THERE FOLLOWED SEVERAL days during which James spent a great deal of time thinking. Actually, there wasn’t much else to do. He’d finally finished the da Vinci essay and sent it off to Mr. Johnson, and he suddenly wasn’t spending nearly as much time with Diane.
He wasn’t entirely sure just why. When he did see her, things were just as great, or almost as great, as ever. The only difference was that they spent a lot more time in public places—at the tennis courts, or swimming pool, or anyplace where people tended to congregate—and a lot less time on hikes in secluded places. But other times when he called up she said she couldn’t see him right then. Usually there was some good reason, or at least some reason that sounded reasonable. Like for instance, she had to go in to Tahoe with her mother to shop for a new bathing suit, which, in spite of the fact that she already owned at least a dozen, sounded like something you’d expect a girl to do. And she always sounded as if she were sorry about not being able to see him.
A couple of times when they’d finally gotten together after several unsuccessful attempts on his part, he’d come right out and asked her if there was anything wrong, and if she still felt the same way about him. Her answers had always been extremely reassuring.
“Jamesy,” she’d say, “how can you ask such a silly question? Can’t you tell how I feel about you? Come here and let me show you.” And she would drag him off (not that he ever resisted much) around a corner or behind the nearest tree, and they would mess around until he’d forgotten his worries completely. At least his worries about Diane. After such sessions behind the corner of the Commissary or the big sycamore on the Parade Grounds, his problems tended to be more physical than anything else. Physical and embarrassing. Not that it ever seemed to embarrass her. In fact she seemed to think it was all pretty amusing, particularly the time he’d had to sit down quickly at a picnic table because some people were coming along the path right toward where they were. That time he hadn’t thought it was all that funny. However the next time Diane wanted to mess around in a semi-public place, he hadn’t exactly refused. And later, during one of the long periods when he had nothing to do but think, he’d gotten over feeling irritated at her for laughing at him.
He’d also had time to do quite a bit of thinking about Griffin and the deer and what had been going on in the hidden valley. He still hadn’t quite gotten over the shock of finding out that Griffin was able to go right up to him, touch him, and even tie things on his antlers. After weeks of careful and patient and maddeningly slow progress, he had earned the right to come to within approximately twenty feet, but no closer, and now in a period of a few days she’d actually been able to put her hands on his wild deer. He still found it hard to believe, although she’d told him all about how she’d done it that day on their way home from the valley.
After they had safely gotten past the cliff trail, which Woody and Laurel had crossed with surprising skill and fearlessness, Griffin had made them run on ahead so she and James could talk.
“How did you get him to let you do it?” he’d asked her. “I’m really amazed.”
“I don’t know exactly.” Griffin looked worried as if she were afraid he was really upset, which of course, he wasn’t, or at least not very much. “I guess it was just that you’d already tamed him so much that he wasn’t really all that much afraid any more. So it was easier for me.”
He shrugged. “Well maybe. But I still can’t understand it. In less than two weeks he lets you walk right up and touch him. You and two noisy little kids.”
“Oh no,” Griffin said. “I can’t do it when the kids are around. He always keeps his distance when they’re with me. I have to be all alone, and everything has to be just right.”
James grinned. “So that’s it. That’s what I was lacking. No olive wreath and Grecian toga.”
She looked embarrassed. “It wasn’t really. Just bay leaves and Wes’ old tee shirt. See.” She indicated the oversized tee shirt that was now tucked into her jeans. “But the rest of it was real. The ceremony was the important part, and that was real.”
“The ceremony?”
She nodded. “The Ceremony of the Talismans Against Evil. It was Laurel’s idea, at least at first. After I told them what you said about how all the hunters would want to shoot the stag if they knew about him, she started to worry like crazy.”
“Laurel does everything like crazy,” James said.
Griffin smiled. “I know. But she was really nervous about the stag, so we decided to have a ceremony to give him magical protection from hunters, or anyone who might want to hurt him. We made the amulets and did a lot of ceremonies to make them powerful, but I didn’t know if he’d really let me tie them to his antlers. I’d touched him before, though just barely. But the ceremony worked. Do you want to hear about the ceremony?”
James said he did, so she’d gone into the whole thing in great detail. There had been a fast, necessitating elaborate maneuvers to keep Cynthia from realizing her charges weren’t eating. And then, after having reached the valley, a ritual had been performed that would bring down a curse on anyone who planned to harm the stag. Then the kids had been stationed where he’d found them, while Griffin had gone off alone to prepare for her part in the final ceremony. The part James had witnessed had been the Purification of the High Priestess.
“I thought it was something like that,” he said. “That was very impressive. Why don’t you leave your hair loose like that all the time?”
“My hair?” They were walking along a narrow stretch of trail at the time, with Griffin in the lead, and he saw her hand go back to touch her hair, a single braid again hanging down the middle of her back. She stopped suddenly and turned back, looking puzzled. “Why did you say that? About my hair?”
“Why? Because I like the way it looked. You have beautiful hair.”
To his surprise her cheeks actually got red and her dark brows drew together in a frown that looked almost painful. Whirling around, she began to run on the rocky, treacherous trail. He watched in amazement as she ran like a frightened deer on the narrow path, the long braid whipping behind her. She slowed down finally, but for a long time she maintained the distance between them.
Kooky kid, he thought. He wanted to ask her what was wrong, but not enough to run after her on terrain like that. There were, in fact, several more things concerning Griffin that he wanted to know more about. Things like why she reacted as she did to any mention of her home life, particularly if her mother was concerned. He had some theories about it. There was obviously a lot of anger involved. One of those love-hate things, no doubt: fascinated by her gorgeous mother, and at the same time hating her for spending all her time with her jet-set friends and neglecting her family. Perhaps hating her for a lot of other reasons, too. Given some of the off-beat things he’d heard about the Westmorelands, he could imagine a lot of reasons why Griffin might resent her mother and stepfather. But most of his ideas were based on imagination, without much definite proof. It would be interesting to discuss it with Griffin and find out how many of his guesses were correct. But it wasn’t likely that he’d be able to, not while she went on freezing up at any mention of her mother. He decided however that if the opportunity arose, he would try again. And not just to satisfy his own curiosity. It would probably be a good thing for her. Get all that pent-up anger and hatred out in the open.
It was on a Saturday morning, only one week before the Fieldings were due to leave New Moon Lake, that James arrived at the snack bar phone booth a little earlier than usual. It was the last Saturday in August, and in the town of New Moon there was to be a Farewell Festival. A farewell to the summer and all the summer tourists. There was to be a parade, all kinds of craft and game booths and even a fun house, which local craftsmen had constructed in an abandoned hardware store. Just three days earlier, when he had last seen Diane, she had said the fair sounded like fun in a corny hick-town way, and would James like to hike over with her on Saturday morning? Except for the fact that there were other more private places he’d prefer to visit with her, there was, of course, nothing he’d like better. And he said so, as far as he could remember, in perfectly straightforward, unambiguous, one syllable words. But when Diane answered the phone that morning, she did it again—pulled the same old routine about not knowing they’d made it definite.
“Oh, we didn’t say for sure did we? I thought you said you thought it would be too corny.”
“You were the one who said it would be corny,” he said, trying to keep the anger out of his voice until he knew for certain how things were going to turn out, because he knew from experience that one sarcastic comment and he would have blown it for sure.
“Oh, really? Are you certain? Because the way I remember it, you said you thought the whole thing would be pretty dumb. But anyway, Jamesy, the thing is, my dad just arrived for the weekend and he wants the whole family to go to the big event together. There’s going to be some big deal ceremony that my dad has to go to. The city fathers are going to give Dad and old T.J. the keys to the city or some dumb thing like that, because of all the extra business since they built The Camp. You know, one of those, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen. It gives me great honor to present…’ sort of things. It’ll be really dumb, but you know how parents are about things like that.”
James knew, he guessed, but he wasn’t happy about it.
“It’s going to be an absolutely petrifying bore,” Diane went on, “and besides, it’s going to be too hot to hike all that way today, anyway. So why don’t you just call me tomorrow morning and we’ll do something then. Okay? Could you maybe call me again tomorrow?”
Glumly he agreed that maybe he could call her tomorrow. Maybe, he said, but he knew of course that there wasn’t any maybe about it. Not the ghost of a paper-thin shred of a particle of a maybe. If there was any chance at all of seeing her, he’d call, and the trouble was—she knew it.
He hung up the phone, thought about going into the snack bar for a chat with Fiona and decided against it. He was in no mood to talk to anyone. With no definite destination in mind, he drifted across the Parade Grounds and out towards the big trees in the bivouac area. It was going to be hot, all right. Hot and bright and dry, and he couldn’t think of a single thing he wanted to do. Diane was gone, for the day at least; and when he thought about the valley and the deer, it occurred to him that some things were gone there, too. The secret was gone and the exclusiveness and solitude. If he’d only kept his stupid mouth shut, he could go there now and stretch out on the boulder and let the clean blue silence seep into him and wash away the fiery whirlpools that seemed to be churning around in various parts of his anatomy. But he hadn’t kept his mouth shut, and as a result he probably couldn’t stretch out anywhere in the whole valley without being stepped on by little kids, or a skinny little kook in a tee shirt toga, leading his stag around on a red ribbon.
Realizing that he was hot, seething, boiling hot, in fact, he drifted towards the nearest tree, the big sycamore with the circular picnic table around its trunk. He climbed up onto the table and sat down, with his back against the trunk and his legs stretched out in front of him. It was somewhat cooler under the huge tent of overhanging limbs, but it didn’t seem as if his internal temperature was dropping much.
Making an effort to get his mind off the things that were driving him up the wall, he started looking around for something to put it on instead. He watched a chubby kid in plaid shorts tearing around the soccer field on a red Motocross bicycle with knobby tires and rabbit-ear handlebars, and two typically well-groomed Camp matrons on their way to the tennis courts. Then a couple of cars approached on the road to the main gate, which crossed the bivouac area only a few yards from where he was sitting. The first car was a very slow moving station wagon with two women in the front seat and a swarm of little kids in the back—probably on their way to the New Moon Fair; and the next car, which was obviously being held to a crawl by the station wagon, was Lance Richardson’s Porsche with the top down. And sitting so close to Lance that she was practically in his lap was Diane.
The strange thing was that it didn’t make him angry, at least not right away. He wasn’t angry, and he wasn’t hot anymore, either. In fact what he felt right at first was cold and numb and a little like something had just hit him hard in the pit of the stomach. He got down off the picnic table very slowly and carefully, as if he were afraid a jolt of any kind might fracture something that had suddenly gone thin and brittle somewhere in his interior, and started walking slowly back toward the center.
He was passing the snack bar when he realized his throat felt strange, tight and dry, so he ordered a Dr. Pepper at the sidewalk window and sat down at one of the outdoor tables. He stayed there thinking for a long time. What he was thinking about was how it might have happened. How Diane might not really have been lying to him, even though at first glance it seemed as if she had been. There were several possibilities. Perhaps, for instance, Lance had just happened to drop by the Jarretts’ just as they were all getting ready to go to the fair, and Diane had suddenly decided to ride over with him, since she had to go anyway. That seemed the best explanation, and the one he kept coming back to over and over again.
He’d been sitting there long enough for the shade from the metal umbrella to have moved without his noticing, when somebody said, “Hey, you trying to get sunstroke or something?”
Mike Jarrett, in swimming trunks and a beach towel, was standing beside him drinking a Coke. Putting his Coke on the table, he pulled up a chair and sat down. James moved out of the sun.
Conversation wasn’t as difficult as he would have expected and actually was a kind of relief. They talked about the hot weather, the fact that Mike was on his way to the swimming pool, and then James brought up the subject of the fair in New Moon.
“I hear your father’s going to be given the keys to the city or something like that,” he heard himself saying coolly. “Aren’t you going to be there to watch?”
Mike grimaced. “I’ll be there all right, if I know what’s good for me. By special invitation of my old man. An offer I couldn’t refuse.”
“Well aren’t you going to be late?”
“Late? It doesn’t start until three-thirty this afternoon.”
“Oh? I got the impression it was going to be earlier. Diane said she had to be there for the presentation, and I just happened to notice her leaving a little while ago.”
Mike looked at him for quite a long time before he said anything. “You did, huh? You saw her leaving—with Lance?”
James nodded. He felt certain his face didn’t show anything, but he wasn’t sure what his voice would be like.
“Look, kid,” Mike said, which fortunately irked James enough to burn out whatever it was that was threatening his vocal chords. More than irked, actually. He happened to know that Mike was barely seventeen. “Look, kid. Don’t worry about that jerk and his Porsche. It won’t last. For one thing, Richardson goes through dames like a chain smoker through a pack of Kools. And he’s not really interested in Di. She’s been after him and his cars for years, and he’s always treated her like a little kid. Which really drives her crazy.” He grinned in a way that he probably meant to be sympathetic but which made James want to hit him in the mouth. Which was a feeling he couldn’t remember ever having had before, at least not since he was about ten years old. “It won’t last,” Mike said again. “I know what I’m talking about.”
Afterwards, thinking back about the whole scene, James could remember smiling coolly and reminding himself not to hit his head on the metal umbrella when he stood up, which he usually did and which, under the circumstances, would have been just about the last straw. But after that he couldn’t remember a thing about leaving The Camp and getting back to the Willowby cabin.
The period that followed was unlike any he had ever known. He went through all the routines—getting up, eating, going out into the woods at least far enough to get away from Charlotte’s worried gaze, coming back to sit holding an unread book—with a curiously detached feeling, as if some important part of him was missing.
For the first time in his life he found himself feeling nostalgic. He found himself, lying in bed, twenty-three days before his sixteenth birthday, looking back wistfully on the days of his youth. On a time when a wakeful period meant leading an army of elephants over the alps, or attacking the sheriff in Sherwood Forest, instead of providing a forum for an idiotic debate over whether Diane was a clever, sneaky cheat, or a beautiful, reckless, exciting person.
And then one morning, when his defenses had been weakened by a particularly sleepless night, Charlotte struck. She waited until William had gone down to the lake for his morning dip, and then she started making gentle sympathetic hints about what he was going through, and it worked. He broke down and told her all about it—all of it, right down to the Porsche and the things Mike had said at the snack bar, and how he didn’t need to be told he was being an imbecile because he knew it, and that knowing it didn’t help a bit.
She waited until he was all through before she said anything and then, instead of saying anything useful, all she did was start telling him a long story that had nothing to do with him at all. The story was about how, when she was in college, she’d fallen in love with the quarterback of the football team—a handsome, macho, charismatic guy with whom she had absolutely nothing in common, but whom she would probably have married if he hadn’t had the good sense to jilt her for another girl.
“We couldn’t have been more wrong for each other,” she said, “and in a way I knew it, and yet I was absolutely mindlessly in love with him.”
She stared out the window for a minute without saying anything, and then she sighed and went on. “Being in love!” she said. “It’s something that happens to almost everyone at one time or other, and the strange thing is, it often seems to have very little to do with any personal qualities the love object might have that would make them a good lover or companion or even friend. But James—there is one thing that I can tell you that is true and important.”
He dropped his eyes because he didn’t want her to see that he didn’t believe her. She couldn’t possibly know what was true for him because she couldn’t possibly understand how he felt about Diane and how he was feeling now.
“You won’t believe me,” Charlotte said, “because when you’re in love, particularly if it’s the first time and even more so if you’re quite young, you’re absolutely positive that nobody ever felt the way you do. But I’ll tell you anyway. The truth is—you’ll get over it. You don’t believe me, but you will. Everyone always does. It either turns into real love, which is something quite different, or it goes away. But in the meantime there are a couple of things you could do about it—and it doesn’t seem to me that you’re doing either one.”
“Like what?” he muttered without looking up.
“You could do something to get her back, or you could put your mind on other things and start getting over her.”
So in a way, what happened was Charlotte’s fault—at least to the extent that it happened because he decided to take her advice. He decided, at first, to get over Diane—to put her out of his mind once and for all. He really tried, but after he’d been trying all the rest of that day and halfway through the next night, he gave up. He couldn’t forget her, and he wasn’t even sure he wanted to, so there was nothing left except the other possibility, which was trying to do something—anything at all—that might help to get her back.
The first step had to be to simply get her to see him. To see him and really talk to him for more than just a few minutes. He had to do something to really get her attention…
He suddenly stopped tossing and turning, and for a long time lay very still. Then he turned on the light and went straight to his desk and opened the shoebox that held his da Vinci file. He found what he was looking for right where he had filed it several weeks before—under S for stag. It was a photograph that he had taken early in July.