“I see what you mean,” said the girl, observing me critically. “My mom says people ought to dress up when they travel. Did you get a discount haircut? One side’s longer than the other.” She didn’t wait for a response. “I’m Abby Keller. I’m going to visit my dad and his wife for the summer.”
Then she asked the inevitable question, “What’s your name?”
I froze for a moment, unable to come up with an answer. Although I could no longer call myself April Corrigan, I was not yet ready to be Valerie Weber, the identity I would assume once we landed in Florida.
“April Gross,” I said finally, settling on a compromise. Half real, half fake.
“Oh, gross!” the girl exclaimed rudely and burst out laughing. “Do people tease you? I know my friends would tease me. Do they say, ‘Oh, here comes that gross girl?’”
“A name’s just a name,” I said shortly. “People get used to it.” Except when it’s a name like Valerie, I added silently.
“Where are you going?” asked Abby. “To Sarasota?”
I nodded, feeling progressively more and more uncom-fortable.
“I wish that’s where I was going to be staying,” Abby said. “It would be nice to live on the coast where the beaches are. My dad and his wife live in Dullsville. That’s not really its name, of course, but that’s what I call it. Can you believe the only movies they get there are so old you can already rent them on DVD?”
I glanced across at Mom and saw she had finished her drink and fallen asleep with her head propped against the window. Beyond the double pane of glass the clouds were the color of smoke, and the sky was beginning to dissolve into gentle darkness. Mom’s face was illuminated by the overhead reading light, which accentuated the rounded curve of her cheek. With nothing to do but read and eat and watch television, she, too, had put on weight during our confinement. That, and the angle at which the shadows fell, blunted her features and gave her for the moment the look of a stranger. This was not the author Elizabeth Corrigan; the woman dozing beside me was Ellen Paul Weber. In the seat on my right, Abby continued to chatter.
“I bet Dad and Margaret don’t even own a DVD player. They probably don’t even sell them in that hick town. If my parents had to get a divorce, you’d think at least my dad could have moved someplace exotic like Miami or West Palm Beach. But no, he moved to Dullsville to be with Margaret. Then after she got him to marry her, she didn’t want to leave, because her daughter’s got one more year of high school. Besides, Margaret’s sister and her family live in Dullsville, and Margaret can’t get along without all her relatives. Are your parents divorced? Is that why your dad’s not with you?”
I mumbled some sort of noncommittal reply. Then, to my relief, the flight attendant who had come by with the drink cart reappeared with a cartload of snacks. They didn’t look appetizing enough to wake Mom up for, but I accepted one for myself and was pleased when Abby did too, as I hoped that meant she’d stop talking and concentrate on eating. I underestimated my seatmate, however, for while I gnawed my way through a dry bag of pretzels, Abby continued to rattle along, undaunted by the food in her mouth, filling me in on every unpalatable detail of her parents’ divorce and remarriages.
Finally, in self-defense, I gave up on eating, put my seat into a reclining position, and closed my eyes. Incredibly, Abby finally took the hint and fell silent. I focused on the hypnotic roar of the engines, and the next thing I was aware of was a voice on the loudspeaker asking passengers to fold up their tray tables and check their seat belts in readiness for our descent into the Sarasota Bradenton Airport.
When I opened my eyes I saw that Mom was also awake and had hauled herself up into a sitting position. As soon as the plane had taxied to a stop at the gate, we collected our bags from the storage compartments over our seats and joined the line of passengers leaving the aircraft.
We emerged into warm, damp air filled with unfamiliar fragrances, descended a set of portable stairs to the ground, and crossed a short stretch of runway to the terminal, which was brightly lit and churning with activity. The door through which we entered opened into the baggage area, where a revolving belt was preparing to spew out luggage.
Abby, who had popped out of her seat the moment the plane touched the ground, was there ahead of us with her mouth already in motion. With her stood a middle-aged couple whom I could only assume were her father and the detested Margaret.
Since we had not checked any luggage, Mom and I continued on across the lobby to a set of double doors at its far end. A few minutes later we were joined by Dad and Bram, who had left the plane through a door in the tail section. Bram seemed calmer, but his eyes were overly bright, and he did not show the slightest sign of drowsiness.
“You’re not wearing your sunglasses!” Mom said accusingly.
“It’s dark!” Bram protested. “You don’t wear shades at night!”
“You’ll have to until you get your contacts,” said Mom.
“It’s my fault,” Dad said. “I spaced out. There’s been so much else on my mind I forgot to make him put them on. A car is supposed to have been left for us in the long-term parking lot. Rita gave me the license number, so let’s see if we can find it.”
We found the dented green Plymouth without much difficulty and made the drive to Grove City in just over an hour. Rather than the metropolis its name suggested, the “city” turned out to be a town with one main street that bisected a three-block business district. This downtown area was composed of small shops, a movie theater, a bank, a mom-and-pop grocery, and a JCPenney. All the buildings were dark, and along each block, widely spaced street lights mottled the sidewalks with alternating pockets of light and shadow. The only indication that the town had any nightlife was a cluster of cars assembled in a parking lot next to a neon-lit building called the Cabbage Palm Bar.
According to the information in our folder, the house that had been purchased for us was on Lemon Lane, set back from the road with a mailbox in front that said “ Jefferson.” A hand-drawn map showed Lemon branching out from Orange, which intersected Main Street at Cypress Circle. We cruised back and forth along Main Street, looking for street signs, and finally somehow found ourselves on Orange Avenue. From that point on we faced even more of a challenge, for although there was a succession of tiny dirt trails leading off into underbrush, it was all but impossible to tell the roads from thedriveways.
Dad selected one of these at random for the simple reason that it matched the position of a road that was marked on our map. We inched our way along it, straining to make out the numbers on houses that were hidden at the back of heavily wooded lots. It was Bram who spotted the mailbox with the name Jefferson, and Dad turned the car into a driveway that bridged a drainage ditch and wound its way back through a maze of trees and bushes, ending at last at the edge of a rickety carport that leaned forlornly against a small frame building.
He shut off the engine, and quiet descended upon us.
“Well, here we are,” he said, his voice unnaturally loud in the sudden silence. “This is home sweet home, so let’s check it out.”
We got out of the car and climbed the steps to the porch, boards creaking beneath our weight in outspoken protest. Dad fumbled around in the darkness hunting for a keyhole, and finally got the door open. A wave of heat came rolling out to meet us, thick with dampness and the faint, sickly odor of mildew. It made me think of a locker room at a sauna with soggy towels left souring too long in hampers. Dad switched on the overhead light, and the living room of our new home sprang into being, narrow and uncarpeted and unfashionably furnished with a sagging sofa, mismatched coffee and end tables, and a couple of overstuffed, under-hung nylon armchairs.
“Max is playing a joke,” I speculated hopefully.
“It could be worse,” said Mom. “At least, I think it could.”
“I wish Porky was here,” Bram said. “I bet he’d like it.”
Then Mom started laughing, and the rest of us joined her, not because what
my brother had said was funny, but because you either laughed or you had to cry. We stood in that awful room and howled till our sides hurt, imagining Porky’s ecstasy at being allowed on the furniture, which was something Mom never permitted back home. Then we walked through the house, flinging open doors and peering into bedrooms, joking and making rude comments until we were teetering on the edge of hysteria. There were six small rooms: the living room, a kitchen, three tiny bedrooms, and a bathroom. Each room was in some way worse than the room before it. Ceilings were cracked and stained, plaster was flaking and pipes were leaking, two bedroom windows were broken, and when we turned on the light in the kitchen an army of cockroaches frantically scampered for cover.
“Who wants which bedroom?” Dad asked, and our laughter stopped.
“We’re not really going to stay here, are we?” I asked him.
“We don’t have a choice,” said Dad. “The program’s provided this. We’re not in any position to make further demands of them.”
“George—” Mom said and caught herself. “I mean Philip.” The strange name seemed to reverberate through the room. “Philip,” Mom repeated, trying out the sound of it. ‘‘It’s going to take me a while to learn to call you that.”
“Ellen, dear,” Dad said gently, putting his arms around her. “It doesn’t make any difference what we call ourselves. We’re still the same people we always were, isn’t that right, kids?”
Bram and I nodded in automatic agreement. We were the same people we always had been, weren’t we? Still, in the instant before I fell asleep that night, I remembered a carefree girl who used to sleep in a room fit for royalty, secure in the knowledge that princesses live happily ever after. I missed that girl, and I desperately wanted her back.
CHAPTER 8
It was a miserable night.
To begin with, it was overwhelmingly hot—the kind of hot that gives that word new meaning. Not that I was used to cool summers. Back home in Norwood we turned on the air conditioner at the beginning of June and kept it running nonstop until into September. There, at least, we’d had an air conditioner. Not only did our house in Grove City not have air-conditioning, it didn’t even have fans to move the air around.
Besides that, the house had been closed up and baking in the sun for so long that it seemed to have absorbed the heat like a sponge and to now be radiating it back from walls, floors, and ceilings. My stifling bedroom had only one tiny window. Even when I cranked it all the way open, the heavy growth of trees and bushes along the side of the house cut off any breeze that might have existed.
Although I was so exhausted I dropped off to sleep immediately, I tossed restlessly all night, and my sleep was rampant with dreaming. In one especially vivid dream I was playing tennis and Bobby Charo was across the net, lobbing balls at me. We were playing with fireballs, and when I attempted to hit one it zoomed through my racket, leaving charred strings dangling like strands of blackened spaghetti and the handle searing my hand like a cast-iron skillet left too long on a stove burner. So intense was the heat that I started to melt as though I were ice cream, with liquid running down my legs and dripping off my ankles to form puddles on the hard clay surface of the court. At that point I heard a cheer and glanced up to see that the bleachers on either side of us were filled with students from Springside. Sherry was shrieking and waving and shouting encouragement, and Jodi was screaming instructions I couldn’t understand.
Steve was there too, cheering right along with them and looking spectacularly handsome in the white button-down shirt with red pinstripes I’d given him for Valentine’s Day. The fact that I now had an audience made me play harder, and the heat of exertion was added to that of the tennis balls. The spectators seemed to grow more and more excited, but still I could not make out what it was they were shouting to me. Then, suddenly, a name rang out distinctly, and to my horror I realized that it wasn’t my name. It was Bobby my friends were rooting for, because he was their classmate! To them I was just a visitor from Florida who was messing up their tennis court by melting all over it.
I awakened from that dream feeling sick and shaken, as if my disillusionment had occurred in real life. It took me several minutes to cut loose from the nightmare and to remember where and who I was. When I did, I drew a deep breath and opened my eyes to find that the pale light of dawn was seeping through the window and the first day of my life as “Valerie Weber” had started. I lay there watching the room grow steadily lighter until I could make out the watermarks on the ceiling and the starburst of cracks in the wall across from my bed. My hips and shoulders ached from the lumpy mattress, and my sweat-dampened skin felt uncomfortably clammy in the morning air. I knew that to fall back asleep again would be impossible, so I got out of bed, got dressed, and went out to face the morning.
Moving quietly past the open doors of the other two bedrooms, I went down the narrow hall to the front of the house. I had some sort of crazy idea that the magic of sunlight might have caused a transformation there. Of course, that hope was short-lived, as daylight did nothing to improve the appearance of the living room. At least at night, by the glow of an overhead bulb, we had not been able to see cobwebs nestled in the corners of the ceiling or the greasy marks unwashed heads had stamped on the sofa cushions. Now those were all too apparent, along with the little piles of mouse droppings littering the floorboards and the faded blue of the curtains drooping despondently at the windows.
Home sweet home, I thought wryly, and felt like crying. Too depressed to continue, I opened the door and stepped out onto the porch. In contrast to my experience in the living room, I was pleasantly surprised by the world outside. The air held the scents of blossoming trees and overripe fruit, and the bushes that lined the driveway and had appeared so mysterious and formidable in the dark were, in the light of morning, a lush green backdrop for brilliant orange flowers. A rabbit was hopping across the yard, squirrels skittered up and down tree trunks, and an invisible chorus of birds was singing lustily in branches high above my head. Even the heavy underbrush that cut off the view of the road had a pleasant, jungle-like quality, like something out of a National Geographic travelogue.
Having nothing else to do until the others woke up, I descended the steps and walked down to the end of the driveway. Once there, I could see no reason not to go farther, and after considering a moment, I turned to my left and started back along Lemon Lane in the direction from which we had come the night before.
As I walked, I considered the reason for our out-of-the-way location. It was apparent to me now why we’d had such a hard time finding the house. Not only were there no intersections for street signs, but there were no curbs on which house numbers could be displayed. The only indication that there were houses back behind the undergrowth was an occasional mailbox positioned next to a driveway.
Obviously we’d been placed here deliberately, in an attempt to make it difficult for people to locate us. The moment I reached Orange Avenue, everything changed, as though I had suddenly crossed some significant boundary line. Sidewalks abruptly materialized out of nowhere, and houses sat side by side on residential lots. I immediately felt more comfortable, like a traveler in a foreign country who discovers to her relief that the natives speak her language. Halfway down the first block I came upon a hospital, set in among the houses as though it was one of them, and two blocks farther I saw, on the opposite side of the street, a flat-roofed building with a sign that said GROVE CITY SECONDARY SCHOOL.
Secondary school? I thought, puzzled. What exactly did that mean? Was that a middle school or a high school? I crossed the street and walked slowly along the pavement next to the building, trying to peer in and see what lay behind the windows. The rooms were dark and the glass was placed at an angle that permitted little view of anything but blackboards. The few clues I did find were oddly contradictory. On a windowsill there stood a row of geography books that looked as though they were geared to classes in middle school, but the wall of another classroom held a chart of
symbols that seemed to be intended for a high school chemistry class.
Spurred on by my curiosity and beginning to enjoy the challenge, I rounded the corner of the building and continued on back to find out what lay behind it. I discovered a softball field and a small gymnasium, and back beyond that, a chain- link fence enclosing tennis courts.
Long before I caught sight of the courts themselves, my ears picked up the sound of a ball being smacked rhythmically back and forth by a pair of rackets. The court in my dream sprang to mind, and I could almost see the high stacks of bleachers and the rows of familiar faces gazing down at me. The memory lost its impact when I came opposite the fence and was able to get a look at the couple who were playing. They were young and blond and looked like brother and sister, and the boy had no resemblance to Bobby Charo. While Bobby was dark and wiry, this guy was towheaded and had a bulky build more appropriate for a quarterback than for a tennis player.
I went in the gate and took a seat on the spectators’ bench. The couple continued to play without interruption, but during a break between games the boy glanced over at me and acknowledged my presence with a nod and grin. He was by far the better of the two players, for the girl was slow on her feet and looked exhausted. It was easy to see that the guy was holding himself back in order to keep his opponent from becoming discouraged. He took the first game but let the girl take the second. Then, with a few strong serves, he nailed down the set.
Appearing more relieved than disappointed, the girl started scooping up balls and putting them in the can.
“Hey, don’t tell me you’re calling it quits?” he called to her.
“Yes, I’m calling it quits! This is a farce!”
“Oh, come on, Kim, be a sport! You’ve just begun to fight!”
“You heard me. No! I’m all fought out, and I mean it.”
“What a sore loser!” The guy turned to look at me. “Hello, over there. I don’t suppose you happen to be a tennis player?”