At Risk Read online

  “You’d rather have Daddy get stung than kill that stupid wasp,” Amanda says to Charlie after the wasp has been directed out the window and car keys and backpacks and gym bags have all been collected.

  Amanda looks over at Ivan, concerned. It’s a look Polly has been noticing a lot more often lately. Suddenly, Amanda is interested in how Ivan feels and what he thinks. When he talks, Amanda listens. When Polly talks, Amanda puts on her Walk-man. And, Polly knows, it’s only the beginning. By the time Amanda is fourteen, Polly will be lucky if her daughter speaks to her, never mind listens to her. Polly remembers only too well when she cut off her own mother, Claire. In her memory still, it’s as if she had two mothers: the warm person she loved to touch and be near and the weak, disappointing creature she realized her mother was as soon as Polly turned thirteen. Of course, circumstances were different. Claire had already disappointed Polly, but Polly has never wavered from her adolescent assessment of Claire, and now that worries her. Amanda was an easy child, the kind who edges onto your lap, who never had to be told to hold hands when crossing the street. Sooner or later, she’ll have to hate her mother, and all Polly can hope for is that their break will be temporary, that it won’t cause any permanent damage.

  While Ivan guides the children out the back door, Polly taps down the broken porch step with the heel of her shoe. The house is white, with black shutters; the porch ceiling is a soft blue, as though a wedge of the noonday sky had been caught inside the wood. With its oval windows on the stair landings and its wide, sloping floorboards, it’s the kind of house Polly always dreamed of having as a child. But Charlie and Amanda take it for granted and treat it badly. They slam doors and complain about drafts; their idea of a great house is something modern and sleek, with skylights and lofts and cable TV.

  “You really make me sick,” Amanda tells her brother.

  “Thank you,” Charlie says, with a formal bow.

  Originally, Polly and Ivan moved up to Cape Ann from Boston for the children. But, as it turns out, they’re the ones who have become most attached. It’s not only the house they fell in love with but the town. Morrow has a wicked history, one the children have no interest in, a history prettily disguised by the large white sea captains’ houses, and the town common ringed with shops, and the day-trippers up from Boston all summer, here for the wide, smooth beaches. Whether or not two witches were drowned in the pond in the center of the common is uncertain, but many towns in Massachusetts could claim that heritage. What nearly turned Morrow into a ghost town was the influenza epidemic after World War I. Whole families perished in single rooms. Children were lost one after another, wives locked themselves in attics so they would not infect their husbands. For years afterward no one was interested in the sea captains’ houses or the summer cottages, even though the reason they were abandoned was long forgotten. In the sixties new-comers from Boston who knew nothing of the epidemic began to buy up houses, cheap, and some of the vegetarian restaurants and craft shops they opened are still in operation, though their prices are much higher now. The school superintendent began to hire Harvard graduates, who, in a later era, might have gone on to business or law school, but who, in 1965, were drawn to a small town where their dogs could run free and summers could be spent digging clams and getting suntans. By the time Polly and Ivan were looking for a house, Morrow’s school district had been rated among the top ten in the Commonwealth. That alone was reason to move.

  Of course, the children tell them often enough how they plan to leave town as soon as they turn eighteen. Amanda wants to live in Manhattan. Charlie alternates between Alaska and California.

  “Good. Go. I’ll pay for your plane fare,” Ivan tells them during arguments when they taunt him with how much distance they intend to put between themselves and their parents once they’re free to do as they please. But when the children are in bed, and Polly and Ivan sit out on the porch and watch lightning bugs drift through the bushes, they find themselves wishing they could stop time and keep Amanda and Charlie children forever.

  Impossible, and yet they hope.

  “No Laurel Smith today?” Ivan teases Polly as she gets the kids into the Blazer.

  “Don’t make fun of Laurel,” Polly tells Ivan. She leans on the open door of the Blazer, only now remembering she has an appointment to take it in for new shocks this afternoon.

  “I knew it!” Ivan says. “You’re falling for her garbage. You’re so suggestible.”

  “I am not,” Polly says.

  This summer, Polly had her long, dark hair cut into short layers with the idea of facing up to her thirty-sixth birthday, but instead of making her look her age, the new haircut has her looking as young as a graduate student.

  “I suggest we send them off in a cab and go back to bed,” Ivan whispers.

  Polly grins at him, not taking his proposal seriously.

  “You make time for Laurel Smith,” Ivan complains.

  “That’s work,” Polly says, annoyed.

  “Mom,” Amanda calls from the backseat, “I don’t want to be the last one there.”

  “She doesn’t want to be the last one there,” Polly tells Ivan, grateful for a way out of a conversation which, she knows, will end with Ivan accusing her of what he himself is guilty of: too many hours spent working.

  “A fate worse than death,” Ivan says. He kisses Polly and Polly kisses him back. Before Ivan moves away, she quickly bites his lip.

  “That’s for being mean about my job,” Polly says as she gets into the car.

  “I was not mean,” Ivan insists. He leans in the window and kisses Amanda, walks around the Blazer toward the ancient Karmann-Ghia he refuses to give up, then leans into Charlie’s window. “It’s just that I’m medium cool about Laurel Smith,” he puns, and the children both let out a groan.

  “Dad, that was pathetic,” Charlie says.

  “Let me out of here,” Ivan says. “I’m going where I’m appreciated.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Polly grins, knowing how unappreciated Ivan has been feeling lately. “Where’s that?”

  “Mother, do you have to argue?” Amanda says from the backseat.

  Ivan and Polly stare at each other. One of them is amused; the other isn’t.

  “Don’t gloat,” Polly tells Ivan. “You’ll be the one they turn on next.”

  Ivan grins and gets into his car. He waves as he backs out of the driveway, and after he’s gone Polly reaches for her sunglasses and heads for the Cheshire School. Charlie sits glumly beside her; as always, he is going with them against his will. As far as he’s concerned, anyone who isn’t his best friend, Sevrin, is just a pain in the neck. As she’s backing down the driveway, Polly gets a glimpse of Amanda’s thoughtful, unreadable face in the rearview mirror. Amanda is always distant before a meet; her nervousness takes the form of an unearthly calm so that Polly has to say everything to her twice before Amanda hears her.

  There’s a seance today, which Polly is missing, but it’s worth it. She has been photographing seances—what Laurel Smith calls readings—since June, and so far not one spirit has appeared on film. Polly has tried slower shutter speeds and faster film, she has switched from color to black-and-whitc. Some of the photographs, though ghost free, are remarkable. In several Laurel Smith, who is a few years younger than Polly, is completely unrecognizable. There’s a photograph in which she looks like an old, dark woman and another in which she doesn’t appear to be more than a child, with her heavy, pale hair fanned out behind her as though dripping with water. The one photograph Polly had found herself going back to again and again was taken during a reading in which Laurel had contacted a client’s husband who was killed in a car crash. Without a doubt, in that photograph, there is a scar along Laurel Smith’s forehead.

  “Either she’s a great actress,” Polly once told Betsy Stafford, “or something real is going on here.”

  Betsy, who is much more of a cynic than Polly, had smiled and said, “You’ll have to wait and read the book to find out th
e answer.” Even after she’d seen some of the photographs, Betsy had refused to admit that Laurel might be anything but a charlatan. “Let’s just accept Laurel for what she is,” Betsy insisted. “A nut.”

  Polly will always be grateful to Betsy because Betsy is the one who pulled Polly out of her indecision about whether or not to become a professional, an act for which there will never be enough thanks. Their first collaboration—an activity book for preschoolers—was begun after the two women met through their sons, both in the same nursery school. Charlie and Sevrin have remained best friends, yet the relationship between their mothers remains professional by choice, even though Polly knows, via Charlie, all sorts of odd and intimate details about Betsy’s life she might otherwise not know: That she allows the sugary breakfast cereals Polly frowns on. That Betsy’s husband, Frank, an attorney who commutes into Boston, often does not get home until past nine and when he and Betsy fight they don’t bother to close the bedroom door. They curse when they fight, loudly. Charlie’s told her so.

  Polly admits to being the passive partner. Betsy is the one who writes the proposals, then goes out and gets the book contracts, and afterward hires Polly. So perhaps it is not a partnership at all, except that it feels like one. Particularly since their last book, an in-depth study of coping with death, is a choice Polly herself would have never made. She almost turned down the project, but the fee was too seductive, enough to pay for gymnastics camp and orthodontists and hamster cages for years to come. After photographing her first terminal patient, Polly spent half an hour throwing up by the side of the road. It never got easier, whether the sessions were in a hospital, a hospice, or the subject’s home. Only two of the people she photographed have not yet died, an elderly woman with cancer and a young man in Boston with an inoperable tumor at the base of his skull. Both write to Polly occasionally, and she always writes back, but she never looks at the finished book, though it is the project that allowed her to say no, now and forever, to photographing birthday parties and weddings.

  The book about Laurel Smith was supposed to cheer them up. A lighter book, it was to be a mild debunking. It has not turned out that way. Laurel looks more like a librarian than a medium and, seances aside, her behavior is extremely sensible. She has long blond hair like Amanda’s, and deep-set gray eyes. She never bothers with makeup, and Polly has never seen her wear any jewelry other than two rings, one a small pearl set in gold, the other a thin silver band. Though her clients seem willing to pay any amount necessary to reach the spirits they long to contact, Laurel never changes her fee. No matter how rich her client, she always charges two hundred dollars for a reading. Betsy, who unbeknownst to Laurel has been researching her background and discovered a small trust fund left to Laurel by her parents, doesn’t give Laurel any credit for generosity. But Polly is not so quick to judge her. There have been times, inside Laurel’s cottage, when Polly has found herself believing in an afterlife. She tells herself it is the powerful conviction of Laurel’s clients, all so desperately convinced whoever they have loved and lost can be reached, that affects her. Or it is the place itself, the movement of reeds and cattails in the marsh, the way the light falls and is caught inside the pearl Laurel wears on her finger.

  By the time Polly drives into the parking lot at the elementary school, the heat has begun to drift up from the asphalt in snaky waves. The glass windows along the gym look smoky and dark, making the place seem empty, but it’s just an illusion. The windows have been treated to keep out the sun; on the other side of the glass, the gym is already filling up with parents. Polly knows she can’t stop Amanda from becoming a teenager, but she’s thankful that the combined high school and junior high is on the other side of town, so that Amanda will be protected from mixing with high school students for another year.

  Amanda gets out of the car, carrying her pink nylon gym bag like a professional, slinging it over her arm, hardly noticing its weight. Strands of her hair have slipped out of the elastic band that holds her ponytail. This is the last meet of the summer, and Amanda is excited about her best three events: floor exercise, the balance beam, and vaulting. In her bag she has her cassette ready, Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like the Wolf,” Amanda is sweating too much; the heat is bothering her, or maybe she’s more nervous than she’d thought. When she woke up this morning her sheets were drenched with sweat. She wants to win this meet. She doesn’t mention the Olympics anymore because people like her parents get sappy, patronizing looks on their faces when she does. She knows hundreds of other girls dream of going to Texas and having Bela Karolyi as their coach, but Amanda is actually saving her money. All she wants is one audition. If he tells her she’s not good enough, she’ll have to accept it.

  ()f course the truth is, she can’t imagine him telling her that.

  “Knock them dead,” Polly tells her when they reach the door to the school. She hugs Amanda tightly, and when Amanda runs off to the locker room, Polly and Charlie head over to the gym. Charlie continues to read as he walks up the bleachers; it drives Polly crazy that he doesn’t watch where he’s going, but she bites her tongue. She’s learned to save her reprimands, to dole them out carefully, in the hopes that they might actually count for something.

  When they find a place in the bleachers, Charlie takes off his backpack and sits down, then unzips the backpack and gets out another dinosaur book. He is a Tyrannosaurus rex devotee. He can tell you how long a tyrannosaurus’s teeth measured and exactly where paleontologists have gathered his remains. Charlie is a lot like his father was at that age. Ivan always says that the sure sign of a budding scientist is that he carries books everywhere he goes so he won’t have to be bored by people.

  “Polly, I’m hearing strange things about you.”

  It is Evelyn Crowley’s mother, Fran. The Crowleys live across the street from the Farrells, and Evelyn is one of Cheshire’s top competitors, especially in the uneven parallel bars, around which she throws her small body with a vengeance. Fran sits down next to Polly. “The occult?” Fran says.

  Outside, the temperature hovers around ninety, but here in the gym it’s at least five degrees hotter, and the competition hasn’t even started. Polly hopes Fran will think her face is flushed with heat, not embarrassment.

  “If you mean I’m photographing Laurel Smith, you’re right,” Polly says, more coolly than she means to. “It’s pretty darned occult,” she adds with a laugh.

  “I wish I had had the sort of dedication these girls have when I was young.” Fran says as the locker-room doors are swung open.

  “Maybe they’re just stupid,” Charlie says without looking up from his book.

  Polly and Fran have been friends for years—which is probably why Amanda and Evelyn can’t stand each other—but Polly doesn’t mind that Charlie has insulted her, she isn’t even bothered by the fact that Charlie is clearly more interested in extinct reptiles than in his sister’s success. The girls have begun to file in from the locker room, and Polly can’t help it, she’s nervous. There are fifteen gymnasts from Amanda’s program, another fifteen from a school in Gloucester. In their leotards, the girls seem awkward and uncomfortable as the onlookers cheer. Amanda is easy to spot because she is the blondest and, at five feet two, one of the tallest. Some of the girls smile when they spy a parent in the audience, but Amanda, always conscious of her braces, keeps her mouth firmly closed. Polly knows Amanda hopes she won’t grow any more; the smaller the gymnast is, the better her chances of staying in the sport. Amanda is second in line to vault the horse and she does so easily, with real power and grace. Polly claps her hands so hard they hurt.

  “Don’t embarrass her, Mom,” Charlie tells her.

  Amanda is less sure of herself on the uneven parallel bars, but certainly she’s better than most. One poor girl falls at the very start of her routine, and she falls hard, turning one of her ankles so badly she can’t continue. Even Charlie looks up when she lurches out of the gym in tears. Polly is thankful that it’s somebody else’s daughter w
ho’s fallen and not hers, and then is disturbed by how much she feels like a stage mother. She realizes that her fists are clenched. A square of sunlight from the highest window in the gym settles on the polished wooden floor. Polly unclenches her fists when Amanda finishes her routine on the balance beam. She has gotten the highest score so far, but afterward Amanda sits down near a pile of mats and the coach kneels down beside her. Polly worries that something is wrong, but soon Amanda gets up and goes over to her team, where she waits for her last event, her best: floor exercise.

  “Our girls are terrific,” Fran says to Polly. And Polly agrees. If she were the judge she’d be hard-pressed to decide between the two. Perhaps that’s why it’s possible for her and Fran to sit together at meets. All along the bleachers other mothers, and a few fathers, are intent on watching only their own daughters.

  Charlie’s knees are pulled up to form a table and his book lies open upon them. His hair, cut short, is damp with sweat. Polly thinks she recognizes a drawing of a hadrosaurus. She knows most of the dinosaurs by now, knows which were fierce carnivores and which ate only marsh plants. She would like to put her arm around Charlie, but, knowing he would be mortified, instead rests her hand against his knee. Charlie looks up at her, misreading her cue, ready to leave. Then they both hear the first beats of “Hungry Like the Wolf.” Charlie makes a face.