Part 8 (1/2)

The leather jacket was in a heap on the floor, where I'd dropped it.

A few minutes later, my bedroom door opened and shut again. I heard the flick of a lighter. My thin mattress dipped slightly as Jack sat down on the edge of my bed.

”So,” he said, finally. ”How was the sock hop, kitten?”

I rolled over and pulled myself up to sit against the headboard. By candlelight, I saw that Jack had changed his s.h.i.+rt and washed the blood from his face. He was staring at me, his expression calm, and rubbing his raw knuckles.

”Leave me alone.”

He went on as if he hadn't heard me. ”Let me guess. All the girls giggled about boys and all the boys punched each other in the arm and slapped each other on the a.s.s and talked sports. You sat there and didn't say a word the entire night.”

”I talked.”

”Yeah? What did you say?”

I didn't answer.

”Because, by nature, we're great conversationalists, aren't we? Let's see. What subjects does one find in the incomparable Raeburn repertoire? You could tell them all about Kepler's theory of planetary motion; I'm sure Kevin's furry little forest friends would have been into that. Or you could break the ice with a few good jokes, maybe some wacky anecdotes? I know, you could tell them about the time at that faculty dinner when the dean of studies puked all over his shoes. They would have liked that one. High school kids like puking.”

”Stop it.”

He moved in closer, staring intently at me. ”Or you could tell them about the time you broke Raeburn's Italian barometer. That's a good one. Particularly the end.”

”Why are you doing this?” My voice was a hoa.r.s.e whisper.

Jack didn't even blink. ”No, here's a better one. Did you hear the one about the guy who had a sister-”

I tried to get up but he blocked me with an arm.

”And she was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen, with pretty blond hair and pretty green eyes, and he couldn't stand the thought of some a.s.shole ever getting his hands on her, hurting her-”

”You told me to do it.” My hands were covering my face. He pulled them away.

”I told you to do it,” he said, his nose inches from mine, his eyes burning into me, ”because I knew you were going to anyway and you had to know what it was like, because you didn't know s.h.i.+t, little sister. And now you do, don't you?”

”Yes,” I whispered.

He sat back and watched me. ”There's a gap between us and them and you can't bridge it,” he said, his voice gentle now. He touched my hair. ”You're not like them and you're not ever going to be. We're different. We're better. We don't need anyone else. Okay?”

I nodded. ”You didn't have to hurt him.”

”He deserved it.”

”He wasn't that bad.”

We sat together and watched the moonlight move across the walls. I was thinking of Kevin crying in the ashes. ”He was going to hurt you eventually,” Jack said after a long while. ”He was going to hurt you worse than I hurt him.”

”He might not have.”

”Well, he won't now,” he said.

Not long after that, Jack and I were sitting on the porch swing on a warm evening, pa.s.sing a bottle of wine back and forth and watching the moths fly at the porch light, when Jack said in an offhand tone that Kevin must not have been too badly hurt, since the police hadn't shown up.

I s.h.i.+vered. I hadn't thought about the police. I pulled at the cuffs of my sweater and asked if it had really been that bad. Jack shrugged.

”But I don't think he'd have ratted us out, anyway,” he said. ”If his parents squawked too much, he'd have made up some story. What else is he going to do? Say, 'Mom, Dad, I've been sneaking out after hours to get stoned and f.u.c.k this girl, and now her brother's gone and beaten the s.h.i.+t out of me, so call the police quick'? No way. He could never admit he'd been so naughty. Might ruin Mommy and Daddy's good image of their little boy.” Jack grinned. ”He could say he'd never had s.e.x with you, but he couldn't prove it, any more than he can prove that you're not fourteen.”

”That I'm not-oh.” I saw what he meant. ”But he wouldn't expect us to do that.”

”Sure he would,” Jack said, ”because that's what I told him we'd do, right before I kicked him in the face.” He slipped an arm around my shoulder and handed me the bottle. The wine was bitter and warm in my throat.

We fell asleep in the parlor that night. Jack was stretched out on the couch and I was curled up in Raeburn's chair under the ugly nude. I woke up sometime in the night. I was still drunk and my head was packed with steel wool. Rising from the chair, trying to be quiet so I wouldn't wake Jack, I made my unsteady way upstairs to my bedroom. My window shade was up. There was enough moonlight in my room to see my way to my bed and to the battered wooden box wedged tightly between my headboard and the wall. Jack didn't know the box existed; it was my only secret.

Carefully, I slid it out from its hiding place. The box held three things, treasures-relics, really-that I had found in the house when I was a little girl and hidden carefully away. There was a charm bracelet, heavy with tiny silver animals and keys and skulls and even a miniature crystal test tube, held to the chain by a thin silver band around its throat. There was a broken wrist.w.a.tch, delicate and obviously intended for a feminine wrist, with a leather strap that still smelled faintly of the perfume, spicy and floral, that had been dabbed on the skin underneath it. There was a folded square of thick paper. The bracelet and the wrist.w.a.tch had been my mother's; the piece of paper was me.

Magee Women's Hospital. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The writing was fancy. The embossed seal was round and smooth under my fingers.

Father: Joseph Raeburn.

Mother: Mary Elizabeth (Chandler) Raeburn.

I'd found the box long ago, shoved carelessly into the bottom of a closet, beneath an old boot and some moth-eaten blankets. My birth certificate was inside it. It was after the social worker brought Jack home, but not long after, because the housekeeper was still there to slap my face when she found me with the certificate in my hands, to tell me that it was important and I had no right to touch it.

But I knew better. I was seven years old, and I could read English as well as Greek, and the name on the thick paper was mine. The paper was mine. The paper was me. I kept it under my bed; I knew it was there.

Josephine Leigh Raeburn.

That night was the last warm night of the year. Soon we had the last of the warm days, and then that summer was officially over. The snow fell early, and we never spoke of Kevin McNerny again.

4.

AS CHRISTMAS NEARED, Raeburn grew secretive and distracted. The changes were small at first. Each week he came home a little later than he had the week before, and Friday afternoons soon became Sat.u.r.day evenings. His eyes took on an unwholesome glitter, like marsh fire, and everything he did was infused with a horrible excitement, even when there was nothing in particular to be excited about. He began to grin.

He still left us piles of work, but didn't seem to care if we did it or not, and had no interest in going over it if we did. The phone would ring late at night and he would jump for it, snarling, ”Don't touch it!” as if we were in the habit of das.h.i.+ng for the phone any time it rang; then he would take the phone into the study and lock himself away, talking for hours to whoever was on the other end. I asked him once, without thinking, who the calls were from, and he snapped that it was none of my business.

Soon all of his weekends were spent behind the closed door of his study, working at the battered manual typewriter he'd had since graduate school (”Computers, children, are responsible for the mechanization of human intelligence”). His wild laughter and the firecracker sound of the typewriter keys drifted through the heating vents.

Jack said it couldn't mean anything good. He said it felt to him like the old one-two, that we'd somehow missed the one but he was watching out for the two.

It came, of course.

”The faculty family Christmas party is next Friday,” Raeburn said one night, during another interminable dinner. ”It's the sort of ridiculous function that I normally try to avoid, but this thing with Searles-I can't afford to be antisocial.” He gave us one of his new grins, humorless and unpleasant. ”We'll all be very charming. I'll find a motel room for the two of you somewhere in town. You can drive up in the truck.”

”I'm not going,” Jack said.