Уильям Макгиверн - Summitt

“That must’ve been the way then.”

“Are you sure?”

“Not really.” She shrugged. “I’m not sure of anything. You’ve got everything I let hang out on those tapes. What else do you want?”

“I’d like to know what you’re afraid of and why you get your back up when I try to talk to you. Please try to understand we’re trying to help—”

“Why am I supposed to understand?” Her voice was tight and angry again. “People do what they’re strong enough and grown up enough to do, and then they expect me to understand it. Why should I? I can’t make people do what I want, so why should I be expected to understand them?”

She turned and stared at him. “Why didn’t you come home from San Francisco that summer? Because you didn’t want to, that’s why, but you expected me and Davey to understand, didn’t you? Her name was Angela, wasn’t it?”

Selby felt as if he’d been hit by a blockingback. “Yes, I think it was,” he said, conscious of the inanity of his response.

“Well, I’m sure it was,” Shana said. “I wrote her name fifty times on a piece of paper... Angela, Angela, Angela, over and over till my hand was tired and then I burned the paper and buried the ashes down at the pond and told Davey, because he was so little then, that that would make you come back.”

“Shana, listen to me, those two weeks had nothing to do with you and Davey. I didn’t even know you knew .”

“How could we help it? We heard mommy on the phone and heard her crying after you hung up. Davey thought you’d never come home, he thought you were dead. He sat on my bed every night, with that spelling game you bought him one Christmas. He’d spell out the time he’d hope your car would come into the drive. Eight o’clock, nine o’clock, ten o’clock, till he couldn’t stay awake anymore—”

“Your mother and I had an argument, Shana. There happened to be an Angela around afterward.”

“It doesn’t matter now.” She had begun to cry, the tears bright under the hair that had fallen across her swollen face. “For a long time I thought what was important was somewhere outside of me. Where Tishie’s mother and father died in Germany. Or how you had to work on a railroad and make teams to get through school, and that big Frenchman, Claud, you hated.” She pushed her hair back and let her breath out slowly. There was a catch in her voice as she said, too wise for her years, “Life isn’t outside you. What’s outside is just what changes . But nobody tells you that. You hear about sex and not getting fat on the pill or anything. When I had my first period mommy said it was like opening a wonderful new book, but I think she was thinking about knitting things and grandchildren.”

She looked out the window. “Your own bedroom, funny kittens, even poor old Blazer, the feeling that everybody will be at breakfast and dinner in their same places forever and ever — they tell you that’s yours, that it belongs to you, but they can take it away any time they want to, except you don’t know that until way later. Davey still doesn’t know it.”

The phone began to ring. “I’m sorry, daddy. Give me a handkerchief, please.”

He gave her a handkerchief and she wiped her eyes. “Want me to get it, Shana?”

“Sure, go ahead.”

“I’ll take it in my bedroom,” Selby said. “Will you try to remember I love you? I know what I mean by that. Remember that, too, okay?”

It was Casper Gideen. “Harry, I think you ought to know. There’s talk going around Little Tenn about Goldie Boy Jessup and Coralee, Barby Kane’s ma. They been meeting with some stranger, not here but once near the old Cooper Mill, another time at Pyle’s Corners. I was watching, Harry. Coralee’s mighty jumpy now. I figure they got to be hiding something. And it touches you, Harry — some way I can’t figure yet. So I’ll keep watching ’em.”

“Casper, you could be letting yourself in for trouble.”

“That could go two ways, I expect. Trouble for somebody else. I won’t call next time, Harry, we’ll meet somewhere. I don’t want my wife and boys knowing about this. Goodbye to you, Harry.”

Selby tried to concentrate on what Gideen had told him, but the scene with Shana had splintered his thoughts.

What was he supposed to tell her? How could he explain away her fears. Goddammit, Selby thought, and slammed his fist down on the desk. The bell at the phone base sounded in tinny vibrations. The Israeli athletes on the wall... was there truth and comfort there? Or where Tishie’s parents had died, or where he had hoisted creosote-soaked railroad ties onto a railway bed, or swung a spike maul in the heat? Did any of that make a little more sense than the words on Shana’s T-shirts? “Reagan for Rex,” “Sky Lab Missed Me,” “Uppity Women Unite!” and “Miss Piggy Is a Pet Rock”?

Selby drove back to Dade Road and studied the terrain on both sides of the bridge again, the sprawling elegance of The Lakes, and the stretch of blacktop cutting through deep woods and past lonely houses.

He didn’t see Eberle’s gray Ford but he wasn’t worried about that now. Something else was bothering Selby. He felt he had missed something. A big, simple truth was staring him in the face, but he couldn’t make out its details and patterns.

He stopped half a dozen times to copy down names from signs and mailboxes, some of them barely visible through the underbrush — Sorenson, Windfall, Vinegar Hill, Ratcroft, R. J. Rose...

He drove back to Muhlenburg and picked up Davey. In the fading light they returned to Dade Road. “You were right,” Selby told him as the station wagon rattled across the shadowed bridge. “I’m proud of you.”

“But where’d he take her from here?” Davey asked, all but ignoring the compliment.

“Let’s keep looking.”

Selby drove first toward The Lakes, the creek shining on one side, a stretch of fairways and sand traps on the other. A wind had come up and the pennants at the entrance to The Lakes were pointing stiffly into the low, gray skies. The guard’s kiosk was centered between red-and-white traffic standards. A man in uniform stepped from the booth when Selby stopped at the traffic barrier.

“Help you, sir?”

The uniform was smart and military, gray twill with epaulets and shining metal buttons. The guard’s hair was white, but there was a capable look to his ruddy face and big hands.

“I was admiring the photographs,” Selby said.

“I saw you drive by earlier, didn’t I, sir?”

“That’s right. I brought my son back for a look.”

“You’re sure welcome. We’ve got a fine place here, the pictures don’t tell half of it.”

The photographs were mounted on a billboard whose wooden supports were painted in black-and-white stripes. The large photographs were of swimming pools, homes and fairways. Smaller photos presented views of tennis courts and riding stables.

Selby smiled at the white-haired guard. “How long have the pictures been up?”

“Couldn’t say for sure,” the guard told him. “A few weeks anyway.”

Selby backed out of the entrance and drove on for a few miles. Then he pulled off the road near the cemetery. When he rolled his window down, a cold wind blew around them. Birds were crying in the trees.

Selby said, “Shana’s afraid of something. Something she won’t talk to me about.” He paused. “You have any idea what it is?”

“No, dad, I don’t. But I wouldn’t know anyway.” Davey sighed. “She won’t talk to me either — about what happened that night. Everything’s different now. We used to talk all the time. We’d pretend we lived together and had our own house. Shana would be an airline pilot and I’d be the navigator and we’d fly through storms sometimes or so low we could see Blazer barking up at us... Or I’d be the steward, getting everybody Cokes. One time we were captains on a Mars shot. We talked about that every night one winter, figuring out how one of us would get lost and how we’d look for each other, or get hit by asteroids or something...” Davey nervously moistened his lips and looked at his father, his face a pale blur in the shadows. “She’s afraid of you, dad. That’s part of it, I think.”