At Risk Page 3

  “Can’t you put that book away?” Polly whispers.

  “No,” Charlie says, “I can’t.”

  He has read this book dozens of times and is no less interested than he was the first time through. Sometimes his lips move when he reads, and Polly knows he is memorizing facts. When she looks at him, Polly often gets a vision of him as a toddler, solemnly counting stones or beads, content to watch a spider build her web, his nature already so set that his first word, spoken at a pond, was not “mama” or “dada” but “quack.”

  Amanda begins her routine with a roundoff, two hack hand springs, and a backflip. Polly, who swims, but is otherwise not athletic, feels that spooky, cold sensation along the back of her neck. Amanda’s feet barely touch the mat. She does a forward roll, then a handstand and full pirouette. There is some scattered applause. The girls on the other team are watching her carefully; it’s a terrific performance and everyone knows it. Polly’s eyes feel hot. When Amanda is through she bows, beautifully. Polly doesn’t give a damn whom she’ll embarrass, she gets to her feet and applauds.

  “Not bad,” Charlie admits grudgingly when Polly sits back down,

  Polly grins and gives him a shove. When Amanda is announced as the highest scorer, Polly stands again and applauds. Other parents are standing up on the bleachers below her and Polly has to strain to see Amanda, who’s so composed you’d never guess she had won. Amanda bows, then quickly leaves the floor, as though now that the scoring is over, she has no interest in the gym.

  “She deserved to win,” Evelyn’s mother tells Polly.

  “They were all great,” Polly says, with more generosity than she feels.

  Polly aims Charlie toward the door and tells him she’ll meet him out by the car. She greets several parents she knows on the floor, then stops to shake the coach’s hand.

  “I can tell you’ve been working them hard, Jack,” Polly says.

  “You should be proud of her,” Jack Eagan tells her.

  “I am,” Polly says, delighted that at last there is someone with whom she doesn’t have to play down her excitement.

  “She picked herself right up after that bad start,” the coach says.

  Polly, who didn’t notice a bad start, smiles and heads for the lockers. Tonight they will take Amanda out to dinner to celebrate, maybe to Dexter’s, which has great fried clams and fries. Polly will sneak a call to Ivan so he can stop on the way home and buy flowers; after all her hard work, Amanda deserves to be treated like a champion.

  The locker room smells musty and lockers are clanging. Here the gymnasts look more like the little girls they are. One, when she sees Polly, quickly covers her bare, undeveloped chest. Polly walks along the aisles, looking for Amanda. Instead, she sees Evelyn Crowley.

  “You had some great routines,” she tells Evelyn.

  Evelyn smiles, but Polly can see her disappointment.

  “I didn’t practice enough,” Evelyn says.

  “Have you seen Amanda?” Polly asks.

  Evelyn shrugs. Amanda is probably the last person she wants to see right now.

  “Maybe she’s in the showers,” Evelyn says.

  Polly walks toward the rear of the locker room. She sees Amanda’s unzipped gym bag hanging in an open locker. Inside there are barrettes and a hairbrush and a necklace made out of tiny plastic beads that look like seed pearls, which Amanda sometimes wears before a meet for good luck.

  The showers are all turned on and Polly can hear the voices of the little girls, a murmur that can just as easily explode into giggles or a contemptuous rating of someone’s routine. Polly has decided, they will definitely have fried clams tonight. When they go home they’ll sit out on the porch to watch for the last few lightning bugs. They’ll hear a chorus of frogs, both from the marshy inlets that surround Morrow and from the aquarium inside the house where Charlie is temporarily keeping a bull-frog, which he swears is the last of the specimens he’ll bring home, just as he swears it’s a matter of life and death for him to record the number of croaks per hour during various weather conditions. Maybe Polly can persuade Amanda to give up one day’s practice and go to the beach with her tomorrow, just the two of them. When they were little, it was hard for Polly to divide her time equally between the children. Charlie and Amanda wanted such different things that one of them always had to be put on hold, and either way Polly felt torn between them. No matter what she did, she always had the nagging sense she was disappointing someone. But now things have changed; the children prefer to be with their friends and Polly has to wheedle hours for herself. Polly often thinks about this when her mother calls from New York, but it never stops her from cutting the conversation short, from always being the first to hang up.

  The closer Polly gets to the showers, the stronger the smell of ammonia. They use some awful heavyduty cleaner and the result is dizzying.

  “Hi, Polly,” a high voice says, and Polly turns and hugs Amanda’s best friend, Jessie Eagan, who is also the daughter of the coach. Jessie is a good gymnast, but she’s not passionate the way Amanda is, and maybe that’s why she can cheer for Amanda and feel no jealousy. It’s too bad Jessie’s not serious, because she has a perfect gymnast’s body, she’s only four feet six and amazingly light. She has brown hair, cut short, and golden eyes. Both she and Amanda are in love with some singer in a rock group, whom they refer to by his first name, Brian, as though they were on intimate terms with him.

  “Amanda was fantastic,” Jessie says. “Even my dad says so.”

  Clearly, the coach is not one to hand out compliments.

  “Come out to dinner with us tonight,” Polly says.

  “I can’t,” Jessie says mournfully. “Don’t tell me if you’re going to go out for clams because I’ll be trapped at my aunt’s having something gross.”

  Polly hugs Jessie again and walks on toward the showers. She forces herself not to laugh when she sees one of the girls showering with her bra on, and in fact she’s a little shocked that an eleven-or twelve-year-old would even wear a bra. The sound of the showers makes it seem as though the room were under water. The tiles are green, and there are no windows back here. Polly sees a hand from inside one of the showers holding onto the outside wall. Without thinking, she begins to run.

  Amanda is doubled over; her blond hair looks green. She is vomiting in the shower, her whole body heaving. A towel she had tried to wrap around herself has fallen to the floor and is soaked. The water is still running. Polly feels absolutely cold. Maybe it’s all this water, the tiles, the green tint of the fluorescent lights. She puts her hands on Amanda’s shoulders and tries to support her. Amanda doesn’t seem to notice that her mother is there. She keeps vomiting until she has nothing to throw up but yellow bile. When Amanda stops vomiting, she’s so weak Polly has trouble holding her up.

  “You’ll be okay,” Polly says.

  “I don’t feel good,” Amanda tells her.

  Too much excitement, Polly thinks. Too much pressure. She puts her palm against Amanda’s forehead and realizes that her daughter has a fever, a high one. Polly reaches the taps and turns off the hot, then cups her hand so she can scoop cold water over Amanda’s face. They are facing each other, with Amanda leaning against her so that Polly is soaked through her clothes.

  “I’m freezing,” Amanda says.

  In fact she is hotter than before.

  Polly drags Amanda out of the shower, sits her on a bench, then grabs a towel and wraps it around her. She runs to the locker, gets the pink gym bag, then runs back and quickly begins to dress her daughter. Amanda feels heavy, as limp as straw.

  “Ow,” Amanda says as Polly maneuvers one leg into a pair of shorts.

  Polly gently touches the back of Amanda’s knee and feels that the joint is swollen. She finishes dressing Amanda and helps her to stand.

  “You’ll be better in the morning,” Polly says.

  It’s what she always says when the children are sick, and they always believe her. But this time Polly is wrong. just after dusk the rain will begin, but it won’t bring any relief. In the morning, the last day of August and the hottest on record, Amanda will still be shivering beneath two cotton quilts.

  TWO

  LAUREL SMITH LOVES COFFEE and cream. It is her weakness. Just the smell of it makes her lick her lips like a cat. She pours a second cup from the glass coffeepot into a yellow mug, a cheap piece of pottery with just the right-size handle. It’s low tide and egrets out in the marsh are closer to her cottage than usual. There are no screens on the windows, but when Laurel has her coffee she always pushes the windows open so she can listen to the birds, even though it means later she will suffer the bites of mosquitoes who manage to get inside.

  She has forgotten to feed the cat, Stella. Although Stella is black, she’s hardly a familiar. A familiar should be utterly feline and Stella is more like a dog. She will retrieve a ball if you throw one for her; she follows along on walks; she doesn’t mind the water and has been known to jump into the marsh, after a duck or Canada goose twice her size. Laurel goes to the pantry for a pack of Tender Vittles and Stella follows, rubbing against Laurel’s white kimono. Outside, it’s brutally hot, but the cottage is backed by tall pine trees that always keep it cool; not a plus in November or in the heart of February, but today the linoleurn against Laurel’s bare feet is wonderfully cold. As long as she’s up, Laurel gets an egg, fills a blue tin pot with water, and sets it to boil. She had a husband once who said she could not even boil an egg. Clearly he was wrong.

  He was wrong about a lot of things. Laurel never tricked him into marrying her. He fell in love with her all on his own; he chose to ignore how shy she was, how ill at ease with people, including, it’s true, himself. He accused her of so many things, Laurel can no longer remember the list, although she certainly remembers how often he insisted that she was in love with death. He was more wrong about this than anything else; Laurel is, and always has been, terrified by death. When a baby cries, she hears a death rattle. The branches of a white birch arc crossbones. She cannot look at spaded earth, even if it is only a corner of a suburban lawn dug up for a new rhododendron.

  She never wanted to receive messages, it just started to happen to her when she was twelve, beginning with what she thought was a dream. She was walking down a long corridor, which became more narrow as she went along, the walls and ceiling curving until the corridor became a tunnel. She stopped. Everything around her was cold. In the distance she could see her grandmother falling. Laurel’s grandmother wore a blue silk dress and a long rope of pearls, and she was falling downward, as though the tunnel were vertical, straight down from sky to earth. There was no pull of gravity, so every path was a slow circular spiral.

  In the morning the call came that Laurel’s grandmother was dead. She had been at a wedding and had fallen; she’d had a stroke and never regained consciousness. Laurel received several other messages from her grandmother; she was terrified, but she told no one. The messages that came through her dreams grew more and more specific, as if someone were trying to prove something to her. She dreamed her grandmother was winding the chiming clock in her kitchen, and the following day the clock arrived, airmail. She dreamed her grandmother led her to an angel with his wings folded tightly against his body, and when her parents took her to the cemetery there was the angel, carved into her grandmother’s headstone.

  When she was thirteen, the messages began to come to her during her waking hours, messages from people she had never known in life. She could close her eyes in math class and hear a child’s voice, a classmate’s sister lost at birth. She dreaded the cold, clammy way her hands felt whenever she was near someone who had suffered a recent loss. While other girls her age were thinking about shades of lipstick and Saturday nights, Laurel could not stop thinking about the brevity of a human lifespan. At night her dreams were terrifying things filled with cemeteries, silence, full white moons.

  When she was seventeen Laurel made a huge effort, and, with the help of prescription for Valium, she nearly succeeded and stopped thinking about death. She finished high school, went to college, married when she was twenty-two. For a while her husband didn’t mind her odd habits. He overlooked it when she hid in closets during thunderstorms, when she refused to leave the house for three weeks after their cat was run over by a car, when she couldn’t accompany him to his father’s funeral. It was true, he had plenty to complain about, everything she did she did halfheartedly. She’d start the laundry but never finish, so that her husband wore damp clothes to work. The frozen dinners she cooked were always icy in the middle. She was still receiving messages, but they were jumbled now, as though she had a crossed connection, and she had a constant, dull headache. What Laurel could never understand was why, when he started to notice and list her faults, her husband seemed so surprised.

  After her divorce, she moved to the cottage in Morrow and began to give readings. At first the messages came through with piercing clarity, but lately she’s found herself drifting and she’s taken to lying. It’s easy; her clients give themselves away in a thousand ways. All she has to do is pick up on their clues, listen for their breathing to quicken, see if they’ve been biting their nails. She has a new client today, at eleven. It’s a bad time of day for a reading, dusk is better, or at least late afternoon, but this client’s husband disapproves of seances and he’ll be home from his golf game by two.

  Laurel makes the bed, showers, and dresses in a white shirt and a denim wrap-around skirt. She brushes her long hair, her one vanity, just as coffee is her one vice. In her bookcase there are mostly cookbooks and novels, and, hidden in the back, some detective stories. Nothing about the occult. Laurel avoids psychic gatherings; she cringes when she reads about channelers who hold public meetings with audiences of hundreds of followers. There are no candles in her cottage, no crystal balls or baskets of herbs. The furniture is mostly wicker and oak collected at auctions and secondhand stores. Her newest, most prized acquisition is a tall brass lamp that has a pink silk shade. She paid too much for it. She had planned to keep it beside the window, behind the wicker couch, but when she got the lamp home Laurel hid it in a dark corner in her bedroom. She didn’t understand why she’d done this until the photographer who’s been coming around spotted the lamp. Polly found it so charming that she wanted the lamp included in any photographs she took and asked if it could be moved beside the table where Laurel did her readings. Laurel had insisted that the lamp would be too distracting. She had realized, all at once, that she should never have bought it. Pink silk and death did not go together.

  It is the last day of August, and the last day of any month depresses Laurel. She remembers now that she dreamed about her childhood, and she never dreams anymore. Her sleep is usually empty and deep, as if she used up all her dream time during her waking hours. In less than an hour, Betsy, whom Laurel always thinks of as “Bossy” ever since she managed to talk Laurel into being the subject for her book, will arrive with the photographer. Stupidly, Laurel has forgotten to mention the presence of a writer and a photographer to her new client, who is so nervous and secretive she may bolt and run as soon as she sees a camera. It will be hard enough to concentrate on a reading in this heat.

  Outside, the sunlight is thick, like a swarm of yellow bees. It used to be easy for Laurel to resist sunlight like this; she doesn’t even think she noticed sunlight before she moved here to the marsh. She cracks the brown shell of the hard-boiled egg she has on her counter, then eats standing up. She’s edgy; something’s not right. Laurel goes to let the cat out; then for no reason she follows Stella out onto the wooden deck. The deck, which juts out from the house, is built on stilts right over the marsh. At night, Laurel can hear crabs clattering in through holes, burrowing in the damp basement, which is often flooded at high tide when there’s a full moon. Once, she found a starfish on the cellar stairs. She leans on the railing and feels the sun through her cotton blouse and on her bare legs. Before she came here, Laurel Smith had never seen a kingfisher; she couldn’t tell the difference between a cardinal and a wren. In a few minutes Betsy Stafford and the new client will both pull into the dirt driveway, but Polly will not be coming to photograph the reading. It doesn’t matter, there will be nothing to photograph and Laurel Smith knows it. She feels a pressure on her forehead, like a hand pushing against her.

  Out on the marsh, two egrets take flight, struggling furiously for distance, as if frightened for their lives.

  THREE

  CHARLIE MAKES HIMSELF French toast. He leaves the eggy bowl on the counter and the burned frying pan on the stove. Summer is so boring, but he dreads the thought of school. Ten more days of freedom. Today he and Sevrin are going to sneak down to the pond, which both their mothers think is too far for them to bicycle to, and look for specimens. They have a theory that not only can sugar not harm you, it is actually good for you, and they intend to set up an experiment that will prove them right, down in Sevrin’s basement, where no one ever goes. Charlie’s backpack is bulging with the Mason jars he’s pilfered from the pantry. He hopes his mother won’t notice they’re missing until next June, when she wants to make strawberry jam. Maybe, when the experiment has been completed, Charlie can set the newts free and replace the Mason jars so that his mother will never know anything amphibian was ever in them. He makes himself laugh thinking about what his mother could find on the shelf: strawberry jam, orange newt, pickled cucumbers, little green frogs in vinegar.

  If Charlie catches whatever his sister has, and misses out on this last week of freedom, he will commit hara-kiri. He has a million things to do in ten days. The door slams as Charlie is pouring syrup on his French toast. Ivan has already been to the drugstore before setting out for the institute.