“See for yourself.”
Erin hurried into the living room. David stood facing her father but turned and flashed his high-voltage grin. He was wearing a tuxedo jacket, ruffled white shirt, paisley blue cummerbund and bow tie, and faded jeans. Down the side seams he’d sewn a blue satin ribbon. He wore red high-top sneakers and a black top hat, and a vivid red scarf poked from the upper outside pocket of his jacket. His bright red clown nose covered his real one.
Erin felt embarrassed. Couldn’t David take something seriously, just once? He hastily tugged off the false nose. “Just kidding about the nose,” he told her, and held out the plastic box with her corsage.
Inside lay an exquisite cluster of violets and miniature orchids. “Do they squirt water?” she asked sarcastically.
“I’m a clown, not an idiot,” he said.
“Why don’t I get a few photos?” Mr. Bennett said, eyeing David skeptically. For a moment Erin was afraid her mother would remind him to please drive carefully, but somehow they made it out the door without her mother hovering too much and her father asking too many dumb questions.
Outside, the moon glowed full and bright. David took her arm and turned her toward him. “You really do look beautiful,” he said. “I wish I had a real coach to take you in.”
Still peeved, Erin said, “Thanks.” She was half-afraid to see the car he was driving, but when she looked, it was a standard station wagon.
David inserted a cassette into the tape deck and began to talk as they drove to pick up Seth and Shara at Shara’s house. Erin made appropriate but nominal answers, all the while thinking how long it had been since she’d been out on a date. Not that she hadn’t been asked, but she hadn’t accepted any since before Amy had died. For the life of her, she couldn’t recall why she’d always said no. And now that she was finally going out, it was with a guy like David, who wasn’t at all her type.
Shara and Seth climbed into the backseat, chattering and teasing David about his clothes, and when they walked into the restaurant, heads turned. Erin wished again that he hadn’t dressed so weird.
After dinner they arrived at the Hilton, where a valet parked the car. The grand ballroom reminded Erin of something out of Hollywood, glitzy and shimmering with crystal chandeliers and pink-linen-draped tables decorated with floral and candlelight centerpieces. She recognized friends from Briarwood, waved and smiled gaily, all the while noticing how her classmates kept eyeing David.
“Lets dance,” he said, and led her to an oak parquet floor where an ensemble band played soft rock music. Erin had danced with David a hundred times in play rehearsals, but this time it wasn’t the same. “You’re stiff,” he told her. “Come closer. I won’t bite.”
“Is that a promise?”
David’s expression seemed puzzled and hurt. “Erin, you’re supposed to be having fun.”
I am.”
“How can you tell?”
Around them couples clung together, silk and taffeta rustling as they moved. Erin wanted to be like them. More than anything she wanted to be a part of the tradition of prom night. “Maybe we should sit this one out,” she told David.
He caught her hand. “Maybe you should tell me what’s bothering you.” She said nothing. “You don’t like my tux?” She felt her cheeks redden and felt petty. “This is me, Erin,” David said earnestly. “I’m not ever going to be just like everybody else. I thought you understood that.”
“Look at us, Erin,” Amy said. “You’re tall, blond, and graceful and I’m—well, short, round, and fully packed.”
“What’s your point?”
“We’re different, that’s all. You got the looks, talent, and brains and I got—”
“Does it bother you?” David asked.
“What?”
“That I’m different from your idea of Mr. Wonderful.”
“How do you know what I like or don’t like?”
“I saw the way you looked at Travis Sinclair.”
“I told you, I hate him.”
Seth and Shara danced past. Seth leaned over and said, “You two sure have a strange way of dancing with each other. You’re supposed to move like this—” He demonstrated by dipping Shara backward.
Erin was grateful for the interruption, but David said, “Buzz off, Seth.”
“I can take a hint. But first, lend me your hanky. I’m dripping.”
Perspiration stood out on Seths forehead, and David reached in his outside top pocket for the red hanky and pulled. Seth took it, but it didn’t stop coming. The four of them stood transfixed as the material kept sliding out of David’s pocket. Around them other couples stopped dancing and closed ranks. Giggles started, then swelled into laughter, as the “hanky” looped and draped to the floor in an endless stream of multicolored cloth.
Determined, Seth kept pulling. ‘Trick hanky?” Seth asked with a bemused smile. Shara giggled.
“Gosh, you’re quick,” David told him.
“You’re a real clown, Devlin.”
The hanky finally pulled free, and David bowed politely from the waist. Around them, the crowd burst into applause. Erin kept wishing she could sink through the floor, unable to remember when she’d felt so embarrassed.
“Stop being such a show-off Amy!”
“Gosh, Erin, I’m sorry. Am I embarrassing you?”
“I embarrassed you again, didn’t I?” David stooped to pick up his handkerchief. The music had stopped, and couples were walking toward the tables. “I don’t do it on purpose, you know. I mean, I really did want to bring this gag hanky along tonight, but I had no idea it would come out right in the middle of the dance floor.”
“Let’s just forget the whole thing, okay?”
“If you’ll give me a smile.”
Erin managed one.
“How about a kiss?”
“Don’t push your luck.”
Erin went to the ladies’ room, where girls surrounded her. “Where did you find him?” someone asked. “He’s hysterical.”
“We’re in the play together.”
“He’s adorable,” another exclaimed.
“Do you think so?”
“Come on, Erin, you know he is.”
“Yeah, better than the dud that I brought along,” another girl said.
Erin toyed with tendrils of hair around her face. So the girls thought David was cool, a real find. She fumbled in her purse and dug out her headache pills and washed one down with water from the spigot. She was feeling all right, but she remembered the times David unwittingly had brought on a headache. No need to take chances, she told her reflection silently.
The evening passed, with David gathering people to him as flowers attracted honeybees. He dragged Erin to a flower-draped indoor trellis, where a photographer took a souvenir photo. And at midnight, when everyone began to leave, he stood near the door and issued “blessings” like the pope.
All the way to Shara’s beach house, they laughed and joked, with Erin in the thick of the banter. Yet she felt as if she were divided into halves. Half of her acted gay and happy, while the other half seemed disengaged, like a spectator sitting on the sidelines.
At the beach house music blasted, and while David wormed his way into the kitchen for sodas, Erin slipped out the door and headed up the moonstruck beach. She welcomed the quiet and the salt air that filled her lungs and stung her eyes.
The water lapped against the shore, and moonlight flecked the caps of waves, reminding her, inexplicably, of Travis’s eyes. “I told you once that I’d never met anybody like Amy. She was wild and a little bit crazy, and we had a million laughs together. But when I walked into that hospital room, when I saw her lying on that bed with tubes and wires and hoses—”
A seagull circled and called forlornly. Erin started. She was accustomed to seeing gulls in the daytime when they scoured the beach for food, but here in the darkness the bird seemed out of place.
Travis said, “See, Erin, your problem is that everybody has to act exactly t
he same way for it to be legitimate with you.”
The gull swooped lower, then hung in midair until an updraft caught its wings and tossed it higher. It flew away, its cry blending with the sounds of the sea.
“Let her go, Erin. For everybody’s sake, let Amy go.”
Erin felt moisture on her cheeks and wondered how the salt spray could have splashed against her face when there was hardly any breeze. Her knees began to give way, and she sank into the warm, gritty sand. She wrapped her arms around herself and began to rock back and forth. The wetness on her face tingled in the cool night air. Sobs began deep inside her throat, little choking noises, desperate to get out.
Salt water splashed the front of her new blue dress, but she didn’t care. All she heard was the drone of the sea that blurred with the memory of hissing ventilators and beeping monitors. The rhythmic litany whispered, “Alone … alone … alone …”
Chapter Fourteen
“Erin, what’s wrong?” David was suddenly beside her, on his knees in the sand. She shook her head, unable to speak. He pulled her up and hugged her to his chest. “Its all right,” he said again and again.
She remembered the night at the pizza parlor when he’d held her while she cried. He must think her an awful baby. “I—I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I’m so mixed up.”
“About what?”
“Sometimes I feel happy and on top of life, then other times I feel so sad. Like in the car, driving over here—wasn’t I laughing and having fun?”
“It seemed like you were.”
“I really was. And now … I just went out for a little walk and … and … all I want to do is cry.” She pushed away from him but grabbed his lapels. “Maybe I’m going crazy. Do you think that could be it?”
“We all have our ups and downs.”
She shook her head vehemently. “I hear voices too. Conversations that I had over a year ago. I’ll be right in the middle of talking to somebody, and these memories come flooding into my mind. I tell you, I can really hear things.”
“What things? Who’s talking?”
“Amy, mostly.” She was about to say, Travis, too, but decided against it. “And so many things remind me of her. A million things … everywhere I look.”
David smoothed her hair, which had tumbled from its combs. “Come on,” he urged, and led her behind a small sand berm that the wind had built up over time. He spread his jacket and sat her down on it. He sat beside her, raised his knees, and pulled her gently across his lap. “I don’t think you’re crazy,” he said, rubbing her cheek with the back of his hand.
Erin responded as if she hadn’t heard him. “But there are other times when I can’t even remember what she looked like. How her face was shaped, or how her voice sounded. That seems to me like I’m going crazy.” She kicked off her shoes and dug her stocking feet into the sand.
“Well, to me it seems like you’re only trying to hold on to her. Life goes on, Erin. I know that sounds corny, but it’s true. And what happens every day sort of shoves the past further away. It’s natural.”
“But I don’t want to forget Amy. It’s—it’s disloyal.”
“I don’t think you’ll ever forget her,” David said, sifting sand through his fingers. “But you can’t make a saint of her either.”
For the first time Erin smiled. “Amy, a saint? Not on a bet! Sometimes she was a real goof-up. She was always promising to do things for people—you know, help out. She meant to do them too, but she always promised more than she could deliver. I can’t tell you how many times I had to bail her out, fill in for her at Moms store and do her chores as well as mine. She could twist my parents around her little finger.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean. Jody’s that way. Whatever she wants, she gets. We all have to work real hard at not feeling sorry for her just because she’s deaf.”
The sand muffled the sound of the ocean and was making Erin feel warm and snuggly. “It used to make me mad,” Erin confessed. “Amy got away with murder because she was the ‘baby.’ ”
“Try being a guy who likes acting and clowning instead of law, like his father.” David glanced away. “Sometimes my father treats me like I must have been switched at birth in the hospital.”
Erin felt a jab of guilt. How little she knew about David! “Why do you suppose parents do that? Make us think we have to do all the things they didn’t, or couldn’t, do?”
“Don’t your folks want you to have a dance career?”
“Yes, they’ve always supported me in my dancing, especially my dad. But now it’s like I have to do things for Amy and me. For all the things she won’t be able to do because she’s gone. It kind of scares me, you know? What if I fail?”
Erin could feel David’s fingers in her hair. “You can’t fail at anything, Erin,” he said.
A funny quiver shot through her stomach. “Why are you so nice to me, David, when I’ve been mean to you?”
“I like you. You’re pretty. And you’re a great dancer, so I respect your talent. You walk around like a princess, as if you’ve got everything under control.” He stretched a curl, then coiled it around his finger. “But you don’t, do you?”
His evaluation made her sigh. “I sure don’t. My parents are hanging all over my life. If I’m even thirty minutes late, my mom is practically calling the police.”
“Maybe they’re scared of losing you too.”
“Maybe so, but that’s not fair to me. All I want to do is dance, go to school, and do things with friends. But most of my old friends pity me. Except Shara. She sort of understands.”
“I hate it when people pity you. When Jody goes out in public, when people catch on to the fact that she’s deaf, they either back off or start fawning over her. Both are insulting. They should just treat her like a regular kid.”
Erin understood what he was saying. She’d experienced much of the same thing when people found out that Amy had died. They either avoided Erin altogether or said stupid things like, “I know exactly how you feel,” or “At least she’s not suffering”—as if death were preferable over suffering. “Do your parents fight a lot?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Before Amy—” She stopped. “When we were all together, our family used to be happier and do stuff together. Picnics, dinner parties, my folks went out. Now everybody sort of goes separate ways. Mom used to love to cook, put together photo albums, things like that, but she doesn’t anymore. She’s busy with her store and all. But sometimes I wish things could be like they used to be.” The warmth of David’s body, the softness of the sand, and the low hum of the sea were making Erin drowsy. Her eyelids drooped.
“Are you feeling all right?” David asked.
She waved her hand. “I’m all right. I took my medicine.”
“What medicine?”
Her eyes struggled open. Why had she told him? She hadn’t meant to. She shifted in his arms and sat up straighten “Sometimes I get these headaches.”
“Like that day at the mall? I remember how sick you were. I was worried about you. So was Jody.”
She wasn’t sure she wanted him to worry about her. It meant one more person to try to please. “Why do you get them?” he asked.
“The doctors don’t know.” Erin paused, embarrassed to feel so exposed before him. “They’ve done a bunch of tests, but in the end they decided it was all in my mind. So now I’m seeing a counselor, and she’s trying to figure out what’s causing them.” She hadn’t meant to tell him about Dr. Richardson either.
“Is she helping at all?”
“I still have the headaches. I hope we have a breakthrough soon, because I’ve got plans to go to a special dance school this summer. I won’t be able to go if I’m not well. And if I’m not well, then maybe I won’t be able to go to Florida State in the fall either. I couldn’t stand that, David.”
“You’re going away for the summer?” He sounded disappointed.
Without warning she grew agitat
ed and struggled to her feet. “Maybe if I go away, I can get well. You know, not having to be around all the things that remind me of Amy could help me out. And being away from my parents might help too.”
David rose next to her. “What does the counselor say?”
“Not much.” She crossed her arms. “I’m supposed to be working through it. I sometimes don’t want to go see her, but Mom freaks out if I don’t.”
She scrambled over the sand berm, saying, “I need to walk,” and headed for the shoreline.
“Hey, wait up.” In a moment David was next to her. “Slow down, this isn’t a footrace.”
Travis’s voice said, “You know, I’ve suddenly got the urge to go for a run. At this hour you don’t have to get out of the way for other joggers. Yeah, the world’s pretty empty right now.”
“Can’t you keep up?” Erin asked David.
He caught her elbow. He’d rolled up the cuffs of his shirt, and his bow tie dangled around the open neck of the shirt. “Why’re you running off? We were rieht in the middle of a discussion.”
“I’m tired of talking,” she said, pulling away and continuing down the beach. The tide was coming in, and waves kept lapping over her feet.
David stopped her again, taking both her elbows in his hands and drawing her close. “If you don’t talk to me, how will I know what you’re feeling?”
Ocean water sucked the sand away, and the sensation was one of being nibbled up by the ground. “I told you, I’m feeling all mixed up and crazy.” She wasn’t cold, but her teeth began to chatter. “Please let me go.”
For a moment David didn’t move; then slowly he released her and stepped backward. She watched him back off and felt lost. Behind her the sea pulled on the hem of her dress. “It was such a simple thing to do, you know? All she had to do was drive to the store and buy some sodas. Any moron could have done it. She knew how to drive too, you know. She told me she’d driven Travis’s car, and it was a real racing machine—not like my old clunker.
“But she screwed it up. She waved good-bye, she drove off, and she never came back. I can still see the taillights of the car.”