Читать книгу Adam's Peak - Heather Burt - Страница 6

It’s a stifling day. They’ve been running through the sprinkler on the front lawn, Clare and Emma and two of Emma’s brothers, and now they’re sitting on the wet grass in their bathing suits, watching waves of hot air ripple over Morgan Hill Road. Clare’s new one-piece is light blue and has a skirt like a ballerina’s. She and Emma are sharing a package of Kool-Aid—dipping their fingers in the orange powder and licking it off. A special treat. Only nothing feels special. It’s the kind of day when everything goes in slow motion and nothing ever happens.

But then, miraculously, as if God or someone has taken pity on them, something does happen.

From the direction of the Boulevard, the Vantwests’ car comes speeding, really speeding, down Morgan Hill Road and into the driveway across the street with a squeal that slices the stale air. Excited, in an uncertain kind of way, Clare sucks her finger while Emma and her brothers shout.

“Whoa! He should get a speeding ticket for sure!”

“Whaddya think’s goin’ on? D’ya think he’s drunk?”

Mr. Vantwest, the driver of the car, gets out and runs to the house.

“Hey, he left the car door open! Someone could steal it!”

“Who’s gonna steal it? That’s so dumb.”

“He left the front door open too!”

“Maybe there’s a burglar in the house, or a murderer, and his wife called him for help.”

“She wouldn’t call him, you retard. She’d call the police.”

Determined not to say anything that might give Emma’s brother reason to call her a retard, Clare sits in silence, staring at the house across the street, while the Skinner children keep talking.

“Mom thinks it’s weird that people like them have a name like Vantwest. She says it’s a Dutch name.”

“So? What’s weird about that?”

“Dutch people are white, like us.”

“So how did people like them get a white name?”

“Mom says they probably intramarried. Their kids go to the Catholic school.”

Clare wonders if Mrs. Skinner has ever been inside the Vantwests’ house. She sells Amway stuff, so it’s possible. Sometimes she comes to Clare’s house with samples, but her own mother always says “No, thank you,” then talks about something else.

“Hey,” Emma begins, “did you know, at the Catholic school they have to—Oh, look!” She points across the street, where Mr. Vantwest is scooting his son and daughter out the front door. When Mrs. Vantwest appears behind them, Emma squeals. “Whoa! Look at that! I bet she’s gonna have her baby!”

It seems Emma may be right. The enormous Mrs. Vantwest is leaning against her slender husband, and the two of them are slowly making their way to the car. Clare dips her finger in the Kool-Aid and sucks distractedly. Emma has told her how babies get out, and even what makes them start growing in the first place, but Clare has never really believed any of it, never believed that she could have come to the world that way. For if such horrible and outrageous things were true, then surely her mother would have told her. Now, though, she isn’t sure what to think. She wonders if terrible secrets have been kept from her ... or if, perhaps, her mother would be as astonished as she herself was to hear Emma’s explanations. The second possibility seems most likely; still, as Mrs. Vantwest reaches the car door, clutching her belly and squatting awkwardly, Clare looks away.

Off to the right, the Vantwests’ son is hauling two small suitcases across the lawn. She fixes her eyes on him. He’s a strange-looking boy, like an undersized grown-up, stiff and serious, with his legs poking out from a pair of school uniform shorts like two halves of a yardstick. He goes to Catholic school, whatever that is. To distract herself from Mrs. Vantwest, Clare wonders about the suitcases—what’s in them, where the boy is going. She pretends one of them is for her, and that she and the Vantwest boy are going to run away from Morgan Hill Road on an adventure, like the Famous Five. They’ll sneak off while Emma and her brothers are watching Mrs. Vantwest, and they’ll go to the train station and sneak on a train. She licks her orange fingers. Then the Vantwest boy looks across the street, right at her it seems, and a terrible awkwardness comes over her. She wipes her hand on the wet grass. The Vantwest boy smiles. It looks like he’s smiling at her, but that’s impossible. It has to be one of Emma’s brothers, or Emma herself. Clare gets up and walks back to the sprinkler, shaking out the skirt of her new bathing suit. Standing under the fan of water, she blocks off streams by covering the holes with her big toe.