Summer of Fear, Page 3

  “And your father?”

  “Dad too, of course. He wants whatever Mom wants, always.”

  “They get along well, then?”

  “Yeah. They married each other, didn’t they?” It was such a strange question I wondered if I had misunderstood it. Some of the terms Julia used and the way she pronounced her words were disconcerting. Perhaps, I thought, she had meant something entirely different.

  But my answer seemed to satisfy her. I felt those eyes draw out of me, and she settled back on the bed.

  “Tell me about your family,” she said. “What are they like? I want to know all about them.”

  It was my bed she was lying on. I wondered if I should tell her and then I thought, No, it doesn’t matter. I could take the other bed for one night. Preferring one bed over the other was simply a matter of habit.

  “You must be tired,” I said. “I’ll leave you alone for a while so you can take a nap.”

  “No, don’t. Stay and talk to me.” It was more a command than a request. “If I’m going to live here I need to know about everybody. Tell me about your brothers. Which one is the oldest?”

  “Peter,” I said. “He’s eighteen, and he’ll be going to college in the fall. He’s the musical one in the family. He plays the bass in a band and during the day he works in a music store. Bobby’s eleven and likes to play baseball.” I paused. “Didn’t Aunt Marge ever talk about us? Didn’t you see the picture Mom sent at Christmas?”

  “I must have,” Julia said, “but I don’t remember it. What about you? Do you go away to school like I do?”

  “No,” I said. “I go to Highland High, right here in Albuquerque. This summer I’m not doing much of anything, at least, not yet. I applied for jobs at a lot of places, but so far nobody’s called me. I babysit for people and I help Mom in the darkroom, and I cook dinners and things when she’s got a job to get out. She does photo illustrations for magazines, you know.”

  “And your father? Where does he work?”

  “He’s an engineer and works for the government. That’s how we get to belong to the Coronado Club out on the base and use their pool and go to the dances. They have a lot of things going on out there for teens. I’ll take you to some of them when—well, when you’re ready. I know it’ll be a while before you’ll feel like doing stuff.”

  I tried to picture Julia at the pool, laughing and splashing and joking around with Carolyn and me. It was a hard thing to imagine. It was equally hard to picture her at a dance. Those huge eyes gazing up at me from the pillow, the thin face half lost in the flood of raven hair, seemed to belong to someone from another world.

  The words on Aunt Marge’s card came back to me—Our angel, Julie, is home for the holidays and the house is filled with singing. “Julie” was such a carefree nickname, it didn’t seem possible that it could ever have been used for this Julia.

  “Julia,” I said haltingly, knowing that I must say something, but what? How could I reach through the wall of grief that separated us and comfort her? Julia’s attempt at making small talk was touching, but I knew the effort it must be taking.

  “Julia,” I said again helplessly, and was interrupted by the sound of scratching at the door. Relief swept over me. Here was the diversion we needed!

  “There’s somebody here to see you,” I said. “Another member of the family.” I went to the door and opened it. “Come in, Trickle. I want you to meet a new friend.”

  “Who is it?” Julia asked, pulling herself to a sitting position. Her voice went strangely flat. “Oh. It’s a dog.”

  “Don’t call him that,” I said. “You’ll hurt his feelings. He thinks he’s people. He won’t even eat dog food because he thinks he should eat the same things we do. Mom and Dad gave him to me on my twelfth birthday.”

  Julia’s body seemed to stiffen. “I’m not very good with dogs. They don’t like me.”

  “Trickle will,” I told her. “He loves everybody, even the garbagemen. Other dogs all bark at the garbage truck, but Trickle just wags his tail.”

  “Keep him away from me!” Julia said. “I mean it, Rachel!”

  “You can’t be afraid of Trickle!” I exclaimed incredulously. “He wouldn’t hurt anybody! He’s the sweetest-natured dog in the world. There’s this man who breeds wirehairs up in Santa Fe—his kennel is where my parents got Trickle—and he said that he’d never sold a puppy who was as—”

  “Get him out ’er here!” Julia said. Her voice slashed through the room as sharp as a whip.

  “All right,” I said, startled. “Of course, if you’re really frightened. But you’ll feel differently when you get to know him. You’ll love him, I promise.”

  Then I heard another sound, low and gravelly. It was something I had never once heard in the entire three and eleven-twelfths years that Trickle had been with us. In amazement I turned and stared at my dog. His head was lowered and his ears were back and his lips were drawn away from his teeth. He was growling.

  When I think back I realize this was the first hint that something was terribly wrong.

  At the time I realized nothing. How could I?

  “Trickle, you bad thing!” I said. “What’s gotten into you?” And to Julia: “I’m ashamed of him. I’ve never seen him act like this before.”

  I took the poor dog by the collar to lead him out into the hall, and he was growling all the way. Then I picked him up and carried him down the stairs and put him outside.

  “You just stay out,” I told him, “until you’re in a better mood.”

  I re-entered the house through the back door and found Peter at the kitchen table, eating a bowl of ice cream and reading Rolling Stone. For such a skinny guy, Pete never seemed to stop eating.

  As I came in he lifted his head and tossed his hair back out of his eyes and said, “I see the parental units got home. Mom was just pulling out of the driveway as I came in.”

  “Probably headed for the grocery store,” I said. “The refrigerator’s empty.”

  “So I discovered.” He gestured toward the sink, where he had tossed the empty ice-cream carton. “Did they bring Julia back with them?”

  “Yes. She’s up in my room, lying down. I mean, in our room,” I corrected myself. “Hers and mine.”

  “What’s she like? Is she pretty?”

  “No,” I said. “In fact, the opposite. Very plain.”

  “Nice?”

  “I guess so. I didn’t talk with her very long. She doesn’t like dogs.”

  “Maybe she hasn’t been around any.”

  “That might be it,” I acknowledged. “Living at boarding school so much of the time, she wouldn’t have had pets, right? Are you rehearsing tonight?”

  “Nope,” Pete said. “We don’t have any gigs coming up till the dance at the club. Why?”

  “I’ve got a date tonight,” I said, “but I feel bad about going out and leaving Julia on her first night here. If you’re going to be home, you could entertain her.”

  “Now, wait a minute,” Pete said. He dropped his spoon so that it clattered against the side of the bowl. “Are you planning to stick me with some lame girl all night while you go out? Where are you going anyway?”

  “To the movies, and we’re taking Bobby.”

  “Well, take her too, then.”

  “I offered,” I said self-righteously, “and she doesn’t want to go.” I knew what was really going on. Pete pretended he didn’t like girls, but the truth was that he was painfully shy with them.

  “You might as well get to know her,” I told him. “After all, she’s going to be living here.”

  Before he could object any further I went on through the swinging door into the family room and turned on the television. Pretty soon Bobby came in, smelling like old sneakers and chewing gum, which was the way Bobby usually smelled on summer afternoons, and lay down on the floor, and we watched a game show together until Mom got home from the store and it was time to help fix dinner.

  It was weird that night to
see the table set with six places instead of five and to know that it would be that way every night from then on. Bobby got to the table first, as usual, and was sent back to wash his hands. Peter went to bring in an extra chair from the kitchen, and I went upstairs to get Julia.

  I knocked and said, “Dinner!” and Julia answered, “All right. I’m coming,” so I went back down to the others and we waited.

  We waited and waited, and finally Mom put the chops back into the oven to keep them warm and Dad said, “Are you sure she heard you?”

  “She answered,” I said. “She said she was coming.”

  “Girls,” Bobby grumbled. “They’re never on time for anything.”

  “At least they wash their hands,” I told him.

  “So? You don’t eat with your fingers, do you? We have forks,” Bobby countered.

  Dad and Bobby went into the usual routine, which we all heard at least twice a week. When it was over, Julia was still not down, and the chops were beginning to smell as though they were burning.

  “Maybe I’d better go up and check on her,” Mom began. “She could have dozed back off—”

  And then she was there, standing in the doorway. Julia.

  Then I knew why it had taken her so long. Julia had dressed for dinner. The dress she had chosen was pale yellow with a long, swirling skirt and bell sleeves. It was a lovely dress, a strangely familiar dress. I had an immediate feeling that I had seen one like it recently on someone else, someone it had looked really good on.

  But it wasn’t good on Julia. It seemed to hang wrong, with the shoulder seams not quite in the right place, so that her wrists extended too far below the ends of the sleeves. It was tight across the chest too, and the color was unflattering. Julia was too sallow to wear that pale, butterfly shade of yellow.

  But Mom got up and hugged her and said, “Honey, you look lovely,” and Dad smiled and said, “It’s been a long time since I’ve had the pleasure of seeing a girl at this table wearing anything but jeans. Have you met your cousins Pete and Bobby?”

  The boys grunted greetings, and Julia said something appropriate. Then everybody sat down and Mom went out and got the chops and we had dinner.

  What did we talk about at that dinner? It’s hard to remember. Just ordinary things, I guess. Mom had found an e-mail waiting for her from a magazine that wanted a picture of young people snowboarding. “Didn’t we take some last winter?” she mused. “I’ll have to check my negative file. Monthly magazines buy several months ahead, Julia, so the calls for winter pictures come in the summer.” Dad remarked on some items in the newspaper. “Professor Jarvis is certainly staying active in his retirement. He’s giving one of his occult lectures at the University Women’s Club.” Bobby wanted to know if he could get a riding mower to cut the grass instead of one that had to be manually pushed.

  I contributed the story of Trickle’s strange performance.

  “I’ve never heard him growl before,” I said. “I wonder if he’s feeling bad or something.”

  “Maybe he’s been eating grass,” Bobby suggested. “That makes dogs sick.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” I told him. “Dogs eat grass because they’re sick. It makes them better.”

  Julia didn’t often enter the conversation, but she listened. Her eyes went from one of us to another, studying our faces as she took in our words.

  It wasn’t until Peter dropped his fork that she spoke up abruptly.

  “Somebody’s coming.”

  “What?” Peter said, startled.

  “Oh—nothing.” Julia looked embarrassed. “It’s just something the hill people say. A silly superstition.”

  “How interesting!” Mom exclaimed. “I imagine you heard about all sorts of fascinating superstitions, living in that area of the Ozarks. Or were you there long enough to be exposed to them?”

  “I heard them from my folks,” Julia said. “They talked about them a lot. My father wanted atmosphere in his book. That’s why they hired Sarah from the village. They used her to learn how the jakey folks talked.”

  “What’s jakey mean?” Bobby asked.

  “Oh,” Julia said, “that’s just what the locals are called.”

  “You make it sound like a foreign country,” Peter said, interested despite himself.

  “It was,” Julia said. “Anyway, the part where we were seemed that way. It’s like nothing there has changed in a thousand years. People get born there and live their whole lives there just like their ancestors. Their idea of a trip to the big city is going into Lost Ridge on Saturdays. You try to tell them there’s a whole big world on the other side of the mountains, and they look at you like you’re crazy.”

  “Your father must have liked it there,” Dad inserted gently. “After all, he chose to live there.”

  “But not forever,” Julia said. “They decided they were just going to stay long enough for him to finish his last book. He’d have been done with it by summer. We were coming back then—this very summer, around August—”

  She let the sentence fall away, too painful to continue. We all shifted uncomfortably in a sudden search for a new direction in which to turn the conversation.

  I grabbed at an old, reliable subject.

  “What did you do when you went out with guys? Were there movies or bowling alleys or anything?”

  “Nothing,” Julia said. “Folks just sat and talked. That was dating. And if a girl wasn’t married by eighteen she was an old maid for sure. Sarah was twenty-two, and you should of heard the things people’d say about her—that she was stuck-up and thought she was too good for any local fellers and waiting for a prince to come riding in and carry her off somewhere. After she came to work for us they wouldn’t hardly talk to her. Not that she cared, of course.”

  “Did you have a boyfriend there?” Peter asked her. It was such an unbelievable question to come from Peter that we all turned to him in amazement. He avoided our eyes, keeping his trained on Julia.

  “No. Not really.”

  “Not really? Or no?”

  “The boys there weren’t my type,” Julia said. “When I pick somebody he’ll be ambitious. A college man, maybe.”

  She raised her eyes to meet his, and a deep flush began to rise in Peter’s face. He dropped his own gaze to his plate and began fumbling around trying to put butter on a slice of bread he had already buttered.

  “Can I have some more potatoes?” Bobby asked.

  “How did your car run while we were away?” Dad asked Peter. “Were you still getting that chirping sound in the engine?”

  The conversation was channeled off into other directions, and Julia slipped from it as easily as she had entered. When I look back, I think that was the only real talking she did during the entire meal.

  Bobby and I were clearing the table when the doorbell rang.

  “That will be Mike,” I said. “We’re going to an early movie. Do you want to come with us, Bobby? I forgot to ask earlier.”

  “Are you kidding?” Bobby asked incredulously. “With horror week on TV?”

  “I hope you’re not planning to go out in those jeans,” Mom said. “They have holes in the knees.”

  “They’re my favorite jeans!” I protested. “I’ve just broken them in!”

  The bell rang again and I went to answer it. I let Mike in and went up to change clothes, because even though I was right and the jeans were perfectly appropriate for going to the movies, it wasn’t worth getting into a fight with my mom about it.

  When I reached my room I saw that Julia had started to unpack. Her suitcase was open and the contents had been shoved around as though she had hurriedly dug through her things in order to locate the yellow dress. As I passed the suitcase my foot struck something and sent it rolling across the floor. I bent to pick it up and discovered it was a small jar that looked as though it might contain some sort of cosmetic, although it didn’t have a label.

  Curious, I unscrewed the top and saw that it held some sort of yellowish powder. It
had an odd smell and I capped it again quickly, deciding then and there that one thing I wouldn’t do with Julia was borrow her makeup. I stuck the jar back into the suitcase, from which it had evidently fallen, and continued across the room to the closet.

  When I went back downstairs, Mike was sitting in the living room with the family, telling them about a job he had just been offered as a lifeguard at the Coronado Club pool.

  “I had my name on the list since last fall,” he said, “but I never expected to get it, not with every other guy in town applying. But this afternoon they called and said it’s mine if I want it. If I want it?! It’s the perfect summer job!”

  “What about your lawn mowing?” I asked him. “Aren’t you supposed to be doing Professor Jarvis’s yard every week?”

  “I’ll pass that on to Bobby. The professor doesn’t care who does it as long as it gets done.” He got to his feet. “We’d better get going or we’ll miss the beginning of the movie. It’s good to have you guys home again. It was nice meeting you, Julia. I live next door, so you’ll have to get used to having me around.”

  “Thank you,” Julia said politely, and Mike and I left.

  “Well, what did you think of her?” I asked when we were in the car.

  “I didn’t think anything. I hardly saw her.” Mike turned the key in the ignition. “What do you think?”

  “She’s not what I expected,” I said. “She’s sort of strange. She has an odd way of talking—when she talks. Which isn’t much. She uses funny words. Slang, I guess, but not like the kind we use around here.”

  “What did you expect?” Mike asked. “She’s from another part of the country. She probably thinks we’re the ones who talk funny.”

  “But she only spent summers in the Ozarks,” I said. “She went to school in New England. And it’s not just her accent and the odd phrases. She has a way of pausing before she speaks as though she’s afraid she’s not going to say the right thing. She seems so tense and—well, almost afraid of us.”

  “Probably shy,” Mike said. “Who wouldn’t be, moving into a house with a nutcase like you in it?”