What The Dead Know

gym, chin-up bars in three heights, a slide that became hot to the touch on June days, hopscotch and foursquare grids painted in bright yellow. There had been a merry-go-round, not the kind with horses but one of those rickety metal ones. No, wait, that hadn’t been at the school but somewhere nearby, some-place vaguely forbidden. In the Wakefield apartments that surrounded the school? In her mind she remembered the dirt track first, because she pushed more often than she rode. Head down, like a horse in harness, she had lined up behind the boys, linking her left arm into the metal bar and beginning to run, making the riders scream with delight. She saw the toe of her-she needed a second to remember the shoes. Not athletic shoes, which is why she got in trouble. She was wearing her school shoes, brown, always brown, because brown was practical. But even practical brown couldn’t stand up to the orange dust of that playground, especially after the April rains. She had come home with dirt caked onto the toes, much to her mother’s exasperation.

What else could she tell them? There were eight sixth-grade teachers that year. Heather had the nice one, Mrs. Koger. They took the Iowa Basic Skills Test, and she was in the ninety-ninth percentile in everything. They did science projects that fall. She had netted crawfish from Gwynns Falls and put together an elaborate aquarium, but all four had died. Her father theorized that clean water was a shock to their systems after the murky, polluted stream and her exploration of that thesis had earned her an A anyway. Thirty years later she was beginning to have a clue how the crawfish had felt. You knew what you knew, you wanted what you wanted, even if it was literally scum.

But, of course, this was not what they would demand of her. They didn’t want the story of Heather Bethany before 1975. They wanted to know about the subsequent thirty years, and small details would not satisfy. She could not placate them with anecdotes about, say, her boxy little tape recorder. It was the first purchase she was allowed to make, a reward for six months of living by their rules, for proving her trustworthiness. They were okay with the tape recorder but appalled by the handful of tapes she bought as well. The Who, Jethro Tull, even some of the earlier punk bands. She would lie on the bumpy chenille bedspread, still in her school uniform, and listen to the New York Dolls and, later, the Clash. “Turn it down,” she was ordered. “Get your shoes off the bedspread.” She would obey, but everyone was still appalled. Perhaps they knew that she, like Holly in the Lou Reed song, was plotting to get on the bus and go take a walk on the wild side.

The irony was that they put her on the bus, sent her away as if she were the criminal. They meant to be kind. Well, he did. Her? She was glad to see her leave. Irene had always resented her presence in the household-not because of the pretense required in the external world but because of the reality of what happened within the house. She was the one who carped about the shoes on the bedspread and insisted that the music be turned down to a whisper. She was the one who offered neither solace nor salve for the bruises, wouldn’t even help concoct a reasonable cover story for those badges of occasional resistance-the cut lip, the black eye, the hobbled walk. You got yourself into this , Irene’s placid manner seemed to suggest. You brought this on yourself and destroyed my family in the bargain . In her head she shouted back, I’m a little girl! I’m just a little girl ! But she knew better than to raise her voice to Irene.

The music drowned it all out. Even when it was turned down to whispery volumes, the music made everything go away-the assaults, physical and spiritual, the exhaustion brought on by the double life that was really a triple life, the sadness in his face every morning. Make it stop, she pleaded with him silently from across the round breakfast table, so homey and warm, so everything she had thought she wanted. Please make it stop. His eyes replied, I can’t. But they both knew that was a lie. He had started it, and he was the only person who could find an end to it. Eventually, he proved that he had the power all along to save her, but it was too late. By the time he let her go, she was more broken than Humpty Dumpty, more shattered than the heads of Irene’s precious china dolls, which she had smashed with a poker one brilliant fall afternoon. Composure finally lost, Irene had flown at her, screaming, and even he had pretended not to understand why she would do such a thing.

“They wouldn’t stop looking at me,” she said.

The real problem, of course, was that no one looked at her, no one saw. Every day she walked out into the world with nothing more than a name and a hair color to disguise her-and no one ever noticed. She came to the breakfast table, aching in parts of herself that she barely knew, and the only thing anyone said was, “Do you want jelly on your toast?” Or, “It’s a cold morning, so I made hot chocolate.” See me, Roger Daltrey sang on her little red tape recorder. See me. Irene called up the stairs, Turn that noise down. She yelled back, It’s opera. I’m listening to an opera. Don’t sass me. You have chores.

Chores. Yes, she had a lot of chores, and they didn’t end at nightfall. Sometimes she made a list, called Who-I-Hate-the-Most, and Irene was never lower than three, and sometimes she made it as high as two.

Number one, however, was hers and hers alone.

PART II. THE MAN WITH THE BLUE GUITAR (1975)

CHAPTER 6

“Take your sister,” their father said, in both girls’ hearing, so Sunny couldn’t lie about it later. Otherwise, Heather knew, her older sister would have nodded and pretended agreement, then left her at home anyhow. Sunny was sneaky that way. Or tried to be, but Heather was forever catching her in her schemes.

“Why?” Sunny protested automatically. She must have known that the argument was lost before it began. It was pointless to argue with their father, although, unlike their mother, he didn’t mind when they talked back. He was happy to have long discussions in which he debated their points. He even helped them shape their side of things, build their cases like lawyers, which he was always reminding them that they could be. They could be anything they wanted, their father told them frequently. Yet in an argument with him, they could never be right. It was not unlike playing checkers with him, when he would guide his opponent’s hand with small shakes and nods of his head, letting the girls avert disastrous moves that might result in double-or even triple-jumps. Still, he somehow claimed victory in the final play, even when he was down to just one king.

“Heather’s only eleven,” he said in what the sisters thought of as his reasoning voice. “She can’t stay home alone. Your mother’s already left for work, and I have to be at the shop by ten.”

Head lowered over her plate, Heather watched them through her lashes, still as a cat studying a squirrel. She was torn. Normally she pushed for greater privileges whenever possible. She wasn’t a baby. She would be twelve next week. She should be allowed to stay at home alone on a Saturday afternoon. Since her mother had started working last fall, Heather was alone for at least an hour every afternoon, and the only rules were that she mustn’t touch the stove or have friends over. Heather liked that hour. She got to watch what she wanted on television-The Big Valley, usually-and eat as many graham crackers as she wanted.

That bit of freedom, however, had been forced on her parents. They had wanted Heather to wait in the Dickey Hill Elementary School library after school until Sunny could collect her, the same plan they had used when Heather was in fifth grade and fourth grade before that. But Dickey Hill got out at three and Sunny didn’t get home from junior high until past four now that her bus ride was so long. The principal at Dickey Hill had told Heather’s parents in no uncertain terms-that was her mother’s recounting of the story, and the phrase had stuck with Heather, in no uncertain terms-that her librarian was not a baby-sitter. So Heather’s parents, always eager not to be seen as people who expected special treatment, had decided that Heather could be in the house by herself. And if she could be by herself for an hour every day, Monday through Friday, then why couldn’t she be alone for three hours on a Saturday? Five was greater than three. Plus, if she won the right to stay home today, maybe she would never have to spend another deadly dull Saturday in her father’s store, much less