Читать книгу The Mourning Hours - Paula DeBoard Treick - Страница 14

eight

Fourth grade wasn’t much different from third grade, with its spelling tests and vocabulary words and the maps of Wisconsin we traced diligently from our social studies textbook. In gym class, my teacher seemed to plan our activities around things a small person simply could not do—shoot baskets, break through the chain in Red Rover. It was shocking how tall my classmates had grown over the summer. Mom resisted my constant pleas to write a note that would excuse me, permanently, from gym. In retaliation I lugged several of her old medical books to the hayloft and spent my afternoons trying to pull off a case of rheumatoid arthritis or intestinal polyps.

Emilie, with her hordes of friends, fit in perfectly at the high school. She was one of only two freshmen chosen to play clarinet in pep band, and she already knew that she wanted the lead in the spring musical, Annie Get Your Gun.

And Johnny—well, Johnny had wrestling and Johnny had Stacy. “You should see them at school,” Emilie told me one afternoon, pointing a finger down her throat in a fake gag. “It’s disgusting. I’m so embarrassed to know them.”

After only a month of school, Johnny’s English teacher called to report that Johnny hadn’t yet turned in his Macbeth essay—hadn’t, for that matter, seemed to have read a word of Macbeth. Mom repeated the conversation to Dad in the kitchen while I eavesdropped from outside the kitchen window, where I was brushing some burrs out of Kennel’s coat.

“This is his senior year,” Mom said to Dad. “He only has a few classes left, and all he has to do is pass them. Instead he’s spending all his time with that girl—”

I paused, midstroke. That girl.

“I’ll talk to him about the essay,” Dad offered. “He’s going to have to keep his grades up if he’s going to be eligible.”

They lowered their voices, but I could tell they were arguing. Then the door slammed, and Dad came down the porch steps. “Hey, kiddo,” he said, spotting me. Kennel jumped up, abandoning his brushing to follow Dad, whose long legs seemed to cover the distance between our house and the barn in only a few steps.

Whatever talk Dad had with Johnny did prompt a slight change in Johnny’s behavior. He spent more weeknights in his room, presumably catching up on homework—although in reality he seemed to be doing nothing more challenging than throwing a bouncy ball against his bedroom wall and catching it with a loud clap. Throw, clap, throw, clap, until I thought I’d go insane.

One night after dinner, Emilie ran into our bedroom and thrust her hand over my mouth. “Ssshh!” she hissed.

“I wasn’t saying anything,” I protested into her hand. At the moment I was nose-deep in The True Story of Bonnie and Clyde. I’d skipped ahead to the pictures, fascinated by Bonnie’s tiny, gun-toting, cigar-smoking figure. When they were ambushed and killed in Louisiana, Bonnie had been twenty-three years old. She was four feet, eleven inches tall and officially my hero. I wondered if she had been routinely chosen last for P.E., and if her classmates regretted that later.

“Listen,” Emilie said, still holding me around the neck.

“You’re hurting me,” I seethed back.

And then from downstairs, I heard raised voices—Mom’s and Johnny’s.

Emilie loosened her grip on me long enough for me to whisper, “What’s going on? Where’s Dad?”

She whispered back, “He went over to Jerry’s for something. I guess Mom found a note from Stacy.”

Uh-oh. I knew this could be bad. Stacy was the queen of writing long notes—it was what she did instead of homework on the nights she came over, a math book open on her lap, bent over pages of dense writing in purple ink, with tiny hearts to dot her i’s. Plenty of times, at the end of the night, she’d fold the note into an ingenious little package and pass it over to Johnny.

“We could hear better from the stairs,” I suggested. For once, Emilie paid attention to me. She released my neck, which had started to cramp at that point, and we crept halfway down the stairs, stepping carefully to avoid creaks, and wedged ourselves onto the same step.

Johnny’s voice was raised, easily traveling across the kitchen, through the closed door and up the stairs. “I don’t understand. You were going through my stuff?”

“I was not going through your stuff,” Mom clarified, her tone deadly. “I was simply doing the laundry like I always do, and part of doing the laundry is to empty all the pockets.”

“Okay,” Johnny huffed. “But you didn’t have to read it. That’s an invasion of privacy!”

Emilie let out a small wheeze, a stifled laugh.

Mom laughed, too, a hard laugh, the kind I knew better than to cross. “Invasion of privacy! Do I have to remind you that I’m the parent and you’re the child?”

“I’m seventeen! I’m an adult.”

“Not yet. Not an adult—yet.”

“I’m old enough to get a letter from my girlfriend without you—”

“This isn’t just any ordinary letter, Johnny!”

I heard a rustling of paper.

“You’re going to read it?” Johnny’s voice was incredulous.

“First it starts with how much she loves you. She probably says that a dozen times. Then, ‘The whole school could have caught on fire and I wouldn’t have noticed, because I was just looking at you. I would have kept staring at you until my hair was singed and the skin started to drip from my bones...’”

“Whoa!” Emilie breathed into my ear.

Ick, I thought.

“Give it back to me!”

“And here she says that she might as well be dead if she can’t be with you....”

Johnny bellowed, “You have no right!”

“I have every right! Later on, and I quote, ‘It’s like you’re the best drug in the world and I need you in me all the time, pulsing through my veins.’”

I didn’t realize how clenched my body was until I bit my tongue sharply and tasted warm blood in my mouth.

“All right! You’ve made your point!”

“No, Johnny. I haven’t. The point is, this isn’t just puppy love. It’s getting way out of hand. Stacy is just getting way too obsessed—”

“She’s not obsessed! What are you saying?”

“She says in this letter that she can’t live without you. She says if she can’t see you every day, she’ll kill herself. It’s not normal, Johnny!”

I shivered, remembering the picture in Stacy’s nightstand again, with the boy’s face obliterated, the pen almost wearing through the paper. Had she felt like that with him, too, that she would kill herself if she couldn’t see him?

Johnny’s voice was quieter when he spoke, as if maybe with Mom reading the note he’d heard Stacy’s words for the first time. “She’s not being serious, though. She’s only trying to say...”

“Johnny.” Mom’s voice was lower now, more controlled. “I’m worried that you’re spending so much time together. You’re not seeing your friends, you’re not keeping up with your grades. The things she says in this letter—they’re not things a sixteen-year-old girl should say. You’re both very young to be so serious.”

“Oh, no,” Emilie said. I felt her grip on my arm, tightening like the blood pressure cuff in the doctor’s office.

“We’re too young to be so serious? I’m too young?” Johnny’s voice escalated with each syllable. “You know, that’s really rich, coming from you!”

“Here we go,” Emilie whispered.

I pinched her arm. “What? I don’t get it.”

Emilie pinched me back, hard. “I’ll explain later.”

Mom’s voice had escalated again. “Johnny, you have no right to say that. It was a different time, a different situation!”

Johnny’s laugh was mean. “I can’t believe you’re using that on me. Somehow you’re going to make even that be my fault.”

“Johnny, that’s enough!”

It occurred to me that somehow Johnny had never learned to be submissive, to roll over and give up like Kennel when we caught him gnawing on one of Dad’s work boots. Emilie and I might push the boundaries from time to time, but we gave in just before getting ourselves in trouble. Johnny didn’t stop, and that’s what made him tenacious in the ring. But it also made him act impulsively, and earned him more than his share of punishments over the years.

“So it was okay for you, it was okay for you and Dad, but it’s not okay for me? Stacy’s ‘obsessed,’ but you were just, what? A normal teenage girl in love? You must not have been so pure and innocent, because—”

A slap—a sound so vivid that I could almost see Mom’s palm connecting with Johnny’s cheek. He must have stumbled backward; there was a thud as his body connected with the table. Emilie gasped. I winced, as if it was me who had been slapped.

“Never mind,” I whispered to her. “I get it now.”

Mom’s voice was shaky. “You apologize for that. You apologize right now.”

Johnny didn’t say anything. There was a scraping sound, as if a chair was being dragged across the linoleum, followed by a heavy thud. Emilie’s fingernails dug little half-moons into my arms.

“Johnny!”

But the screen door was already slapping behind him, and before Emilie and I made it to the kitchen, Johnny was down the porch stairs and getting into his truck.

“We’re not done!” Mom yelled, but the Green Machine had already shuddered to life, stirring up a spray of gravel before roaring away on Rural Route 4. I didn’t have to be a genius to know that he was going to see Stacy.

Mom’s words lingered in the kitchen like an ugly bruise. Looking around, I saw what had caused the crash. Johnny had thrown one of our heavy kitchen chairs against the wall; it lay toppled on its back, one of the spindles hanging loose.

Mom tucked her T-shirt into her jeans and, without saying a word, righted the chair. With a little pop, the spindle slipped back into its place, and she slid the chair under the table.

Back upstairs, I lay on my bed, facing the wall, staring at nothing. Maybe Mom was right—Johnny and Stacy were getting too serious. I blushed, remembering how Johnny had pinned Stacy to the ground, the breathless way her chest had heaved beneath his. Did she really think of Johnny as a drug, that she needed to keep coming back for more? Would she really kill herself if she couldn’t see him every day? I pulled my quilt over my head, feeling suddenly as if I knew too much.