Читать книгу Cumberland - Megan Gannon - Страница 11

Four

The rain’s coming down so hard it’s erased any horizon, and when I go downstairs Grand is sitting at the table making one of her lists. Presidents’ names, church members, state capitals, the addresses of buildings the Carson brothers built—lists and lists she keeps in a stack on the desk, sometimes duplicating the same lists without looking. I pour myself some coffee, then top off her cup. Rings that must be from a week’s worth of breakfasts line the saucer.

She nods sideways at me without looking up. Somehow, she’s always reminded me of a scarecrow in a clown’s wig—rigid-backed, with grey curls surrounding her flat-faced, round head. Her dark eyes are like two holes punched through paper and I pretend it feels good to have someone’s eyes on me when she glances up. “Was there something you needed?”

I get the words out fast. “Izzy has a slight temperature. I think she has an infection.”

“Well.” Grand crosses out a name on her list and I wait for her to say something else as the rain slows from torrents to a hard fall of thick drops. Over the drumming, one high drip drip drip chimes out, the leak in the gutter at the end of the porch I’ve yet to fix.

“So… I think we need to call the doctor.”

The room is silent as I brace myself—is she so far inside herself she hardly hears me, or just gathering her breath the way a storm gathers clouds? She writes a few more names and sighs. “Did you clean her up?”

“Yes,” I say.

“Give her an aspirin?”

“…Not yet.”

“Well. Go get her an aspirin and see if that doesn’t help.” She screws her mouth into a sideways pucker as she prints two more names in exact block letters.

My chest feels fluttery as I pass through the living room to the back bedroom door that’s always closed. The blinds in Grand’s room are drawn as always, but the faint light that seeps in around the cracks shows rumpled bed-sheets musty with the scent of old coffee grounds and stale perfume. The wardrobe door stands open, overflowing with dresses hanging in clear plastic, and lidless hat-boxes litter the room, one bursting with scarves, another with purses.

I cross to the corner and pull open the bathroom door, turning on the light to see the bathtub with a deep rust stain streaking up the center, the chalky, dank-smelling tile gritty under my bare feet. The toilet has dark rings inside it and I put the lid down to dampen the swampy smell. Lipsticks and hairpins and a round tin of face powder clutter a little doily-draped table beside the sink. I pull open the medicine cabinet and sift through the rows of orange prescription bottles where Grand has always kept the aspirin, pick one and turn the bottle over so I can read the name on the typed prescription label: John Mackenzie.

It’s hard to imagine there was ever someone else here trying to shore this old house up against rotting. I glance upstairs, but since she’s in a good mood today I walk back into the kitchen and try to ask in a voice so casual she won’t even notice she’s responding, “What was Granddad like?”

Grand looks up quickly, squints, then puts down her pen and takes a sip of coffee. “Well, it’s hard to say. When you live with someone, it’s… hard to describe a person.” She sets her chin, turning her cup in the groove of the saucer, and clears her throat. “How would you describe Isabel, for instance?”

“I wouldn’t,” I say, and Grand sees her mistake, since she’s the one who forbids me to talk about Izzy. She purses her lips and looks down at her list.

“Well.”

“I mean, I wouldn’t... know where to begin.”

She lifts her cup and blows her coffee, one pink rose showing between her narrow fingernails. “You see,” she says, looking at me levelly across the rim.

The rain turns down to a trickle as Grand moves into the den for the day’s game shows. I give Izzy two aspirin and tell her I’ll be back up in a few hours to check her temperature. I’m sitting at the table playing solitaire when there’s a clomp clomp on the porch steps and a tap ta-tap on the screen door. The tall shadow through the curtain could be one of the Carson brothers, but when I swing the door open Everett Lloyd is standing there in a dripping windbreaker and drenched shorts. He stomps his feet and tousles a hand through his dark hair.

“Hey,” he says, grinning. My knees feel shaky and I suddenly fear Izzy’s long-gone bell will start ringing like an alarm. I grab the doorknob behind me.

“Hey.”

He pulls his windbreaker off and his grey t-shirt is soaked underneath, sticking to the bones of his chest. “Ever been swimming in the rain?” he asks.

“Ever been struck by lightning?”

He smirks and his eyes shift beyond me into the house. I pull the door closer behind me and stare back at him. Smiling, he shakes his head, turns and clomps back down the porch steps. I shoot a quick glance back at the den before latching the door and following him, picking along the gravel walkway in my bare feet around to the flagstone. He’s grinning like a game show contestant as he slides sideways, his arms out for balance, down through the loose sand to where the tide washes up.

I slide down after him and he’s already pulling off his shoes, laying his sopping socks across them. He pulls off his shirt and I drop my eyes, kick clumps of sand towards the water. The clouds are opening, the air clean and still, and the sound of the ocean is louder for the loss of rain. We have to shout to be heard.

“Well?” he says.

“Well, what?” I say, not looking up.

“You coming?”

“It’s freezing. The water’s probably freezing.” I fold my arms across my chest and squint out at the misty horizon.

“Yeah, so.” He leans in and mutters a few inches from my face, “Nobody asked you to get naked.” His ears are red before the words are even out of his mouth and he turns, lets out a whoop and runs in, holding up his sagging shorts with one hand as he flops backwards into the ocean. I run a few yards down the beach and plunge in, burying my cheeks in green sea.

He treads water and pushes back into the oncoming waves as they start to crest, then paddles quickly as a swell catches the back of his head, driving him under. He comes up spluttering, grins and waves me over, but I dive like I didn’t see and come up close to shore. I swim for a while by myself, treading water and checking the house to make sure none of the curtains are pulled back from the window.

The quiet, dreamy-eyed boy in homeroom—I never would have believed he could be so loud. He shouts and ducks under water, coming up spluttering and laughing, then whoops as a wave gathers and gathers and gathers, paddling hard to catch the edge of the crest. At school he’s silent, his elbows tucked close to his body like he’s ready to flinch at the slightest movement, but now he spreads his arms wide and flops backwards, his eyes shut with a quiet, beaming smile.

I slog out of the water and pull my legs up to my chest, shivering. Everett rides the wave straight towards shore, his head sticking out like the carved face on the front of a pirate ship as the tide sweeps up to my toes.

“I’ve gotta go,” I say. “I’ll catch pneumonia.” He flops down on the sand beside me and I inch away.

“Oh, right,” he says. “You’re never sick.”

“What are you talking about?” I’m looking out at the water but I try to put a lot into my voice: You don’t know me. This is the first time we’ve ever even hung out. Dummy. Jerk. What do you know.

“You didn’t miss a day of school all year,” he says, propping up on his elbows so he’s staring straight at me. He’s right. My first year of high school (and the three years of junior high before that) my home room teacher gave me a Perfect Attendance certificate on the last day of school.

“How would you know? Been interviewing my friends?”

He lowers his chin and gives me a steady, patient look, as the heat creeps into my face. If he’s noticed I never miss school, then he’s noticed I don’t have any friends. In the beginning I got invited to sleepovers but of course I could never go. After a while the girls in my class stopped talking to me, and now I sit alone during lunch, rewriting the notes from my morning classes so I’ll remember what to tell Izzy. Most of the other kids pretend like I’m not even there.

I clear my throat. “Well, what, been keeping a chart?” This time I look over and he’s the one to drop eyes and look out at the water. He sits up and brushes the sand from his shoulder.

“I mean, you’re kind of a loner—it seems like you’re always there.”

“Yeah well, what are you, my parole officer? The attendance police?” He walks over to his clothes and shakes out his t-shirt, ducks into it, then grabs his socks and loops his fingers in his shoes.

“I’ve… gotta go,” he mumbles. I watch him scramble up the dunes. The water slaps into me, washes around and behind, then pulls sand out from under me as it recedes. I stop shivering as the light fades from the sky.

There’s the problem of getting into the house and changing without Grand or Izzy seeing me soaking. I jog down the drive, down the sloping hill to where the pavement starts, then walk into the gathering dark and jingle into Red’s garage. He glances out from the truck he’s under as I grab the bathroom key and wave it at him. He nods and I walk around to the side of the painted brick and let myself in. It takes a good fifteen minutes to dry my shirt and shorts under the hand-dryer enough so you can’t tell they’ve been wet. I tiptoe across hot asphalt around to the door, hang up the key and wave to Red again on my way back out.

My feet are raw and prickly by the time I jog back up the porch steps. Grand is sitting in her chair, her face flickering with the light from the TV, so I pull three turkey TV dinners out of the freezer and heat them in the oven. I crimp the aluminum edges back, pull off the cardboard top, then carry Grand’s in on a tray as she finishes filing her nails and lays the manicure set on the table beside her. “Here, please,” she says, patting the coffee table without taking her eyes from the screen.

I eat my dinner at the table, then carry Izzy’s upstairs. She’s scribbling in a lineless notebook she keeps under her pillow and when I walk in she stops writing to stare at my still-damp hair. She raises a pale eyebrow at me, then points out the window and makes swimming motions with her arms.

“No—no swimming. It was just still raining when I went for a walk.” She scribbles on her notepad and holds it up to me. I heard shouting down there.

“Don’t know.” I shake out the thermometer and stick it in the corner of her mouth. She writes, Hair’s on fire!, smiling wanly around the thermometer.

“What’s that mean?”

She shoots me a mock-withering look and writes, Liar, liar.

“It’s pants on fire.”

She laughs. I like hair better.

“Yeah, well, you wouldn’t know a saying from a...” It’s an old game we used to play called “you-say-I-say.” One of us would start a sentence and the other had to finish it. If you guessed what the first person had been thinking, you won.

I stare at the second hand on my watch, waiting a full minute for the mercury to climb. Izzy ponders then writes, Silhouette?

It’s been so long since she’s guessed one I can’t even remember what it feels like, having someone else know what I’m thinking. I take the thermometer from her mouth and tilt it in the light to read, the thin silver line topping out at 100˚. “No, Izzy,” I say, swallowing against the fear rising in my chest. “Salt shaker.”

Must be something, that someone shouting down at the tide line. She’ll give away anything to prove she’s not hiding what she’s hiding. So long since I last heard her thinking I can’t quite guess. Yes, a someone, but someone so new to her, held so slightly inside her, I can’t see. So new she hasn’t learned how to wear this him or her, hasn’t learned how to show herself to her best advantage. A him. Must be. One she hasn’t touched, doesn’t yet bear a trace of. The image of him so thin inside her she’s fighting hard against forgetting, holding onto the memory wisp wrapped tight around her shoulders.