The Weird Sisters (35 page)

“Maybe. I hope so.”

He reached out, covered her hand with his own, smiled at her in that way she never could resist. Oh, she knew he was not the most handsome man in the world, not the one whom women would pause on the street to watch walking by, but to her, he was the only light in the sky. “See, I told you people can change. It’s not so hard.”

If Rose had not been so busy leaning in to kiss him, to taste the ale on his lips, to luxuriate in the fact of being able to touch him rather than holding herself as his voice whispered across the ocean, she might have questioned that idea. Change was the hardest thing of all.

EIGHTEEN

I
t was all Bean’s idea. We were fifteen, twelve, nine. None of us, obviously, had a driver’s license. Occasionally, if it was a clear day and we were in no hurry, our father would pull over by the side of the road and let Rose drive on one of the wide country roads surrounding Barney, spreading out in ropes of black licorice away from the town. On all sides lay pastures, cows looking balefully at us as we sped by. Though “sped” would be the wrong term, as Rose never wanted to take the car above twenty-five miles per hour. Boys in sports cars with T-tops would whiz by, screaming, music exploding from the windows, making her hands jerk on the wheel, ten and two.

But Bean had barely been given this chance—maybe twice, three times. Our parents were out of town, our father speaking at a conference where serious professors would assiduously take notes on each pearl he cast before them, and then go drinking in the hotel bar, stumbling to their rooms full of wine and paled purpose. Our grandparents were with us, but Nana and Pop-Pop had long ago reached the age where their bedtimes aligned with ours, and the excitement of the change in the house had made us too wired to sleep.

Rose was in bed, lost in the world of
Treasure Island,
when she heard Bean and Cordy giggling in the next room. Their growing friendship frightened her, made her freeze, terrified of being left behind. Throwing back the sheet, clean and white in the cast of the reading lamp, she placed her toes on the floor and padded over to Bean’s room. The door stood open, a wedge of light pooling on the hall floor, and she hesitated, hand on the knob, before she opened it and slipped in, the squeak of the hinges announcing her arrival.

Bean and Cordy were changing, bodies still flat and futile, slipping on jeans and T-shirts and sneakers.

“Come on,” Bean said to Rose, for if we made her our ally, she would not stop us. “We’re going to the Deee-Lite.”

“Now?” Rose asked. Whatever she had pictured us getting up to, certainly it had not been this. “It’ll take an hour to walk there.” The Deee-Lite was at the other end of town, where the houses turned to cornfields, all dark and empty at that time of year.

Bean and Cordy turned to each other and giggled. Cordy slipped on her shoes. “We’re taking the car,” she said, and for some reason, this struck us as hilarious again, and we laughed so hard we thought for sure Nana and Pop-Pop would wake up.

Of course Rose tried to talk us out of it, but there was something about that night, about the snap of fall in the air—the Deee-Lite would close for the winter the next week (a regular occurrence, not our fault)—about the freedom we felt with our parents far away and our grandparents innocently asleep down the hall. And we think it had something to do with the three of us alone together, so rare and beautiful that it made our insides hum like the strings of a guitar.

But when she saw we were going with or without her, she decided to come. To keep us safe, she said.

And now that we think about it, how stupid were we? How foolish was it for three girls, only one of whom had any real driving experience to speak of, none of it at night, all far too young to be going out into the darkness where there were boys in fast cars and girls in short skirts dragging the strip, in search of a little danger to break the monotony? We have now done a million things more foolish than that night, but it still makes us shake our heads.

But we didn’t know that then. All we knew was that we were wild and venturesome, and the night was ours, and there was power in the three of us, the Weird Sisters, hand in hand.

Rose made a big deal out of everyone taking her jacket, as though it were some sort of talisman, a charm against the sheer idiocy of our action. And she knew it was crazy and stupid, and completely unlike her, and conceivably that is why she agreed to go along with it.

When we had all dressed, we went out the front door, holding our breath as we walked on the boards that were sure to creak and betray us, opening the heavy door and hearing the aching squeal of the screen door, not yet taken down from summer. Rose carried the keys, because we had bargained that she would drive. She had never actually started the car before, and she let the engine grind hard for a moment before she took her hand off the key and found the headlights and we pulled out into the darkness.

Bean had called shotgun and was flipping through the radio stations, something that, typically, was absolutely Not Allowed, until she found a pop song she liked, and we rolled down the windows and we crept out of town with the music swirling around us, and we felt like we were in a movie, and this was the soundtrack for our great escape. All around us, the houses were dark and still, but as we drove by the dorms, we heard lights and music, and that energized us and made us feel part of a world where things happened and three girls could sneak out of the house to hit the open road and everything would be okay, and we could be anyone—Rose especially; we did not have to be ourselves anymore, but someone thrilling and fearless.

Every time we hear that song we think of that night, and how happy we were. Bean looked over at Rose, her hands gripping the wheel, forehead tight with concentration as the streetlights flipped across her face, light and dark, light and dark. In the back, Cordy leaned against the seat, singing along and staring out the window.

When we passed out of the town limits, Bean suddenly pushed her head out the window, threw herself into the night down to her shoulders, and howled wildly at the moon. Scared the crap out of Rose, too. Then Cordy clambered over to the side and held her hand as we raged against the dying of the light, and behind us, Rose’s nattering criticisms turned to laughter, and then we joined her in laughing in the face of the darkness. A half a mile of quiet pasture lay between the end of town and the Deee-Lite, but it felt like the world spread wide before us, our futures and our open lives.

It felt unnatural and pedestrian to come down from our giddy high and find ourselves in the parking lot of the Deee-Lite, where the families had long since gone home and the pavement had become a place where romances kindled and extinguished, where rumors spread and friendships were destroyed or cemented, where this all-American life outside Barney and the Coop and our no-television world spun its thread. And though we each in our way wanted to be part of that world and all its shiny idealism—Bean with her teen magazines, Rose with her romances, Cordy with her curious dreams—we realized we could be so much more than that, the way we were that night.

The ice cream was only important to Cordy, we think. She got sprinkles on a twist cone, and Bean had a banana split, and Rose, assuredly, had vanilla, and paid for all three with her allowance money. She spent more money than anyone else, but she always seemed to have the most, too. Rose, parsimonious, would count the coins carefully out of her hand as though she were allotting parts of herself to the disinterested cashier, but she had never denied us anything we asked for, either.

We let Cordy get a large cone, something our parents always refused on the grounds that it would give her a stomachache (and may we just point out that they were absolutely correct). But she ate the whole damn thing anyway, leaving her mouth covered with sprinkles and dried soft serve, and her hands sticky and smelling of milk. Rose and Bean were talking and laughing, while Cordy ran circles around one of the tables outside, the plastic ones with the cockeyed umbrellas, making herself sicker by the second.

There might have been a full moon. Certainly when we think back, we remember it as so tremendously bright; images coming in sharp relief, museum-perfect, display-lit. And that, too, might have had something to do with the mood, the way even Rose, perfect as a petal, came with us, and laughed when we were about to kill ourselves hanging out the window, and whispered and joked with Bean about the boys who skulked past, loose hips and curled lips. Cordy lay back on one of the tables, her head hanging upside down over the edge, and watched as Bean sauntered over to a trash can, pebble and plastic, coming scandalously close to a couple of boys who were smoking, watching the parade. Rose covered her mouth, laughing silently as Bean swished her nonexistent hips, and of course you know the boys’ silent eyes followed her, the way they would for years to come.

We were so happy when we got back in the car to come back. It seemed the danger had been in the leaving, and the going home was simply a task to be performed. So maybe that was why Rose gave Bean the keys. Or maybe because we felt so close at that moment, full and sleepy and sweet-sick on ice cream, our baby sister running like a released Ariel around us, her hair flying in the darkness, while we played at being girls other than us. And maybe because we had gone there a million times, driven that road a million more, we knew every inch of fence and pavement, every straggle of grass, and Barney had always made us feel safe and contained.

But whatever the reason, she did it, and Rose sat back in the passenger seat and told her what to do, and watched her do it, and we didn’t feel unsafe, even then. Cordy lay in the back, her hands on her bloated belly, moaning softly to herself, and Rose turned the radio down.

At first Bean pressed too hard on the accelerator, and we bucked and shook out of the parking space and then screeched to a halt at the edge of the lot as she looked right and left. Wild in the wind, a motorcyclist came in beside us, the shriek of rubber on the pavement, the flatulent rev of the engine, and she started, taking her foot off the brake and allowing the car to drift into the road. Rose inhaled sharply, gripping the edge of the seat, but Bean placed her foot firmly on the pedal, and then accelerated.

The pleasure in driving is lost the more you do it, but that night it was fresh and cold independence, and we sped down the road, faster than technically prudent, and Bean hardly saw the shape of the deer leaping over the pasture fencing and into the headlights.

Rose saw it. She swears she did, she saw it an instant before Bean did, but she couldn’t even open her mouth to scream, it was that fast, and then the heavy thud of the impact, and the squeal of the brakes and the way the car fishtailed crazy into a fencepost. In the back, Cordy slid off the seat and ended up arched over the tiny hump on the floor, bumping her head on the door handle as she went. She cried, of course, but when Bean and Rose opened the doors and went shrieking out into the night, she pulled herself up and came out behind us, one tiny slick tear trail cutting through the ice cream on the side of her cheek, looking pitiful and confused. It struck us as we stood there that the amount of trouble we were going to be in was immeasurably large. This was the worst thing we had ever done. Even our parents, who were incapable of consistently applying groundings or time-outs or any punishment more severe than a stern talking-to, were going to have to do something.

“I was driving,” Rose said. Oh, Rose—sensible even in the face of disaster, and don’t think we don’t love her for it. But Bean didn’t even hear; she was standing in the middle of the road, her hands pinned to her mouth in horror. The deer lay just to the side of the thick yellow lines down the middle of the road, as if obeying the signs: this is a NO PASSING zone. A doe, still a rich butter-chocolate brown from the summer, a patch of white at the base of her neck. Every time she lifted her head, trying vainly to move her body, the white fur flashed like a star in the headlights.

Rose tried to keep Cordy from seeing it, but she struggled out from under Rose’s firm hands and stepped into the road. She reached for Bean, who stood, still silent, panting under her cupped hands, staring at the deer, watching its death throes, hearing its quiet groan, a plea for assistance. Bean refused Cordy’s touch, turned away from her, but her eyes were still locked with the doe’s. One of its legs was broken and there was blood on the pavement.

Who knows how long we stood in the road, shell-shocked, sugar-shocked, until the police cruiser came by. We knew the deputy, Officer Franklin; he had breakfast at the diner next to the bookstore, and when he walked by us on the street, he’d pull a quarter from one of our ears and make us laugh. He was young, and we would ask if we could try on his hat, partly to laugh at the way the wide brim slipped down over our foreheads, and partly to see the vulnerable pink of his scalp under his crew cut.

The spinning lights of his cruiser turned the silent road into a carnival ride, spinning blue and red and whirling us around. He looked at us, at the car, at the empty spaces where our parents should be, and then he looked at the deer, the patch of white fur going red—from blood or from the cruiser’s lights, we can’t say. Without saying a word, he walked back to his car, his heels a heavy
click-clack
on the road, and he returned with a shotgun. There was the heavy metal slap of the barrel as he pumped it. We all watched, the three of us, as he raised the gun, looking at us over the stock, and his voice was gravelly when he said, “You girls need to look away now.” And we did.