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“You’re probably right.” Once again, her face swelled with happiness. Her body was so thin and fragile that the least emotional change was immediately visible. “And this way, you can bone up on your French,” she said. “What a good way to spend your time. Mrs. O’Brien will be pleased.”
“I hope.”
“Were you in Sissy’s French class?”
“No.”
“No?”
“I took Spanish.” No one who spoke French ever came to Katydid, but there were lots of Mexican pickers and factory workers. I’d thought I might be able to speak Spanish to one of them, but I never had the nerve to try.
“Oh, well, French is a beautiful language,” Mrs. Vernon said. She backed toward the door. “I’ll leave you now. Goodbye—how do the French say it?”
“Toodle-oo?” It was all I could think of. She didn’t notice, just waved and closed the door.
On Saturday evening, she brought me dinner on a tray. Later, she sent up her husband, Walter, a big, growly man, who was a foreman at the KTD. He knocked and then filled the whole doorway, his chest hairs spilling out of a tattered, sleeveless T-shirt. He’d obviously come on this mission reluctantly, and he stumbled around trying to make conversation, asking me things like whether I was good at geometry and did I think President Eisenhower was going to dump Nixon. I couldn’t talk to him, and finally he blurted out, “Well, do you want to come listen to the Cubs’ game on the radio?”
I shook my head, and he went away.
Mrs. O’Brien called once, to see how I was getting on, and Bunny came on Saturday and again on Sunday afternoon, between shifts at the country club. By Sunday, she was smoking cigarettes, something she does when she’s nervous. She stomped around Sissy’s room, flicking ashes on the floor and stubbing out her butts in a manger that was part of a religious scene. She didn’t mean any harm by it. She was distracted, and the thing looked like an ashtray. She kept talking about how the people of Katydid were against her and how we should have moved out after they sent Tom to jail. After a while, she started going on about how Eddie Boggs had said they couldn’t do this to her, and how Eddie had said she should sue Mrs. Benedict and Chief Springer, and Eddie this and Eddie that until I started feeling worse than ever. Finally, I told her that Eddie had enough problems of his own without advising her on mine. Besides, I asked, what does Eddie Boggs know about anything? Her head snapped up, and she paused and looked around the room. “Ugh,” she said. “What hideous wallpaper.”
At night, I lay on Sissy’s bed, stretched out on my back. I’d think for a while—and then, when it got bad, I’d try not to think. Before all this, the idea of suicide had never occurred to me. The thought was simply beyond my realm. People, animals, plants—every living thing fights to continue life, not to end it. But lying in the darkness on Sissy’s bed, I became convinced that I had ruined everything for me and, worse, for Bunny. I felt so weak and hopeless that it seemed my life would end, whether I did anything about it or not. The string would simply run out, and that would be all. Later, after I’d lived with the situation for a few days, I started to daydream back, imagining that time had returned to Friday morning and that I was again biking up to the Benedicts’ house. I’d have another chance, and everything would be different. But over that first weekend, the truth of what had happened was too close for there to be any comfort in imagining.
At about 8:30 Sunday night, after Mrs. Vernon had removed the tray of pork chops—still untouched—that she’d brought up earlier in the evening, the lights went out all over Katydid. I was already in the dark in Sissy’s room, but outside, in the dusk, it was as if night had fallen very suddenly. I could hear the Vernons scrambling around on the first floor beneath me. Out of the stillness, a siren sounded, then another. The phone rang and, seconds later, Mrs. Vernon appeared at the door, holding a candle. Her face was a skeleton behind the flickering yellow light.
“Are you all right, dear?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Something awful’s happened.” She moved closer, and I could see that it wasn’t simply the candlelight—her face had tightened with fear. “Someone’s hit a light pole out on Willow Road. A terrible accident, they’re sure to be dead.”
Around us, the light from the unsteady flame made the statues move.
“Are you all right?” she asked again.
“Yes,” I said. In fact, I was surprised at how calm I was. For two days, I’d been preparing for death. Now, it had turned out to be someone else’s.
“Do you want me to leave you a candle?” she asked.
“No, thanks, the dark is fine.”
“Sissy hated the dark. She always slept with a nightlight,” Mrs. Vernon said. She added quickly, “I wish you’d take a candle.”
“No, thanks, I’m just going to lie here.”
“Well, all right. Call me if you need anything.… Call me.” She looked at me longingly. For a moment, I thought she really loved me.
“I will,” I said.
After she’d gone, I let myself cry at last. The tears poured down my face, soaking Sissy’s pillow. I cried so hard and long I amazed myself—where does all this liquid come from?
The sirens carried on for an hour or so. Then everything was quiet again, except for an occasional motorcycle gunning down Oak Street. After a while, I started to notice a humming sound, a low, mechanical noise that almost made the air vibrate. The noise seemed familiar, like something I’d heard long ago, but I didn’t recognize it until I sat up in bed and put my ear to the windowscreen. It was the sound of the machines down the street at the KTD, working right through the weekend and the blackout. Walking past the factory, I’d heard that sound a thousand times before, but only close up. The other noises of the town drowned it out as soon as I was a block or so away. But now, with the rest of the town silenced, the sound took over the neighborhood, covering things like a light snowfall. Later, at midnight, the factory whistle blew a moist, promising toot, and I imagined a whole shift of men stepping away from their machines and sitting down with their black lunch pails and pulling out the sandwiches that their wives had made up and wrapped in wax paper earlier that evening. And thinking about how things just kept going down at the KTD finally helped me fall asleep.
FOUR
On Monday, Mrs. O’Brien arrived to drive me to court. “Achhh,” she said, as we walked to her car, a maroon station wagon with wood paneling painted on the sides. “I never should have eaten that second corn muffin this morning.” She patted her stomach. “It’s just sitting there like a brick.”
She motioned for me to get in front and then slid behind the steering wheel, hiking her plain white dress up above her knees. The back seat of the station wagon was piled with files and notebooks, ma
