It had been twenty-five minutes, and her father had yet to show up. She had always expected this, that one day the truck would finally die. Every day that her father waited for her, on time, the dragon filling the air in front of the school with its special blend of toxic fumes, was an anomaly, and today was expected. But if it were expected, she did not know why she had never drawn up a contingency plan.
She walked back to her locker and opened it, feigning a search for a forgotten book. She waited for Mrs. Webster to lock her door and begin her way down the hall.
“Whatcha doin’, Polensky?” Oliver smacked the open door of her locker with his palm. His signature scent of Wrigley’s chewing gum and aftershave worked its way into the space between her and the dark hollow of her locker.
“Nothing,” she answered, fingering a copy of Les Miserables in French. What could she be doing here? She played no sports; math club was on Tuesdays, science on Wednesday. “What are you doing?”
“Getting the hell out of here. Want a ride?”
It was not a divine intervention, and it didn’t feel like one, but Heidi was strangely at peace with whatever serendipity was in the works, with her father’s absence today, Oliver’s seeming chivalry. She’d let him drive her home, see where she lived. Maybe he would stay and actually meet her father this time, since the aforementioned nursing home visit to meet his grandfather had never materialized. Or maybe he’d break up with Shauna. Her torture of Heidi had not stopped, contrary to Oliver’s belief; instead, she’d just grown more clever, more careful about it—saying hi to her in his presence, complementing her on a shirt she must have worn for three years—while Heidi still found used tampons in her locker, her clothes still stolen from the locker room during gym; once, underwear doused in vinegar, and crushed potato chips in her shoes.
Maybe, in his guilt, Oliver thought of her at night, some innocent fantasy of seeing the Jasper Johns exhibit together at the university in town and ramming his tongue into her throat in the back of his Mustang, flowers, long, fluent letters on looseleaf detailing his long-kindled devotion, and a date to the prom secured. Maybe he had staked her movements out for the last week, two, seeing an opportunity as she idled by her locker and seizing it.
Or maybe she was just delusional. They walked silently through the hall, filled with amateurish posters advertising this year’s theme—Enchantment Under the Sea—out to the student parking lot, a square of concrete where plans were made, alliances between cliques forged, and impromptu trips to Buildaburger taken. It was a hub at which Heidi had never bartered, only heard about in the aftermath of newsworthy events. Oliver whistled. His aluminum varsity baseball bat lay across his shoulder. At the end of it, dangling, rested his backpack, and with a flick, he catapulted it across the parking lot, where it landed at the back of his Mustang like an obedient dog.
“Nice aim,” she said.
“You want me to do yours?”
“No.” Although she was flattered that he would show off for her. “I’ve got breakables.”
“Yeah—I broke my trig calculator once,” he conceded. “Um, so do you have a date for prom yet?”
“I don’t have any plans,” she answered. She could not believe he was actually asking her. Her father would have to splurge for this—a dress. Perhaps she could even ask Ms. Webster for a loan.
“Yeah? Maybe I’ll see if one of the boys wants to take you. Richard Young doesn’t have a date.”
She felt her backpack slide off her shoulder and onto the tarred pavement. Richard Young would probably be as unpopular as she was if he was not batting .478 as the Tigers’ left fielder. He was an orangutan with pimples and braces and always smelled like mayonnaise and salami. Oliver scooped the bag up with his bat and flicked over on top of his, figuring, perhaps, that whatever fragile piece rested inside was already broken.
“So, yeah, I’ll ask Richard.” They reached the car. It couldn’t get any worse at that point, she figured, how could it? Except that when she grabbed her backpack and went to open the passenger door of Oliver’s Mustang, Shauna was already sitting in it. Her eyes widened as she cracked her gum.
“Jesus—yuck, you scared me.” Shauna pulled the door closed on her. “Go away, troll.”
“I’m giving Heidi a ride home.” Oliver said, opening the driver’s side door. He threw his own backpack roughly into Shauna’s lap. “So shut the fuck up.”
Shauna’s jaw dropped at perhaps the same velocity and speed as Heidi’s. They stared at each other as some weighed balance rolled, like a roulette ball, between them. For a moment, there was a pinhole of vulnerability in the irises of Shauna’s eyes, the beginning of a tear on one of her eyelids, before their gentle, pulpy black hardened irreversibly, and Heidi knew that her remaining days at Mt. Zion would be as cursed and unforgettable as a nightmare.
“Get in.” Oliver said to Heidi, nodding toward the front seat. “Shauna was just leaving.”
“I just remembered—my father is going to pick me up soon.” She backed away, unable to unlock her gaze from Shauna, a medusa busy turning Heidi’s limbs and stomach to stone the longer she stayed put. “Thanks, though.”
At an alarming and embarrassing speed, Heidi ran back toward the school, hoping to catch Ms. Webster before she left. She could get a ride and perhaps some advice on how to avoid the freight train of Shauna’s wrath that would be barreling through the school at her as early as Monday morning. But the halls were dark, smelling of dust and adolescence—an eau de gym sock, bubble gum, and hormones. She stood outside in front, willing the orange monster to make its slow turn from State Avenue and lumber before her.
After forty minutes, she traced the route her father would take to the school to get her, if he was indeed coming. Six miles. It was breezy, and she scurried along the side of the road like an opossum for two hours, ready to duck into the high grass or ditch at any vehicle that wasn’t the truck. She had been stupid not to take Oliver’s offer, and for some reason, this made her angry at her father, rather than Shauna or Oliver. Her father was at fault, along with her stupid mother, for her existence in this shit world. And Ms. Webster, too, for giving her a chance. She became angrier every step she took, and by six o’clock, reaching the driveway of their farmhouse and seeing the truck parked in the driveway, she was furious.
Right away, she knew something was wrong. All the lights were out, and her father was a notorious waster of electricity on account of his glaucoma. Even during the day, at least the kitchen light burned. She stepped inside the hallway and there he was, like a pile of laundry that had settled at the bottom of the steps.
“Shit.” She lifted his face between her hands, his head the weight of a bowling ball. Some of his drool smeared across her right palm, but he was cold, unmoving. She pinched his nose and blew in his mouth and pushed his chest, trying to approximate the CPR she’d learned during swimming classes years ago. Finally, she rested on top of him, feeling her short, beleaguered breaths press against the rigidness of his chest.
She got a glass of water from the kitchen, gulping it greedily by the sink, pressing her lips tightly so that she would not immediately throw it up. When she turned, he was still there, where she’d left him. She sat down and took one of his hands. It was strange to think that the only person she’d ever known on earth, really, her only home, had gone to some other place, some other home. And left her here to fend for herself, with thirteen sixty-eight in his checking account until his next pension check.
She picked up the phone and called Ms. Webster. She waited, strangely composed, as the rings went unanswered and she hung up. If she spoke of it, it therefore would be true, and the thing, strong and green inside her, would rot and snap and never grow again. She could not speak of what had happened just yet. She willed the tears from her eyes and went back to the stairs. She grabbed her father’s shoulders and pressed her foot aside the side of the step for leverage, pulling him up to a sitting position. He looked like he did when he slept, except he was cold and everything about him was weighted down with gravity, enclosed in a faint smell of urine.
“Why’d you have to go and pull this? Jesus,” she asked, smoothing the collar of his shirt. Her thoughts began to gather speed, when his pension would come in, how much she could cash at a time, when she could pay the bills and get gas. She’d already done so much of it with and without him present, that it didn’t seem so hard. So hard to what? To pretend nothing was wrong? It was her senior year, and in a few months, she’d graduate. She didn’t want to go into foster care, for the state to sell the house, to evict her from the only memories she had. She didn’t want any extra attention at school, or even pity. And, mostly, she didn’t want to believe it. He’d left her. She sat on the stair above him and dropped her head in her hands.
She heard it then, creak in the kitchen, not the creak of mice or settling foundations, but the creak of an intruder, a slow moan on the soft spot of the kitchen floor near the stove.
A young man appeared at the entrance to the living room, wearing a white V-neck undershirt and jeans, a leather jacket, some undetermined type of mountain boot, a timeless nondefinitive style, certainly no one she’d ever seen before.
“Wait…” He held out his hand, but she was already up the stairs, the charge of survival electrifying her limbs like a cattle prodder. She locked her father’s bedroom door and made for the shoebox at the top of her the closet where he kept his .22 pistol. It felt heavy and foreign, like an alien transponder, and she wished she’d taken him up on his numerous attempts to train her in firearms. Unfortunately, he was usually drunk when the offers had occurred, and she spent more time trying to talk him out of shooting the empty Wild Turkey bottles he’d lined on the fence for his own safety than wondering when her own marksmanship would come in handy.
She crouched by the door and listened to his boots squeak on the wooden planks of the steps. Each board pressed against her heart, pinning it against her throat. She moved the safety with her finger, thank goodness she knew that much, and pointed the gun at the door.
“Heidi?”
The knock, his voice, startled her. She held the gun as steadily as she could with two hands and waited, her breaths quick through her nose. He knocked again, and she felt the sweat build in her armpits and begin in run down her sides. There was no third knock, and as the boots moaned again on the planks down the stairs and outside the house, she moved to the bedroom window, peering out. He turned, and she caught a glimpse of his face—placid, square—and she leapt back, wondering if he saw her. She thought of a Joyce Carol Oates story Ms. Webster assigned them last semester—about a convict with a motorcycle jacket and too-big boots who talks a girl out of her house and into his car while her parents are gone.
He walked toward the truck. She took a deep breath and flew down the stairs, hurdling over her father’s body to the front door to lock it. She let the gun fall to her side and glanced through the curtains. At the truck, he had turned, staring at the door, realizing what had happened, and he trotted back up and tried the doorknob before disappearing around the side of the house. Her heart flittered in her ears as she moved back through the house to the kitchen. Sure enough, he was coming around the back of the house.
She locked the back door and ducked as his form filled its six glass panes. The handle jiggled, and then he knocked again. She tried to imagine herself part of the wallpaper, a chameleon.
“Heidi, I don’t mean you any harm. Please—answer or something.”
But he didn’t knock again, and after a few seconds, she could see smoke lazily spiraling up to the sky. She stood up to find him sitting on the back porch steps, smoking. She wondered how long he would wait.
A long time, apparently. Fifteen, twenty minutes passed, and she crept from room to room, peering through different windows. She could not turn on the lights as the sun began to disappear in the sky, could not turn on the television, not even take a shower. She thought about slipping out the front and running to the Harris’s house a mile up the road, asking Mr. Harris to come back with her. But she was a terrible runner; surely he would catch up with her. It would be better to be bold. It was not, she realized, as if she had anything to lose. Her life was no longer anything she knew and she would have to walk through the storm’s eye and get to the other side, wherever that would be. She sighed loudly, walked with the gun at shoulder level, and opened the door.
“What do you want?” She growled. The man stood up quickly in surprise.
“I’m sorry,” he answered calmly, backing down the steps and into the yard. He seemed unbothered by having a gun leveled at him. “I came to see your father, Stanley Polensky.”
“And you killed him?”
“No—he had a heart attack.” He twisted the cherry out of his cigarette and crushed the filter in his hand. “I’m sorry.”
“You’re trying to rob us? Does it look like we have anything? I called the police, just so you know.”
“Oh.” He looked at his boots, his lips tight. One of his shoelaces was stained with ketchup or blood. She squeezed the handle of the gun, hoping the former. “I wish you hadn’t.”
“I bet.” She felt tears on her face, but there was nothing she could do. Her arm began to warm and ping and numb from pointing the gun at him.
“No, it’s just that I wanted to explain.” He held his hands up over his head. “I’ll stand here like this and we’ll just talk and then I’m going to beat it out of here when the police come.”
“Hurry, then.”
“Heidi, I’m so sorry about your father.” He blinked his eyes, and for a moment, she felt as if his eyelashes had wiped her face dry, had held her chin, caressed her cheeks. She noticed how stunning he was, like Robert Redford in The Great Gatsby. “I surprised the hell out of him, that’s for sure. We haven’t seen each other…for years.”
“Are you…my brother?” It was entirely possible that, if her mother had hidden one child from the public eye, she had hidden another.
“Oh, no.” He laughed. He shook his head and chuckled again, as if sharing in some inside joke to which she was not privy. “I’m a little older than that. I’m an old friend.”
He poked around in his leather jacket for his cigarettes and pulled out a pack of Pall Malls. “Want one?”
“I don’t smoke. My father doesn’t—didn’t—have any friends.”
“So you’re his daughter, huh?” He looked up at her and cocked an eyebrow. “You really don’t look anything like him.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Hey, come on—you gonna level a gun at me all day?”
“Until you get out of here and don’t come back. I told you, the police will be here any minute.”
“Listen.” He inhaled his cigarette and squatted on the ground. “Did Stanley Polensky—your father—ever mention a Calvin Johnson to you?”
“Why?”
“Well, Stanley and Calvin were in the war together, which I guess you’d know if you know Calvin Johnson. I just wanted to get some information from Stanley about the war. I’ve come a long way. I’m not here to rob you or anything, I swear.”
“What kind of information?”
“Yeah.” He scratched the back of his head. “Probably a strange request. But I’m interested in a—corsage—that Stanley carried around. A dried flower that he kept in his helmet. I always figured it was probably a corsage from a girl at a dance or something, right, although Stanley never talked about any sweetheart, from what I can recall. Anyway, it’s really important that I see the herb. I’ve wanted to get in touch with Stanley for a long time, but I lost track of him after he moved from Baltimore. I finally find him, God, it was so good to see him, but he got all worked up seeing me and had a heart attack. I tried to resuscitate him, but…anyway, the herb isn’t important right now, is it? Your father is dead. We should help him, not leave him there like that.”
“He’s staying where he is.” She waved the gun as if to remind him it was still there. “How do I know you didn’t hit him or choke him or kill him some other way?”
“You don’t.” He flicked his cigarette onto the ground and stepped on it.
“So maybe you’ll explain that to the police.”
“Heidi, I’m Calvin Johnson.” He looked up at her. “I served with your father during the war.”
“Stop it.” She shook her head. “Do you expect me to believe that? I don’t know what’s going on here, but we’re going to wait here until the police come. And if you try and run, I’ll shoot you.”
“It wouldn’t matter if you shot me or not, but I won’t run.” He sat on the ground cross-legged. “I’ll wait.”
“I’ll be right back.” She backed into the house toward the phone to call the police. In the kitchen, she poured herself a glass of water and watched him through the window. He remained on the ground, smoking another cigarette, as if resigned to his fate. Something about him seemed so harmless, so familiar. And he knew about the crazy herb in her backpack, the one her father had told her about, the one Melanie Huber told her was definitely not pot, but if her father was growing any shrooms, to please let her know. Suddenly, a stranger was her only familiar face in the world. She sighed and poured another glass of water and took them outside.
“Here—if you’re thirsty.” She put the glass down between them, then backed away, pointing the gun at him. He took the glass and gulped it empty.
“Thanks,” he answered. “I’m glad Stanley had a family. He was so shy with the ladies while we were in the army. I bet he was good to you, huh?”
“Don’t.” She wiped the sweat from her brow and sat on the porch steps. “Don’t try to play my sympathies.”
“I’m not. I’m just really sorry you had to come home…to this. Were you in school or something?”
“Why are you curious about this—corsage?” She interrupted him. He studied her, but she could not tell what he was thinking.
“Well, it may have some medicinal qualities. Do you know anything about that?”
She looked at her water glass and then past his shoulder.
“Do you know what I’m talking about?” He stared at her. “The flower? You are aware of its existence, right?”
“Yeah—I’ve heard about it,” she answered finally, and his face lit up. His hands dug into each other as if he were trying to keep himself from her.
“Is it in your possession? Stanley said he gave it to you.”
“What’s it to you?”
“Listen, I don’t have any money. I can’t pay you anything, but I’d do whatever it takes to get to see it. You see, a friend of mine, a scientist, he wants to examine it.”
“Can’t he get his own somewhere?”
“That’s the thing.” He stood up and lit another cigarette, running his hand through his hair and pacing back and forth. She felt her body stiffen. Her hand with the gun followed him back and forth. She grabbed the railing with her other hand to steady herself. “It’s very rare, this herb, he thinks. Maybe a few patches existed in Europe a few centuries ago, or maybe this particular piece that Stanley owns was tampered with in some way. But we’ll never know until we test it.”
“Why do you think there’s something medicinal about it?”
“Because.” He stopped pacing and looked at her. “Because Stanley Polensky fed it to me in Germany in 1944 and then left me for dead…but I lived. And I’ve been like this…young, undead…ever since.”
“What are you saying? That Calvin Johnson is still alive?” Heidi thoughts raced, constructing a man as old as her father withering away in some nursing home in Ohio. Her heart swelled for her own father, that he did not live to have the incident that weighed him down reclaimed, like lost baggage, years later.
“Yes.” he smiled. “I survived. And we—the scientist and I—think it might have to do with the herb Stanley gave me.”
“You are so full of it,” she said, even though she felt herself shaking. “What’s my grandmother’s name?”
“Safine.”
“My aunts and uncles?”
“Henry, Thomas, Cass, Julia…and Kathryn. Linus was your grandfather.”
“What about my mother?”
“Don’t know.” He dug his hands in his pockets. “I only knew him until 1944. Listen, did your father ever eat the herb, to your knowledge?”
“No, he didn’t.”
“Did you?”
“Of course not.” She picked at her tennis shoe. “But you expect me to believe you did.”
“I don’t know how much I ate. I remember your father stuffing it into my mouth, my wound. It was pretty bad, the wound. I was missing most of my leg from taking a shell.”
“I know this. I also know the paramedic pronounced Calvin Johnson dead at the scene. And, theoretically, you’re just a guy who knows it, too, since I saw my father’s diary on the floor of the living room.”
“Police sure take a long time in these parts.” He cocked an eyebrow toward her.
“Well, I guess you have more time to make shit up,” she answered.
Over the next hour, he told her everything as if he expected her to believe it. She wondered whether he had stolen anyone else’s identities aside from Calvin Johnson’s, whose Social Security checks he had stuffed in the backpack she’d noticed lying in the living room. Whoever he was, it puzzled her why he cared so much about Calvin Johnson’s past enough to come here and involve her father. Did he have some serious cash tucked away that she did not know about, perhaps recording royalties from her mother? Had he lied to her all this time, forcing them into some austere existence for the sake of making some point about his own frugality?
“I can prove this to you,” the man said. “The herb. I’m telling you, that herb is magic.”
“Either that or you’re a nut.” She sighed. He seemed smaller, shallower, to her, a con man off his meds. She figured that, like most con men, he thought he had his in with her and now he wouldn’t leave unless she got the police involved.
“We should do it now.” He stood up. “Come on.”
“What?”
“I want you to shoot me.” He stood in the backyard, arms and legs spread out. “I’m proving to you that everything I’ve said is true.”
“I’m not going to shoot you, you moron.” She felt sick to her stomach. It was turning out to be some crazy Joyce Carol Oates story after all. Maybe she had wanted to shoot him a few times in the past few hours, but this was not the same. “I don’t want to go to jail.”
“Nobody will hear. I’m sure gunfire isn’t that foreign a sound in these parts,” he said. “Now, come on. You think I’m a con artist, that I’m trying to milk you dry or something, right? All I’m saying is shoot me in, here, the hand, and you’ll see.”
He held his palm open toward her, far away from his body.
“And then what?”
“Well, it’ll hurt like hell, and it’ll bleed for a bit, but a few hours from now, you are going to see the wound start to heal. In no time at all, it’ll be completely gone.”
“Either you’re a fool or I’m dreaming.” She scrunched her eyebrows. “And I’m supposed to take care of you during your convalescence?”
“Not if you don’t want to. If you’ll kindly lend me a towel, I’ll sit out there in the cornfield by myself.”
“Couldn’t you just rob us like a normal person?” She laughed at the unreality of her evening. Perhaps she had fallen asleep during seventh period. Everything, from Oliver to her father to this faux Johnson had morphed stranger and stranger as if she’d eaten chocolate before bed. “Why did you have to bring my father into this, and poor Calvin Johnson, too?”
“Do you think I want to be twenty-two years old forever?” He narrowed his eyes as he felt for his cigarettes in his jacket. “You think it’s fun watching the people you care for age and get sick, knowing that every person you meet, you’re going to watch die? Believe me, I’m secretly hoping that this is the bullet that will kill me.”
“Well, since you’re not going to back into the truth anytime soon, how about I start? We have nothing. There isn’t any money for you to take. We live on $230 dollars a month. You know what that buys, besides gas, when the truck is working, electricity, water, and food? Yeah, nothing. Sometimes, it doesn’t even buy water and food.”
He turned from her and walked away, toward the cornfields, kneeling down on his hands and knees, eyes closed. She saw the bands of muscles in his arm, his legs, and his jaw tense before he started to cry, big bawling sulks, his head shaking, a cry even worse than any she’d ever had. He pounded the ground with his fists, his eyebrows slanted in fury toward his nose. Then he sat up, the residue of his anger rolling off him.
“We can still give him the herb.” He nodded his head as he stood up, as if it had never happened. “He might wake up. Where’s the herb? Let’s give it to your father.”
“He’s been dead for hours.” She fell back on the step, relieved that he was no longer angry, perhaps a little less dangerous.
“It doesn’t matter how dead—it can’t matter. My whole leg was gone. I must have been dead for a month.”
“But you already had the herb in you when you were alive,” she pressed, and then grabbed at her hair. “What am I talking about? This is all a bunch of bullshit.”
“Look.” He sat back on his haunches. “I know this is all very, very difficult to swallow. I wouldn’t believe it myself, if you came up to me with the same story. But there are others like me, even. I can show them to you, if you want. There’s all sorts of classified research going on to isolate what’s going on in me, the others, and the flower, to see whether the secret to immortality is finally known. Even if you don’t believe me, at least let’s go inside. I know you didn’t call the police. I know you must believe in something, Heidi.”
“I don’t know what I believe.” It was dark. She wanted to talk to Ms. Webster.
“Believe me when I say I want to help you.” He walked toward her slowly, his palms facing outward. “I want to help your father, help you, and then maybe you’ll help me.”
She let him come inside. They sat on the couch and looked at Stanley across the room. In the deepening twilight, he looked asleep. Everything in her father that Heidi had always assumed to be available to her, her father himself, had been washed away as if it were written in sand.
“I feel so selfish for never having asked him anything about himself,” she said, to the man or to herself. “I’ve spent all my life worrying about myself.”
“You’re young. I didn’t think about my parents, really think about them, until we shipped out from Fort Benning and I thought I might never see them again.” He pulled out his wallet and showed her a folded black and white photograph of a man and woman. The woman wore a shin-length polka-dot dress with white lapels folding out over a square collar. “Here they are, in front of our home. I wasn’t born yet, so it’s probably the 1920s.”
“That’s very nice.” Heidi studied the man, who had thick Brylcreemed hair, a straight nose, and a square jaw. “You look a lot like that man. Even the slicked hair. And you definitely look like the guy on the ship.”
“Heidi, get the herb. I want to save your father.”
“He didn’t want to eat it. Look, I will give you the herb—I don’t really care about it. But you’re not giving it to my father, okay? I have to respect his wishes.”
“But I need to know if he can undo this.” The man pressed her arm. “I can’t be like this the rest of my life. Don’t you want your father to live?”
“No…yes…I don’t know.” She shook her head. “He never asked anything of me, except for that.”
She rummaged through her backpack and put the sandwich bag on the table. His hand hovered over it, but he did not touch it.
“Do you think it’ll work?” She stood up, her legs like paper, unsure whether she was scared or hopeful.
“It has to,” he answered. “I’m living proof.”
“But if you give it to my father, there might not be any more. Maybe the scientist should try and replicate it first…if it’s that important to you.”
“Heidi, your father is dead over there.” Calvin picked up the bag. “Don’t you want him to live?”
“Of course…but not if he’s going to be some Frankenstein.”
“Is that what I am to you?”
“I don’t know.” She wrapped her arms around herself. “I didn’t ask for any of this. I just wanted to get through high school. Yes, please save him.”
The man bent over her father and pinched open his mouth, manipulating the herb out of the plastic sandwich bag with the other.
“I’m sorry, Dad.” Heidi held her hands in prayer. She did not know any prayers, so she made one up about her appreciation of her father, his hard life, his small enjoyments of losing money at the track and at the liquor store, his faith in the orange dragon, who might miss his erratic and drunken driving, even if the rest of the world wouldn’t.
“I can’t do this.” The man sat back on his heels. “Why would I take from your father the only thing I’ve wanted all these years for myself?”
He stood up and placed the herb on the table before her.
“Here, I can’t. Can you?”
She looked at the herb, the one she almost sold to Melanie, in her gym class, who sat on the bleachers singing “Sugar Magnolia, blossoms blooming” with a doctor’s note about her asthma even though her lungs were stronger than an elephant’s. She looked at her father. He would be pissed. He would be so pissed. But he was her only father, her only…anything.
“Will he stay fifty-five forever?” She asked the man, who absently took her father’s pulse. “How long has he been dead now?”
“Over two hours. Almost three.” He stood up. “Look, I don’t mean to take the decision out of your hands, but if it works, he’ll never die. There’s another one, this girl Ela—the scientist adopted her—she’s been nine for nearly two hundred years. She’s watched so many people die, and she’ll never become a woman. I thought I wanted your father to take it, but I don’t know. He’ll have to watch you die, which will kill him, even though he can’t die. Because he loves you so much, Heidi. I’ve never seen someone love a child so much. He told me how smart you are, how you’re going to do the Polenskys proud, that ‘Lil Cindy didn’t know what she missed.”
“At least he gets to see her again. I don’t know if she’ll want to see him,” she laughed. But the tears that started growing in her eyes were not funny. “He’s probably giving her an earful right now.”
“Well, she deserves it.” The man walked over to her and put his arms around her, squeezing her, warm and soft. He smelled like his jacket, clean but wild. He kissed the top of her head and held her in his arms and she let him.
It took over an hour to dig the grave. She could barely see Johnson in the darkness, the dirt flying over his shoulder. Her father lay wrapped in the spare plastic shower liner by the widening hole. She sat on the porch drinking a glass of water. Perhaps, when her father went in the hole and she didn’t see him again, it would begin to hit her. It was easier to accept that it was Calvin Johnson digging the hole than her father dead beside it. She wondered what would happen when he left with the herb. She would go back to school on Monday and try to pretend that nothing happened. Maybe she could ask Ms. Webster to lend her a little food money until the beginning of the next month, when the pension check arrived, ready to be stretched every which way.
Over the mound, Johnson crossed himself, and so did Heidi.
“Do you think animals will get to him?” she asked.
“I don’t know.” He mopped the back of his neck with a dish towel she’d brought outside. “I dug it six feet. The shower curtain is wrapped pretty tight. I’ll put some two-by-fours I found in the basement as a layer. That might help.”
“I’m sorry you had to do all that,” she said in the kitchen as he soaped up to his elbows at the sink.
“Don’t worry about it. You just worry about yourself.” He smiled at her from the sink. “So where’s the gun?”
“Oh, Christ, you’re not going to ask me to shoot you again, are you?” Sweat pooled in the small of her back as she tried to comprehend the pendulum on which his personality swung. He could have been waiting all along to gain her trust, then kill her. She gripped it where it rested into the waistband of her corduroys.
“It’s the only way I’ve got to get you to believe me. Please don’t make me do it with my hunting knife. It’ll take longer and hurt so much more.”
“I’m done with you, really, I am.” She shot from the kitchen and out the front door. If she could escape, she could drive to the police station, somehow find Ms. Webster. His boots kicked up the gravel behind her as she ran. She reached the truck and flung the driver’s door open before realizing she did not have the keys. She could feel him on the other side of the door. Her heart beat in her ears, blood filling her head, as she tugged at the gun in her waistband.
“Heidi.” She felt his hand on her back, and she screamed, but no sound came out as she spun, pistol in her hands, and fired. Calvin fell back on the gravel, and the rocks underneath his boots spit at her legs.
“Oh my God.” She dropped the gun on the seat and kneeled next to him as he grabbed at his abdomen. Blood seeped over his fingers. It was dark, almost purple, and she felt sick. She took off her sweater and tried to press it under his hands, trying not to think too much about how it was her favorite, an old cable knit sweater she had gotten at the thrift store in town, such a rare find, because she knew it was selfish, and it didn’t matter because it was soaked in few seconds.
“Can you walk?” she asked, standing up a little. “We need to get you to the house.”
“I might,” he grunted. “Thanks. I would have preferred the hand, but the stomach will do okay, too. It’ll just take a little longer.”
“What are you talking about?” She wrapped her arms around his waist, taut and smooth like an inner tube, and he wove his arms gently around her shoulders. “I’m calling an ambulance.”
“No, you’re not.” He pushed gently on his heels, taking the gun off the seat, as she lifted with her knees, something she had learned after helping to carry her father’s body through the house. “The bleeding will stop in a little while. Trust me. And in a week, you won’t even know it happened.”
“And what about the bullet?” she asked, as they walked gingerly to the house. “It’s just going to stay in there?”
“I still have shrapnel in my leg from 1944. I can still feel it sometimes when it rains.” His weight gradually burned in her legs, her shoulders. She stooped but kept moving. “Let’s rest for a minute. I don’t want to hurt you.”
He slumped to the ground, a few feet from the porch. Blood covered her skin and his skin, as if they were conjoined twins moments before, now separated and left to die. And Calvin really did look like he might. He began to sweat; his face was pale, brow furrowed.
“I’m going to get some sheets.” She hurdled the porch steps to the front door. “We can make a tourniquet.”
She flew up the stairs, flecks of blood splattering on the walls and wood, and pulled the sheets off her father’s bed. When she got back, Calvin had pulled himself on the porch and sat on the steps, leaning against the porch railing.
“How do I do this?” She began to thread the sheet around his arm.
“We don’t need to make a tourniquet. Just pressure.” He helped guide the sheet around his body, and when it was finished, he took her hands in his and pressed them against his stomach. She was sickened by how cold they were, how cool the skin on his back felt. The blood on her breasts and stomach smeared sticky against his back.
“I need to call an ambulance.” She moved to stand up, but he held onto her hands.
“I’m telling you, I’ll be fine. If anything, let’s just get inside the house so no one driving along the road sees us.” His weight pulled her forward as he dragged himself to his feet and moved slowly to the door. Once inside, he took heavy, slow, teetering steps up the stairs as Heidi stood a few steps behind, wondering whether he’d fall back onto her at any second. In the bathroom, he shrugged off the sheet before sitting on the toilet and easing himself out of his jeans, the waist of which was rimmed in blood. He grabbed her arm for support as he lowered himself in the tub.
“What now?’ She sat on the toilet and held the jeans in her hands, kicking the sheet to the corner.
“Nothing. Maybe if you could get me a pillow, I’ll just take a nap in here after I bathe.” He pulled the curtain tight between them, and she could hear the water running from the faucet. She went into the hallway closet and got a spare pillow and some washcloths, a towel.
“Are you still alive?” she said to the shower curtain.
“Yep. Just hurts.”
“I’m leaving the pillow by the tub here, along with some towels, okay?”
“Thanks. Do you mind bringing me some water, too? And my cigarettes. I hate to be a pest.”
“You’re not a pest—you’re dying. How am I going to get you out of that tub after you’ve died?”
“I’m not going to die—why is that so hard to believe?” She heard him laugh, then suck shallowly for air.
“I’m going to call 911.”
“You do, and we’ll have to explain why we buried your father outside in the woods. Just give me some time, okay? I’ll tell you some things about him when you come back.”
She went downstairs and filled a glass of water from the kitchen, along with Calvin’s packs of boxers and tube socks from his backpack. When she returned to the bathroom, the pillow was missing from the floor, replaced by a wet pair of bloody boxers. She could hear the water draining in the tub.
“You okay?” She put the glass of water on the tub’s edge. “Are you alive?”
“Yep. Just waiting for you, doll-face.”
“The minute you stop talking is the minute I start dialing.”
“Stop worrying, Heidi. I’ve already died twice.” She watched his hand, big and pale, grab the water, heard it disappear in sharp gulps behind the shower curtain. “I think the bleeding’s stopped. You mind giving me one of those clean towels?”
She leaned over, dangling the towel in the crack between the wall and shower curtain for him to grab.
“Oww, that hurts,” he said. “You know, we always had the runs in the Army. It was easy to understand why. But your father, he had the stomach of rice paper. One night outside of Germany, we were in the foxholes, freezing cold, and he had the shits bad. From the chocolate bars we got, at that—Christ, that was practically all we ate. I’m thankful I still have teeth. All night—we couldn’t leave the foxholes—he’s shitting into that helmet and dumping it off to the side. I said, ‘Christ, Pole, you’re going to drive off the Krauts with your ass alone’.”
“What’s a Kraut?”
“You know, a German. I guess it’s not the correct word nowadays. Not the stuff you’d find in your textbooks, anyway.”
The cloth shower curtain wrenched open, and Calvin stood before her, a towel high around his waist, covering the wound. She gasped, but not because he stood before her, less worse for wear. It was because he stood before her—a boy/man/God, talking to her, like she wasn’t a freak.
“It’s already looking better.” He curled the towel down slightly to show her. The hair around his bellybutton was mottled red, a dark leeching scab that left little puddles of pink on the white terrycloth. “It stopped bleeding, mostly.”
She watched her fingers hover near the wound, her stomach full of glass. He grabbed her hand and pressed it against the furry, gelatinous spot, and she recoiled at the fire on his skin. She imagined his metabolism churning, little mitochondria in the cells pushing them to collect and stick and close the wound, little red elves with fire heads. But it could not be true, she thought. It was not the way she learned in biology class. It could not happen so quickly. And yet, there it was. She pulled her hand away, savoring the light pressure that remained on her skin from his fingers. She looked at her skin, clean but moist.
“You’d better get dressed—you’ll catch your death,” she said, in a daze. She walked out of the bathroom and into her father’s bedroom, falling on the scratchy wool blanket and staring at the ceiling. Tears warmed the corners of her eyes and burrowed sticky rivers down her cheeks. She heard Calvin stepping into his jeans, pulling his t-shirt over his head. He stood in the doorway, hair wet, his skin a pleasing post-bath pink and not the gallows white it had been earlier.
“You okay?” He looked at her, and she nodded her head.
“I guess…your being here has reminded me of how lonely I am.” She rolled onto her stomach and studied the dust bunnies in the corners of the bedroom, trying not to cry. He sat on the bed and put his hand, massive and warm, on her back. A chill spidered through her body, and she concentrated on her breathing, slow and steady.
“Poor girl,” he said, moving his hand in a circle. “I understand.” She hoped he would do it for a long time, but then he stopped, and when she rolled over on her side to face him, he was looking out the window, somewhere else.
“What will you do for me, if I gave you the herb?”
“I don’t know.” He smelled like soap, and she imagined placing her lips on his neck. She rolled away from him, suddenly angry. “What do you want?”
She stared at her hands. She wanted to wake up the next day and have it all have been a strange dream. She wanted her father to knock on her door and chide her for oversleeping, telling her she’d be late for school. She wanted to hear him burp and fart in the kitchen while he greased the frying pan with butter and cracked his eggs. She wanted him to drive her to school in the truck, even as it had always embarrassed her. And she wanted him to be waiting when she got out, reading the newspaper and smoking a cigarette in the truck cab.
And if she couldn’t have those things, she decided she wanted Calvin.
“Let me go with you—wherever you’re going back to.” She stood up and looked out the window.
“Heidi, you’re nothing but a little girl—a whole future in front of you. You don’t want to get messed up with a guy like me.”
“What am I, in a movie or something?” She laughed, and he stood up slowly from the bed and came behind her. He put his hands on her shoulders.
“Imagine being in a movie that never ended,” he said, his breath tickling the top of her head. “And no matter how many times you went to the candy counter, the john, it still was playing.”
She didn’t answer, but that movie, with her and Calvin as its stars, sounded perfectly all right to her. She turned and wrapped her arms around his waist, her head pressed against his chest, and she was prepared to not let go, no matter how hard he pushed her. But he didn’t. He slowly put his arms around her and she felt sleepy, fetal, in the expanse of him. She pushed him toward the bed and he slowly gave in to her. He lay on his side, and she pressed her back against him, drawing her arms around her, and she rested her chin on his arm. She felt his breath on her neck, and she turned into him, looking into his eyes, the impenetrable earth of them, sediment deep and layered and hardened.
There was nothing familiar about him, the curve of his chin, his smell, the unwelcome stiffness of his muscles, and yet she felt safe there, yielded to his ferocity. She wanted him to want her, to bite into her heart and puncture it, thirst for its blood, its young pulse, and the stone of him would melt, for just a moment, and she could see the soft pulp of him, the organs and boy, the things that would make him cry, his mother. She felt her lips part, anxious for him to press his against hers, to offer her everything she had been starving for, starving for so long she had no longer realized until now that she was hungry.
But he told her about Kate. About Ela, the Polish girl, his asymmetrical twin, separated by hundreds of years, destined, perhaps, to be together hundreds of years still. She listened, captivated, heartbroken, drained, watching the muscles move in his throat. They lay entwined in silence for a long time as the night spilled over the corners of the room and over the bed, and they were shadows in the dark, listening to each other’s breathing, their thoughts passing boats in a foggy night.
They slept. They slept like stones until the light of Saturday moved across the walls of the bedroom, and they slept some more, like people who have been through hell ice-fire, who have traversed dark valleys and need for their souls to lick their wounds.
“It’s nice to be here with you like this,” he said after a while, and her heart leapt a little. “It’s so hard to tell this story over and over again and wonder who really believes you.”
“Don’t they believe you when they get older and you don’t?”
“Sometimes, even something in front of your face, if it goes against your belief system, seems unreal. I was dead in a lake for twenty years. In the ground in Germany. I can hardly believe it myself.”
“Are you mad? How can you believe in a God?”
“Sometimes it’s a blessing, other times it’s a curse. If I hadn’t returned from the dead in Germany, I wouldn’t have met Kate, even though now I might have to watch her die. I wouldn’t have gotten to see your father and watch him die. As for God, there’s something out there, I guess, and it’s made this path for me. I’ve given up being angry about it.”
“I’m sorry my father did this to you.”
“Don’t apologize.” He drew her close, her face against his neck. “I got to meet you, too, now didn’t I?”
She pressed her lips against his skin, the slight scent of soap filling her nose, and she began to kiss upward, toward his ear. She felt his body stiffen, his groin press against her. She stopped, amazed that she had such a power over any man, much less Calvin Johnson, before kissing him again.
“Heidi, I think you’re great.” He wriggled away from her into a sitting position. “But I could be your father. And you’re Stanley’s daughter. He would want me to honor and protect you.”
“What about the herb?” She got up from the bed. From the window, she could see it was dusk again. She had not eaten in over a day, but she was not hungry for food.
“What, you’re not going to give it to me? You want me to be a cad, lie to you, romance you, so you’ll give me the herb?”
“I don’t know.” She wiped the tears from her eyes and went downstairs. She could bury the herb, send Calvin Johnson on his way. Why should she give every stranger who walked in the door what they wanted? No one had ever been there for her.
The sound of a car outside paralyzed her. She caught her breath and pressed by the window, peering outside. Ms. Webster’s green Squareback was parked in front. She got out of the car and made her way to the door.
“Hey.” Ms. Webster smiled from the darkness of the porch. “I thought I’d see whether you were interested in a movie. They’re playing ‘Wild Strawberries’ over at the community college at eight.”
“I can’t.” Heidi filled the space between the door and the frame with her body.
“Oh, does your father need you?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you all right?” Ms. Webster adjusted the strap of her shoulder bag. “Have you been crying?”
“No,” she answered. She felt the salty sting on her cheeks as she grimaced.
“You’re going to lie to me to my face?” Ms. Webster laughed. “Come on outside.”
“No…it’s not anything. I’m just feeling sorry for myself.” Heidi shook her head. She reached behind her and turned on the porch light, hoping that if she allowed closer scrutiny of her physical condition Ms. Webster would be satisfied.
“Oh my god, Heidi.” Ms. Webster took a step back on the porch and looked around her. “There’s blood everywhere.”
She had forgotten about that, seemingly, the shooting. And in even the dimmest halo of light bathing the porch, she could see the red splotches on the steps and the drips heading to the truck and the bloody handprint in the doorjamb.
“I cut myself trying…to change a flat,” she answered. “I just haven’t cleaned it up yet.”
“Heidi, if you don’t let me in the house to see whether everything is okay, I’m going to call the police.” She moved forward, her hand on the doorknob.
Calvin would not be stupid, she knew. She hoped. She had Ms. Webster take a seat in the living room and went into the kitchen to boil some tea water, buying some time.
“You haven’t opened these?” Ms. Webster held three large envelopes from Bryn Mawr, Swarthmore, and NYU in her hand. Perhaps her father had brought them in the previous day without her noticing. She carefully slit the tops of the envelopes, Ms. Webster standing beside her.
“Oh my goodness, Heidi, three for three!” Ms. Webster beamed, kissing her cheek. “I’m so proud of you. What a tough decision you have ahead of you.”
She clasped Heidi’s forearms and studied her body. She ran a hand on the inside of her forearms, her stomach, the nape of her neck. Heidi blushed, thought for some strange reason that Ms. Webster was going to kiss her again, but instead she stepped away and frowned.
“I thought you said you cut yourself changing the flat.” She stared at Heidi.
“Not on my arms,” Heidi answered. “Actually, it was my father. He’s upstairs…sleeping.”
“Do you mind if I poke in on him?” Ms. Webster stood up. “I just want to make sure he doesn’t need any medical assistance.”
“He’s asleep.” Heidi shot up beside her. “I can take you up. We can look in on him, but we shouldn’t wake him up.”
She walked up the stairs ahead of Ms. Webster, repeating the last sentence loudly. The bedroom door was open, but no shape lay on the bed. Ms. Webster moved to the right and flipped on the bathroom light. On the edge of the sink lay the revolver.
“Heidi.” Ms. Webster turned to her and grabbed her by the arms. “You need to tell me the truth about what is going on here.’
Calvin’s shadowy frame filled the doorway, and Ms. Webster screamed.
“It’s okay,” Heidi said as Ms. Webster grabbed the revolver from the sink and pointed it at Calvin. “I can explain.”
“If you try anything funny, to me or to Heidi, I’ll shoot.” Ms. Webster, both hands on the gun, pointed it at him.
Calvin looked at Heidi, and they burst into laughter. Nothing had seemed funnier since the beginning of time. They went down into the living room, followed by Ms. Webster, a few steps behind them.
“I don’t see what’s so funny,” Ms. Webster said as Heidi and Johnson sat on the couch. “And just so you know, my father is a member of the National Rifle Association.”
“Calvin is my friend,” Heidi looked at him, and he smiled. “A friend of the family. My father’s been in the hospital the past few days, and he’s been staying with me.”
“How do I know he didn’t kill your father? How do I know that your friend Calvin isn’t holding you hostage?”
“You’re going to have to trust me on this.”
“Trust you? There’s blood on the porch, a handgun on the sink, your father is missing, and there’s a stranger in your house.”
“I’m safe, Ms. Webster.” Heidi leaned back in the couch and drew her legs up to her chest. It could end here, she supposed. Calvin could have killed her father, held her hostage for all this time. She could have tried to shoot him, to escape. She wondered whether Ms. Webster would be appointed her guardian. She imagined Ms. Webster’s apartment, a sunny kitchen, with plants hanging from hooks and records lining a corner by the stereo, records of singers and bands Ms. Webster might listen to, like James Taylor or Rikki Lee Jones or maybe Joni Mitchell. She thought of the bookcase filled with Shakespeare and Yeats and Woolf and Austen. She imagined a small, impish cat, a warm afghan, a boiling teapot. Things she imagined for her own life, eventually, after receiving a head start on them with Ms. Webster, a new start.
She looked at Calvin. He sat slouched in a new undershirt and his jeans, his hands clasped between his legs, looking at the floor, and his attempt to look small and harmless belied the powerful fulcrums of his knees, which seemed to reach Heidi’s shoulders. His girth sucked the couch toward him, and her by extension, his thigh touching hers, the warm of him seeping into her skin. Would Ms. Webster understand how their short time together had already made everything monstrous and unfair and off-kilter in her life seem insignificant, had blown Shauna and Oliver and Mt. Zion High away like dandelion spores? She had spent so much time fighting the tide of a sea that had only been in her imagination, and now she was free.
“I can leave, Heidi,” Calvin said finally. “I don’t want your friends worrying about your safety.”
“Why would you leave without me?” she asked, and looked at Ms. Webster. “Calvin is my boyfriend. We’re leaving this place.”
“Don’t be silly, Heidi.” Ms. Webster paced back and forth with her arms crossed, cradling the revolver in her hand like a baby. “You’re going to get scholarships. You’re going to Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr, or NYU. That’s all you’re going to be deciding. You’re going to have a great life.”
“I’m going to have a great, lonely life. I want to be with Calvin—haven’t you been in love, Ms. Webster?”
“You’re not in love. There’s plenty of time for that. You need to take advantage of the great opportunities afforded you. You’re going to bloom in college, Heidi. Trust me, I was the same as you. I had a terrible time in high school.”
“I have a hard time believing that,” Heidi answered. “You’re beautiful. I’m hideous…a freak.”
“You’re not a freak, Heidi.” Calvin turned and took his hand in hers. “I love you.”
“I love you, too.” Heidi craned her neck and kissed his cheek. He took her face in his hands and kissed her on the lips, lingering for a second before turning away. She thought she would pass out from the lightheadedness. It may not have been a real kiss, performed at gunpoint, but it was her first.
“Well, I’m glad you two lovebirds have figured this out.” Ms. Webster said. “But this still doesn’t answer any of my questions.”
“The truth is, I shot myself, by accident.” Calvin stood up, sending Ms. Webster into a ready position, gun pointed at him. He pulled up his shirt, where a raw wound the size of a fingertip poked through his hair. “It was a flesh wound, but I bled like a stuck pig. I was opening the magazine to take out the ammo, but one must have gotten stuck in the chamber. That’s why I was upstairs, trying to rest a little. Heidi’s been so upset about the whole thing it—all the blood makes it look worse than it really is.”
“I thought he was going to die,” Heidi added.
“And Heidi’s father?”
Heidi looked at Calvin, who looked back at her. Like a stick in a bike tire, their easy, shared conniving grinded to a halt, planting their faces into the asphalt. It happened to the best of liars, she figured.
“My and Heidi’s fathers were in the war together,” Calvin began, and Heidi dug her nails into the palms of her hands. “She and I have been penpals for years. She called me and said her father died in his sleep and that she didn’t know what to do. She needed the Social Security checks so she could eat and pay the bills, and she was worried they’d put her in a foster home and sell the farmhouse. She just wanted to hang on until college, you know? I told her I’d come and help her figure something out. So I got here, and we weren’t thinking clearly, I guess. He was dead, so we buried him—who could afford the funeral?”
“Jesus, you expect me to believe that?” Ms. Webster’s face seemingly had aged decades since she arrived. Her right eyebrow had begun a slow dive into her right eye, a skepticism that narrowed her eyelids and drew her lips tight. She sighed, taking almost all the air in the room into her lungs, it seemed to Heidi, who held her breath. “All right, let’s see this body.”
Calvin, Heidi, and then Ms. Webster left the house. Calvin pulled a shovel out from under the crawlspace of the porch. He stuck it into the mound, fresh and fly-infested, and threw the dirt off the side.
“Are you sure you want me to dig him up?” He paused, looking at Ms. Webster, then Heidi.
“Heidi, go inside.” Mrs. Webster nodded at Heidi. “You shouldn’t have to see this.”
Heidi went into the house. She took the bag with the herb off the table, along with her father’s diary, and shoved them between the waistband of her pants and the small of her back. She pulled on her hooded sweatshirt and left it billowy, unzipped. Then she went to the living room and got Calvin’s backpack. She went out the front door and put everything under the passenger side of the truck seat and hurried back. She glanced out the window and saw that Calvin had dug a shallow hole the length of the tomb. She ran back upstairs and threw some toiletries in her backpack, underpants, an extra shirt. She put in her own journal, a few paperbacks, and went back outside, stuffing the backpack under the dashboard of the truck.
As she got back into the kitchen and sat at the table, Ms. Webster appeared. Her face was pale as she struggled against the convulsions of impending vomit. Her right hand rested on the edge of the kitchen sink as her left rose to her face. She breathed deeply twice and then looked at Heidi.
“Calvin is reburying your father.” She reached into her right front pocket, where she had briefly parked the revolver. “And you’re coming with me.”
“Why?” Heidi ducked as Ms. Webster reached for her hand.
“Come on, hurry—before he has a chance to finish.”
She thought to overpower her, but Ms. Webster grabbed her by the arm, her grip strong. Maybe she could explain everything to Ms. Webster in private. Maybe her determination would waiver as Ms. Webster calmly explained the dangers of going away with a man she had known little more than a day, and she didn’t know him, really. Ms. Webster had lived longer and knew more, and she would know what exactly to do next.
“Hurry.” Ms. Webster nudged her into the passenger seat of the Squareback and hurried around to the other side. She missed the slot for the key. When she tried again, pinching the key tightly between her fingers, Heidi could see her hands shaking.
“He won’t hurt you,” Heidi said. “He didn’t hurt me.”
The engine roared, and Ms. Webster yanked the clutch into gear, shooting down the road in reverse until they were out of view of the house before turning. Heidi hoped Calvin would get to the truck on time to follow them. The orange dragon was no match for the calibrated purr of the Volkswagen, which Ms. Webster eased up to 75 on the highway.
“Why didn’t you say anything to me earlier, Heidi?” Ms. Webster lifted her hand off the clutch and patted Heidi’s palm. “You knew you could come talk to me.”
“I don’t know…it happened so fast. I don’t want foster parents and to go to college in some strange city and it’ll be just like high school except I won’t even have you or my father.”
“Oh, Heidi, I know it feels like that. It feels like that to everyone—don’t you think it’ll feel like that to Oliver and Shauna and any other kid at school? And for them, it will be even worse. They’re used to having status. Then, all of the sudden, they’ll be lowly freshman, and no sophomore or junior or senior will care about their social status at their old school. But, for you, that will be a blessing. You can make a new home, a new history.”
Ms. Webster pulled into a two-story apartment complex. The brick and siding structure looked grimy and old. The siding was weathered gray, and the bricks, crumbling. Tricycles and toys and garbage paraded in the grass. Ms. Webster guided Heidi to an apartment on the second floor. Inside, it was small, a layer of exotic oils and perfume almost covering the sourness of tenants past. Heidi sat on the couch, and Ms. Webster locked the door and looked out the peephole.
“We have to figure out what we’re going to do.” She walked into the living room and sat at the other end of the couch. “Even if I take your story as true, the truth is you didn’t alert the authorities when your father died. And you could be charged with social security fraud if you don’t. I don’t know whether you’d go to jail, but this could keep you from going to college for a little bit.”
“I know…which is why you should let me go home and not get involved.” Heidi wrapped her arms around herself.
“Oh, Heidi, no—I would never do that.” Ms. Webster curled her feet up and fished a cigarette out of her purse. “We can figure this out without implicating Calvin in any of it. He can go home and no one would be any the wiser.”
Heidi looked at the bookshelves at the other end of the apartment, filled with the books she had imagined. No cat. She wondered what Ms. Webster did on the weekends, aside from inviting lonely girls like herself out to the movies.
“Do you have a boyfriend, Ms. Webster?”
“No.” She exhaled. “I haven’t really met anyone here. But I have friends. I travel. I know that you don’t want to hear this, Heidi, particularly since you struggle with it so much yourself, but people are lonely a lot. Even if there is someone. There’s always a loneliness that people can’t fill, that pets can’t fill. And you have to make peace with it because you come into the world alone and you go out the same way.”
“Have you made peace with it?”
“Sometimes.” She stubbed out the cigarette. “I’ve been in long-term relationships, and I’ve been alone. I’m just saying that I don’t want you to think Calvin can save you from it.”
“But why be with anyone at all, then?”
“Because it’s fun and we procreate and that’s what we do. But it doesn’t mean anything unless you’re comfortable with yourself. And you can go with Calvin or you can go to college, or you could go into the Peace Corps, but you have to find the home in yourself because everything else is so much window dressing.”
“Calvin isn’t attracted to me,” Heidi blurted. “I’m sure it’s obvious. I have something…of his father’s. He came here for it. That’s all. He didn’t have anything to do with my father dying. We can go to the police tomorrow and tell them everything.”
“I think the truth is the best way to do it. I’m so sorry about your father, honey. I’m so sorry you had to go through that all alone.”
Ms. Webster reached over and touched her knee. Heidi felt rocks in her chest, in her stomach, begin to break away, a raw, soft loam beneath them. The grief would come now, she knew. Ms. Webster boiled water in the kitchen as Heidi dug her chin into her chest, trying to blink away the memory of her father’s body, the dirt brushing his eyelids, mixing in his hair, his nostrils, as she heaved it from the pile into the hole.
“Ms. Webster, do you think they’ll let me stay with you?” she asked when Ms. Webster returned with two steaming mugs of chamomile tea.
“I don’t know, honey.” Ms. Webster sat back on the couch. “I don’t think it’s appropriate, being your teacher. But I’m sure we can hang out. We could go the movies, dinner.”
Heidi sipped the tea. This seemed the right thing to do. It would seem foolish otherwise. Even her father, she reasoned, would advise her against going with Johnson, the man with whom he shared his foxhole.
Ms. Webster folded a sheet and blanket over the couch, brought her out a pillow. Heidi took off her sneakers and slid under the sheets, thankful that they smelled like detergent and not bar soap, that they were soft and cool and that Ms. Webster’s apartment, although smelling faintly of mold, the memory of residents past, felt homey. Perhaps, even if she could not stay with Ms. Webster, she would stay with a family who would make sure she was clothed and fed and loved. Even if she wound up in jail, she reasoned, she would be fed three times a day, and the shower water would be hot.
“Heidi, I’m not going to call the police now,” Ms. Webster said. “But I can’t stay up all night. So I trust you that you’ll still be here in the morning. We’ll go to the police and what happens will happen, but I will be here for you every step. It’ll only be worse if you decide to go with Calvin.”
“I know.”
Ms. Webster bent over and hugged her. Heidi’s life receded into the thick waves of Ms. Webster’s apple-scented hair. If she could be Ms. Webster’s conditioner, she reasoned, she would be content.
In the dark, she thought of Calvin, smelled his sharp, earthy musk, felt the pistons on his fingers pressing against her waist, her back, her shoulders. He had kissed her earlier that evening. Perhaps he hadn’t been faking all of it. Their lips had fit together like skin on bone. Because of his relationship to her father, he was almost family.
And he was not human. She had seen it with her own eyes. But she was, awkward and frail and bumbling. She imagined him going to New York, perhaps saving Kate, and they would march, superhuman, divine, in the sunset ever after. And Heidi would curl up in the library of some large university on the East Coast, anonymous and destined to inherit the earth after they tired of it.
She slipped out of bed and tiptoed across the room with her shoes in her hands. As she got to the door, she listened for Ms. Webster. She wondered whether she was letting her leave, make her own decision. Maybe the secret of the farmhouse grave would die between them. She slipped out of the door and padded down the concrete stairs to the parking lot, wondering how she would find her way home, to Calvin. But she did not need to wonder long, for she saw the rusted orange truck at the end of the parking lot, the dark shape of Calvin’s body behind the wheel. She pulled on her shoes and ran over.
“How long have you been out here?” She climbed into the passenger side of the truck.
“Since you’ve been inside.” He flicked the butt of his cigarette out the open window. “Where’s Teach?”
“Asleep, I think. Look, I just wanted to find you so that I could give you this.” She crouched between her legs and felt along the seat of the truck, pulling out the sandwich bag with the herb in it. “You’re free to go back to New York.”
He took the bag from her outstretched hand and looked at it, turning the fragile skeleton around and around in its plastic casing.
He was silent, still holding the herb, and she could not tell what he was thinking.
“I’m going to stay with Ms. Webster tonight,” Heidi continued. She took the straps of her backpack in one hand and placed the other on the door. “Why don’t you come upstairs? Maybe I can call you a cab or we can get you to the bus station tomorrow.”
“You’re not coming?” He asked suddenly, looking at her.
“Um…no.” She let go of the handle and looked back at him. “I need to get everything straightened out with my father. But you should have the herb. My father would have wanted you to have it. I hope you can save Kate.”
“Your father also wouldn’t have wanted you to be alone,” he said. “It’s my responsibility as your father’s friend to make sure you’re taken care of.”
“I’m fine,” she answered, although she was not really sure. She’d already, under panic, botched her father’s ascent into the afterlife in epic proportions. Who knew what else she would screw up, given the chance? “Really. You have the herb—don’t worry about me.”
“Heidi, I can’t leave you like this.” He slipped the palm of his hand underneath the straps of her backpack and tugged it gently from her.
“I was planning to go with you.” She explained as he zipped open the top, exposing a crush of clothes now expanding into the open space. “I put everything in the truck while you dug up my father.”
He put the backpack on the seat and thought, his eyes piercing the air that hung stale between them. She watched his eyelids blink.
“Is there anything you need from Ms. Webster, up there in the apartment?” he asked finally.
“No.”
“Good.” He turned the key in the ignition. “Are you ready?”
“For what?”
“To go.” He threw the lever into drive. She felt her stomach tumble. Perhaps he did care for her. “I already found the herb in your things, while I was waiting here in the parking lot. I could have already left without you.”
“It’s all right Calvin—I’m not in trouble. At least, I hope not very much trouble. I don’t think running away is going to help my case.”
“I don’t care about any of that, Heidi. I just want you to come. Will you please come with me?”
“I don’t know, Calvin.” She paused, looking through the windshield at the darkened bedroom window of Ms. Webster’s apartment. “I just…everything is happening so fast.”
“You’re right.” He pulled the key out of the ignition and handed it to her. “You’re going to be okay, Heidi. You’re going to have a great life.”
“You too.” She sighed, took the key from him and put it in her pocket. She felt it dig into her skin. “I hope you are able to get help for yourself.”
He nodded, and they stood in front of the apartment complex.
“You should give me an address.” He zipped up his jacket, the collar up, grazing his chin. “So I can let you know how things are.”
“You can come back and visit.” She shrugged, moving toward the steps. He grabbed her arm and pulled her to him. She thought of Oliver and Shauna and the other kids in her classes, saw them in varying degrees of transparency. Perhaps they were always that way, even herself, and it took someone as solid as Calvin Johnson for her to feel the weight of other things. She pulled away, and the air between them seemed to dissipate into him.
“Well, okay, kid.” He nodded, shoving his hands in his pockets.
“Okay.” She nodded back, feeling a weight in her throat. She watched him walk away, out of the complex, out of her life. She had been given what she wanted, and she let him walk away. She sat on the steps, cracked and bubble-gummed, in front of Ms. Webster’s apartment building. Two apartments up and over, a couple’s argument escalated from angry murmurs to full-throated screams. She thought of Ms. Webster in the bed upstairs and wondered whether she slept on one side or sprawled across. She did not know why it mattered. She slipped upstairs, back into the apartment and opened the bedroom door. Ms. Webster lay on the left side of the bed, close to the alarm clock, her limbs folded carefully on the sheet. For a moment, she thought to crawl in next to her, to fill the space. To wake up and know she was not alone, that someone cared for her. To be Heidi Polensky again. She shook her head. She was no longer Heidi Polensky. But who she was, she didn’t know yet. She ran back to the parking lot, got in the truck, and gunned it up the street, not stopping until she saw him walking on the side of the highway. Pulling in front of him, she idled and blew the horn.