Babysitter, page 3
He had this feeling, this plain lucky feeling, that Nikki was somehow going to come through for him, too.
Over his second martini, he began to make his plans more specific. Tomorrow afternoon, while Marietta was at the club helping his mother with the Founder’s Day ceremony and the girls were taking their afternoon nap, he could sneak back here and . . .
He had forgotten utterly about the suitcase.
3
So time travel was possible, after all, Jody thought, standing on the corner of Parsons and Main.
Merely by strolling by three blocks of dusty buildings—whose architecture ran to ornate cornices and ersatz Grecian columns and art deco lobbies left over from the thirties—Jody could recall vividly what it had been like to be a girl on these streets.
To have a Cherry Coke or root beer float over at the Rexall drugstore (now torn down and replaced by a red brick office building), or to see a scary movie at the State (now torn down and replaced by a concrete block building that said POLICE over its front doors), or to sit in Gibbon’s Square (still thankfully intact), an ocean of green grass upon which floated a bandstand that used to be eye-hurtingly colorful on the Fourth of July with red, white, and blue bunting, or to simply sit on one of the park benches with a Cherry Ames or a Nancy Drew or a Hardy Boys if there was nothing else (she’d always secretly felt that Frank, the erstwhile hero, was largely a dork), or to go further up the street to Lyman’s Union Tap and see if Uncle Bob would invite her inside, where, among the headiness of older men and their secret conversations and the smell of malt and hops and Winston smoke, she’d play bumper pool and listen to Kenny Loggins and Rick Springfield records on the big Wurlitzer jukebox.
So many memories.
But much of it, much of downtown Winthrop—the bastards—had changed.
She stood in the waning sunlight of the day, recalling the blaring bugles and thumping drums of holiday parades that used to march right down this very street, and how goofy yet magnificent the bandleader with his plumes and his high-stepping bravado used to look. A lurid McDonalds stood where she could see Mom and Uncle Bob and Gramps and herself (usually kneeling next to Gramps’s wheelchair) eating plump mustardy hotdogs and drinking strawberry pop.
So many memories
In her recollection the sunlight itself was richer, its dust motes the quick colors of fool’s gold, as before her eyes passed a bright yellow Corvette (how thrilled she’d been the first time she’d seen one of those). And on that corner over there waved Daryl Simmons, the somewhat awkward farm kid who’d taken her to the junior prom, and who had soon after died in some place nobody had heard about, Angola. She saw boys with punk hair-dos trying hard to be Adam Ant, and girls with pink lipstick trying hard to be Olivia Newton John, and adults who looked like adults (none of this trying-to-dress-like-young-people jazz) with short haircuts and trousers worn high and dresses worn low and the air ripe with Evening of Paris and Old Spice and—
—and so many memories.
The worst of it was, she started crying.
Right there on the corner where Pearson’s Bookstore used to be (where she bought Valley of the Dolls for fifty cents in a plump black paperback edition and rushed home to find that it was not only sexy but good, actually a true and honest book that long remained in her memory)—
Right there with shiny new 2012 cars passing by and kids with vaguely punk hairstyles passing by and boys with earrings passing by and girls with I’M EASY T-shirts passing by—
She had walked the blocks that were familiar to her and was now in the new part of downtown Winthrop. One building was twelve stories high. There was a closed mall with a parking lot as vast as the whole of old downtown Winthrop. There was a cop on a corner with a very big gun and menacing mirror sunglasses (in the old days only one cop had patrolled downtown, Gus Fenton, plump, white-haired, and willing at any moment to sit with you at the soda fountain in Rexall and talk about the Rocky pictures—which he liked just as much as you). And there was a four-story monstrosity that could only be a parking garage, where way down low you actually could see big-city graffiti.
So many memories
She put on her dark brown sunglasses so nobody could see that she was crying. On her return trips to Winthrop over the years, she’d seen the gradual changes, but none of them had ever hit her quite this way before.
Her granddaughter Jenny’s peculiar condition, no doubt, had unnerved her.
She walked along the river now, the banks newly landscaped. Couples in bright summer clothes sat on green benches beside the blue water. There was a fishy breeze from the river and the scent of roses from the city garden nearby. An old man with a liver-spotted face nodded hello to her and chewed on the end of a wonderfully malodorous cigar, and she wondered if buried inside his fading eyes the corridors of his mind rang with the same recollections hers did—
Then she was at a Dairy Queen. She bought herself a Dilly Bar and sat at a wobbly picnic table while next to her two small brats misbehaved, their parents seemingly unable to stop them.
Then she thought of how hypocritical she was being. Jody Wagner was hardly a paragon of parenting. Hardly. Not with two husbands (both having left her because she had been unable to wean herself from the bottle) and a daughter who was a cocaine addict and a granddaughter who was presently—
She thought of Jenny’s dead gaze and shivered.
What had happened to Jenny, anyway? What could have happened in the past few days that would have so traumatized her?
From her bout with the bottle, she’d come to understand that walking had a special calming effect on her. She walked . . .
Up past Winthrop High with green sloping hills as a backdrop and steep, dramatic stairs in the front. A two-story red brick building, it seemed to shamble on forever. Over on the side was a cinder track surrounding a grassy field where they used to practice for cheerleading in the waning hours of hot September afternoons.
She walked . . .
Up past the working-class neighborhood, once fiercely proud in the way the homes had been kept, but now a jumble of littered lawns and rusty screen doors hanging by single hinges and cracked windows taped up like wounds and dead cars, stripped as if by vultures, lying ugly on front lawns long gone unmowed. There was—and God how she hated the snobbery of this term—an underclass now. In her day it had been the overriding dream of blue-collar parents to send their children to college. Looking at this bomb site of a neighborhood (the very same once-neat neighborhood in which she’d grown up), she wondered what the dreams of these parents were. If they had any dreams.
She walked . . .
Only now she headed back toward town, the slight gold Bulova on her wrist saying it was nearly time to reclaim Jenny and see what the pleasant Dr. Ruth Peary had to say. (Why didn’t Jody ever accept very pleasant people at face value? Maybe they were just as happy and well adjusted as they seemed.)
She was downtown when what appeared to be rush hour started. Bumper-to-bumper traffic came spilling out of parking lots and the lone parking garage. Horns blasted each other angrily. A cop, hot, exasperated, stood directing traffic at a light that was apparently not working. City buses, the sleek new silver kind that had been imported from Japan and Korea, leaked black fumes into the air. The people aboard looked very happy they weren’t in one of the cars.
And someone was shouting
Or she thought someone was. Or she imagined someone was. With all the noise, it was hard to tell.
So she found her way back to Parsons Street and finished the short walk to the building where Dr. Peary worked. Already, she felt tension working into her shoulders and up her neck and into the lower brain.
Migraine? God, she hoped not. Sam was really out of commission and given Jenny’s condition, Jody really had to be a parent. She had to do what so many people who had been lousy parents to their own children did—become textbook parents to their grandchildren.
She was one step from the exterior door of Dr. Peary’s office when, above the honking and rumbling of buses and screeching of rubber tires on the hot pavement, she thought again she’d heard someone calling after her. Calling her name, actually.
She started to turn and he was there, out of breath and right behind her.
He wasn’t at all what she’d have expected him to become (he’d been unable to attend their two class reunions so she hadn’t seen him since senior year).
For one thing, he’d put on twenty pounds. For another, his hair was almost completely gray. And for still another, properly dressed boy that he’d always been, he wore stonewashed jeans, a white button-down shirt, and a pair of black thick-rimmed bifocals that said he had some serious vision problems.
She thought back quickly: the last time she’d seen him he’d been in a blue three-piece suit and every girl who had the chance found some excuse to give him a graduation night kiss. As always in those days he’d looked mortified at PDA (Public Displays of Affection), as if he’d rather be flung from a mountaintop than be treated this way in front of the other boys who’d never quite found him manly enough (not that he was wimpy exactly, just a little daydreamy).
Now he startled her completely by sliding an easy arm around her shoulder and bringing her gracefully to him so he could put a tiny tender little kiss right in the center of her forehead. At that precise moment she realized two things: how proper, in fact, he still was, and how she still felt some weird kind of kinship with him, maybe because in their class they’d both been insiders who were also, in some important secret ways, outsiders as well.
He laughed then and it was an older man’s laugh, chesty and even a bit beery. “I sure as hell hope you remember who I am. I mean, you’re probably not used to being accosted on the street by old guys with white hair.” Then he touched her hair gently, letting it spill through his fingers like golden water. “I don’t believe it. It’s natural.”
“Seems to be,” she said, softly. She was a little bit stunned and a little bit inhibited and a little bit gaga over the last minute or so here on the street, but finally she found her voice and spoke to the man who’d long ago in that time of Rocky movies chosen Lorna Daily over her.
She touched his hand and half kind of patted it and half kind of shook it and said, “David Fairbain. I can’t believe it. I really can’t. I thought you were living in LA.”
Then she smiled and thought to herself: So time travel really is possible, after all.
4
“Night.”
“Dark.”
“Mother.”
“Uh, love.”
“Sweet.”
“Uh, cookies.”
“Sky.”
“Blue.”
“Sky.”
“Uh, clouds.”
Dr. Ruth Peary said, “Very good. You’re very quick, aren’t you, Jenny. I’ll bet you do well in spelling bees.”
Eight-year-old Jenny shrugged inside the folds of her proper little blue dress. “Pretty good, I guess. I beat Teresa a few times.”
“Teresa?”
“She was my best friend in Chicago.”
“Did you like Chicago?”
For a few minutes during her session, Jenny had shown signs of emerging from her state of disorientation. It was like coming out from behind a gauzy screen. Her blue eyes had focused. Her voice had become rich with interest. She’d even wiped some dust from the toes of her black patent leather shoes.
The word association had done it. Children liked it especially. It was like a game and it allowed them to forget where they were. If you played it long enough, the children not only loosened up, they began to be honest with you, to admit some of the things that had brought them here.
Dr. Peary handed Jenny a fresh steno pad and a pencil. “Now we’re going to try something new.”
“Something new?”
“Mm-hm.”
“What?”
“I’m going to ask you to draw things for me.”
“Draw?”
“Do you draw in school?”
“Sometimes.”
“Do you like to draw?”
“Well, yes, I guess.”
“Good. Then we’ll draw.”
“Draw what?”
“I’m going to say a word to you—just the way I did with word association—then I’d like you to draw whatever comes into your mind.”
Pretty Jenny sighed and touched her toes together. “I’m not a very good drawer.”
“That’s all right. You don’t have to be for this game.”
“Okay.”
Actually, Dr. Peary wasn’t sure how this would go at all. Last summer she’d attended a convention in San Diego in which a Swiss shrink had projected the drawings of children between seven and ten. The shrink had pointed out that many times children would draw what they would not say.
Of course, that same convention in San Diego was where she’d met Bruce, her long-distance lover and a man who was a past master at being noncommittal. She sure hoped that this technique proved more reliable than Bruce had.
“Are you ready?”
Jenny, the steno pad open and on her lap, prepared to draw by sticking the number two pencil in her hand. She nodded.
“All right. Let’s start with the word happy.”
“Happy?”
“Yes. Draw something that makes you happy.”
Jenny’s blue eyes gazed off distantly. For a moment, Ruth Peary feared the girl was sliding back into her state of withdrawal.
But then she bent over the pad and energetically began scribbling. When she finished, a minute or so later, she looked up.
“Good,” Ruth Peary said. “Let’s go on to the next word.” She paused. “Sad.”
“What makes me sad?”
“Yes, Jenny. What makes you sad.”
Again, the thoughtful look out the window. This time was different, however. Tears welled in Jenny’s eyes. Slowly, almost hesitantly, she leaned over the pad. This time she drew very carefully. The drawing completed, she gazed up at Ruth Peary with shiny, tear-filled eyes.
A lump gathered in Ruth Peary’s throat. She was such a dear little girl, Jenny was; the daughter Ruth had never taken the time to have. And with Bruce foot-dragging the way he was. . .
“How about one more word?” she said, handing over a box of Kleenex Boutique tissues to Jenny.
Jenny deftly plucked one from the box and put it to her nose.
She very properly set the used Kleenex in the big orange ceramic ashtray (Some of Ruth Peary’s patients still liked to smoke).
“Before I give you the last word, I’d like to ask you a question.”
Apprehension showed in Jenny’s eyes.
“But I want you to understand something.”
“What?”
“You don’t have to answer.”
“I don’t?”
“No, if it’s something you’d rather keep to yourself, I’ll understand.”
“You will?”
“Yes.”
“And you won’t be mad?”
“I won’t be mad in the least.”
“You promise?”
“I promise.”
Jenny said, “I guess it’s okay if you ask then.”
Ruth Peary paused a moment and said, “Your grandmother seems to feel that something happened to you in the last few days.”
Ruth Peary was astounded by the pall that came over the eight-year-old’s face. Fear? Horror? Terror? Her expression contained each of these, but there was more, too.
Her body language was remarkable. She drew her arms and legs together very tightly and seemed to crawl backwards up the couch; she looked as if she wished she could continue right on up the wall till she reached the ceiling and had at last escaped Ruth Peary’s office.
“Are you all right, Jenny?”
“I’m not supposed to talk about it.”
“Pardon me?”
“I’m not supposed to talk about it.”
“Talk about what?”
Jenny put her head down. “The other night.”
Ruth Peary had encountered this tactic before, albeit not accompanied by this kind of—apprehension.
Jenny did not want to talk.
Ruth Peary said, softly, “Jenny, do you remember what I said?”
Head still down.
“I said that you didn’t have to answer if you didn’t want to.”
Head still down.
“And I’m as good as my word, Jenny. You don’t have to talk about it at all.” Beat. “Are you listening, Jenny?”
When Jenny raised her head, something different—something new and startling—was in her eyes, but Ruth Peary could not decide exactly what.
Suddenly it struck her.
The high cheekbones and soft mouth, so feminine before, had suddenly assumed a tight, feral look. Jenny was no longer pretty at all.
Spittle shone on the left edge of her mouth and began running down her chin.
For a reason she did not understand, Ruth Peary became abruptly afraid of this little girl. She glanced down at her own arm and felt goose bumps. Acid had begun working its painful way up from her stomach. Here she was, an adult, sitting in an office in broad daylight with a little girl—and she was afraid?
“Jenny,” she said.
“What?”
That was the most startling change of all, the deepening and coarsening of her eight-year-old voice.
“Why don’t we draw now?”
“Draw?”
“Yes. On your pad. With the pencil.”
Ruth Peary had the eeriest sensation that she was no longer talking to Jenny, but rather to a stranger inhabiting Jenny’s body. One who didn’t understand what drawing meant.
“Are you ready?”
Spittle came out of the other side of Jenny’s mouth. She looked like a rabid dog.
Jenny raised her pencil. Her eyes, streaked red now, glared at the doctor.
“Fear. That’s the word. Fear, Jenny.”
A low rumbling started in Jenny’s chest and spread up through her throat and out her mouth. Ruth Peary had never heard a human being make a sound like that before.
