“Dope?”
“Barry doesn’t do drugs. Oh, he smokes a little weed now and then, but nothing hard. You don’t shoot somebody to get one joint.” Her voice was shaking. “I love him, Collie. He loves me too. Someday we’re going to get married. When he gets out of college, or even before! I don’t mind working….”
“Of course you don’t.”
“He thinks I’d mind. It’s old-fashioned of him, isn’t it? But nice. He thinks it wouldn’t be right to marry somebody and have her work. He’s just so marvelous! When I first met him, it was two years ago. He picked me up one day, when I was walking home from school. He said I was pretty.”
“He was right,” Collie said. At the moment the statement was not true, but this he discounted. He took his right hand from the wheel and reached over to give her an awkward pat on the shoulder.
“You hang on now, okay? Going to pieces like you did back there in the studio won’t help anything. You don’t seem like the kind of girl who falls apart in an emergency.”
“I’m usually not,” Helen said. “It’s just that this is Barry.”
“Well, hang in there. We’ll be at the hospital in a few minutes, and then you’ll know more about what happened. Whatever it is, you take it head on. Okay?”
Helen reached up to touch the hand on her shoulder.
“You’ll come in with me, won’t you?”
“Sure.”
They drove the rest of the way in silence, except for the music, which stopped at last when Collie turned the key in the ignition to shut the engine off.
The hospital lobby was all but deserted. The gray-uniformed woman at the admitting desk sent them to the second floor, and a nurse there directed them down the hall to a small waiting room.
Several people were there already.
“Mrs. Cox!” Helen cried, breaking away from Collie’s side to rush over to a thin-faced blond woman in a beige pantsuit.
The man next to her was portly and gray-haired with tired eyes. Automatically, as though from force of habit, he began to rise to his feet, and the woman put out a hand to gesture him down again.
“Hello, Helen,” she said. “I’m surprised to see you here.”
“Surprised!” Helen exclaimed. “How could I not be here! Oh, Mrs. Cox, I can’t believe it! I just can’t!”
Her eyes filled and she reached out as though to embrace the woman. Mrs. Cox drew back slightly and gestured toward the other people who were with them.
“Myrna, Bob, this is Helen Rivers, a classmate of Barry’s last year. These are the Crawfords, our dear friends and next-door neighbors.”
“How do you do,” Helen said dutifully. The stony faces of Barry’s parents seemed to bewilder her. She turned to Collie. “This is Collingsworth Wilson. He’s a friend. He lives in the same apartment complex.”
“Barry has lots of friends,” Mrs. Cox said. “I’m glad to see that most of them had the good taste not to come trooping down here. This isn’t a circus, Helen. There’s nothing to see. It’s my boy in there—my boy—terribly hurt! Maybe dying!”
Abruptly she raised her hands and covered her face. The rings on her fingers twinkled under the overhead light. Watching her, Collie found himself wondering how she ever managed to use her hands, as encumbered as they were.
Mr. Cox put an arm around his wife’s shoulders.
“Now, Celia,” he said gruffly. “Chin up, dear.” He turned to Helen. “You’ll have to forgive her. She’s very upset. We all are. It was thoughtful for you and your friend to come down here, but I do think it might be better if we kept it to close friends and family. Right at this point anyway.”
Helen’s face was white.
“She said he might be dying!”
“He has the best care, the best doctors.”
“What are they doing to him in there?”
“Send her away,” Mrs. Cox cried. “My god, how much of this do we have to be put through? If she hadn’t phoned him, if she hadn’t insisted on dragging him out to meet her, this wouldn’t have happened.”
“What do you mean?” Helen asked. She turned to Mr. Cox. “What is she talking about?”
“We’re not blaming you, Helen,” Barry’s father said. “We know the last thing on your mind was bringing harm to Barry. Nevertheless, it was your phone call that brought him out onto the playing field in the dark. Of course, you were not directly responsible for this tragedy, but if you had left him alone, let him stay in the frat house and study, which is what he should have been doing—”
“But I didn’t talk to him tonight,” Helen said in confusion. “I called him once early this evening. I wanted to tell him something somebody had done, a thing on my door….” She brought herself under control with an effort. “He was supposed to call me this weekend. He promised. And when he didn’t…I had to tell him. But he wasn’t there. I called about five, and he was out, and I left word for him to call me back, but he didn’t.”
“We’re set for a long wait here, dear.” Mrs. Crawford spoke up quietly and her voice was not unkind. “The Coxes have your number, I’m sure. We’ll see that you are called when there is something definite to report. In the meanwhile, I think you’d better go. I really do.”
“But, Barry and I—I’m not just a school friend. I’m more, a lot more—” Helen’s voice was rising sharply.
“Come on,” Collie said softly. “I think we’d better go somewhere else to wait. People here are upset enough. Okay?”
“But,” Helen began, “I don’t understand.”
Gently he took her arm and turned her around. “Come on.”
Nobody spoke to call them back. Still holding her arm, he steered her down the hall to the elevator.
“There are other waiting rooms. We’ll sit in the lobby. We’ll have that whole place to ourselves. You can yell or cry or anything you want, and it won’t bother anybody.”
“I don’t want to yell,” Helen said. “I want to wait here, outside of surgery. This is where the news will come when there is any. I’m not just anybody, Collie. I’m Barry’s girlfriend! I’m the one he’s going to marry someday!”
“Maybe so,” Collie said, “but his mother doesn’t seem to be in on the secret.” He pressed the button for the elevator, and as they rode down he did not loosen his hold on her arm.
Julie James placed the receiver back on the hook and went into the living room.
“Mom,” she said. “Somebody’s shot Barry Cox.”
Mrs. James, who was kneeling on the floor, cutting around a dress pattern, straightened up with a gasp. “Why, Julie, how awful! Barry Cox? The boy who goes out with Helen?”
“That was Ray on the phone,” Julie told her. “He heard it on the radio. No, I guess he said it was his dad who heard it. It happened over at the U, on the athletic field. They don’t know who did it.”
Her voice was flat and emotionless with shock.
“I was afraid there might be some trouble over there tonight,” Mrs. James said. “That Memorial Day fireworks display should never have been held on campus, not with student unrest the way it is today. The six o’clock news mentioned the fact that some of the students were gathering for a demonstration. But for them to have taken it this far—to have had one of your friends injured—why, it’s just incredible! Is he badly hurt?”
“Ray didn’t know. He called the hospital, and they wouldn’t tell him anything.” Julie dropped to her knees beside her mother.
The dress on the floor was to be for her. It was pink. The bright material swam before her eyes.
“Do you think it was the war demonstration?” she asked. “Do you really think it was that? Could somebody have had a gun at the demonstration?”
“What other answer could there be?” her mother asked her.
CHAPTER 8
Helen awoke to the sound of a motor running. The waking was gradual; at first the sound was there at the back of her consciousness as part of a dream, and then it seemed to grow louder and louder so tha
t the dream itself was lost in the roar. Then she became aware of the fact that she was in bed and that the sound was not within her head at all but from someplace outside of herself.
She opened her eyes to find the room flooded with morning sunlight. Below her bedroom window the Four Seasons caretaker was cutting the grass with a power mower.
I slept, Helen thought in amazement. How could I have slept so hard when Barry—
Just the thought of his name brought her to a sitting position. The happy-face alarm clock on the bedside table showed ten fifteen.
The morning’s half over, Helen thought incredulously. I’ve been asleep for over six hours!
It had been three in the morning when Barry had been moved from surgery to the recovery room and the Coxes and their friends had stepped from the elevator into the lobby. Helen, who had been seated in a chair opposite the elevator door, had sprung to her feet.
“What? How?”
“They got the bullet,” Mr. Cox told her wearily. “It was lodged in the spine. How much damage it did, they can’t tell yet.”
“But he’s going to live?”
“Prognosis is good. He came through the surgery well. He’s a strong boy; the doctor seems to think he’s going to make it all right.”
“Oh, thank god!” Weak with relief, Helen put out a hand to steady herself against the back of the chair. “I’ve been praying. I haven’t stopped praying since I heard the news at the TV studio.”
“Thank you,” Mr. Cox said. “We’re grateful for your concern.”
Mrs. Cox and the Crawfords had crossed to the far side of the lobby. Mrs. Cox’s face was white and drawn, and for the first time since she had met her, Helen thought the woman looked older than her husband.
“You’re going home now?” Helen asked.
“Yes. My wife is exhausted. The doctor says there is no reason to remain here; it will be hours before Barry’s anesthetic wears off and a good deal longer than that before he can have visitors. He suggests that we try to get some sleep, and that should apply to you too.” He turned to Collie, who had risen to stand at Helen’s side. “You’ll see she gets home, Mr. Wilson?”
“Of course,” Collie said. “I brought her down here.”
“I won’t be able to sleep,” Helen said. “I don’t think I’ll ever sleep again.”
But she had. The golden light of midmorning proved that. She had slept so hard that her body ached from having been so long in one position, and when she got out of bed her legs felt rubbery, as though they might give way at any moment.
She went out to the telephone in the living room and dialed the number of the hospital. The voice that answered told her that Barry Cox was “resting comfortably.” He had been removed from the recovery room and was now in room 414-B. For the time being he was to be allowed no visitors except for family.
“But I’m sure he will want to see me,” Helen insisted. “You’ll ask him, won’t you? Tell him it’s Helen.”
“Are you a member of the immediate family?”
“Not exactly.”
“What is your relationship to the patient?”
“I’m a-a friend,” Helen said. “A very good friend.”
“The orders are that Mr. Cox is to have no visitors outside of the immediate family.”
“Oh, damn,” Helen muttered as she replaced the receiver. “I can imagine who made that rule—dear Mama Cox herself.”
The events of the night before rose in her mind with the odd, unfocused quality of a nightmare: the announcement at the television station, Collie’s arrival, the drive to the hospital, the cold, sharp hatred in the eyes of Barry’s mother.
“If she hadn’t phoned him,” she had cried. “If she hadn’t insisted on dragging him out to meet her—”
“But I didn’t!” Helen had told her. “I didn’t!”
They had not heard her, or they had heard but not listened.
“We’re not blaming you, Helen,” Mr. Cox had said, but in fact they were blaming her, both of them. Even though Mr. Cox had stopped to speak to her in the lobby, she had seen the blame in his eyes.
“I didn’t,” Helen said aloud now, her voice coming strange in the empty apartment. “I didn’t call Barry to meet me out on the playing field. I didn’t talk to him at all last night.”
But there had been a phone call. A statement from one of Barry’s fraternity brothers had confirmed that. Someone had called and talked to Barry and set up an appointment, someone whose request had seemed important enough to draw him out of the house in immediate response.
Who was it who had called and why? Was it a girl? Could Barry have another girl, someone he was seeing when he wasn’t with her?
“No,” Helen answered herself firmly. “No, of course not.” She was Barry’s girlfriend, his only girlfriend. If she couldn’t trust Barry, then who on earth could she trust? And yet there had been things over the past year, odd, assorted little things, none too important in themselves, yet added together, enough to be slightly disturbing to someone less sure of his love than Helen.
There was that conversation with Elsa the night of the accident. Helen always thought of it that way, as “the accident,” unpreventable, arranged somehow by the hand of fate. One moment they had been riding along, relaxed and happy, her head on Barry’s shoulder, the car radio wrapping them in soft music, and the next moment the child had been there in front of the car. There was nothing Barry could have done about it. There had been no time for him to get his right arm back from around her and his right hand onto the steering wheel. Even if both hands had been on the wheel in the first place, it was doubtful that he could have swerved in time. They had done the best they could. Ray had called 911. It was not Barry’s fault that the boy had been injured beyond help; no child of ten had any business riding his bicycle on a mountain road in the middle of the night.
It was not Barry’s fault, it was none of their faults. Still, it had been a terrifying and dreadfully upsetting experience. She had cried a lot on the way home, and when she had come into the house, softly so as not to disturb her parents, she had not been prepared to find Elsa still awake with the light on, reading.
Elsa had glanced up from her movie magazine, and her eyes had narrowed behind her glasses.
“You’ve been crying!”
“No, I haven’t,” Helen had said.
“You sure have; your eyes are red as beets!” Elsa had laid aside the magazine with an air of somebody close to triumph. “What did he do, break up with you? I’ve been wondering how long it would take for him to get around to it.”
“Don’t be silly,” Helen said. “Everything’s just fine between Barry and me.”
“Then why have you been crying?”
“I told you, I haven’t been. It was just smoke in the car.” Helen went to her side of the dresser and took her nightshirt out of the top drawer. She could feel Elsa’s eyes focused on her back.
After a moment Elsa said, “If it didn’t happen tonight, it will soon, you know.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You don’t think Barry’s going to stick with you now, do you? He’s starting college in a couple of months.”
“I don’t know what difference that should make,” Helen said, turning to face her sister. “He’s going to the University, right here in town. He can see me every night if he wants to.”
“But why should he want to?” Elsa asked her. “Face it, Helen, Barry’s a catch for somebody. He’s good-looking, his family has money, he’s a big football hero—every girl’s dream guy. There are a lot of sexy girls going to the University, real women with brains and background. How do you think you’re going to stack up?”
“Barry loves me,” Helen said defensively.
“Has he ever told you that?”
“Well, not in those words exactly. But there were plenty of other girls in high school too. I’m the one he picked.”
“High school’s different,” Elsa said. “Guys look for dif
ferent things then, kid things. Big boobs and highlights in your hair, that’s cool stuff in high school. College guys are different. They’re looking for quality.”
“You’re cruel,” Helen said softly. She stood, staring down at her sister’s heavy, doughish face, at the pursed little mouth already indented at the corners with grooves of discontent. “You’re just jealous. Boys don’t like you, they never have. You never had anybody like Barry. You’re jealous because I do.”
“I’m not jealous of you. I’m sorry for you.”
“That’s a lie,” Helen said. “Barry’s not going to drop me. I may not have a high society background and folks with money and things like that, but I’ve got a lot to offer that other girls don’t.”
Elsa regarded her coolly. “Like what, for instance?”
“Like…like…” Helen floundered for words.
“Dream on,” Elsa said and picked up her magazine. “You just keep dreaming on.”
The next day Helen had taken her junior class picture, a good picture that showed her fine bones and shining hair and bright, perfect smile, and entered it in the Channel Five Future Star Contest. It turned out to be the smartest move she had ever made.
There was a rap at the door. Helen snapped out of her reverie with a jolt.
“Who is it?”
“Collie. Just checking to see how you got through the night.”
“Wait a minute, will you? I’m just getting up.” Hurriedly, Helen went to the bedroom and got a robe out of the closet. A glance in the mirror as she passed it caused her to stop to comb her hair and apply some lipstick. Collie might be no more than a platonic friend, but he was, after all, a male friend.
That fact was reflected in his eyes when she opened the door to him.
“I was going to ask you if you slept,” he said. “I thought you’d be all haggard and baggy-eyed. I thought wrong.”
“I did sleep,” Helen told him with a touch of apology in her voice. “I don’t know how I could, but I did. I was just going to make some coffee. Would you like some?”
“I already had some, thanks. I’m on my way out to my folks’ place. Did you have a chance yet to call the hospital?”