A Solitary Blue (20 page)

“Look,” he said, keeping his voice expressionless, hiding everything about himself. “I thought I'd come out and see you, and I want to meet this sister of yours. If you're busy, I'll go. If you don't like the idea” — he thought for the right, unemotional words — “of me being here — you just have to say so.”

“No,” she answered quickly, her face relaxing, her hostility flowing away and out, like a wave, washing past and gone. “It's not that. Come on in, I've only got a little more to do here. I was just surprised to see someone.”

Jeff was surprised himself at how relieved he was to hear her say that. But if this was what she was like when she was only surprised, she would be a terror if she was angry. He leaned his bike against a post and came closer, cautiously. He took the guitar off his back. “If that's the way you react to surprises, I'll be careful not to surprise you again,” he promised her. It was, now that he thought about it, pretty funny, the whole scene.

For a long time she kept looking at his eyes, and then she smiled at him, just briefly, because her smile disappeared as fast as it came, even though it stayed, somehow, bright behind her eyes. He was glad he'd stayed out her anger. Glad because of the smile and glad because he'd had the courage. Her smile told him she liked him for fighting back.

When she asked him to play a song while she finished, he had to strum chords for a while and pretend to be tuning up until he settled down. He didn't want her to see how unsettled he'd been by the whole thing. How unsettled he still was. He had thought he was the fisherman, but he saw now —

She had pronged him, with a single stroke, pronged him through the heart and he was caught. Just like with Melody, caught. But this wasn't Melody, Dicey wasn't. And besides, he didn't feel pronged, he felt — overwhelmed, out of breath, breathless.

Dicey watched him, but he did not look up to meet her eyes: he had things to settle inside himself first, he thought, recognizing that he felt easy, at ease, and also alert, eager, as if he had just fought his way through some thick overgrown jungle to the ocean beaches beyond.

 

J
EFF's LIFE that tenth grade year became suddenly crowded, with people he liked, with things he wanted to do. Sometimes he caught himself protesting to himself: life is too rich. Like one of the French meals Brother Thomas cooked for them, where when you concentrated on the taste of chicken you knew you were missing out on the sharp, winy sauce and the sweetness of onions or mushrooms sauteed so briskly that their musty flavor got locked inside each slice. Life is so rich, Jeff said to himself, gratefully.

Much of this had to do with the Tillermans; especially Dicey, but — since you couldn't separate her from her family, and Jeff didn't even want to — the whole crew of them, individually and together. He spent a lot of time at the farmhouse after that first day. One way and another, he did a lot of work with them. That first day it was Maybeth who knocked him out. She was almost ten and so lovely Jeff had to be careful not to stare at her. Staring at her, he knew, would make her more shy. He could feel how frightened she was, of anyone strange.

Her eyes were large and round, clear hazel, and looked right at him once she got her courage up. They were the kind of eyes that you could look all the way into and know there was nothing ungentle in her. At first she was shy and silent but, like Dicey, she could be looped in with music. He watched the way the songs and the singing won her over slowly. He watched how quietly she moved and how quietly she sat, her hands still. He watched how her skin shone as if from within, like fine porcelain. All of her reactions were slow. When he asked her how she liked a song, or if she wanted to choose one, he had to wait for her answer while she looked at him out of clear eyes. You couldn't hurry Maybeth, and he didn't want to because he felt how that might hurt her. Once he caught on to her particular rhythm, the slowness didn't bother him.

Walking their bicycles down the driveway at the end of the afternoon, he asked Mina Smiths the question he didn't dare ask Dicey. “Where are their parents?”

Mina was tall enough to look him straight in the eye, a measuring glance, wondering if she could trust him. “Do you gossip?”

“No.”

“That kid can sing, can't she?”

“Yeah,” Jeff agreed wholeheartedly.

Mina kept looking at him until she finally said, “I'll tell you what I know. Their father's been gone since before Sammy was born and never married their mother anyhow. Then, last summer, their mother went nuts. She's in a mental hospital somewhere.”

“So their grandmother took them in,” Jeff finished. “Poor kids.” He could see them, just the four of them standing alone in a hostile world.

“You stupid, friend?” Mina asked. She was laughing at him. “You know how they got here? They walked. Dicey brought them, just the kids, just the four of them. There was some cousin in Connecticut, and that's where they started if you want to look at a map. Dicey didn't like it at the cousin's, so they ran away and came down here. Mrs. Tillerman wasn't going to let them stay — ”

“Why not? She seems to like them.”

“I think Dicey convinced her. I guess when Dicey wants something she gets it.”

“They're alike, Dicey and her grandmother, don't you think?” Jeff asked.

Mina hadn't thought of that. “Maybe they are. That would be funny, because Dicey said their grandmother didn't even know they were alive. They hadn't even heard about her until Connecticut.”

“You mean they came down here without knowing anything?”

“That's it.”

It would be like jumping off a cliff and hoping the water was deep enough, Jeff thought. Only Dicey had to jump with the three little children holding onto her. And travelling all that way, too. It would be like whistling in the dark and following the sound of your own melody. He couldn't have done that, he knew; he hadn't had to, but he could see the kind of courage it took, and the kind of hopelessness. He just shook his head. “I guess they're not exactly pitiful,” he told Mina.

“Not exactly,” she agreed.

“And they really feel like a family, all of them,” he said.

“More than mine, and mine hasn't ever been disrupted,” she said. He looked across at her and began to see why she liked Dicey.

“I'm an only child,” he said.

“And you're not stupid, are you, friend,” she said, her eyes still laughing, but friendly.

“Not a bit of it, friend.” He was sure of that.

What he liked about the Tillermans, he decided — after knowing them for winter and spring, after taking care of the little kids when Mrs. Tillerman took Dicey out sailing, after working with the stubbornly energetic Sammy on the spring planting, after arguing ideas with James, after learning how to play the Martin behind Maybeth's voice and how to sing harmony with all of them. . . . What he liked was the person he became around them. He liked the complicated interactions, trying to keep aware of what each person was feeling. He liked being able to move comfortably among them.

With Mrs. Tillerman, you had to stand up to her and not let her bully you and also let her just be herself, let her wander around in bare feet, let her say what she thought even though half the time Jeff couldn't tell how she made the connections between one idea and the next. With Sammy you had to wrestle and play catch and be ready to tease him into laughter or let him clown at you until you laughed. With Maybeth you had to go slowly, gently, let her open up like a flower. With James you had to be smart like the Professor and Brother Thomas, carry on the argument, but not tell James what to think. You had to understand that some of his wrong thinking was right for a smart kid in fifth grade and trust him to grow out of it at the proper time. Jeff could do all these things, he discovered, and do them pretty well.

With Dicey — he didn't know, he could never be sure. Sometimes she wanted to be left alone, and sometimes she wanted to chase down crabs with everybody running around in circles. Always she liked music, of any kind, and she was smarter than she'd figured out yet, he thought. He'd watched her turn quiet and inward after her mother died. That had happened just before Christmas — the mother had never gotten well — and Dicey was as private as the Professor in her sorrow, as solitary. He had known she needed to be left alone, just as he had known that Sammy needed to be wrestled with, hard, during that long time of grieving, that James's absorbed interest in entomology came from the same source, and that Maybeth was all right, stronger, somehow, for this than any of the others.
Stronger even than Mrs. Tillerman, whose temper flared, whose eyes watched Jeff warily.

If he stayed too long she would come into the room. “Go home, boy, we can't feed an extra mouth.”

“Yes ma'am.” He would leave quickly, knowing that her greeting when he returned would be as direct.

“It's a good thing you came by, James keeps talking about bugs at me.”

Jeff kept up with his friends, with Phil and Andy, partly because they were his friends and partly because he couldn't crowd the Tillermans. Phil asked him, that spring, what was going on with Dicey. “What is it, you have a thing for that Tillerman kid?”

“She's not a kid. She's a girl.”

“Yeah, but Greene OK — OK, OK, none of my business, right? Don't bother telling me to stuff it, I know what that kind of stiff-faced look means. We'll drop it. I mean, for all I know, she's as sweet as honey and a real hot number, for all I know.”

Seeing Dicey as Phil saw her, Jeff just laughed. Phil joined in, and Jeff didn't say what he might have because Phil wouldn't have understood. Honey, Dicey wasn't. She was tart, bitter — alive; and she made him feel alive too, awake. They all did. And he thought she liked him too, anyway more than she liked most people — and that was pretty good.

Jeff kept up his own friendships, pestering Andy with the questions James asked about insects, until he finally introduced the two of them and left them to their discussions. He kept up with his schoolwork. He kept up with his guitar and his hours appreciating the water, marshes, sky, birds, trees — sometimes just the whole world. He kept up with the Professor, too, especially; listening and talking, living together.

That summer, because Andy was going up to Baltimore for some advanced classes at Johns Hopkins and Phil worked at the business of farming, Jeff set up in a crabbing business with the Tillermans. They had to learn how to lay and run a trotline, but between Mrs. Tillennan's experience and James's research, it didn't take them long. Dicey had a couple of regular baby-sitting jobs as well as her grocery store job, so it was Sammy or James who waited at the dock for Jeff, a shadowy figure in predawn light. Sammy had more endurance for the work. He had the energy to pick up a badly set line and reset it, never complaining about the sheer hard work. James had
the kind of mind that never rested quiet. Either way, Jeff enjoyed the long hours.

It was James, sitting in the back of the little boat while Jeff did the job of hauling in the trotline, who asked him about his parents. “Is your father really the one who wrote that book?”

Jeff stood up straight, relaxing tired back muscles. He looked back to where the younger boy leaned against the silent motor. “Yeah, why?”

“I read it, it was good,” James said. He rested his feet on top of one of the bushels of crabs they'd deliver downtown.

“He told me, asked me anyway, not to read it until I was fifteen,” Jeff said He had to wipe sweat from his forehead and the smell of ripe salted eel assaulted his nostrils. “Ugh,” he said.

“What about your mother?” James asked. But then he changed the subject. “So I shouldn't have read it? I could reread it later; it was a good book, I don't mind. It was dedicated to you.

“I know,” Jeff said, making himself bend to the task again.

“Why not your mother?”

“She walked out on us, when I was in second grade.”

“I didn't know that. So did my father, but I wasn't that old. I guess it's not so uncommon. So did my mother, but that was different. I used to think it was me, or us.”

Jeff didn't turn around, but he thought hard. “I guess everybody thinks that. Kids. Maybe adults too.”

“I don't know why people have kids if they're just going to walk out. Did you ever ask your mother? Did you ever see her after?”

“A couple of times,” Jeff said. “I asked her, but she lied.”

James didn't answer right away, then he spoke quickly, the way he did when a new idea had just occurred to him. “Maybe it's women; maybe women are liars, maybe that's one of the differences. Dicey knows how to lie, you should have heard her. When we came down here, and it was just us? She would spin stories — sometimes I thought I'd bust out laughing. Every time different, every time perfect. Cripes — now I think of it — she was really something.”

“Dicey doesn't lie,” Jeff said. His stomach felt cold, even with the heat and sweat out on the water.

“Sure she does.”

Jeff heaved the cinderblock that anchored down the line's end, heaved it up and into the boat.

“No, she doesn't.”

“Why shouldn't she? Cripes, Jeff, you don't know what we were up against, even I didn't and I'm glad I didn't. Sometimes when I think about it. . . .” He stared at Jeff. “Never mind,” he said, closing Jeff out. “I shouldn't have told you. I know what you're thinking, but you're wrong.” Jeff just shook his head. He couldn't answer, he didn't trust himself to speak.

The whole day had gone black and cold around him. James couldn't know what he was thinking, and Jeff didn't want to be thinking what he was thinking, about Melody. He knew James was closing him out, but he didn't care.

He felt as if he'd just learned that Dicey was dying of some incurable disease. He felt the fragile inside part of himself cracking. He could hide it, he felt pretty sure about that; he knew he was strong enough to hide it. From everybody but himself.

So that when Dicey finally did what he'd been wanting her to do for a long time and asked him if he'd like to go for a sail, he almost said no. It wasn't that he liked her any less or expected her to be perfect. He knew she wasn't perfect — she was often bossy, and she always knew what she wanted, so she was impatient with anyone less decisive. She was harsh, sometimes; too quick to judge, especially people who didn't work the same way she did. He knew that. But he didn't want her to be imperfect in that one particular way. And if she was (and James would know) Jeff didn't feel necessarily safe with her alone. He looked over her shoulder, thinking up excuses.

“Hey. You don't have to,” she said, puzzled, irritated. Well, he'd certainly hinted, so he could see why she was puzzled. Her eyes studied his face, trying to figure out what he was thinking; but he kept his face expressionless. “I mean, if you're scared because I'm not very good yet, that's OK.”

How did she know he was scared, Jeff wondered. The same way he knew she was more puzzled than angry, however she sounded. “It's just that I promised the Professor,” he said, seizing the half-truth.

“You don't need to make excuses,” she told him.