17

THE SWING

June 20

It was almost dawn when Lindy rose and stepped out onto the balcony. The atmosphere was lifeless, still, the sea little more than a vague whisper. There were pale rose-colored streaks in the distance. She placed her hands on the rail a moment and then walked the entire length of the balcony, pausing for a while to look out toward the ocean. Sluggish, indifferent, distant. She continued to move, and when she came to the place that overlooked the grove of trees she stopped again. She swept her hair back from her shoulders, conscious of the way her robe hung open and how the early morning air lay cold against her flesh. She leaned forward, studied the trees for a time, then the dark strip of highway beyond. The silences impressed her. How deep they seemed.

And yet there was something concealed by the quietness, an undercurrent of whispered voices, as if just beyond her range of vision people were talking together in low tones. She tilted her head to one side and listened, then she looked along the balcony to the door of Tommy’s room and she remembered how she’d gone in there when the kid was sleeping, how she had kissed him—and the memory of that disturbed her.

She strained to catch the whispers again.

Elusive, always just out of reach. Always just beyond her grasp.

She shut her eyes very tight. (Why would she have gone into Tommy’s room anyhow? Why would she have done a thing like that? It didn’t make sense—but then nothing was making much sense to her these days. Everything around her and inside her was changing, and she could feel these alterations as surely as you might feel vibrations from a stringed instrument held against your body.)

I am different, she thought. I am not the person I was when I first came to this place.

And she tried to remember what she had read somewhere about the development of sexuality in young adolescents. Hormone imbalance. Chemical changes. The growth of sexual curiosity, the need for experiment. (Not with Tommy, she thought. Surely not with a kid like Tommy!) It seemed to her that she’d become two different people all at once. Lindy who went to school in Syracuse and lived with her mother in a very ordinary house in the suburbs and who hung out with her friends at a place called Carlini’s Pizza Palace and talked about boys and ambitions and movies and rock and roll. And somebody else, another Lindy, whose thoughts and actions and dreams were unfamiliar and alien, a girl who seemed to exist in a twilight condition. Who heard voices. Who just seemed to know things she shouldn’t have known and dreamt dreams she shouldn’t have dreamed—and felt the touch of somebody when nobody was present.

It was as if the real world had taken one step backward. Had become a shimmering, mysterious place. And she was drawn toward this other world; she was being pulled into it—and such things as school and Carlini’s and her friends seemed farther away than mere distance in miles.

She opened her eyes when she heard a very faint creaking sound and she assumed that somebody had stepped out onto the balcony, but when she turned her face to look she realized the noise was coming from the trees below.

She scrutinized the grove for a while but she couldn’t see anything down there. No movement. Nothing. Until—

Until she could make out, in the dead center of the grove, the motion of a single branch shaking as if it were being pulled on by an invisible hand. A single branch shaking while all the others were still. Back and forth. Back and forth in an easy rhythm.

She looked away for a moment, and when she turned once again to face the trees she saw the child.

She saw the child sitting on the swing.

And the man who stood directly behind her, pushing the swing.

A man and a young girl, materialized out of nowhere, out of nothing; and she thought, I am not scared. It just seems the most natural thing in the world. A man pushing a young girl on a swing, the creak of a branch, the motion of the child’s hair as the draft stirs it, the darkness of the man’s arm. The most natural thing.

The man stepped backward, as if tired of the activity, and the swing came slowly to a stop. For a while the girl sat motionless, staring straight ahead, and then she jumped down and turned, holding her arms out toward the man.

They embraced.

They embraced for a long time, the child’s head pressed against the man’s waist.

And Lindy thought: You are seeing the past here.

What you are seeing is the dead.

The dead.

How could that possibly be?

Then she was conscious of how both faces turned toward her and stared at her without expression, without curiosity, without any sign of interest. She put one hand up to her lips and thought: The dead. They are both dead.

Suddenly the early morning air was filled with the light sound of the child’s laughter and in the shadows, in the darkened texture of the light, Lindy saw the girl’s face turn back once more to the man’s body, then the child was clinging to him, her head pressed into the center of his stomach and her hands clutching him behind the thighs, and then the man’s hands locked tightly at the back of the child’s neck and he was holding her to him, rocking his body slightly—rocking, rocking, his face turned once again to the balcony, his eyes fixed on Lindy.

Then they moved, passing directly beneath her, and she held her breath and waited to hear footsteps on the porch or the sound of a door slam—but there was nothing, only the dumb silence.

She stepped back from the rail.

Now she was conscious of the chill around her.

The chill, the silences.

She lifted her face, looked up at the sky, the great starless expanse of the growing dawn.

And she wondered what she had seen, what it was she had intruded upon like some hapless trespasser. She placed her arms across her breasts and curled her fingers over her shoulders, thinking about the child locked in the strange embrace with the man.

Roscoe, she thought.

Roscoe and the child who had owned the doll.

The Roscoe she had dreamed.

She leaned against the wall of the house, her robe open against her thighs, and she stared down toward the trees. There was something sad in the emptiness of the grove now, an absence she couldn’t quite encompass.

Then the balcony trembled slightly and she turned her face in the direction of the sound.

He was standing very still, his hands held out toward her.

He was smiling.

She looked away, trembling, sensing the presence of something more powerful than she’d ever experienced before. She looked away, waited, didn’t move.

And when she next looked, he had gone.

Leaving behind a quietness that seemed to scream inside her head.

A quietness.

A sense of evil.

Exquisite evil.

It was like staring at the closed door of a room she wanted to enter.

More than anything else in the world, she wanted to go inside that room. And she wanted to embrace the man the way she’d seen the child do.

And she would, she thought.

She would.

She would enter Roscoe’s room.

When she stared down once more in the direction of the trees the branch was shaking again, and although she couldn’t see anybody now, she realized that the creaking of the limb was like the sound of laughter mocking her.