The Window (9 page)

And then, after all that hiding, we're driving along listening to the radio when suddenly Hannah says, "Ted, stop."

She reaches past me to turn the music up loud, and in another minute all four of us are out in the middle of the road, dancing. Dancing in the headlights of Ted's car, lights that shine through my eyelids when I turn toward them.

Cars go past and everyone honks, and the guys are laughing as hard as we are.

Then Ted says, "That's a police cruiser," and we scramble back inside his car.

We're sitting in the car's four corners, trying to act like we haven't been doing anything unusual, when the patrolman comes to the window. He swings his flashlight around; I see the light when it crosses my eyes.

"You kids OK?" His voice gets louder, I guess at some indication from Ted. "Everything all right here?"

"Yes, sir," says Ted.

But the patrolman says, "Girls?" and waits until both Hannah and I answer.

"Then you better get on home and get dressed," he says.

"Yes, sir," says Ted again, and then, once we're driving, we laugh and laugh like we're going to laugh forever. I say, "Ted, he meant us, Hannah and I should get dressed."

"How do you know?" Ryan asks, and the four of us about die laughing, Ryan the hardest, and Hannah tells Ted to watch the road.

H
ANNAH AND
I wake up in the tent, sometime in the middle of the night. It's cold and damp, and I say, "Hannah, let's go up to my room." We go inside, climb into my big double bed, which is chilly, too, until the sheets warm.

And then we don't wake up again until Aunt Emma's at the steps, calling that if we're not downstairs within the hour we'll miss lunch.

"I can't believe we did that, go to town in nightgowns," Hannah says.

"Me either."

"My mom would kill me."

"Aunt Emma, too," I say, even though I don't think she would. "I had fun last night."

"Me, too." Hannah pauses, and I get the idea she's choosing her next words carefully. "Mandy, don't take this wrong and get all huffy, but I want you to know I really admire you." Her voice takes on a raw edge, like she's suddenly close to tears. "I mean, whatever happens, you just kind of charge forward and deal with it, and I'm not always so good at that."

There's no way I can imagine she's joking because her voice tells me she's not, and I'm too stunned to answer quickly enough.

Hannah turns over, and when she speaks again the rawness is gone. "I guess if my folks get a divorce my brother and I will stay with Mom. Dad will probably get us on weekends."

"Is that what you want?"

"That's how it's usually done," she says. "Want doesn't come into it."

"Want doesn't come into it." Gwen's mother's words, and hearing Hannah say them makes the skin on my arms tighten into goose bumps.

Hannah asks, "Should I pull up another blanket? You shivered."

"No," and I'm thinking back, trying to remember if I'd told her those words. Maybe they're Texas words, I think, and everyone says them.

Hannah stays with me through the afternoon, even though she listens every time the phone rings, like she's hoping it's for her. We both know things must be really weird at her house if her mother's not calling her to come home.

Hannah opens my bedroom window. "Mandy, have you seen Gwen anymore?"

"No," I say, guilty because I'm lying but still not wanting to tell her about the last time.

"Come try," Hannah urges until I stand next to her. "Call," she says, insistent in a way that's not like her.

"Gwen," I yell, feeling stupid, "Gwen."

I tell Hannah, "This isn't how it works."

"You mean Gwen won't let me see her," Hannah says, jerking me inside and pulling down the window.

Pulling it down on the voice in the wind.

She hasn't heard, but I have. Little Abe is calling Gwen.

In the evening, when I'm alone again, I go back to the window. To reach out to Gwen, or to wait for her to let me go to her. I've stopped knowing which way it is.

I find her summer has turned into a chill December, and her house has become a house of careful, small moments....

Gwen wandered through the rooms, touching this, looking at that, as if she was trying to memorize things.

Abe came in from outside, dropping his coat in the hall.

"Want to go play a game?" he asked.

Gwen swooped him up and hugged him so tightly he said, "Let me down, you're hurting."

Then she went up to the attic, to her room. She ran her hand along a shell pink wall and starched lace curtain. Looked across the stretching fields, already rented out now that her father was gone.

She opened a drawer and wondered what she should take.

"You're leaving, aren't you?" Her mother's voice at the doorway made her jump. "I thought so."

"How did you know?"

"Gwen, please. It can't be so bad here that you have to run away."

"There's not anything bad, Mama," Gwen said. "It's just that..."

"Then why?" her mother asked, but she didn't wait for an answer. She shook her head as though she had already decided arguing was useless. "Well, I can't stop you, but I won't take you back, either."

Gwen spent the next long hours by herself, waiting for evening, for Paul. He'd written that he'd found a room for her just off base, that he was using his first real leave to come get her. Gwen had planned to go off with him and then write, but somehow her mother had guessed.

Her mother came up to the attic just once more. "I hope you'll get married?"

"We already are," Gwen said.

Her mother made a strangled sound, more like a snort than anything. "Here, then," and she thrust one of her own nightgowns into Gwen's hands. "You can't go to your husband in pajamas."

When Paul's car sounded in the drive, Gwen grabbed her suitcase and ran down all the stairs and out to meet him. And then, for all her hurrying, she looked back. Looked back at an empty porch and nobody waving good-bye.

Her mother's nightgown was on top of everything, in her suitcase.

Ted has started picking me up on his way to school. It's not far out of his way.

He honks and I go out to his car, a vehicle that he is very proud of. He got it right after he got his license, he told me, because the bus doesn't go near his house and his mother wanted to stop driving.

"His parents," Aunt Emma said, "think the sun rises and sets on that boy. If he wanted his own airplane, they'd find a way to give it to him."

This morning I'm only halfway to his car when he calls, "Mandy, come here and hold out your hands. Together and carefully."

He puts something soft and warm and incredibly light in my palms. "A baby possum," he says. "I found it by the road."

"Alone?"

"A big one was nearby, run over. I think it was this one's mother."

The baby is so small I can almost hold it in one palm, and I'm terrified I'll hurt it. "Take it, Ted," I say, "before I drop it."

"You won't. You can raise it."

"Me? You found it. Him. Her. Whatever."

But even as I talk, groping for a joke, my insides are thumping over because I want so much to care for the little thing. I'm wishing I dared trust it to one hand. I want the other free to stroke it, and find the top of its head, and how its tail feels.

At the same time, I'm panicky.

"I don't know anything about taking care of an animal," I say. "I've never had a pet. What do you feed it?"

"It's a baby, Mandy." Ted sounds exasperated, but he's laughing, too. "Milk, of course."

"And Aunt Emma probably won't let me keep it. If she wanted a pet, she'd have a cat or a dog."

"Why don't you ask?"

I pull back one hand just a little, begin to explore the hairless tip of its tail with my finger. A low growl and hiss make me wonder if I'm going to get bitten. Then I realize probably it's the baby that's frightened.

I leave the opossum with Ted and go in the house to find Aunt Emma. I was right about her not wanting a pet. "Keeping a wild animal is probably not even legal," she says. "I'll call the shelter and see what they say to do."

I won't beg. It's something I've never done and I'm not going to begin now. I turn, walk partway down the hall.

And turn again and go back.

"Please, Aunt Emma. Just until it can go out on its own?"

"Mandy..."

"Please?"

There's a long silent moment, a moment in which I swear to myself that if Aunt Emma says no I won't ever ask her for anything again. Won't ever ask anyone for anything. I shrug and start to say, "Never mind."

"I guess," she says, "we could try feeding it some of the milk replacer your uncles keep on hand for calving. I should have an eyedropper somewhere."

Then she catches my arm as Ted and I are leaving. "Mandy, it probably won't live, you know. Wild things often don't."

I'd like to say it doesn't matter, but I can't. "Please don't let it die, Aunt Emma," I say. "Please, please don't."

Ted, on the drive to school, is absolutely delighted with himself, all out of proportion to saving an orphaned opossum.

At school Hannah's lining up my day, telling me we should go shopping in the afternoon.

I tell her I can't. I have to get home to the opossum.

Besides, I wish Hannah would understand that I don't want her help shopping. Finding the right presents for Aunt Emma and the uncles is something I should be able to do by myself.

The school halls are even more noisy than usual, and at lunch the cafeteria is thundering with band instruments playing a preview of a holiday concert. I can't hear what anybody is saying, can't even hear voices well enough to know who's sitting where.

"I'm leaving," I shout, to whoever's listening. I get up, only where I thought there was a space there's not and I knock a tray crashing to the floor. I reach down, touch something cold and wet, wonder how to clean up.

Someone says, "I'll get it."

I sink back into my chair. For a moment everything—the tray, all the noise—it's more than I can deal with.

"Hey," somebody yells in my ear, "you're complaining about the food?" I recognize Ryan's voice. He's trying to make me feel better.

Then Hannah's with me, and we're walking outside toward the building where the resource room is.

"I don't know what happened," I begin. I realize I owe Hannah some sort of explanation, but I'm just too tired and overwhelmed to make it. The opossum, Aunt Emma giving in to me, those blasted presents I don't know what to do about ... This day feels like it's been thirty hours long.
"Sometimes I just want to get away from everything."

"Me top," says Hannah.

In Ms. Z.'s room I slump into a seat, and for once nobody comes and asks me if I need help. I must sit there twenty or thirty minutes, listening to the quiet click and chunk of keyboards and printers, to the hum of machinery fans, to the murmur of one of the boys reading under his breath. Slowly things calm down inside me, until I'm finally ready to get to work.

I go to my computer and begin a file for a paper I'm writing for English. The assignment is to capture an instant using sensory detail. I'm doing mine on an early summer morning, as far from Christmas as I can get.

It's pretty boring stuff, how the sunrise looked through the back window of the car the summer Mom and I drove west. How the sky went clear down to the earth. How empty the road was, empty as we were because we hadn't stopped for breakfast yet, empty like I always felt when we'd left one place and hadn't yet found the next.

I hear someone come up behind me. Ms. Z. says, "You make it seem real."

"It's just what I remember," I say.

"Being able to remember details is a gift."

And then she goes away and Ted takes her place. He must have been watching us, reading our lips, because he says, "I heard the ocean once, in a seashell. When I was little, before my hearing got so bad. But I don't have words for the sound."

I know what he's saying, that he wishes he could put sounds on paper, to keep them.

The way I wish I could know for sure I won't ever forget the sky, or the color of an empty road.

"I hope Ms. Z.'s right," I say, "about me having a gift for remembering. Because sometimes I wake up and everything is black, and for an awful time I wonder if I've forgotten how it was, what things looked like."

"Like the sun," says Ted. "Like the sun through the car window. You won't, Mandy."

I shrug. How can he know?