“Awesome,” Peter said.
“That must have just missed us,” Amber said.
The rain was coming down hard and the sky was now almost black. Without the lights in the cafeteria it was darker inside than out.
“Or it just hit us,” I said.
“Wow,” Taylor said and lifted her eyebrows. “Will they send us home?”
I looked across the table to where Lynette sat quietly. I couldn’t completely make out Lynette’s face in the shadows, but I knew something was not right. Her eyes looked wild, scared. Then I saw Lynette slowly bend over like a little kid with a stomachache and shriek loudly once. Just like at the assembly back in October.
Amber, who was sitting on the other side of Lynette, nearly jumped out of her seat. Peter and I exchanged looks, but neither one of us knew what to do. Lynette began shrieking steadily. Slowly the rest of the people in the darkened cafeteria stopped talking till all there was to hear were Lynette’s cries.
Taylor tried to put her arm around Lynette. She talked softly, as you would to a frightened animal or a small child. But Lynette recoiled from Taylor’s touch. She continued to cry and occasionally broke out with a loud, frightening scream.
Miss Crosby showed up first. The gym teacher and the two cafeteria ladies arrived seconds later.
“We got her,” Miss Crosby said to Taylor. “Thank you.”
Miss Crosby turned out to be very strong. She nearly lifted Lynette up from her fetal position in her chair. Then the gym teacher helped. They carried Lynette right out of the cafeteria, still crying. Miss Crosby was saying things to Lynette but wasn’t touching her, as if she knew not to from past experience.
Just as they left, the lights went back on. But the room stayed quiet for another few minutes. Slowly the cafeteria came back to life with the ordinary sounds of eating and smashing milk cartons, putting away trays and garbage.
“Is that what happens when you get hit by a truck when you’re a baby?” Peter asked, the first at our table to speak.
I narrowed my eyes at him. “That’s such a stupid thing to say.”
Peter looked sorry. Boys are mostly so stupid, but at least Peter knew it.
“Anyway, she wasn’t hit by a truck,” I told everyone. “She was left in an incubator when she was born and the doctor forgot to turn on the oxygen for a few seconds.” My information was authentic and I could hardly stop myself from feeling proud to be the only one who knew it.
Amber, Taylor, and Peter all looked duly interested.
“But that’s not true,” Lea said. Until then no one had really noticed she was still there with us.
“She told me that herself,” I told Lea firmly.
“Lynette tells stories,” Lea said. “The first time I went to her grandmother’s house, Lynette told me she was adopted as a baby from Bosnia.”
I don’t think I had talked to Lea Fry-O’Malley since second grade when she put my sneakers on by mistake after we did barefoot prints in art class. I know Amber Whitman
never
had. Now we were all here at the same table listening to Lea Fry-O’Malley. Things had certainly changed.
“So?” Peter prompted. He slid down to be closer to her and we followed.
“So her mother did it to her. She used to lock Lynette in the closet,” Lea told us matter-of-factly. “That’s why she has to live with her grandmother. Her grandmother doesn’t want her, either, but the state took Lynette away from her mother.”
“Is that why she gets so scared in the dark?” I said, putting the two incidents together, the darkness at the assembly and the power outage here in the cafeteria, knowing this was the truth.
“Yeah,” Lea said. “She used to get locked in a closet for a long time. Sometimes for days.”
No one said anything more. We finished eating.
Pretty soon the lights came back. The bell rang and lunch period was over. We all got up and headed to where we were supposed to be. Gratefully.
Then I saw Lynette in the nurse’s office on my way to last-period math class. She was sitting on the little cot by the wall.
“Lynette, are you all right?” I peeked in.
“Oh, Gabby. Yeah, why? I just have a little headache so I came to the nurse. I get headaches sometimes.”
Lynette didn’t even remember screaming. She didn’t want to. That’s when I knew. I had believed, as Lynette believed, in the stories because they were easy. Because they were stories.
The storm had ended in a drizzle of rain and then disappeared altogether.
“I get headaches because I was in an incubator when I was born,” Lynette said, “and the doctor forgot to turn the oxygen on.”
“Oh, that’s really sad, Lynette,” I said. And I meant it.
Chapter 31
By dismissal the sun was radiating off every wet, glistening object it could find. If it weren’t for the puddles you would have never known there had just been a thunderstorm.
Taylor was coming over after school. Normally, we went to one of our houses after school every day. On weekends we had sleep-overs. But this Friday, Taylor had to leave right before dinner because she was going to her dad’s for the weekend and her mom wanted her home early.
We rode the bus to my house, along the road to the Rosendale Bridge, the long way since the road was still blocked, although parts of the river were beginning to recede. All along the road trees marked the river’s highest point with a thick coating of mud circling their trunks. My house sat as if it were abandoned in the center of a bog, with one long dirt road trailing straight into it.
“Cool,” Taylor said, looking around as we stepped down off the bus.
I waved to Mr. Worthington and we started walking down my driveway. Our backyard had disappeared into a horizon of shallow water.
“It’s eerie. It’s like another world,” Taylor said.
We crossed the wet fields to cut off some of my driveway and headed to the front of the house. We listened to our feet squish loudly, our socks soaking up the warm water. The air was still and muggy and tiny mayflies buzzed around our sweaty skin.
“Everything is so gross,” I commented, watching my sneakers turn dark with wetness.
“Except for right there!” Taylor pointed. “Look!”
She hurried ahead to the deeper grass, closer to the river itself, grass that had just recently been exposed to the air again. Brown silt clung to each weed and stick and in every crevice. All but one small tip of one small object that glittered back up to the shining sun. Taylor bent down and picked it up.
It was my butterfly barrette. One of them.
“Oooh. Look, it’s beautiful,” Taylor said. She tried to clean it with her hands. The mud just smeared.
“Hey, that’s my barrette,” I told her.
I never had to tell Taylor about Cleo. Cleo was gone just as Taylor and I were becoming best friends. Taylor never knew enough about Cleo to ask questions.
Cleo.
Even thinking her name seemed strange. I was trying to imagine how my barrette could have gotten so far up here. And how did it get unearthed? The river washed it all the way up here?
“I lost them a long time ago. There were two,” I said. “So funny, here’s one of them.”
“I never saw you wear anything like this.” Taylor was rubbing the barrette against her shirt.
“Well, I never actually wore them.”
The butterfly was nearly sparkling again. I remembered when Cleo insisted on buying them for me, just because she wanted to. I felt a stinging in my eyes and my throat for a second, before I could push it away.
“So how did you lose them if you never wore them?” Taylor asked.
“All right,” I said. We neared the front door of my house. “I wore them once, for a short time, and then I lost them.”
“Did you ever bother looking for them? This one’s beautiful.”
I opened the back door to my house and spoke to the air and the bicycles hanging in the garage. “I didn’t even remember that I had them. Why would I look for something I forgot all about!?”
We went inside.
My dad wasn’t in the studio and Ian wasn’t to be seen when we walked into the kitchen. Taylor left the barrette on the counter, as a sign, I hoped, that she would stop asking about it.
“Want something to eat?” I asked Taylor. I went to find something to offer her.
Taylor and I could hear the faint sound of the guitar coming from Ian’s closed bedroom door.
“Is that Ian?” Taylor asked.
I pretended not to notice, but I could tell that Taylor was a little too interested in my brother. But since Ian had been nicer to me lately, I was okay with it. To a point.
Then I heard the music of an electric bass, too.
Ian must have someone over practicing with him,
I thought.
Paul?
My stomach tightened, warning me that stupid things were potentially going to come out of my mouth. I closed the pantry doors.
“Is that Ian playing?” Taylor asked again. She headed toward the music.
“Well, it’s not me,” I said. I followed her into the living room, toward the muffled sounds, toward Ian’s room.
The music was actually drifting out Ian’s window and in again through the big, open screen doors in the living room. Then the music abruptly stopped as the door of Ian’s bedroom banged open and Paul stepped out. He turned directly to where Taylor and I stood gawking. He stopped.
“We just got home,” I said to Paul, breaking my own record for saying the stupidest thing imaginable.
Paul looked at us. “Oh, that’s nice,” he said.
Then, just when I thought I couldn’t say anything stupider, Taylor did.
“We rode the school bus,” Taylor said.
“Oh,” Paul said, wrinkling his brow. He was very tall. The door behind Paul slowly creaked open further, and there was my brother, sitting on the bed, one foot on the floor, his guitar in his hands, sheet music resting on his one folded knee.
“Hi, Gab. Hi, Taylor.” The pencil he was holding in his mouth dropped out. “Dad just called and said he’ll be home any minute.”
“Uh, can I get by?” Paul asked.
Oh, my God. Paul had been trying to get by me all along, not standing around so he could talk to us.
“Oh, sure,” I said and quickly stepped aside, and Paul moved through the space that I had just been standing in.
And that was it.
Ian got up to follow. He told me that he and Paul had to go into town. He said to tell Dad he’d be back before supper. They left in Paul’s van, which I would have seen in the driveway if we hadn’t cut across the tall grass, gotten our sneakers soaked, and found the barrette.
*
“He’s cute,” Taylor said. We were sitting and watching TV and coloring in my new
Movie Stars of the 30s and 40s
coloring book.
“Yeah,” I said. I thought Paul was cute, but I would never have said it first.
“No, I mean your brother.” By this point in our friendship Taylor knew more what I meant saying than I did.
“I think Ian’s cute,” Taylor said as she busied herself with Jean Harlow, Blond Bombshell, filling in her hair canary yellow.
“Is he?” I asked. I was working on Claudette Colbert. Short brown hair. Star of
It Happened One Night
, I read.
We had had cookies and potato chips already. And iced tea. My dad had come home and he was out back working in his garden. He’d probably stay outside till he decided to defrost some frozen dinners or order a pizza.
“Well, I think so,” Taylor said, still talking about my brother.
We colored in silence for a while. Then I asked Taylor if she wanted me to get us a Fruit Roll-Up.
“No, thanks. But you’re lucky,” Taylor said. She put down her colored pencil. “My mother practically measures everything that goes into my mouth.”
“Lucky?” I stopped coloring. Should I be worrying about what I eat, too? I thought I remembered that was on my list somewhere: Watch your weight. Don’t eat too many sweets.
“Oh…I didn’t mean you’re lucky you don’t have a mother,” Taylor quickly added. “I mean, lucky that you don’t have someone breathing down your back all the time.… But…I guess…I didn’t mean that how it sounded.”
“I wasn’t even thinking
that
, Taylor,” I told her. “Wanna switch?” I turned the page to Bette Davis on one side of the spread-open coloring book and Maureen O’Hara on the other.
“But I think it’s really, really sad you lost your mother when you were so little,” Taylor went on.
“I didn’t lose my mother,” I said. “She died.”
Taylor started coloring Bette Davis. “But you lost her, too. My grandmother died a few years ago, but my dad and I talk about her all the time.… So it’s like we still have her.”
A one-dimensional Maureen O’Hara stood with her hands resting delicately on her legs. She was in a plain bathing suit with two outfits free-standing beside her. One outfit was a Tarzan dress. She looked out from the page at me with a gray smile. I’d never heard of Maureen O’Hara. And here she was in a book. I read the short caption below her picture. When she was born, where she lived, what movies she made.