Уильям Макгиверн - Summitt

“I told you it was the sound of that car. It scared her, too... the lady, didn’t it?”

“I guess you’re right, it did.”

Shana pushed open the door and put a foot on the graveled drive.

“But there’s another thing.”

“Daddy, I told Barby I’d call her. Can’t we talk about it some other time?”

“No, let’s get it over with. Davey told me you were upset about something that happened a long time ago, something about a jukebox.”

Shana settled back and crossed her arms. Staring through the windshield, she said, “I told him because I thought he deserved to know what was worrying me, what I was feeling. I didn’t want him growing up with lots of mysterious things around him he couldn’t understand, that he’d feel anxious and guilty about.”

She looked skeptically at him. “It wasn’t just the jukebox. Don’t you remember anything about it?”

“We were in a booth having Cokes or something, I remember that much,” Selby said. “Tell me the rest of it.”

“I was wearing a white blouse and sweater, and a blue velvet skirt that Tishie made for me. Some men started laughing. They were having fun. I thought I was, too. When I started dancing, one of them said something and you told him to stop. It was a joke, I thought at first, but your face was mad, as if you were being threatened, not me. Outside I started crying, I couldn’t help it.”

“I told them to watch their language. You were pretty young, and I asked them to stop. That’s all there was to it.”

“But when you came out of the bar, there was blood on the back of your hands and you were laughing and that’s what I always remembered, how you were laughing, and that’s when I got sick all over Tishie’s skirt. You were laughing because you were strong and because everyone else was so weak—”

“Shana, you’ve got the whole thing twisted—”

“Because you say so?”

“No, because maybe you’re not seeing it exactly right... isn’t that possible, honey—?”

“I don’t care. Like this time... it was something happening to me, not to you, but before I could even try to understand it you took it away from me and turned it into something I could never be sure about. Daddy, you took over, but you left me out. That’s not going to happen again... I know what happened that night in that house. Nobody can ever tell me I’m wrong about that or didn’t understand it or that there are always two sides to things. What happened, happened to me, daddy. Not you. If you find out who did it and knock him around in a parking lot or something, then it’s yours... that might prove something to you, but it won’t prove what I need to prove, what I’ve got to prove to myself before I can understand and feel all right with myself again.”

“Shana, Shana,” he said wearily. “What is there to understand? What is there to prove?”

She climbed quickly from the car and stared back at him through the open door. “Well, you never even knew what happened in your own life, you told us that a thousand times... about spending Christmas and holidays at college because there wasn’t any home to go to after Davenport, and never knowing your father... We grew up with your feelings, they got to be part of our lives. We were never sure what was you and what was us, or where the truth of anything was for us . Do you understand now what I’m trying to say? I mean, I don’t want any doubts about what happened. I was raped. I was raped, and the man, whoever he is, has got to admit he did that to me. Not to you, daddy. Me. I didn’t want it, or look for it, or like it and nobody is going to twist that around and say it was anything else, not now and not ever. I mean... I belong to me, the truth belongs to me...”

She slammed the car door and ran to the house, running from him, Selby knew, her hair streaming behind her under a drift of leaves.

Selby sat behind the wheel looking after her. “I belong to me, the truth belongs to me...” It wasn’t a reasonable statement, it wasn’t a logical or sensible one. Only the passion and the touching, high candor of someone very young could have found such words to frame them.

In the study, he called Gideen, who had heard a report of the fire on the radio and had already driven out to Vinegar Hill.

“Saw your car there, and the police, so I went on by, Harry. But I picked up a tail coming back through Buck Run. Them fellas in the black Connie again. New York plates, but I didn’t get the numbers. Talk around here now is that Ollie Jessup might move his Tabernacle church over to Atlantic City, or somewhere on the shore. Except for them things, Harry, I’d got to say we wasted them buck hounds last night.”

Selby changed into a sweat suit and jogged from the top of the meadow down a trail to their pond, which was like a flat, oval slate in the clear sunlight. When he was worried, as he was now, a workout sometimes burned away his restlessness.

Shana’s bicycle, he thought, start there. Red paint on it, according to Davey. Not so, according to the police. Or start with Jarrell at Summitt City. And the girl who hadn’t known where the coffee was. And the sergeant with a chiseled Indian profile. Someone tailing Gideen.

The grass was slick and brittle with the morning’s frost, snapping like glass under his feet.

The ducks swam urgently from the sound of his running footsteps. Selby shook beads of perspiration from his eyelashes, and everything around him was refracted crazily by those tiny drops of water, the pond shot through with shards of light and the trees distorted and shimmering in surreal patterns.

Vinegar Hill. Bloodstains, ropes, fingerprints, any other physical evidence, burned to ashes, flooded under tons of water...

On the trail he and Davey had cut parallel to the logging road, Selby thought of the man in a car watching their house the night he had been at Summitt City. A man in a red sports car...

At last he rested under a shattered oak tree, a relic of an electrical storm that had struck the county during the summer Sarah’s mother had lived with them.

“Pay the two dollars,” had always been Tishie’s advice about anything in life you couldn’t budge or change — accept, don’t argue, don’t aggravate yourself, pay the fine, who can fight City Hall? Who wins? Don’t break your head over what can’t be helped, the will or whim of authority, the hem that couldn’t be lowered because “there was nothing to work with,” rain on wedding days, the undertaker, the tax collector, live with it. Pay...

Selby looked up at the dead tree, limbs gray and leafless, and remembered that she hadn’t been so philosophical about thunder and lightning; they scared her out of her wits and she would invent any excuse to stay with Shana during electric storms, reading to her and Davey, or mending things that didn’t need mending, anything so she wouldn’t be alone in her room when thunder sent Blazer with his tail between his legs into the basement and lightning cracked like a big, bright whip over the meadows.

Tishie’s husband had been Joseph, Sager, “assistant to the concertmaster” of the Manhattan Symphony Orchestra, a man of shy dignity and manners — few faults and fewer words, Tishie had always said of him. Starting at the Manhattan as a janitor, a refugee from Germany, he had been eager for anything to turn his hand to. Mopping floors, sweeping out dressing rooms, loading instruments into cabs or vans when the orchestra traveled. Over the years he became the concertmaster’s valet and personal chauffeur; in Tishie’s view this had only confirmed the title she had bestowed on him from the start — “assistant to the concert-master.” With strangers and an extra glass of sherry, she might slur a word or two and smilingly elevate her husband to the post of “assistant concertmaster.”