Читать книгу The Fainting Room - Sarah Pemberton Strong - Страница 8

4.

It was 2:25 p.m. when I opened my eyes, and Mister, I wasn’t too happy about it. My head felt like it had been stomped on by castanet dancers all night long. But I had to get up. I had to go meet a client.

Ingrid carried her bicycle up out of the dorm basement and coasted down Academy Road through a light drizzle. When she’d asked if she could go meet the Shepards by herself, she hadn’t really expected Ms. Luce to say yes. But the dean, harassed with pending graduation duties and unaware that it had started raining again, had let her go.

As soon as Ingrid was off campus she started to feel better. The light rain on her face felt good, and the slick green of new leaves on the trees was almost fluorescent. Ingrid shifted into high gear and pedaled down the next hill so fast the handlebars shook. Speeding like this—the wind hard on her face, the tires skidding dangerously over sandy patches of wet asphalt—the ride seemed to clean away the poisonous residue of having talked to her father’s girlfriend Linda the night before.

“Are you surprised you were suspended?” Linda had asked. “You’re such a bright girl, I can’t believe it hasn’t crossed your mind that dressing like one of those punk rockers—”

“I wasn’t suspended for wearing a Black Flag T-shirt,” Ingrid said.

“But you know what I’m trying to say. It’s your attitude. Now I realize spending the summer with me and Melanie isn’t your first choice—”

“You’re right about that,” Ingrid said. Melanie was Linda’s daughter. She was two years younger than Ingrid and wore plaid hair bands that matched her plaid skirts. She plastered her bedroom walls with posters of boy pop stars. Ingrid kicked her toe against the wall beneath the pay phone. There were a lot of dark scuff marks there where other students had kicked before her. Kicking the marks made her feel slightly better. She knew arguing with Linda was futile, but arguing seemed to be the only way Ingrid could keep from having some vital part of her sucked away, out through the phone lines and into the vortex of Melvin, California, where she would never get it back again.

“I know you miss your father,” Linda was saying. “I understand that what you really want is to stay with him—”

“What I really want,” Ingrid interrupted, “is to stay here at Newell and go to Summer Intensive.”

“—But your father’s in a position of great responsibility at the lab, and given your history of acting out, he has no choice but to have you come to our house.”

“What history of acting out?” Ingrid said. She wasn’t trying to bait Linda. But everything Linda said was a little barbed hook.

“Melanie and I will give it a try if you will,” Linda said. “And Ingrid, you may not believe me now, but once you get here I know you’re going to see how much fun a family can really be. When everyone’s willing to give it their best shot, everything just has a way of—”

Ingrid didn’t hang up. She just let the receiver dangle gently against the scuff marks and walked down the hall.

Did she miss her father? The question fell into the category of things she didn’t think about, things that wouldn’t matter anyway if Reagan started a nuclear war. It was true that she had loved spending time with her dad when she was younger. He’d taught her to identify constellations, to read a compass, and which desert plants were safe to eat and which were poisonous. When he was too busy to play with her, she’d even tagged along with him to work sometimes, wandering around the lab at his old job at the University of California, Irvine. But that was years ago, back before he disappeared into his über-secret, high security clearance job for the Department of Defense.

Once, when Ingrid was seven, her father brought her a piece of uranium ore. She was watching television in the house they lived in then, a split-level they had moved into when her father married his second wife, Cathy. He came into the den with a metal box in one hand and a surprise something in the other.

“Hold out your hand,” he said, and dropped a small rock into her palm.

“Huh,” said Ingrid, unimpressed. Except for some yellow, lichenous crusts on one side, it looked like any rock you might pick up on the playground at school. She turned back to Gilligan’s Island.

“Now watch this,” her father said, and set the metal box on the coffee table. It was about the size of Ingrid’s lunch box, and had a circular gauge on one side and a silver tube on the other. “This is a Geiger counter,” he said. He held the tube against the rock in Ingrid’s hand and the needle on the gauge jumped. Ingrid heard a ticking like a sped-up clock.

She looked up at her father in surprise.

“That,” he said, pleased with her reaction, “is a measurement of the power inside that rock.”

“Inside it?” Ingrid watched the needle jump on the meter.

“The electricity that lets you watch TV and run the air conditioner begins right inside this rock.”

“You’re telling me electricity is in this rock.” Ingrid frowned. She knew perfectly well electricity was in the electrical outlets in the wall.

“Energy is in the rock. Or to be exact, potential energy.” David Slade didn’t believe in talking down to children. “Right now it’s just a rock, but a very special one: it has in it what we need to make nuclear fission possible, and with that, the potential energy becomes real, usable energy. Through science.”

Science. The way her father pronounced the word made her love it, too. There was nothing science could not do, and all of it was wonderful: cure disease, turn on the television in every kid’s living room, and help the entire nation by—as the inscription on a coffee mug her father got from Sandia Lab boasted—“Securing a free and peaceful world through nuclear technology.”

The day after Ingrid’s thirteenth birthday, the zirconium cladding in the Number Two unit at Three Mile Island ruptured and the fuel pellets inside began to melt. By then, Ingrid understood better than most adults what had actually happened, and listening to reports on the shortwave radio set her father had helped her build the summer before, she felt not only terrified but personally betrayed—her interest in the beauty and power of nuclear fission had never extended to its biological consequences. Now, with the rise of the No Nukes movement, she learned the darker history of splitting the atom. She worried that she would get cancer from all the nights she’d taken her uranium rock under the covers with her to watch it glow, and she became convinced that the bone cancer her mother had died of when she was four was the result of their having lived downwind from the Nevada test site when Ingrid was a baby. Then in August she watched a special on PBS about a Japanese girl who got leukemia from radiation poisoning in Hiroshima. The girl tried to fold a thousand paper cranes to cure herself and died anyway.

“Ingrid,” her father said at the end of the program, “dropping the bomb was a terrible thing, but it was the only way to end the war. That doesn’t mean everything nuclear is bad.”

In response, Ingrid shaved off all her hair with her father’s razor to demonstrate how she would look with radiation sickness, and three weeks later began ninth grade at the public high school with a murderous fuzz clinging to her scalp and the wig her stepmother Cathy had bought her in a wad at the bottom of her knapsack.

That night Cathy came into her room to talk to her. Ingrid was lying in bed reading The Western Boy Scout’s Guide to Regional Plants and Trees, a book that had been her dad’s when he was a boy.

“Ingrid,” said Cathy, I know this isn’t an easy time for you.”

Ingrid waited, looking at the shiny leaves of the poison oak.

“You’ve just started high school, your body is changing—”

Ingrid froze her face into a turned-to-stone slab, designed to arrest forever any potential body changes.

“—And you may have noticed your father and I aren’t having such an easy time right now.”

Ingrid shifted the stone slab into a scowl.

“Ingrid, the world doesn’t always go exactly the way we want it. We have to learn to accept that the world goes according to God’s plan, not ours. Sometimes that plan doesn’t seem to make much sense to us—”

“Huh,” said Ingrid and put her book over her face.

“—And that’s when God is testing our faith, that’s when we need Him most.”

“Does God plan to have us get into a war with Russia, or is he just going to send an earthquake to make all the reactors between here and San Francisco split in two?”

“Ingrid, Ingrid, honey.” Cathy moved to sit beside Ingrid on the bed, put her hand on Ingrid’s shoulder. Ingrid did not want a hug, and remained stubbornly flat on her back.

“You shouldn’t be thinking about things like that at your age,” her stepmother said.

“At what age should I be thinking about them?”

Her stepmother sighed one of those melancholy adult sighs that gave Ingrid the creeps.

“Ingrid, I know what you’re going through. But sometimes what we’re afraid of just doesn’t happen. So there’s no sense in worrying like this. Sometimes things just work out.”

“And we all live happily ever after?”

To Ingrid’s surprise, Cathy’s eyes filled with tears. She blinked them away again, but Ingrid decided that her stepmother knew something she wasn’t telling. The danger must be even greater than she had suspected.

Her ninth-grade year ended as it had begun, in crisis. The last day of school, Ingrid went to class only because the science teacher had said she could have the garter snake over the summer. She hadn’t bothered to figure out how she was going to transport it from the terrarium in the classroom to the one in her bedroom, so when the dismissal bell rang that afternoon Ingrid had the snake in a brown paper lunch bag clutched firmly in one hand as she pedaled her bicycle home. In celebration of being finished with school, she left the bike on the front lawn, where her stepmother had told her not to leave it, and banged into the house. Her father and stepmother were in the den, her dad on the Barca Lounger and Cathy on the sofa. They both looked up at her when she came in and Ingrid felt a shiver of fear at their blank expressions.

“Why are you home so early?” she asked her father.

“I left early today. Come sit down, sweetie, there’s something we want to talk to you about.”

Ingrid stayed where she was, clutching the neck of her paper bag. She couldn’t move. She knew why her father had come home early. She knew what they were going to tell her. There had been an accident at the lab. Radiation was seeping through the air, through the walls of the house, through the air conditioner and into their bodies, their bloodstreams, their lungs. First they would become nauseated, then their hair would begin to fall out. Their skin would blister and bleed as the radiation lodged in their thyroids; their chromosomes would mutate and break, blood cells would die while tumors sprouted like dandelions on a lawn. And then slowly, agonizingly, everyone would die. She would never grow up. She would never start 10th grade because she wouldn’t live that long.

“Ingrid, Ingrid,” said her stepmother, and pulled a frozen Ingrid down beside her on the sofa.

Ingrid burst into tears.

“She already knows,” her father said, “I told you she could hear us.” He looked at his daughter sobbing on the plaid couch beside his wife and said, “Now, sweetie, I know it seems hard—”

“It is hard,” said Cathy, glaring at Ingrid’s father.

Ingrid wept harder. Everything would be gone, everyone, all the kids at school who hated her, her teachers, her poor garter snake who hadn’t done anything, all of them would sicken and die and she had known it all along and her father hadn’t stopped it.

He moved to sit beside her on the couch. She looked up at him, her father who had gone to work every day like an idiot and done nothing at all to stop this.

“How could you?” she sobbed.

“Ingrid, this decision wasn’t easy. But we have to take into consideration—”

“Decision? What are you talking about? I don’t want to die.”

Her father and Cathy exchanged glances over Ingrid’s head.

“Sweetie, you won’t die for a very long time,” said her father. “I know a shock like this might seem as if it’s the end of the world, but it isn’t, not really.”

This was too much. “It is the end of the world,” Ingrid wailed. “All the people will die and the rivers will be poisoned and the fish and birds and there won’t be any more fruit or vegetables we can eat and the rain will poison everything it falls on.”

“What?” her father said.

“Everyone is going to die and you know it. Any victims within a five-mile radius from ground zero can expect to die from radiation sickness, cancer, or leukemia within the first six months.”

There was a short silence.

“What are you talking about?” said Cathy.

“Ingrid,” said her father, “there’s not going to be any bombing.”

“A meltdown, then. Same difference.”

“Sweetie, there’s no meltdown. We’re not—”

“Oh my God,” said Cathy, and put her hands over her face.

“Then what?” Ingrid demanded. “What happened? Why are we all sitting here? Why is Cathy crying?”

“Sweetie,” said Ingrid’s father, “we wanted to tell you. What we wanted to tell you is.” He looked at the carpet. “We’re getting divorced.”

She was going to live, she was going to live, and she loved the plaid couch, the orange shag carpet, the dusty eucalyptus-scented air outside, the itch of poison oak on her left forearm, the candy dish on the coffee table beside her stepmother’s knee, her father’s polyester pants scratchy against her thigh. The world was not ending just yet after all, and Ingrid began to cry again, this time with relief.

Then her stepmother screamed. Her legs kicked out in front of her, upsetting the coffee table. The candy dish went flying, scattering miniature Clark bars over the rug.

“Jesus Christ, Cathy,” said Ingrid’s father, “what is it now?”

Ingrid’s stepmother jumped into a crouch on the sofa. “A fucking snake,” she gasped. “A snake just crawled over my foot. There.”

Ingrid and her father looked where Cathy pointed. The three of them watched Ingrid’s garter snake as it moved slithering through the shag carpet as if through dry grass. It paused, disoriented, by the leg of the TV stand, then turned suddenly and vanished behind the drapes.

The empty paper bag lay on its side at Ingrid’s feet. Ingrid picked it up and absently began crumpling it into a ball and then stopped. No one said anything more, and no one moved. The silence settled in around them and thickened, holding the three of them on the couch in a kind of suspended animation, eyes fixed on the spot where the snake had disappeared.

In the ensuing shuffle of the divorce, Ingrid was allowed to leave Melvin High and go to boarding school, which her father referred to as A Good School Back East. She did not exactly fit in, not even with the other mohawked kids, but no one made fun of her, either. She did her schoolwork, had one real friend, and dreaded the holidays that meant a return to Melvin. The thought of spending the whole summer back there, waking up every morning at Linda’s in one of the twin beds in Melanie’s room, with its yellow daisy curtains and matching bedspread, its walls plastered with posters of Scott Baio and Andy Gibb—well, it was enough to make you want to be dead.

Ingrid had been pedaling her bicycle as fast as she could go through Newell and around the reservoir. Now, coming into Randall, she felt winded. At the crest of the hill she stopped and gazed down at Randall Center.

The Town Green looked just like a postcard, the kind that says GREETINGS FROM NEW ENGLAND across the top. All picture-perfect, Mister. Grass so manicured it looked like each blade had been cut with nail scissors, old wrought iron benches that didn’t know the meaning of the word rust. A white clapboard church with a big bell in the steeple, nice maple trees. Whatever problems the people who lived here had, they could probably just sprinkle them with a little money and make them go away again.

At least, that was how it looked from the outside.

As she stood straddling her bike and trying to light a cigarette, the rain began, sudden and intense and very cold. By the time she had pedaled ten yards to take shelter under the nearest maple tree, she was drenched. Too wet to smoke, even. So she got back on her bike and pushed on, around the green and out Old Adams Road.

When she found the Shepards’ house, Ingrid wiped the water from her face and stared. The house was worth staring at. It was different from all the others she’d passed, neither rambling farmhouse nor boring colonial. Her eyes ranged appreciatively over the steep roof of blue-gray slate, the wide porch detailed with gingerbread scrollwork under the eaves. There were arched stained-glass windows flanking the front door, copper downspouts etched with the turquoise patina of age. It looked to Ingrid like a house in an old movie, the kind that hid a lunatic in the attic or a body in the basement. She propped her bike against an oak tree, ran across the lawn and up onto the porch, pushed her sodden hair back from her eyes and rang the bell.

The woman who answered the door did not go with the house at all. She looked like she’d be more at home in Southern California: mail order pastels, big gold earrings. Ingrid felt a lurch of disappointment in her stomach.

“Mrs. Shepard?” Red hair, pancake makeup. After a pause that went on too long, during which Ingrid felt herself being looked over and found wanting, the woman smiled.

“Yes, hi. You must be Ingrid. I was expecting you a bit later.” Mrs. Shepard looked past Ingrid to the driveway. “Where’s Liz Luce?”

Ingrid hooked her thumbs in the back pockets of her jeans. “Mrs. Luce couldn’t come.”

“Oh—well, come in. You’re drenched.”

“Yeah, it’s raining,” Ingrid said, and then wished she hadn’t.

She followed Mrs. Shepard inside and looked around. There was hand-carved scrollwork on the post thing at the bottom of the stairs, a very old mirror built into more carved paneling beside the front door. The antique brass door hinges with an inlaid pattern of fleurs-de-lys. Old things, well made. Whoever had built this house had cared about what they were doing, had intended it to last a long time. Through an archway Ingrid glimpsed a living room filled with books, a fireplace and a worn brown velvet sofa with wooden legs that looked like lion’s paws. She imagined stretching out on the sofa after everyone else was asleep and reading. The image pleased her.

“This is a cool house,” she offered.

“Let me just see where Ray is,” Mrs. Shepard said. “Why don’t you go on in the living room there. Here, take off that sweater, and I’ll get you a towel.”

Ingrid hesitated, then peeled off her sweater. Beneath it she wore a black Minor Threat tee shirt whose collar and sleeves she’d cut away with some very dull scissors. She felt Mrs. Shepard’s eyes on her and wished for a moment that she’d worn more regular-looking clothes. Then she shook away the feeling and wished instead for a cigarette—if the Shepards weren’t going to like her, it was better to find out now.

In the kitchen, Evelyn threw Ingrid’s dripping sweater across the back of a chair and spread a dishtowel beneath it so the floor wouldn’t get wet. This was the girl who was going to save her from doing something even crazier than throwing a rock at her husband’s head? This girl, with hair sticking out from her head every which way, with clothes so ragged even a church poor box wouldn’t want them, this girl with a safety pin in her ear, this girl who showed up wringing wet a whole hour early? This girl was not going to make her life any easier. She hadn’t even had time to vacuum or figure out what to serve, or—shit, she hadn’t even cleaned up the broken glass in the study upstairs. The big jagged pieces of windowpane and the smashed lampshade were still all over the rug and the rain had probably come in and wrecked the rug entirely. She should have dealt with that first thing this morning; what was wrong with her?

Evelyn leaned against the sink and took a deep breath. She could at least bring out some snacks. But what? Her own mother, when she was being fancy, used to set up a card table outside the Winnebago on which she’d serve ladyfingers she had cut in half and filled with Cool Whip, then sprinkled with powdered instant coffee. Right, Evie Lynne, that’ll look real good. She began opening and closing cabinets: brownie mix, corn muffin mix, Bisquick. She’d bought these things herself, but at this moment the boxes seemed malevolent and alien. Just choose something, anything, she thought, and bring it out on Ray’s grandmother’s old tea set. That, at least, would lend an air of class.

Ray came out of the bathroom to find a bedraggled-looking girl in old clothes sitting on the living room sofa and neither Evelyn nor Liz Luce anywhere in sight. The girl stood up when he came in.

“Ray Shepard,” he said, extending his hand. “Glad you could make it in this weather.”

“I’m Ingrid.” She ducked her head, as if she were a little shy, but then seemed to recover and shook his hand with more force than he expected from someone her age. Her hand was clammy.

“Hello, Ingrid. I’m sorry, my wife and Liz are...?” he looked around, as if they might be hiding behind the sofa.

“Your wife went to get me a towel,” the girl said. “Ms. Luce didn’t come. I rode my bike.”

“In this rain? She told us she was going to bring you over.”

“She was—but I came by myself.”

She did not smile. Ray was reminded of the sober-faced women and children who stared out of 19th century daguerreotypes looking as if they had never cracked a smile in their lives.

“Well, here, please, have a seat.” Ingrid sat down again where she had just been sitting. Ray cleared his throat and called, “Evelyn?”

The door to the kitchen swung part way open and Evelyn poked her head out.

“I’ll join you in a minute,” she said brightly, a brightness like a sharp knife; her smile was tight and a muscle twitched in her jaw. She gave him a little wave before disappearing behind the door again.

“So Ingrid,” Ray began, in the manner of a man who does not know how to fish bravely casting his line, “Do you enjoy school?”

As soon as he said it he remembered being asked this very question when he was her age, and knowing that the adults asking were doing so only to be polite; he had resolved to be different.

“It’s okay,” Ingrid said, in the bored tone the question deserved.

Ray cleared his throat and tried again. “Liz—Ms. Luce—tells us you’re hoping to spend the summer here in Massachusetts.”

“She didn’t tell you I got suspended?” Something that might have been a smile flickered at the corners of Ingrid’s mouth and was suppressed.

“She did, actually. She said you’d been caught drinking beer, but she assured me you aren’t a problem drinker. I should hope not, at your age.”

“It was one lousy Budweiser. If she only knew what goes on in the woods behind the music building, she wouldn’t have bothered with me.”

“So the problem is not that you’ve been suspended, but that you cannot return home for the summer because your parents are away.”

“It’s not a problem for me. I’d rather die, actually, then go back to Melvin.”

“Melvin’s your father?”

“Melvin is a horrible sprawl of houses that passes for a town east of Irvine, California.”

“Ah, yes,” said Ray. “Those awful houses, ‘designed,’ as it were, by builders—houses bearing no relation to the landscape or to one another, save that the walkways from garage to house are all filled with the same shade of artistically-placed beige gravel. I don’t blame you.”

“Yeah.” She looked at him approvingly. “Are you a Southern California transplant too?”

“No, just a poor old-fashioned architect trapped in a world of vinyl siding and poured concrete.”

“That’s right, you’re the guy who designed our new dining hall, Ms. Luce told me. I like it, there’s lots of light. Are you going to do any more buildings there?”

“I wish I were. At the moment I’m working on a very unpleasant bank in Waltham, and writing a book on Victorian architecture to keep my sense of aesthetics intact.”

Ingrid was looking around the living room. “Did you work on this house too?”

“I remodeled it to look more or less like it did when it was built in 1880.”

“I like it—I like old stuff. In Melvin everything is so new it’s all untested. You never know whether the next big earthquake to come along will just flatten all of those stupid kit houses right down.”

“Let me show you around,” Ray said.

As they got to their feet Evelyn came out of the kitchen.

“There you are,” said Ray. “What were you doing all this time?”

“Just whipping up a snack for our guest here.” Evelyn smiled brightly, a smile that Ray knew was not a good sign. His wife was trying too hard, which inevitably led to things going wrong, to tears. “I hope you’re both hungry,” Evelyn said. “I just came out to tell you that tea will be ready in a few minutes.”

“I’ll show Ingrid the house, then.”

“Yes, do that. I’ll be out in a bit.” She disappeared back into the kitchen. Ingrid followed Ray through the foyer and up the stairs, the soles of her wet sneakers squeaking on the floor.

They had gone halfway up when Evelyn appeared again. “Ray!”

He paused on the landing and looked down at his wife standing at the foot of the stairs. Evelyn darted her eyes meaningfully in the direction of the study, then toward Ingrid.

“What?” he said, having forgotten about all the broken glass.

Evelyn sent her gaze around the circuit a second time: upstairs, then to Ingrid, then back to Ray.

“What,” said Ray again, exasperated now.

“It’s just, you know, Ray, some of the rooms are—a mess.” She glanced at Ingrid, who looked like she might be about to laugh. “I haven’t had time to clean today,” Evelyn went on. “Maybe you two would like to have some tea now while I tidy up, and then later—”

“Nothing’s that messy,” said Ray, puzzled. “I’m sure Ingrid won’t take offense at the sight of an unmade bed.”

“God, no,” said Ingrid. “You should see my dorm.”

“But, Ray—”

“Come on, Ingrid,” Ray said a little too heartily, and ignoring his wife, he led the way up the rest of the stairs and turned down the hall to the guest bedroom. “Evelyn can be a trifle overzealous in her standards of cleanliness,” he said, hoping to make a joke of it, “but really, we aren’t swine.”

As they went down the hall he showed her the old brass gaslights that had been converted to electric wall sconces, and the spare bedroom she would sleep in if she came to stay. Then, as he was turning toward the door of the study to show off its curved bay window, he realized all at once what Evelyn had been trying to communicate. Behind the closed door was the smashed window, the glass all over the rug; there was blood on his desk. Of course he couldn’t take Ingrid in there, it was too bizarre: bizarre that it had happened, and that they hadn’t cleaned it up yet. Ingrid was standing at his elbow, waiting. He turned and led her instead to the little room at the head of the stairs.

“This is the fainting room,” he said, and opened the door all the way so she could step inside. This room really was a mess: Evelyn never went in here, and Ray had begun using it as a de facto storage space. Boxes of books, an old typewriter and a shoebox leaking tax records were piled on a big executive’s desk too large for the tiny room; a couple of broken chairs and a suitcase took up the available floor space.

“Why’s it called a fainting room?” Ingrid asked.

“That’s what the Victorians called it. Some of the houses from this period have a room like this on the second floor. After climbing the stairs in tight corsets,” Ray smiled, “breathless ladies would go into the fainting room to sit down and sniff sal volatile to recover themselves.”

“No kidding?”

“No kidding. Tummy-firming pantyhose, I gather, are not nearly so constricting, so nowadays the room has a different purpose.”

“You do your writing in here?” Ingrid asked dubiously, eyeing the desk. The old manual typewriter Ray had used in college was parked there beside a box of battered paperback crime novels. The open door of the tiny closet revealed further disarray: more boxes of books, old coats on wooden hangers, manila folders spilling across the floor.

“My writing?”

“Yeah, your architecture book. Is this where you write it?”

“Oh.” He turned in the direction of the study and then stopped. “Actually, I’m sort of between desks,” he stammered. “We’re having some—some work done on the actual study, so in the meantime, I’m rather adrift.”

“That’s a cool typewriter,” Ingrid said, running one finger lightly over the space bar. She wasn’t really listening, he noted, relieved.

“Oh, I don’t actually type on that. I’ve got a new electric that takes a lighter touch.”

She nodded, laid her fingers on the keys without striking them.

“I learned on an old one like this in typing class,” she said. “I like the sound it makes when you’re typing much better than the sound of the electric ones.”

Ray looked at her in surprise. He also held this opinion but had never voiced it; at work his receptionist had the latest model IBM Selectric, a machine whose dull, industrial hum he found annoying. His own electric typewriter, the Smith Corona in the study, was quieter, but made a curiously flat and unsatisfying slap when the keys struck the paper. He had written all his college papers and a few detective stories on this manual Underwood, and he was still fond of it.

“Yes,” he said to Ingrid, “I know what you mean.”

Downstairs Evelyn arranged cups and saucers on a tray in the kitchen. Anger made her hands clumsy. What would Ingrid think when she saw the blood and glass all over the study? How could Ray be so dense? And why was she, Evelyn, such an idiot that she had not cleaned it up? She had wanted a tea party as perfect as the delicate teacups themselves, but Ingrid had come too early, the cake she had hastily thrown in the oven was nowhere near done, and the state of the study was inexcusable. She measured the loose tea Ray liked into the teapot, poured the water, and shook sugar cubes into the sugar bowl—the tea set, at least, looked elegant. When she first moved in she had found it in a box in the attic, the carefully wrapped china as thin as bird bones—Ray’s grandmother’s wedding pattern.

They were coming back downstairs. Evelyn pulled the oven door open a crack, as if after ten minutes the cake could possibly be done. Of course it wasn’t; a shiny skin had formed over the top, the wet batter beneath it having tentatively risen. Evelyn ripped open a box of Walker’s shortbread and arranged the buttery rectangles on the serving plate. That would have to do. She elbowed open the swinging door, trying not to slosh tea all over the tray.

They sat in the living room, Evelyn and Ray on the sofa, Ingrid in an armchair. Ray watched as Evelyn carefully picked up two sugar cubes with a pair of sugar tongs and dropped them into Ingrid’s tea. He wondered where his wife had unearthed sugar cubes and tongs. Evelyn must want Ingrid here very badly, he thought; she was doing her utmost to make a good impression, and as so often happened when she did this, because she was trying too hard the result was unintentionally comical. It was like electroplating, it was campy, almost. He glanced at Ingrid and caught a fleeting expression he couldn’t read—possibly amusement, possibly derision. It’s not Evelyn’s fault, he thought protectively. And to appease his own sense of guilt for thinking ‘electroplating,’ he moved closer to his wife and put his arm around her shoulders.

Evelyn stiffened a little. The room was damp, and Ray’s body seemed to be radiating heat—she felt perspiration dampen the back of her shoulder where his arm rested. She tried to shift so that he would move his arm away again, but he seemed to interpret the movement as snuggling closer, and gave her an affectionate squeeze.

“So how long have you guys lived in this place?” Ingrid asked.

And Ray was off and running, eager as always to talk about the house, what a find it was, the challenges of remodeling—Evelyn had heard it all before. She recalled a time when she had found this discussion interesting—she had been fascinated by Ray’s ability to change a physical structure from one shape to another. It was almost, she’d felt, as if he could do magic. But now, sitting in the middle of the finished magic trick, in this particular moment she felt claustrophobic. Ray’s arm on her shoulder seemed to be cutting off her circulation; the side of her neck was numb.

“The previous owners had done nothing since 1960,” Ray was saying, “when the extent of their remodeling was to put in a dropped ceiling in the kitchen—they covered the pressed tin with acoustical tiles—can you imagine?—and then digging a fallout shelter in the basement.”

“A fallout shelter?” Ingrid sat up very straight on the couch.

Ray laughed. “There aren’t any tins of chipped beef or propaganda manuals lying around. They never finished it, so I turned it into a wine cellar.”

Evelyn felt as if she were watching foreign film without her contact lenses in—she couldn’t read the subtitles, had lost the thread of what was being discussed. She had no idea why Ray was saying “Eleven gauge—not galvanized, mind you, but stainless steel” or why Ingrid, sitting there in her ratty black clothes, responded with, “Awesome, that is so awesome.” There was something odd about her sneakers: like her hair, they seemed to have been dyed black with dye that had not quite taken. The roots of Ingrid’s hair had a slightly greenish cast—not enough ammonia, Evelyn thought—and the black canvas of her shoes was a streaky gray in places.

And then there was the safety pin in her ear—was that supposed to be daring? Ingrid should see the Human Pincushion in the Jones and Wallace sideshow. And yet it was daring, because how dare she, this Ingrid? She was in Randall, she was a student at Newell Academy, the least she could do was dress correctly, but she didn’t seem to care at all, she seemed perfectly happy to sit there in their nice living room wearing whatever she wanted. Evelyn looked from Ingrid to Ray. They seemed to have forgotten she was there.

So say something intelligent. Something perceptive and cool.

“Did you color your sneakers black with magic marker?”

There was an uncomfortable silence. Faux pas number two, as Ray would say. Ingrid looked down at her shoes.

“Um, yeah, I did, actually. In English class. I was bored one day.”

“It must be a relief not to have a dress code,” said Ray, smoothing over the awkward pause that followed. “Walking around your campus last fall, I remember thinking how pleasant it was to see kids wearing what they wanted. When I was at Andover, we all had to wear ties.”

Ingrid nodded. “I interviewed at two other schools that wouldn’t take me because of my hair—I had a Mohawk then. Like the point of going to school is a hairstyle or something. It was ridiculous. I mean we’re supposed to be learning how to think, right?”

Evelyn took a sip of tea and burned her mouth.

“So Ingrid,” she tried again, “you need a place to live for the summer.”

For the first time since sitting down, Ingrid looked right at her. “Yeah,” she said. “I really really do.”

Evelyn saw the hope in her eyes and felt a surge of triumph at having finally gotten the upper hand in the conversation. Ingrid wanted something that she had. She glanced at Ray, and he made an almost imperceptible Sure, why not expression.

“Well, we do have plenty of room here,” Evelyn said. “This is a very large house.”

“It’s a great house. I really like it.”

“You don’t think you’d be bored,” Ray asked, “spending your summer out here in the provinces?”

Ingrid shook her head vigorously. “Compared to Melvin, this is paradise. I guess the only problem is, I was hoping to get a summer job, and this is pretty far away from everything. Maybe some of your neighbors have kids I could baby-sit, or some gardening I could do or something?”

“I can always use a hand in the garden,” Ray said.

“Or whatever you need done around the house. Hey, I could help you with typing your architecture book. I’m a really fast typist.”

“That’s not a bad idea. I’m an absolutely wretched one.”

“So then you wouldn’t mind having me here?” Ingrid asked, and ducked her head, suddenly shy.

Evelyn felt a stab of fear. She had meant to gain some leverage in the conversation, not actually invite Ingrid to live here, not yet.

“We’ll have to talk it over,” she said, and the other two looked at her. “I mean, with the school, before anything gets decided, I’m sure there are considerations we’ll have to…consider,” she finished lamely. I’m a jerk, she thought. But this was supposed to be an interview, not a promise.

“Oh.” Ingrid suddenly looked smaller, as if she had shrunk into herself. “Um, okay.” She turned to Ray. “You heard about me from Ms. Luce—I don’t know what she said, but maybe you could talk to one of the other teachers at my school. Mr. Carberg, the physics teacher, likes me.”

“Oh, Liz Luce didn’t speak ill of you at all,” Ray said quickly. “I think Evelyn meant logistical considerations. In any case, I imagine your parents will want to speak to us.”

“My dad’s pretty hard to get hold of. Better just talk to the school.” Ingrid put down her teacup. “Well, I should go. If I could just get my sweater—”

“Of course.” Evelyn jumped up.

Ray looked toward the windows. It was still raining. “We’ll drive you back to Newell,” he said.

“Don’t bother, I can bike it fine.”

“It’s no bother,” Evelyn said, coming back with the sweater, “Ray will take you.”

“I like biking in the rain,” said Ingrid. “I’m fine, really.” She crossed her arms over her chest to emphasize her position of fine-ness; under the high ceiling, a dark, small-boned girl in damp old clothes, she looked absolutely lost. “Well, see you around.” She went to the door, opened it herself.

Ray followed her, feeling furious at Evelyn for raising the girl’s hopes like that if she didn’t mean it. What was she trying to do?

“I’ll call Liz,” he said. “By the way, what’s your last name?”

The word she mumbled sounded to him like ‘slay’.

“Sleigh? As in jingle bells?”

“Slade.” She spelled it for him.

“Well, we’re pleased to meet you, Ingrid Slade.” He gave her a smile he hoped was reassuring and she smiled back, finally. Ray thought he saw the reason she hadn’t smiled earlier: she had the most lopsided grin he’d ever seen; only one side of her mouth curved up while the other side remained neutral. The effect was not unpleasant, but it was strange—the kind of thing he imagined a self-conscious teenager might take pains to suppress.

He watched her run down the porch steps and across the lawn, hike her leg over a black ten-speed and ride bumpily across the brick path and down the driveway, head bent against the rain.

Evelyn was collecting the saucers and teacups.

“Well?” he asked.

“Well what?”

“What’s going on? What was with the tea party business? My grandmother’s Spode china and the sugar tongs, and why did you tell her she could live here, in so many words, and then in the next breath take it back?”

“I can’t explain.”

“Try, why don’t you.”

Evelyn stared at him a moment, then went out of the kitchen. He had no idea what was going on. You thought he was so smart until he did something and you saw that he was missing half the action, like he’d fallen asleep in the middle of the movie and missed the big scene. Well, she would show him. She would go and get the rock from the study, she would tell him she was the one who threw it. Then he would see.

She went up the stairs but the rock wasn’t there—the glass, yes, all over the place, and the blood on the desk and the carpet. But the rock was gone. Had the police taken it? To fingerprint? She stared at the glass on the floor, at the rain coming in through the broken window, then looked out the window at Ray’s herb garden. There was the garden’s perfect border, nothing missing. He must have put the rock back himself. Just put it back as if nothing had happened.

She went downstairs again, through the kitchen with its smooth, gleaming appliances, past Ray and out the back door onto the porch. She would get the rock, she would show him how bad and crazy she was. Then he would see.

But as she stepped out from under the eaves and the rain hit her face hard and cold, she came to her senses. Are you kidding, Evie Lynne? Ray would throw her out and then what would she do? Go back to Jones and Wallace and sell popcorn? Live in her sister’s trailer?

Rain foamed from the square-mouthed gutters, the driveway was lined with flattened daffodils. Evelyn stepped back under the eaves and wiped the rain from her eyes. What had Ingrid said when she was leaving? I like biking in the rain. Obviously Ingrid had not grown up in a falling-apart trailer with a leak over her bed. What was to like about rain? For years she had driven pickup trucks and trailers through it, she knew all about patching leaks in aluminum roofs to protect herself from it, about sleeping with towels thrown over the blankets in case the flashing did not hold. It was raining the night Joe died, an autumn thunderstorm.

Evelyn began to shiver. Why did Ray think everything was all right? It was dangerous to think that, to be so off-guard. If he would just realize how far from all right everything was, maybe he could figure out how to fix it. Because she had no idea.

She went back up the porch steps and into the kitchen. Ray had taken the overdone cake out of the oven and was standing at the sink rinsing teacups. He turned around and looked at her rain-soaked face, brown rivulets of mascara streaking her cheeks, her soaking clothes, the mud on her shoes.

“What the hell are you doing?” he said.

Evelyn inhaled the fragrance of chocolate, a tiny shelter.

“I’m sorry.”

Ray was silent a moment, looking at her. Then he said, “You don’t have to be sorry, but sweetheart, I’m worried about you. This isn’t good, that you’re—” she could see him search for the tactful phrase—“that you’re feeling so bad so often. Why don’t I ask Marseille for the names of some people, and you can go talk to someone—”

“No,” Evelyn said quickly. “I’m all right. I know I’ve been acting like a freak, I just—” she stopped. It was me who threw the rock, she wanted to say, the words were right there on her tongue, she could taste them: glass and blood.

I’m dangerous, you have no idea.

“I just, it was—” she tried. And then fell silent.

Ray came and put his arms around her. The rain in her clothes soaked into his, sticking them together so that she felt the warmth of his body seeping into her cold skin. She breathed in the scent of him, skin and clean clothes and soap, a scent that had always produced in her a feeling of comfort, safety. She did not feel safe now. She rubbed her cheek against Ray’s shirt, breathed him into her lungs again. Twelve weeks after they met, he’d asked her to marry him. At the time she was too high on endorphins and the delirium of winning the love lottery to consider it from any point of view except her own. Now she drew back and looked at her husband. He had made her part of the architecture of his happiness, had drawn her into his plans and now there she was: a solid structure before him.

Shaking, ready to fall down.

She couldn’t tell him. Not about the rock, not about anything. She must do something to shore things up however she could.

“Ask her,” she said.

“Ask who?”

She could see in Ray’s eyes that even without knowing she’d thrown the rock, something in her face had made him afraid. She touched his cheek.

“That girl—Ingrid. Ask her to move in.”