“Lots of fun things come in the morning,” Pinky told him.
“Name three.”
“Santa Claus,” said Shara quickly.
“The Tooth Fairy,” Andy added,
“Unconfirmed,” David told him. “Many suspect she comes late at night.”
“Sunrise,” Erin said quietly, remembering how Amy used to hate getting up in the mornings too. “Sunrise comes early in the morning.” The others looked at her oddly. How could I say such a stupid thing? she thought.
“That can be confirmed,” David interjected hastily, as if to cover for her.
Seth cleared his throat, and the awkward moment passed when the waitress brought a pizza, still sizzling from the oven. David divided up the pie and continued with a string of stories that kept the others laughing
Erin half listened, concentrating instead on picking the mushrooms off her slice of pizza. She flicked them absently, wondering where her hunger had gone. Her stomach was knotted for some reason, and she just couldn’t eat.
“Something wrong with the food?” David asked.
“Tm just not a mushroom fanatic.”
“Not a mushroom fanatic!” David feigned horror. “But mushrooms are our friends. In fact some of my best friends are mushrooms. Consider Seth here.…”
A tiny smile curled Erin’s lip as David quickly started another conversation, this time about basketball. David did have the gift of charm and a ready wit, something shed always envied in people. Amy had been that way, she thought. She set her piece of pizza down and tuned into what Andy was saying. “ … no way, Devlin. You’ve got your hopes pinned on the wrong team. The Celtics are gonna take it all.”
“In your dreams, buddy. How could you ever pick the Celtics to come out on top? Get with it, man! You’d have to be brain dead to pick them.”
For Erin the world seemed to stop spinning, and the walls of the room closed in on her. Brain dead. She stood rapidly, pushing Andy out of the booth.
“Hey!” he yelped.
Erin didn’t care. She only knew she had to get out of there before she screamed. She felt as if she were running through a thick fog. She heard Shara shout, “Erin! Wait!” She even felt a hand grab at her. But she wrenched away and ran to the door. People were staring, but it didn’t matter. She had to get outside and into the cool night air.
She ran across the parking lot to her car and dug frantically through her purse. Where are the stupid keys? She climbed into the front seat and spilled the contents of her purse in her lap. She found them, finally, and jammed one into the ignition. She never got to turn it, though, because someone yanked open the passenger door, jumped in, and tugged the key from the switch.
Erin turned furiously toward the intruder, David Devlin. “Go away!” she shouted. “Go away and leave me alone!”
Chapter Seven
“I mean it,” Erin said through clenched teeth. In the light from the overhead street lamp, she saw David’s tortured expression.
“I’m sorry, Erin. I—I didn’t know.”
“Didn’t know what? Give me my keys.”
“I didn’t know that you had a sister who died.”
“Who told you?” Her chin lifted defiantly.
“Shara did, the minute you ran out. All I heard her say was that your sister had been brain dead after a car wreck; then I ran out after you.”
“Sharas got a big mouth. The truth is I’m sick to my stomach.”
David reached for her, and she shoved him away. “My keys.” She held out her open palm.
“Talk to me,” he pleaded. “Tell me what happened.”
“If you don’t give me my keys and get out of this car, I’m going to start screaming.” Her hands were shaking, and tears were straining behind her eyes. Why didn’t he go away and leave her alone?
“No,” David said.
She lunged. He tossed the keys into the backseat and grabbed her wrists and pulled her toward him. She struggled to break free, fought to hold back the tears, but she couldn’t do either. With a strangled cry the dam broke.
David held her, and she didn’t resist because the fight had gone out of her. She didn’t know how long she wept, but eventually the tears subsided, leaving her as limp as a rag doll. She fumbled in her lap for a tissue, while David stroked her hair. She eased back into her seat, but David held tightly to her right hand. “I haven’t cried like that since …” Her voice sounded raspy. She remembered the day that her parents had signed the organ-donor papers for Amy and she’d stood in the shower wearing all her clothes and cried. “ … well, for a long time.” She was embarrassed, because no one had ever seen her lose it that way.
“Are you still mad at me?” David asked.
“No, you had no way of knowing.”
David took a deep breath. “I wouldn’t have hurt you for the world, Erin. My dad always tells me that I talk too much.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Outside, people drove cars out of the lot, but Erin felt isolated and alone with David, as if they were the only two people in the world. She rolled down her window, and the night air cooled her hot, tearstained cheeks.
“Tell me about your sister,” David said. “What was her name?”
“Amy,” Erin told him. It seemed strange that he didn’t know. For years everybody she’d known had known Amy too. “She was sixteen, a sophomore at Briarwood.”
“You must miss her a lot.”
Fresh tears came up, but Erin blinked them away. “Yes.” David reached out and ran his thumb across her cheek. “I must look awful,” she said, sorting through the mess in her lap for her hairbrush.
“Not to me.” Without warning her heart began to thud. She glanced at him shyly. He took her hand. “I think you’re beautiful.”
She shrugged self-consciously. “You didn’t get to eat your pizza.”
“I don’t like mushrooms either.”
All at once David seemed different to her, kind and caring, not crazy and foolish. She was ashamed that she’d judged him before getting to know him. “I’d better get this stuff put away. I really do have to get home.”
“I’ll help.” He held the purse while she scooped her belongings into it. “What time do you have to be at work tomorrow?” he asked.
“Not until three o’clock,” she said, embarrassed that inside the pizza parlor she’d made it sound much earlier than that.
“Good.” David reached over into the backseat and hunted for her keys. “I’ll pick you up at ten.”
“What? But—but—”
“No ‘buts.’ ” He handed her the keys and opened the car door.
“But where are we going?”
“I have a show to do, and I want you with me. And I want to introduce you to the second-most-important woman in my life.”
“Who …?”
David got out. “Tomorrow,” he said, shutting the door and jogging back to the restaurant.
“But …” Erin said to the empty car. Slowly, thoughtfully, she started the engine and pulled out into the light flow of traffic. “The second-most-important woman?” she asked aloud. Did that make her the first? Erin smiled despite her confusion over David.
That night she lay in her bed and remembered how gentle he’d been with her, how he’d let her cry herself out, holding her and hugging her. She noted something else too. For the first time in months, she felt peaceful, as if the tears had washed away the hard knots that lived inside her stomach and along her spine. And she also realized that she’d told him about Amy and didn’t have a headache.
“Couldn’t you have put your makeup on when you got there?” Erin asked, staring at David as he drove, dressed in his full clown gear.
“It’s a kid’s birthday party,” he said. “Can’t spoil the illusion by going off to the bathroom and changing when I get there, can I?” He looked over at her and grinned. Even under the white greasepaint and big orange mouth, she recognized his electric smile. He looked exactly as he had a year ago—oversize baggy suit, yellow
curly wig, and bowler hat perched on his head. A flower she knew squirted water was stuck in his lapel.
“People are staring,” Erin said as a car passed them and the driver did a double take.
David waved. “That’s the trouble with the world. It’s too conventional.”
David might be indifferent to what others thought, but Erin wasn’t. It was one of the things that made her and Amy so different. Amy never cared what others thought, while to Erin it had always mattered. Maybe that’s why Amy, and now David, made friends so easily; and why it had been so out of character for Erin to dress in Amy’s clown makeup the year before and fulfill Amy’s commitment at the Children’s Home. “People hardly expect to see a clown driving down the freeway,” Erin told him.
“Careful, sweet-face, or I’ll douse you with water. But then, I don’t want to spoil my routine for you.”
Erin almost told him that she knew his routine but decided that it would take too much explaining. “So who’s this all-important woman I’m supposed to meet?”
“She’s a regular doll,” he said mysteriously. “You’ll love her.”
Erin wasn’t too sure. David parked his car in front of a two-story brick house on a tree-lined side street off Bayshore Drive. She could smell the salt water in the breeze. He took Erin’s hand and led her up the sloped driveway. The door of the side entrance flew open, and a little girl with blue eyes and dark blond hair barreled out and grabbed David around the waist.
“Whoa,” he said, laughing and hugging her. She made several gestures with her hands, and David responded with rapid gestures as well as words. “I know I’m late, but I told you I had to pick up a friend.”
The girl turned toward. Erin who watched, fascinated as the child’s fingers flew in more gestures and signs. “This is Erin,” David said, shaping her name with his fingers. “We’re in the play at school together.”
The girl measured Erin with wide, unblinking eyes. Caught off guard, Erin didn’t know how to respond. “This is my sister, Jody,” David said.
Erin was at a momentary loss. Why hadn’t David told her that his sister was deaf? “I—urn—hello, Jody.”
“Watch,” David told her. “This is the sign for ‘Hello.’ ”
Erin repeated it awkwardly, and Jody giggled, then turned back to David and signed something. David laughed. “She thinks you’re pretty,” he told Erin. “And she wants to know how I got such a pretty girl to date me.”
Just then a woman flung open the screen and ushered the three of them inside a big, sunlit kitchen. “David, the kids are waiting for you in the den.”
“Well, I can’t keep my public waiting, can I?”
Twenty children sat on the floor in a semicircle, and they giggled and pointed when David entered. Erin hung toward the back of the room, where she watched as David performed. He did magic tricks, made animal shapes out of balloons, and managed a few pratfalls in between. Watching him, Erin felt her throat grow thick. She kept remembering how well they’d worked together at the Children’s Home, and she couldn’t understand why she hadn’t told him about it before now. She felt that she was deceiving him in some way.
“Isn’t he wonderful?” the mother of the birthday child whispered in Erin’s ear.
“Yes,” Erin said.
“We’ve known his family for years. My daughter, Tracy, and David’s sister, Jody, started at the same school for the hearing impaired when they were both two.”
“That young?” For the first time Erin perceived that in spite of all the laughter, the room was strangely quiet to be filled with twenty children. “Are all these kids deaf?”
“That term’s inaccurate,” Tracy’s mother said. “Some are more handicapped than others. Tracy and Jody both are considered ‘profoundly deaf’—they can’t hear anything. Others have some hearing with the use of special hearing aids. They ail attend a special school where they’re taught a combination of signing and lipreading. They’re all taught to talk too, but since speaking depends so much on hearing, they don’t sound like regular kids to the rest of us.
“In other words, you can’t imitate what you can’t hear?” Erin asked.
“That’s right. Eventually we want to mainstream Tracy and Jody.”
Erin knew that mainstreaming meant putting kids with handicaps into regular classrooms. “Was Jody born deaf?” she asked.
“No. When she was a year old, she caught meningitis, and it left her without her hearing.”
“She’s a pretty girl.”
“Yes, and she absolutely adores her big brother. He’s a nice guy and very talented.”
Erin watched as David brought Tracy from the audience and made quarters appear from behind her ears. Then he presented her with a bouquet of flowers that seemingly materialized from under his coat.
When it was time to serve the cake, Erin helped Tracy’s mom pass it among the children, then she and David slipped out the back door. In the car David tugged off his hat and wig and red false nose and tossed them to the backseat.
“I’m impressed,” Erin said. “You had them eating out of your hand.”
He grinned, and his orange-painted mouth stretched cheek to cheek. “All women under the age of ten fall at my feet.”
“It must be your humility that attracts them.”
David snickered. “That’s one of the reasons I keep you around, Erin. You never let me forget I’m a mere mortal.”
“Someone has to remind you.”
They rode in contented silence for awhile. “How about a Coke?” David asked.
“Sounds good. You look like you could use one too. Your face is running.”
David laughed and swiped at the greasepaint with a tissue. It smeared, making his dark-penciled eyebrows smudge over his forehead. He turned into the driveway of a McDonalds and parked.
“You’re not going to drive through?” Erin asked incredulously.
David got out of the car, came around, opened her door, and offered her his hand. “Why?”
“Well because—I mean—your makeup and all. People will stare.”
“Stop caring what people think, Erin. Life’s too short to live it by other people’s rules. Come on, let’s go in.” Still she hesitated. He held out his hand and added, “If you do, I’ll be your best friend.”
Erin felt as if a giant hand had clutched her heart. “Why did you say that?” she asked, her voice trembling. “Why did you say that to me?”
Chapter Eight
“What did I say?” David asked.
For a moment Erin couldn’t get it out. “I’ll be your best friend,’ ” she finally said.
They were standing in the middle of McDonalds, in everyone’s way. “Lets sit down, all right?” David led her to a booth in the back.
Erin slid across the vinyl, another knot forming in her stomach.
“Now what’s wrong with being best friends?” David asked.
“It—it was just something my sister used to say all the time.”
David shook his head and sighed. “I have no way of knowing these things, Erin, and I hate having to be on my guard around you all the time. I probably picked it up from the kids—they say that all the time.”
His attitude irked her. She at least wanted him to be sorry. “Can I have that Coke now?”
While David ordered, Erin stared pensively out of the window, wondering about her feelings toward him. Sometimes he got on her nerves, yet other times he seemed so sensitive and kind.
When he returned, she saw that he’d been to the mens room and removed the greasepaint. Chalk one up to sensitivity, she told herself. “So how did you ever get into clowning?” Erin asked, attempting to lift the cloud that had fallen between them.
David sat across from her. “My mom tells me I was born a comedian. Anyway, after Jody was diagnosed as deaf I noticed that her eyes always followed me whenever we were in a room together. I used to make gestures and faces to make her smile.”
“She does have a pretty smile.” P
retty smiles seemed to run in his family, though Erin didn’t want to tell him that.
“Thanks. When Jody started at the special school, our family learned how to sign so that we could communicate with her. When she was little, she’d throw terrible tantrums if we didn’t understand her. We couldn’t let her get away with it, but I understood how frustrating it was for her when no one could figure out what she was trying to say.”
Erin knew what he meant. She’d been the only one to understand Amy’s baby babble when they’d been small. “So you became her interpreter?” Erin asked.
“That’s right. My parents would ask, ‘David, what’s she saying?’ Anyway, I began to pantomime and entertain her. And one thing led to another until I had such a routine down, that I began performing at birthday parties and hospitals to make extra money.”
“Is that why you’ve decided to become an actor?”
“Partly. You know, deep down clowns are really serious people. They see the good and bad in life and help people laugh about both.”
“But sometimes there’s nothing funny about life.”
David shrugged, “Not to me. I think that hurting gives us a way to measure being happy. How can you know one without knowing the other? Its the difference between doing a hard dance move and an easy one. Which would you rather do?”
“The hard one’s more challenging, so I feel better if I do it well.”
“That’s the way I feel about life. Why walk around desensitized? Why go for the easy moves when the hard ones make you feel better? I watch Jody deal with other peoples’ ignorance every day. People who don’t understand her handicap and who laugh at her whenever she tries to talk because she sounds weird to them. Sometimes it gets her down, but most of the time she keeps right on going.” David balled the wrapper from his straw and bounced it on the tabletop. “I decided that making people laugh is sort of my mission in life. So I do my clown bit whenever I can. I’m doing the Special Olympics in June.”
“Isn’t that when all the handicapped kids compete in sports events out at USF?”