And she, after all, was not thinking only of Jethro. She wanted to impress Christo right back. But later. Much later. Right now she had to get to Jethro first. Warn him. Save him. Keep him.

As if, she thought in another moment of unwanted clarity, as if Jethro is
my
trophy before he’s Christo’s trophy.

She could think of nothing to say that was not stupid. Let’s get French fries. Let’s go with the others and try on sneakers. Let’s check out the new videos and T-shirts and perfumes and pizza toppings. This nonsense when Christo was saying: Let’s shoot the monster. And stuff it. Let’s go out there and get the thing. “You don’t want to come,” he assured her. “You’d get squeamish.” He laughed a strong male laugh, full of plans and promises. “In the morning,” said Christo, “I’ll take my father’s shotgun.”

The hunters had had shotguns. And what had happened to them?

She had a third all-too-clear vision.

It was not Jethro she had to worry about. Jethro was safe. The cave was his and he knew it.

It was Christo—innocent, show-off, excited Christo.

What had happened to the hunters would happen to him. He, too, would fall forever down. If she let Christo go on this expedition, she would betray him as well. She knew the length and depth of the fall Christo would take. She knew where he would hit bottom.

She knew he would never come out.

Never again sing or play ball. Never flirt or grow old.

Now as she looked at Christo, he seemed infinitely desirable. Perfect in every way. A person the world must have, a person who must live out his life span.

Christo, looking down at her, saw emotion in her eyes. He saw desire and fear and hope but he read it as love. Not a wish that he would live, but a wish that he would be hers.

Right there in the blandness of the encircling mall, among tired mothers pushing strollers and bored teenagers sipping soda, he kissed her with the sort of passion reserved for movies. The sort of intensity that belonged on late night drama.

He was embracing her with a ferocity she did not expect from a Madrigal singer. Perhaps this was Christo the football player, perhaps she was a goalpost he was trying to reach.

But no. He was kissing with the ferocity of a hunter.

When it ended, people were smiling softly and indulgently, enjoying this glimpse of true love. Christo was dizzy, backlit with the glow of his crush on her. He pulled slightly back from her to admire her from a distance of several inches instead of eyelashes against eyelashes.

But Nicoletta only wondered if Jethro would ever kiss her like that.

The day passed as, unbelievably, all days do.

It was a fact of life that fascinated Nicoletta. Even the worst days draw to a close. Sometimes a day seems to have the potential of lying there forever, trapping its victims as if they were treads on a circling escalator. But it never happens. The shopping ends, the van brings you home. The sun goes down, and the table is set for supper.

She endured her family. She swallowed her meal. She stared at a television screen. She held a book on her lap.

Outside, the snow fell yet again. They had never had such a winter for snow. The wind picked up, singing its own songs, sobbing its own laments. It dug tunnels in the drifts, as if hunting for its own set of hidden bodies.

Nicoletta undressed for the night.

Naked, she examined her body. What body did Jethro possess, he of the sandy hands and the granite face?

If I wait till morning, she thought, Christo will already have left on his hunt.

So I cannot wait till morning.

T
HE NIGHT WAS YOUNG.
She had heard that phrase and never understood it. But now at one in the morning, she knew the meaning. She ran easily over the crusted snow, jumping the immense piles the plows had shoved against the curbs. She, too, was young. They had been born together, she and the night.

But the dirt road was far and the roads, with their walls of hard-packed, exhaust-blackened snow, obstructed her.

She was afraid of being seen. If a police car happened by … if grown-ups returning from parties noticed her … would they not stop? Demand to know why a lone girl was running down deserted streets at such an hour?

But the snow loaned Nicoletta enough hiding places to last a lifetime. Every pair of headlights caused her to bend a knee, and wait patiently behind a snow mountain until the vehicle passed by, and then she rose to her feet and ran on.

The night grew older. After one it became two, and was fast reaching three when finally she came to the end of the paved road, and found herself in the woods she wanted. She was exhausted. When the running ended, the trembling of legs and joints began, as if her body wanted to give up now, before its goal.

The boulder waited for her. It had gained in stature, for the snow had drifted upon it, increasing its height and breadth. As she trudged wearily up to it, snow fell from its stony mouth like words she did not comprehend.

She stopped walking. She had a sense of the boulder taking aim.

The moon was only a sliver, and the stars were diamond dust.

It was not enough to see by. And yet she saw.

And was seen.

In the pure, pure black of the night, she felt eyes. A thousand eyes, searching her like a thousand fingers. “Jethro,” she whispered.

She wet her lips for courage and the damp froze and her mouth was encrusted with ice, the way Jethro’s body was encrusted with sand. “Jethro,” she cried, louder.

There was not a breath of wind. Just icy air hunched down against the floor of the forest as if it planned not to shift for months. She waded through the cold and it hung onto her pants legs and shot through the lining of her jacket.

When she reached the boulder, she put her mittened hand against it for support. But there was no support. There was not even any rock. She fell forward, her hand arriving nowhere at all. She screamed, remembering her brief fall in the cave.

But this fall, too, was brief.

There was so much snow that her arm went through white right up to the elbow and then she touched rock. But under its blanket, the rock was not warm and friendly. It seemed to lunge forward, as if to hurtle her away from itself.

“Jethro!” she shrieked.

The trees leaned closer and listened harder. She pressed her back against the great rock, even though it did not want to shelter her. “Jethro!”

Her voice was the only sound in the silent black. It lay like an alien in another atmosphere. Nothing answered.

She would have to go to the cave in this terrible dark.

She remembered that first portion of her life when every day she had acted out
Little House on the Prairie.
She preferred being Laura, of course, because Laura had more fun, but every now and then it was her turn to be Mary. Nicoletta had always wanted to change the course of history and give Mary antibiotics so she didn’t go blind. That was the only really awful thing in
Little House.
Oh, you could have your best friend read aloud to you for ten minutes and be your eyes for half an hour, but then you lost interest and had better things to do, and you didn’t really like to think about Mary being stuck inside herself. Caught there in the dark. It used to make Nicoletta feel guilty and crawly that she could run away from blindness. Run into the sun and see and know the shapes and colors of the world, while Mary had to sit quietly at the table, forever and ever and ever in the dark.

The woods were so very dark.

She even thought she understood the meaning of forever, it was that dark.

If she did not find Jethro, she might lose her balance and slide into the black lakes and she, too, would be forever and ever in the dark.

A hand took hers firmly and guided her down the straight path toward the lakes. She was grateful for help and tightened her grip on the hand and even said thank you.

But there was no one there.

She was holding a stick. She could not even remember picking it up. It was weirdly forked, as if it really had once been a hand. She threw it hard into the trees to get it off her but it clung to her mitten and went nowhere. She began to cry soundlessly, because she was afraid the rest of the twigs and trees would attack if she made an ugly noise.

“Don’t be afraid.” The voice came from nowhere, from nothing. Now she screamed silently, twice as afraid. “They’re trying to help,” it said.

She was frozen. She had neither breath nor blood.

“It’s me. I don’t want you to look. I don’t want you to know. You shouldn’t have come, Nicoletta. Why do you keep coming when I keep telling you to stay away?”

Jethro. Oh, Jethro! “I had to warn you.” She could not see anything. She knew his voice but he was not there. Nothing was there.

“Warn me of what?”

“Christo is coming back in the morning,” she said. She began to cry again, and it was a mistake, for the tears froze separately on her cheeks and lay like rounded crystals upon her skin. “He wants to get you. Shoot you. Stuff you. He wants to take you for a trophy and go on television with you.”

“Don’t worry.” Jethro’s voice was consoling and gentle. “He won’t find me. He’ll find only the bottom of the cave.”

The bottom of the cave.

Handsome, flirty, athletic Christo taking one step too many. Tumbling backward, screaming his final scream, hands flailing to stop himself, body twisting as helplessly as a pinecone falling from a tree.

Landing on the sharp spikes of stalagmites, dying slowly perhaps, his bones mingled with the bones of the hunters.

Oh, Christo! You don’t deserve that!

He’ll find only the bottom of the cave.
How could Jethro say a thing of such horror in a voice of such comfort?

Fireworks of shock rocketed behind her blind eyes.

“Anyway,” said Jethro, “the hunters will be glad to see him. They need company.”

“What do you mean? Weren’t they killed?”

“No one is killed by a fall into that cave.”

“Jethro! Then I have to call the police! And the fire department! They’ll bring ladders and ropes! We’ll get the hunters out! We’ll—”

“No, Nicoletta. No one gets out of the cave.”

“You get out!”

“It took me a hundred years to learn how.”

Exaggeration annoyed her. “Don’t be ridiculous. Jethro, where are you? I can’t really see you.”

“I don’t want you to really see me,” he said quietly. “I don’t want you to be as scared of me as you would be.”

“I’ve seen you before! I know you in that shape. Jethro,
I need you.”

There was no sound in the woods except the sound of her own breathing. Perhaps Jethro did not breathe. Perhaps he was all rock and no lungs. But then, how did he speak? Or did he not? Was she making it up? Was she out here in the woods by herself, talking to trees, losing her mind?

“You need me?” said Jethro. His voice quavered.

Humans have two great requirements of life. To be needed is as important as love. Now she knew that he was human, that he was the boy who sat beside her in art as well as the creature wrapped in stone. “I need you,” she repeated. She slid her scarlet mitten off her hand and extended her bare fingers into the night.

The hand that closed around them rasped with the rough edges of stone. But the sob that came from his chest was a child’s.

T
HEY SAT ON THE
boulder, wrapped in snow as if in quilts. It was a high, round throne and the woods were their kingdom. The night was old now. The silver sliver of moon had come to rest directly above them, and its frail light gleamed on the old snow and shimmered on her gold hair.

She kept his hands in her lap like possessions. They were real hands. They had turned real between her own, as if the oven of her caring had burnt away the bad parts. “You are a real boy,” she said to him.

“I was once. It was a long time ago.”

She snuggled against him as if expecting a cozy bedtime story of the sort her parents loved to tell.

“Long ago,” said Jethro. He told his story in short spurts, letting each phrase lie there in the dark, as if each must mellow and grow old like the night before he could go on to the next. “Long before the Pilgrims,” said Jethro, “ancient sailors from an ancient land shipwrecked here.”

The town was only a few miles from the sea, but she never thought of it that way. There was no public beach and Nicoletta rarely even caught a glimpse of the ocean. People with beaches were people with privacy.

“They found the cave,” said Jethro slowly, “and explored it for gold.”

Yes. She could believe that. Those gleaming walls and incredible patterns of royal rock—anybody would expect to find treasure.

“There was none. The men who went first fell to the bottom, and could not be rescued by the others.” His voice waited until she had fully imagined the men in the bottom who could not be rescued. “They had to be abandoned,” he said, his voice a tissue of sorrow.

“Still alive?” asked Nicoletta.

“Still alive.”

Wounded and broken. Screaming from the bottom of a well of blackness. Hearing no words of comfort from above. But instead, words of farewell.
We’re sorry, we have to go now. Die bravely.

“In their society,” said Jethro, “the soul could not depart from the body unless the body was burned at sea with its ship. But they, of course, could never return to the ship. And so the men at the bottom of the cave never died. Their souls could not leave. Their bodies … dissolved over the decades.” His voice was soft. With revulsion or pity, she did not know. “Until,” he said, “they became the cave itself. Things with warts of sand and crusts of mineral.”

His hands took her golden hair, and he wove his fingers through it, and then he kissed her hair, kissed that long thick rope, but he did not kiss her face. “The ones who fell,” said Jethro, “put a curse on the cave.”

A chill of horrified excitement flashed down Nicoletta’s spine. She had never heard a human being utter those words.
A curse be upon you.

“What was the curse?” She whispered because he did. Their voices were hissing and lightweight, like falling snow.