Rainy Season (12 page)

Lane,

I have already gone on a commando mission to the other side to get that dumb kid Jason Mikulluh. I’m going to counter attack which will be a big surprise which he’s not expecting. I’m writing so you don’t get all worryed like a crybaby about where I am, but if you tell Mom or Dad or Marita, I will be REALLY pist off. If I need back up, I will come back for you and Ted by 21:00.

Over and out

C. G. Beck

I
CRINKLE THE LETTER
into one hand and run out of his room, out the front door, and onto the front lawn. The sky is smudged deep blue with the beginning of night and the heavy air is warm as breath.

“Charlie, can you hear me? If you’re out there, tell me. Mom’s going to be mad—the rule is no going out after supper. Can you hear me?” The darkness erases my words into a bleat. I hear crickets and smell bug spray, but I don’t see Charlie anywhere. “Don’t you do anything stupid, Charlie,” I call. “You just better not do that to me.”

I turn back to the house and spy Marita in the window, bent over the sink. The catering truck’s gone. Twin beams of car headlights flash in the distance and I watch as Dad’s jeep pulls into view, flooding the street with a pool of electric yellow.

“Is that you, Lanie?” he asks when he shuts the engine. “What are you doing; decided to bring your worries out for an airing?”

“Not really.”

“Then what really?” Dad’s voice is loudly cheerful. His arms are weighted down with two brown paper bags and he slams the door of the jeep with his boot.

“Nothing I guess. I was just going in.” I follow him into the house, into the den where he deposits the bags on the bar. He pulls out all the bottles from the bags and sets each bottle neatly on the glass bar shelf with the others. Rows and rows and rows of bottles, all sizes and shapes.

“That ought to get this crew through tonight, anyway,” he says, surveying the shelf, satisfied.

“How was the change of command party?” I ask.

“So-so. Got more fun later. The thing was …” He strides out of the den, so that I have to tag along behind.

“Was what?” I trail him upstairs and into his and Mom’s bedroom, where he starts to depin his buttons and tags and medals from his dress blue uniform, carefully dropping each item into Mom’s open jewelry box.

“That we were all sad to see Major Gregory leave for Fort Ord, and we’re not so excited about Jacobs taking over Alpha Company, so while the ceremony and party were nice, it marks the beginning of a not-so-fun time for Alpha. And some of the younger guys were …” He shakes off his dress jacket and disappears into the walk-in closet.

“Were what?” No response. I pick up one of Dad’s pins—it’s actually just a name tag—Lt. Col. Beck. Everywhere I go here, I am glued to that name. It’s stuck to my house, my ID, my passport, all my forms for school. Lt. Col. Beck’s dependent; that’s how the army catalogs Charlie and Mom and me. I drop the tag back in Mom’s jewelry box.

“Were what?” I ask louder. Dad pokes his head out of the closet.

“What were what?” he asks. “Where’s Mom?”

“She and Alexa went to buy candles. Downtown.”

“Lane, you’re going to have to scram now while I get ready, okay?”

“I’m going to bed.”
After Charlie comes back. Please come back Charlie.

“Good idea.” His head disappears again.

The downstairs seems extra spacious, and I realize the coffee table and the end tables are missing from the living room. Party-proofing, Alex calls it, when you hide your furniture from rowdy guests who might scuff or break or burn their cigarettes on it. I didn’t notice it missing before; and now I wonder where the furniture got stored. I tour through the rooms, opening doors, aimlessly looking for it.

I find everything piled and stacked perfectly into the impossibly small space of our coat closet. Mom must have done it herself; her mind knows exactly how to wrap around problems of squares and spaces and angles. I imagine all those math-teacher rules boxed-up and gathering dust in a corner of her mind. She liked teaching, but after the accident she decided that facing a classroom of ninth graders each day was too much to handle. “Too much to think about,” she told me. Her teacher’s clothes and books are neatly packed away with all our winter stuff in storage chests at my grandparents’ house.

It would be nice to see my winter things again. I miss my navy blue wool coat with red piping, although I bet it’s too small for me now and moths have likely eaten holes in it. I miss my ice skates, too, although I was always too chicken to do more than shuffle around the edge of the pond in them; and I’d like to see my Swiss hat with the attached braids again.

I used to wear that hat even in the summer, pretending with my dolls that I was Heidi sitting on the Alps, drinking my milk out of a soup bowl, and eating big hunks of cheese until Emily and her friends’ teasing—they’d yodel, “yoo-hoo-loo-oo—ser”—made me have to hide my milk and cheese parties in my room.

“If I don’t see a winter for the next twenty years, it will be too soon,” Mom had said when the last box was packed, her words sealing shut my hopes of ever going back to Rhode Island. I’d never gotten attached to any one place. Before Rhode Island we’d lived in Tennessee, before that Georgia, before that Washington, before that Virginia, where Charlie was born and back as far as I can remember, though I was born in South Carolina. But, still, I hope I see winter sometime in the next twenty years.

I go back up to my room and fasten the lock on my door. My letter to Emily is dumb when I reread it. I can’t remember how I’d been planning to finish off the now-broken sentence I had started before Charlie interrupted me. I cross out the last sentence and write instead:

Now Charlie is missing because he went to beat up some dumb old kid. I have to think about how to get him home, so I’m signing off now.

With so much love from,

Lanie

When I tear out the letter I notice there’s almost no paper left, just a lot of scraggledy edges from where I’ve torn out pages. It scares me all of a sudden, seeing all those crooked jags where paper used to be. The book was so thick; I never thought I’d use all the paper. I close the journal and stare for a long time at the girl in the tulip who Emily said looked like me.

I fold the letter into an envelope, then take a long time writing Emily’s name on the front in calligraphy letters. Emily had taught me calligraphy when she got a set for Christmas, but I used to write it so blobby and messy. Once I wrecked one of her best calligraphy pens and she cried and didn’t talk to me all day. I can still see that pen, its smushed-up tip dripping over with blue ink from where I pressed too hard. She had called me a klutz, but that was a long time ago and now I have my own pens and I’m very good. Very very careful. I replace the journal under my mattress and set the envelope on the corner of my desk to let the ink dry.

“Where are you, Charlie?” I ask out loud. Cars have been pulling up to the house, doors thud shut, and voices of men and women are laughing and calling out each other’s names as their footsteps clack up to our house. Dad has turned on the hi-fi, and soon the house is steaming over with the energy of people who want to dance and talk and eat too much.

I lie on my bed and pick up my Nancy Drew book. The jewel smugglers just found out that Nancy is not a belly dancer, but a girl detective, and so now they’re in hot pursuit. I work to focus on the printed words, but the downstairs is becoming way too noisy. Mom and Alexa have returned, I hear Alexa shout—“We found them, and we bought hundreds!” and then the voices slowly begin sliding over to the outside of the house as people gather on the porch. Dishes and glasses clatter and clink and everyone’s all mouth to me, laughing and talking and eating.

I try to identify voices. I hear Dee and then Ted, but I don’t want to leave my room and say hi. Ted and his other group of Zonie friends can move into the land of adults in a way that makes me feel like a dorky military kid.

I hear a tapping on my door.

“Come in.” The door opens a little and Mom’s face peeks through the slivered space. Her cheeks are pink.

“Lane, if it gets too loud, and you and Charlie want to, then Mrs. Davidson says you both can sleep at their house next door in their spare room.”

“Okay, maybe I will.”

“Where’s Charlie?”

“Bathroom.” I look down at my book. “Good night Mom.”

“We found candles at this awful little store off the Tumba Muerto,” she says.

“It sounds like a big party, huh? Too many army wives?”

“Oh, they’re no big deal …” Mom’s smile reveals her teeth but not her thoughts.

“Well, good night then, Mom.” I look down. The page blurs in front of my eyes and I blink to refocus. Mom lingers and I feel her staring at me, unfixed about what else to say but not wanting to leave me just yet.

“So remember to tell Charlie when he comes out of the bathroom. About the Davidsons.”

“I will.”

“But check in with me if you do go, so I know.”

“Yep.”

“Good night, Lane. Love you.”

“Love you, too.” I look up to smile at her pink-cheeked smile but she’s already shut the door.

A
FTER NANCY ESCAPES THE
jewel thieves and is reunited with her father, the distinguished attorney Carson Drew, I get up and walk into the bathroom to brush my teeth. A moth bats against the fluorescent lighting; its blue-white tract hums along with the moth’s bump and whirring. I shove open the bathroom window and switch off the light.

“Stupid moth,” I say. “Shoo.” Maybe the moonlight is bright enough to draw the moth back outside. But when I switch back on the light, the stupid moth hasn’t moved, and starts its dance again. “Your funeral,” I tell it, trying to sound casual, but in my heart I’m worried. I brush my teeth quickly so that I can turn the light off again, and when I come back to my room Ted, changed into a nonwrinkled shirt and shorts, is sitting on my bed reading my book.

“You are a Nerd with a capital N,” he says, grinning. “How many of these Nancy Drews do you read a week?” He tosses me the book, which I catch and hold against my chest.

“As many as the library lets me have. Are Hans and Court here?” Hans and Courtland are Ted’s two older friends from the Zone. They’re Ted’s best Zone friends—sophomores in high school—and they’d only ever talk to me if Ted were around. I’m actually pretty scared of them, and if they’re roaming through my house I need to be forewarned.

“Yep, the two stooges—out on the porch being buffoons, lying to your mother and my mother about how good they’re doing in school. Where’s Port Charlie?”

I can’t answer with a lie and I can’t answer with the truth so I don’t say anything.

“Are you deaf?”

“He went for a walk.”

“At nine o’clock at night? Where did he have to go walk to?”

I don’t answer, but I’m relieved. Ted’s guessed immediately.

“Oh, don’t even tell me. He went to the other side to do some damage to the fort, right?” Ted stands up and exhales so hard that I see his nostrils flare out. “When did he leave?”

“Forty minutes ago.”

Ted checks his watch. “Okay, so we’ll wait half an hour and then go get him. I’m going to give myself the benefit of thinking all that’s really going to happen is that Charlie’ll run all the way over to the other side, kick the side door of the fort a few times, throw a few mangoes at the tree, and run home with his arms in the air like Rocky. Safe bet?”

“I guess so. See, some boards of our fort fell down—from the rain I guessed—and Charlie’s all mad, thinks it was Jason McCullough behind it.”

“Yeah, I stopped and looked at our fort with Court and Hans on the way over. It’s easy to fix, plus those guys want to work on it, too. We’re going to double-enforce it with two different kinds of wood.”

“Um, good.” I wind my hair up off my neck and nervously start twisting it into a crooked braid. If Hans and Court are planning to work on the fort, then there won’t be any room for girls—except maybe girls like Steph. It’s a depressing thought. “I guess we can wait half an hour.”

“Have you eaten? Great food tonight. Better than last night’s spread at the Horowitzes’.” Ted slips his fingers back through his hair. “Do I look okay? Jennifer Elwig’s here.”

“She’s a junior in high school, big shot. Two grades over you.” I reach up and pluck a piece of fuzz off his shirt collar. “You look okay for a dork.”

“Come out and chow down with me when you’re tired of reading,” Ted messes up my hair with both hands. “And don’t freak out about Charlie. He always comes home eventually, right?”

“Right.”

And then Ted is gone. Now I feel like a prisoner in my room, knowing that Hans and Courtland are tracking through my house in their big basketball sneakers, their mouths full of food and critical comments.

Hans and Courtland and most Zonian kids over age fourteen show up at any party they can get to on-base, because basically all Zonians do almost everything together. Dad says it’s ridiculous that the Zonian adults and kids go to the same parties. The typical schizophrenia, he says, of people who have no true culture.

After forty-two minutes of trying to read and then sketching lopsided old wedding dresses—I am definitely rusty at my drawing—I can’t stand it anymore. I’ll have to face the party to retrieve Ted so we can find Charlie.

“Of course it’s not like anything really bad will happen to him,” I mutter to steady my nerves. “Nothing bad will ever
really
happen if I think through all the possibilities of what
might
happen.”

“Well, Lane, what are you doing still up?” asks Mrs. Wagner when I slink down the hall. She sits in the middle of a packet of army wives in a circle of chairs that have been rearranged in the living room. Their dinner plates are balanced neatly on their knees, their heads and shoulders are all hunched forward and drawn in together like spokes of a tepee.

“Hi, Mrs. Wagner. I’m just about to go to bed now. Hi, everyone.” The army wives murmur and smile and dip their heads. Aside from their whispering campfire, no one else is in the room.