The Stranger (7 page)

“Nicoletta, you’re so annoying. He’s a football star, isn’t he? Me and my friends went to every game last fall, didn’t we? We won the regional championship, didn’t we? He has his picture in the paper all the time, doesn’t he?” Jamie made several snarling faces at her sister.

Nicoletta never thought of Christo as an athlete. She thought of him exclusively as a baritone in Madrigals. She thought of him, not in a football uniform, but in the glittering turquoise and silver he wore for concerts, a king’s courtier, a royal flirt.

Christo was a football player, and she did not even know, had never attended a game, never considered his practice schedule. And Jethro. Did he play sports? What was his schedule? Where did he live?

“You don’t even care what you’re wearing!” complained Jamie. “You didn’t even ask Mom to buy you a new dress for this!”

Her dress lay on the bed, waiting for her to put it on.

She felt as if there were a veil between her mind and her life. The veil was Jethro. She was as consumed by him as if he had set her on fire. It was difficult to see anything else. The rest of the world was out of focus, and she did not care whether she saw anything clearly but Jethro.

Jamie held the dress for her and she stepped carefully into it. It was Jamie who exclaimed over the lovely silken fabric, the way it hung so gracefully from Nicoletta’s narrow waist, and dropped intoxicatingly at the neckline, like a crescent moon sweeping from shoulder to shoulder. Nicoletta had borrowed her mother’s imitation ruby necklace. The racing pulse at her throat made the dark red stones beat like her own blood.

“You’re in love, aren’t you?” whispered Jamie suddenly.

Nicoletta turned to see herself in the long mirror.

I’m beautiful, she thought. She blinked, as if expecting the beauty not to be there at the second glance. But it was. She was truly beautiful. She had to look away. It felt like somebody else in that gown.

And it is somebody else! thought Nicoletta. It’s somebody in love with Jethro, not somebody in love with Christo.

Jamie was also reflected in the mirror: a scrawny little girl, still with braces and unformed figure—a little girl utterly awestruck by her big sister. For the first time in their lives, Nicoletta was worth something to Jamie. For Nicoletta was in love, and beautiful, and going to a dance with a handsome boy.

“Do you think you’ll marry Christo?” said Jamie, getting down to basics. “What’s his last name? What will your name be when you get married? I’ll be your maid of honor, won’t I?”

But Christo’s last name did not matter. Only Jethro’s.

Who is he? thought Nicoletta.
Where
is he?

Love was like clean ice.

Nicoletta skated through the evening. All things were effortless, all motions were gliding, all conversations spun on her lips.

Christo was proud of her, and proud that he was with her.

And if she glittered, how was he to know she glittered for someone else?

They left the dance shortly after midnight.

Snow had begun again.

There was a full moon, and each snowflake was a falling crystal. The night world was equally black and silver. Even the shadows gleamed.

They drove slowly down the quiet streets, rendered perfect by the first inch of snow.

“Where are we going?” said Nicoletta.

“That road,” said Christo. He smiled at her. “I never noticed that road before. It looked quiet.”

He wants to kiss, thought Nicoletta. He is going to drive me down Jethro’s road, to park at the end of the lane where Jethro’s stone will see us. What if the stone tells? I know they talk. I don’t want Jethro to find out about Christo.

She was dizzy with the magic of her thoughts. There is no stone, she told herself, and if there is one, nobody talks to it.

Jethro had not been in school. The gloomy skies and early dark of winter had been a perfect reflection of Nicoletta’s emptiness when there was no Jethro in Art Appreciation. He was the only art she appreciated.

How she wanted Jethro to see her in this gown!

For she was beautiful. She had been the princess of every girl’s dream at that dance. She had been as lovely as if spun from gold, as delicate as lace, as perfect as love.

She saw herself in the snowy night, floating down the path, her long gown flowing behind her, her golden hair glittering with diamonds of snow. She saw herself untouched by cold or by fear, dancing through the dark like a princess in a fairy tale to find her prince.

O Jethro! she thought. Where are you? What are you thinking? Why weren’t you in school? Are you ill? Are you afraid of me? What promises do you have to keep? What does the stone know about you that I do not?

Driving with his left hand, Christopher touched her bare shoulder with his right. He was hot and dry, burned by the fever of wanting Nicoletta.

She thought only of Jethro, and of Jethro’s hand. The first time he touched Nicoletta, his fingers had not felt human. The first time he touched Christo, he had left behind grains of sand.

A strange and terrible thought had formed in Nicoletta’s mind, but she refused to allow it a definite shape.

Christopher kissed her once, and then again. The third time he shuddered slightly, wanting a hundred times more than this—wanting no car, no time limit, no clothing in the way. The calm young man who easily flirted with or touched any girl because it meant nothing, was not the one driving the van tonight.

Touching meant a great deal to Christo tonight.

Think of Christo, Nicoletta told herself, accepting the kisses but not kissing back. But she could not think of him at all. She could hardly see him. He felt evaporated and diffuse. She felt sleazy and duplicitous. What have I done? thought Nicoletta. What have I let happen? How am I going to get out of this? “Good night, Christo,” she said courteously. “And thank you. I had a lovely time.”

She put her hand on the door handle.

Christo stared at her. “Nickie, we’re in the woods, not your driveway.”

But she was out of the van, standing in her fragile, silver dancing slippers on the crust of the snow. She knew she would not break through, she would not get snow in these shoes. She touched the ruby necklace. The moon came out from behind the snow-laden clouds, and rested on her face and her throat. The ruby and the red rose of her cheeks were the only heat in the forest.

Like a silver creature of the woods, she found the path, swirling and laughing to herself.

“Nickie?” said Christo. He was out of the van, he was following her. He could not stay on the surface of the crusted snow, as she could. His big feet and strong legs slogged where she had danced. “You don’t even have a coat!” he cried.

The boulder carried a shroud of snow. Nicoletta was a candle flickering in the dark. She quickstepped around the immense rock. The boulder shrugged its shoulders as Christo passed and dropped its load of snow upon him. Muffled under layers of white, his cry to Nicoletta did not reach her ears. “Wait up!” he said to her. “Don’t do this, Nickie. Nickie, what are you doing?”

She was in a dance choreographed by an unknown, moonlit hand. She had a partner, unseen and unknown, and the only thing was to keep up, to stay with the rhythm, her skirts making scallop shells around her bare stockinged legs, her feet barely touching the white snow, her hands in synchrony, touching, holding, waving.

Christo struggled free from the snow and circled the boulder.

He could see her, her gown luminous as the stars, her hair like golden music. He could not imagine what she was doing, but he did not care. She was too lovely and the evening was too extraordinary for reason. He simply wanted to catch up, to be with her, to see her eyes as she danced this unearthly dance.

When he caught up to her, she was dancing on a balance beam between two black-iced ponds. The path was so narrow his heart stopped. What if she fell? What could she be thinking of? He was too out of breath to shout her name again, he whose breath control and athletic strength were his strong assets. The stillness of the night was so complete it was like crystal, a call from him would shatter the glass in which they danced.

A black, black hole at the end of Nicoletta’s narrow danger opened wide, and opened wider.

Christo stared, fascinated, unable to think at all, unable to shout warnings if warnings were needed.

From the side of the ice-dripping, rock walked rock. Moving rock. The rock and Nicoletta danced together for a moment while Christo tried to free himself from ribbons of confusion. What is going on? he thought.

It was possible that the night had ended and he was deep in a dream, one of those electrical-storm dreams, in which vivid pictures leap and toss like lightning in a frightened sky.

“Nicoletta?” he said at last.

She spun, as if seeing him for the first time, and the rock spun with her, and it had a face.

The rock was a person.

“
Y
OU BROUGHT HIM HERE
,
” it said to her.

She knew who he was now, but not why or how. She wanted to talk to him. Not just this night, but every night and forever. She wanted him to be the only person she ever talked to.

But he was not a person. He was a thing.

“When do you change?” she said to him. “When are you one of us?”

“I am always one of you,” he said desperately. “How could you have brought Christo? How could you betray me?”

“I would never betray you. I love you.”

He released her, and the rough granite of him scraped her painfully. There was more red now under the moon: her rubies, her cheeks, and her one drop of blood.

“Go!” he breathed. “Go. Convince him I am not.”

Convince him I am not.

Not what? Not who?

She was alone now between the lakes and Christo was trying to join her, his large feet clumsy on the tilting ice and snow. “I’m coming, Christo!” she said, and ran toward him, but she was clumsy now, too. Her partner of the silence and snow was gone; her choreography failed her.

She slipped first, and Christo slipped second.

They were a yard apart, too far to touch, too far to catch.

At first she was not afraid, because she knew that even falling through the ice, the creature would save her, lift her, carry her out.

But the sharp tiny heel of her silver shoe punctured the ice at the same moment that Christo’s big black shoe cracked it, and as the frigid water crept up her stockings, she realized that the creature would not save her, any more than it had saved the hunters. What mattered most to it was being unknown, and being untouched, and being safe itself.

Christo and I will drown, she thought. We will fall as far beneath the black water as the hunters fell in the black shaft. We will die in ice and evil cold.

She thrashed desperately, but that only made the hole in the ice larger.

Christo said, in a normal high school boy’s voice, “I can’t believe I have done anything as stupid as this. Don’t tell anybody, that’s all I ask.” He was crouching at the water’s edge, having pulled himself back. He grabbed her hand and waist and yanked her unceremoniously to dry land. “Let’s get out of here before we get frostbite.” He hustled her along the straight path and back into the woods and back around the boulder.

Nicoletta was afraid the boulder would roll upon them, would crush their wet feet beneath its glacial tons, but it ignored them. Back in the van, Christo turned on the motor and then immediately the heat, with the blower on high.

After a moment he looked at her, reassessing what had happened and who she was.

He knows now, thought Nicoletta. He knows who I love and where I go and what matters most.

But he did not know. People in love seldom do.

“You,” said Christo finally, “are not what I expected.” He was laughing. He was thrilled. Nicoletta had proved to be full of well-kept secrets, a girl whose hobbies were not the usual, and he was even more proud of being with her than he had been at the dance.

Christo started to list the things they would do together—things he probably thought were unusual and exciting. To Nicoletta they sounded impossibly dull. They were of this world. They were commonplace.

Nicoletta had a true love now, from another world, a world without explanation or meaning, and she did not care about Christo’s calendar.

The light was on in the bedroom Nicoletta shared with Jamie when Christo pulled into the Storms’s driveway. Jamie had definitely not gone to bed. Her little face instantly appeared, and she shaded the glass with her two hands so that she could see into the dark.

Christo grinned. “We have to give your little sister a show for her money,” he said.

No! thought Nicoletta, shrinking. I can’t kiss you now. I’m in love with another—another what?

Man? Boy? Rock? Thing? Beast?

Or was she in love with a murderer?

She thought of the two men falling to the depths of the cave.

Where are we going?
they would have said to each other.

Down.

Down forever, down to certain death.

He could have prevented the hunters from dying, she thought.

Then she thought, No, he couldn’t. They would have killed him first, shot him, it was self-defense, in a way.

Her thoughts leapt back and forth like a tennis ball over a net.

It came to her, as black and bleak as the lakes in the dark, that she had forgotten those two men. They had fallen out the bottom of her mind just as they fell out the bottom of the cave.

Love is amoral, she thought. Love thinks only of itself, or of The Other.

There is no room in love for passersby.

Those hunters. They had passed by, all right.

Did they have wives? Children? Mothers? Jobs?

Nobody will ever find them, thought Nicoletta. They will never be buried. They will never come home. Nobody will ever know.

Unless I tell.

“Good night,” said Christo softly. He walked her up the steps, dizzy with love. Together they stared at the blank wooden face of the door, at the bare nail where last December a Christmas wreath had hung.

Christo’s kiss was long and deep and intense. His lips contained enough energy to win football games, to sing entire concerts. When he finally stopped, and tried to find enough breath to speak, he couldn’t, and just went back to the car.