Other Shepards Page 10

  I smile; other people have talked about John’s public speaking voice, how he liked to get his point across in crashing decibels.

  “I also asked my mom what she would do if a ticket to Saint Germaine dropped in her lap,” Louis continues. “Guess what she said?”

  “What?” I lift my shoulders. “I give up.”

  “She said, ‘I’d think someone up there was watching over me.’”

  “Is that what you think?”

  Louis uses his free hand to scoop something from the pocket of his leather jacket. “Here, give me your hand,” he says.

  “What is this?” I cannot see, I can only feel the nugget of weight he places in the palm I offer him.

  “It’s Saint Jude,” Louis tells me.

  “What’s he the saint of?”

  “I think he’s the saint of travel. You should take him with you to Saint Germaine. He’ll keep you protected.”

  I almost want to laugh in Louis’s face, he sounds and looks so trusting and earnest, but instead I quickly drop my head to scrutinize the tiny tin statue, no bigger than a Crackerjack prize. Then I lift Saint Jude to my ear, like a shell.

  “He’s saying, ‘Remember to take sunblock.’” Louis smiles. His hand on my shoulder anchors me to him. “He’s saying, keep safe and come back in one piece.”

  “Is he?”

  “Yeah.” The second kiss Louis Littlebird gives me feels like slow motion, as if he had decided on it long before he climbed up onto this roof tonight. At first my face and body are stiff, and I keep waiting for him to figure out that I haven’t had any experience with kissing, but soon I realize that it comes pretty naturally to me. The sign of a genuine Ick, I guess.

  Suddenly the moon makes its debut, throwing white light over us, making me shy.

  “It’s getting late, probably,” I say. “I bet it’s almost eleven.”

  “Yeah, I should get going. I’ll see you tomorrow morning.” We stand together, and he kisses me quickly on the cheek, a velvety soft brush that is nothing like a night crawler.

  “Goodnight.”

  “’Night, Louis.”

  He swings down the ladder with an athlete’s ease. By the cloudy, apple juice light of the street lamps, I watch him, a long shadow with a confident stroll, until he vanishes.

  The tickets are hidden under my mattress, and Saint Jude stays under my pillow. I keep thinking they might guide me to the right decision. But my Tuesday night sleep is awful, and I wake the next morning feeling as if I haven’t slept at all. Geneva avoids me and I know she is terrified that I will tell the parents. Every time I look at her, I am confronted with her face of silent pleading.

  Wednesday night I am exhausted, flip-flopping from side to stomach to side, drifting in and out of shallow sleep. My dreams sputter and fade and are forgotten. I wake up and hear Geneva in the bathroom. Is she running the faucet or flushing the toilet? I force my eyes closed in an effort at sleep.

  My fingers find the edge of Saint Jude. He is made of metal so thin that at first I thought I could bend him between my fingers, only I tried and I can’t. Behind my closed eyes is dark ocean. The water moves around and through me, and so I dive deeper, pulling myself along the current. We’re swimming together, Geneva and I, and she is telling me how the water fixes her, but her words are secret, the private underwater words shared between sisters, and I am smiling now, the water rushing in between my teeth and pouring into my smile.

  “Holland! Holland!”

  My name. I open my eyes to see my sister standing in the doorway of my room. The light shining behind her acts as an X ray, separating her body from her nightgown.

  “Holland, are you okay?”

  I close my eyes and open them again, but I do not wake up. I am not dreaming, but I am not awake, either. Held in this moment between sleep and consciousness, I am resolved. I know what we are supposed to do.

  “I’m awake.” I yawn and slither up in bed.

  “You were talking real loud. I couldn’t understand what you were saying. It must have been a dream.” Geneva approaches me reluctantly. “You need me to sing or hear prayers or anything?”

  “Geneva,” I say slowly. “I am going to ask you a question and you must answer honestly. Think hard and take your time. How scared would you be to get on a plane?”

  She is even frightened of the question. I can see by the way her body collapses slightly around her middle, shoulders drooping and knees bending to give way to the disintegrating support of her stomach.

  “Very,” she answers. “Very very. As many verys as you can say in three hours and twenty minutes. But I’d do it. I’d do it if I knew that Saint Germaine was waiting for me at the end.”

  When we come home from school on Thursday afternoon, the kitchen looks wild, framed by colors never before introduced into our house. I have been a helper to the process, a reliable mixer of varnishes, a steady hand at stippling the mattes of the sky and ocean. Geneva and Annie are the real artists. As soon as she drops her book bag, Geneva is at the sink, where she begins to mix paints and thinners with the expertise of a chef.

  They have been painting the sky as a storm front, “because the colors are more funky,” Geneva informs me, using a word I know she borrowed from Annie. And so our walls shine oyster gray and sulfurous yellow, ribboned with hints of pink and lavender and misted with cloud tatters.

  “On the ceiling you should paint Zeus, holding a giant lightning bolt ready to strike down anyone using too much basil,” I joke. “Since it’s a kitchen,” I explain, when neither Annie nor Geneva laughs. Geneva dips her brush and scrutinizes its color.

  “Does this look too mustardy?” she asks me, holding the tip of her brush. “Maybe more linseed oil,” she says, answering her own question.

  Annie is crouched on the floor, mixing paints into pottery saucers. “Take off your funny hat, Holland, and get working,” she says, looking up at me. Her face is bright with cheery flecks of paint, but grape-dark shadows are scooped beneath her eyes, and her linen blazer seems to engulf her body.

  I stoop next to Annie. She hands me a bristle brush and a dish of brown goop.

  “Are you shrinking, or are your clothes growing?” I ask her, half-kidding.

  “Add a little more ochre and mix until it’s even,” Annie says. “It’s for shading the tree trunk.”

  “You look tired. Might be spring flu. It’s going around,” I say. “There were four kids absent in my class today.”

  “Holland, if I’m here to help you, what’s the use of your trying to help me? We just cancel each other out.” It is the first time Annie has admitted she came into our home for any other reason than to paint the walls, and her comment takes me by surprise.

  “Okay,” I say. “Forget it. Take care of yourself.”

  “Thanks.”

  “We’re going,” I say after a minute. I squirt a dollop of ochre yellow paint into the saucer, like melting butter into chocolate, and wait for her reaction. None comes. “Tomorrow,” I continue. “We’re cutting school at lunch. We’re not telling anybody. Other than you, I mean. And Louis. And I’ll tell the parents, too, once we’re on our way.” It was my final bet to myself. If you can get yourself to that island, you have to let the parents know. It’s not fair to worry them.

  Annie sits back on her heels, touching her fingers against the hollow of her neck. We lapse into a silence so long that I think she is angry with me. I draw my face up, defiant, waiting.

  “Well, Holland Shepard,” she says finally through a little laugh, “you have more spirit than I’d figured. You’re turning into someone I can really relate to.”

  Her words make me so happy I could hug her, if she were the hugging type.

  ten

  saint germaine

  I SINK MY SPOON into the molded plastic compartment of chocolate pudding, which looks like a square of wet cardboard and tastes not much better. I turn away from lunch to gaze at my view, so clear it is as if the window itself had been painted blue
.

  Geneva has worn herself out with Hail Marys and is working through a string of Pledge of Allegiances. When I lean forward I can see that her body is pushed up into her chair, head and shoulders glued to the back of the seat, giving her the appearance of an astronaut just launched into space. Only her mouth moves—“antoo the republic forwidget stans …”

  “Do you want your crackers?” I ask. Without turning her head, she flips the package onto my tray.

  Neither of us has brought books, so I busy myself with the travel magazines stacked inside the netted pocket attached to the back of the seat in front of mine, then turn my attention again to the window. The view, though unchanging, exhilarates me. “We will be cruising at an altitude of 28,000 feet,” the pilot had informed us over the speakers. A breathless height.

  So far, I have enjoyed everything about this trip, especially the airport, with its cargo-sized elevators and free-standing lounges and endless glass terminals through which you can see landed planes idling like slow-moving beasts in a game park. Even the taste of packaged food and the hum of packaged air is flavored with adventure and chance.

  Getting to this point, all the way up here to become a dot in the sky, had not been so difficult, not nearly as hard as I had thought it would be once I knew we were going. The dentist’s notes had been easy; only the most critical eye could tell my imitation of Mom’s skinny, long-tailed handwriting from the real thing. The train ride was quick and efficient. Check-in offered only a few uncertain moments when, filling out our unaccompanied minor forms, I was faced with having to list the names of who would be picking us up and supervising our stay on the island. I hesitated before printing Ryan and Dana Hubbard. As the check-in clerk took the forms, briskly stapling them to our tickets without a second look at the parents’ forged signatures, I remembered what Annie had said about people being too busy with their own lives to care about anyone else’s. She might have been right, but it’s a lonely vision, a city filled with people who see right past or through you as long as you seem to play by the rules and don’t make trouble.

  I phoned the parents the moment before our seats were called for boarding. Dad’s voice sounded lonely and long distance, as if he already knew I would be disappointing him. “Leave a message and we’ll be glad to return your call.”

  “Hi, it’s Holland. Look, this is hard to explain, but Geneva and I are going away for the weekend. We’re fine, we’re safe, I’m sorry, but we’re going to Saint Germaine. To our house. We’ll be back Sunday night, I’m sorry, again. I love you. I promise I’ll be grounded when we get back.”

  After hanging up, I moved far away from the phone, retreating to another part of the airport lounge to resist calling the parents again and apologizing a few more times before takeoff.

  “I love to travel,” I say to Geneva now, pressing my nose against the plane window. “Love it, love it, love it.”

  “How much longer till we get down? My head hurts from the altitude. I might be dehydrating.”

  “Geneva, you act like we’re hang-gliding to get there.”

  “I can’t help getting airsick, especially since you made me take the aisle.”

  “You said you wanted the aisle.”

  “I need to find the bathroom,” she says. She unhinges from her seat with the stiff joints of a marionette. I watch her careful progress up the aisle before returning to stare at my sky.

  When we met at our vendor this morning, Louis told me not to forget my camera.

  “I don’t own a camera,” I said, surprised. I hadn’t even thought of it.

  “Aw, man, if I’d known I would have lent you mine,” Louis said.

  “Really,” I answered, “it’s no big deal.” What Louis didn’t know was that I wouldn’t have taken a camera even if I did own one. I’d seen enough glossy, eternalized moments of Saint Germaine, and I don’t want to capture more of them. For the past couple of days, I have been electric with impulse, like the person who rushes headlong into the picture just before the flash goes off. I do not want to think about consequences.

  I smile into the blue window and my smile is defiant: I am here, too, it says. I have a right.

  Geneva returns a few minutes later, all eyes.

  “You look like you saw a Martian.”

  “Did you know all along?” she gasps. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “Know what? Say what?”

  “That Annie is on our plane! Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “No! She is? I didn’t know.” I lift out of my seat and crane my neck, trying to locate Annie among the hills of heads bumped over their seat backs.

  “In front.” Geneva points. “She’s sleeping. I’m not kidding. Go look.”

  A movie has started and I walk, half-crouched up the aisle, to where I find her within the vague radius Geneva indicated, asleep on the aisle seat of the third row.

  She is tented by her blazer, a deflated crumple across her shoulders and chest. In sleep she is fixed and distant as a star. Her nostrils do not dent in sleep-breath, her body makes no stir. Yet her presence is more assuring to me than the guarantee of any inflatable life raft or seat that doubles as a flotation device.

  “Annie,” I whisper. The man next to her looks up at me, scowling. He is wearing headphones and he points to the movie.

  “Shhh.”

  “Annie!” I say louder. She opens her eyes; their gray is only a saucer’s overlay around sleep-dark pupils, and her face looks tired, soft enough to smudge with the barest press of a finger.

  “See, I’m your warden after all,” she says in the secret voice.

  “You didn’t have to come,” I say, although I am sure relief beams over my face. “Why did you come? You look so tired.” So sick.

  “Mmmph. I’m just doing my job, delivering you safely.”

  “Do the parents know?”

  Annie snaps her eyes shut and turns her head away from me. I can see there’s no point trying to work more words out of her.

  “You’re right,” I say wonderingly when I rejoin my sister. “She’s up front. I can’t figure out how she sneaked on. We never saw her in the terminal or anywhere. She says she wants to make sure we get there safely. She looks pretty worn out, though, and none of the flight attendants even thought to give her a blanket.”

  “Oh, other people don’t notice her,” Geneva says.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean they don’t pay attention to her. We see her in our own way, but everyone else?” Geneva flicks the air. “No one notices. No one knows how to look.”

  I try to watch more carefully how people observe Annie once we deplane and are faced with the bleak airstrip of the main island, but as far as I can tell nobody really reacts to any of us.

  All our bags are carry-on, so we don’t have to wait beside the carousel in the baggage claim. Annie has slid into her broken strap shoes and does not remove her blazer, although Geneva and I ball our own jackets into our bags as soon as the air, warm as a bakery, hits our faces. The setting sun hurts my eyes. My watch reads 6:21 P.M.

  “We’re here at last,” Geneva says, stretching her pale, bare arms over her head. “My fortune came true. I knew it would.”

  “We’re not there yet. We need a car to take us to our launch site,” Annie reminds her as we walk out into the nearly empty airport parking lot. Other passengers are staggering into the heated air, waving for the few available car services to pick them up. “That guy over there, standing next to the Range Rover. Geneva, go ask.”

  The man, a native of the main island, tells us his name is Chad.

  “I can drive you to Regina Beach, then you wait for the boat to take you over,” he says, opening the doors of his spotlessly clean car. The interior smells like an entire can of air freshener was recently unleashed into it. “Thirty minutes to Saint Germaine, twenty minutes to Clothilde, forty-five minutes to Moore Island by motorboat. If you take a sailboat, a bit longer. Where are you going?”

  “Saint Ge
rmaine,” I say.

  “As I was going to Saint Germaine,” Geneva recites giddily, bouncing on her seat, “I met a man with seven brains. And every brain had seven pains, and every pain had seven—”

  “What are you talking about? Calm down!” I scold her. “There are days I wish you would slice off your tongue.”

  Instead she sticks it out at me, but I am relieved that she is more enthusiastic than unnerved by the new surroundings. In fact, for a day of traveling she has done remarkably well.

  We are here at last. I roll down my window and am wrapped in arid air. The troubles that bound me all morning; the lies I told my teachers, the shrinking sock-wad of bills that I’ve paid out for cab and train fares, the bolt of chaos that will be striking 176 Waverly Place any second—slowly release their hold.

  The setting sun is bleeding its orange and grapefruit and cranberry juice colors into the sky. We drive past walls of sugar cane, a clutch of goats all tied together by one long rope, a man selling painted coconut shells. We pass a row of cement houses and a cemetery of crooked crosses. I close my eyes and the Range Rover seems to gather speed, hurtling us faster and faster down the road, so fast that we melt into a ball of red fire roaring through the green cane. My heart shudders in my chest and my hands are a fusion of salty, wet fingers. I open my eyes; I remember to breathe. The colors of the island are so beautiful, they hurt.

  Annie sleeps between us. Her arms, still freckled with the paint of our kitchen mural, rest on her lap. She does not open her eyes until we have arrived at Regina Beach.

  She is right—it is romantic, more romantic than the Jersey shore. Pale surf breaks over a stretch of blond sand, nearly deserted save a rickety free-standing pier, a few forgotten canvas deck chairs, and a couple of fat, bright-eyed seagulls. They pick up their feet in a jerking march, sometimes heaving their bodies into a couple yards of flight before dropping back to earth. As I climb from the car, I open my mouth to taste the cool salt air. Geneva, a shoe in each hand, runs to the edge of the water, testing it.