“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” he said.
That’s how I knew what he was thinking.
“Why not?” Jamie asked, her brow furrowed. She seemed genuinely perplexed by his lack of enthusiasm.
Mr. Jenkins picked up a pencil and started tapping it on his desk, obviously thinking about how to explain himself. In time, he put down the pencil and sighed.
“Even though it’s a wonderful offer and I know you’d like to do something special, the play is about a father who eventually comes to realize how much he loves his daughter.” He let that sink in for a moment and picked up the pencil again. “Christmas is hard enough around here without reminding the kids of what they’re missing. I think that if the children see something like that . . .”
He didn’t even have to finish. Jamie put her hands to her mouth. “Oh my,” she said right away, “you’re right. I hadn’t thought about that.”
Neither had I, to tell you the truth. But it was obvious right off the bat that Mr. Jenkins made sense.
He thanked us anyway and chatted for a while about what he planned to do instead. “We’ll have a small tree and a few gifts—something that all of them can share. “You’re welcome to visit Christmas Eve. . . .”
After we said our good-byes, Jamie and I walked in silence without saying anything. I could tell she was sad. The more I hung around Jamie, the more I realized she had lots of different emotions—she wasn’t always cheerful and happy. Believe it or not, that was the first time I recognized that in some ways she was just like the rest of us.
“I’m sorry it didn’t work out,” I said softly.
“I am, too.”
She had that faraway look in her eyes again, and it was a moment before she went on.
“I just wanted to do something different for them this year. Something special that they would remember forever. I thought for sure this was it. . . .” She sighed. “The Lord seems to have a plan that I just don’t know about yet.”
She was quiet for a long time, and I looked at her. Seeing Jamie feeling bad was almost worse than feeling bad because of her. Unlike Jamie, I deserved to feel bad about myself—I knew what kind of person I was. But with her . . .
“While we’re here, do you want to stop in to see the kids?” I asked into the silence. It was the only thing I could think to do that might make her feel better. “I could wait out here while you talk to them, or go to the car if you want.”
“Would you visit them with me?” she asked suddenly.
To be honest, I wasn’t sure I could handle it, but I knew she really wanted me there. And she was feeling so down that the words came out automatically.
“Sure, I’ll go.”
“They’ll be in the rec room now. That’s where they usually are at this time,” she said.
We walked down the corridors to the end of the hall, where two doors opened into a good-size room. Perched in the far corner was a small television with about thirty metal folding chairs placed all around it. The kids were sitting in the chairs, crowded around it, and you could tell that only the ones in the front row had a good view of the thing.
I glanced around. In the corner was an old Ping-Pong table. The surface was cracked and dusty, the net nowhere to be seen. A couple of empty Styrofoam cups sat on top of it, and I knew it hadn’t been used in months, maybe years. Along the wall next to the Ping-Pong table were a set of shelves, with a few toys here and there—blocks and puzzles, a couple of games. There weren’t too many, and the few that were there looked as if they’d been in this room for a long time. Along the near walls were small individual desks piled with newspapers, scribbled on with crayons.
We stood in the doorway for just a second. We hadn’t been noticed yet, and I asked what the newspapers were for.
“They don’t have coloring books,” she whispered, “so they use newspapers.” She didn’t look at me as she spoke—instead her attention was directed at the kids. She’d begun to smile again.
“Are these all the toys they have?” I asked.
She nodded. “Yes, except for the stuffed animals. They’re allowed to keep those in their rooms. This is where the rest of the things are kept.”
I guess she was used to it. To me, though, the sparseness of the room made the whole thing depressing. I couldn’t imagine growing up in a place like this.
Jamie and I finally walked into the room, and one of the kids turned around at the sound of our steps. He was about eight or so, with red hair and freckles, his two front teeth missing.
“Jamie!” he shouted happily when he saw her, and all of a sudden all the other heads turned. The kids ranged in age from about five to twelve, more boys than girls. After twelve they had to be sent to live with foster parents, I later learned.
“Hey, Roger,” Jamie said in response, “how are you?”
With that, Roger and some of the others began to crowd around us. A few of the other kids ignored us and moved closer to the television now that there were free seats in the front row. Jamie introduced me to one of the older kids who’d come up and asked if I was her boyfriend. By his tone, I think that he had the same opinion of Jamie that most of the kids in our high school had.
“He’s just a friend,” she said. “But he’s very nice.”
Over the next hour, we visited with the children. I got a lot of questions about where I lived and whether my house was big or what kind of car I owned, and when we finally had to leave, Jamie promised that she’d be back soon. I noticed that she didn’t promise I would be with her.
While we were walking back to the car, I said, “They’re a nice bunch of kids.” I shrugged awkwardly. “I’m glad that you want to help them.”
Jamie turned to me and smiled. She knew there wasn’t much to add after that, but I could tell she was still wondering what she was going to do for them that Christmas.
B
y early December, just over two weeks into rehearsals, the sky was winter dark before Miss Garber would let us leave, and Jamie asked me if I wouldn’t mind walking her home. I don’t know why she wanted me to. Beaufort wasn’t exactly a hotbed of criminal activity back then. The only murder I’d ever heard about had occurred six years earlier when a guy was stabbed outside of Maurice’s Tavern, which was a hangout for people like Lew, by the way. For an hour or so it caused quite a stir, and phone lines buzzed all over town while nervous women wondered about the possibility of a crazed lunatic wandering the streets, preying on innocent victims. Doors were locked, guns were loaded, men sat by the front windows, looking for anyone out of the ordinary who might be creeping down the street. But the whole thing was over before the night was through when the guy walked into the police station to give himself up, explaining that it was a bar fight that got out of hand. Evidently the victim had welshed on a bet. The guy was charged with second-degree murder and got six years in the state penitentiary. The policemen in our town had the most boring jobs in the world, but they still liked to strut around with a swagger or sit in coffee shops while they talked about the “big crime,” as if they’d cracked the case of the Lindbergh baby.
But Jamie’s house was on the way to mine, and I couldn’t say no without hurting her feelings. It wasn’t that I liked her or anything, don’t get the wrong idea, but when you’ve had to spend a few hours a day with someone, and you’re going to continue doing that for at least another week, you don’t want to do anything that might make the next day miserable for either of you.
The play was going to be performed that Friday and Saturday, and lots of people were already talking about it. Miss Garber had been so impressed by Jamie and me that she kept telling everyone it was going to be the best play the school had ever done. She had a real flair for promotion, too, we found out. We had one radio station in town, and they interviewed her over the air, not once, but twice. “It’s going to be marvelous,” she pronounced, “absolutely marvelous.” She’d also called the newspaper, and they’d agreed to write an article about it, primarily because of the Jamie– Hegbert connection, even though everyone in town already knew about it. But Miss Garber was relentless, and just that day she’d told us the Playhouse was going to bring in extra seats to accommodate the extralarge crowd expected. The class sort of oohed and aahed, like it was a big deal or something, but then I guess it was to some of them. Remember, we had guys like Eddie in class. He probably thought that this would be the only time in his life when some-one might be interested in him. The sad thing was, he was probably right.
You might think I’d be getting excited about it, too, but I really wasn’t. My friends were still teasing me at school, and I hadn’t had an afternoon off in what seemed like forever. The only thing that kept me going was the fact that I was doing the “right thing.” I know it’s not much, but frankly, it was all I had. Occasionally I even felt sort of good about it, too, though I never admitted it to anyone. I could practically imagine the angels in heaven, standing around and staring wistfully down at me with little tears filling the corners of their eyes, talking about how wonderful I was for all my sacrifices.
So I was walking her home that first night, thinking about this stuff, when Jamie asked me a question.
“Is it true you and your friends sometimes go to the graveyard at night?”
Part of me was surprised that she was even interested. Though it wasn’t exactly a secret, it didn’t seem like the sort of thing she’d care about at all.
“Yeah,” I said, shrugging. “Sometimes.”
“What do you do there, besides eat peanuts?”
I guess she knew about that, too.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Talk . . . joke around. It’s just a place we like to go.”
“Does it ever scare you?”
“No,” I answered. “Why? Would it scare you?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “It might.”
“Why?”
“Because I’d worry that I might do something wrong.”
“We don’t do anything bad there. I mean, we don’t knock over the tombstones or leave our trash around,” I said. I didn’t want to tell her about our conversations about Henry Preston because I knew that wasn’t the sort of thing Jamie would want to hear about. Last week Eric had wondered aloud how fast a guy like that could lie in bed and . . . well . . . you know.
“Do you ever just sit around and listen to the sounds?” she asked. “Like the crickets chirping, or the rustling of leaves when the wind blows? Or do you ever just lie on your backs and stare at the stars?”
Even though she was a teenager and had been for four years, Jamie didn’t know the first thing about teenagers, and trying to understand teenage
boys
for her was like trying to decipher the theory of relativity.
“Not really,” I said.
She nodded a little. “I think that’s what I’d do if I were there, if I ever go, I mean. I’d just look around to really see the place, or sit quietly and listen.”
This whole conversation struck me as strange, but I didn’t press it, and we walked in silence for a few moments. And since she’d asked a little about me, I sort of felt obliged to ask her about herself. I mean, she hadn’t brought up the Lord’s plan or anything, so it was the least I could do.
“So, what do you do?” I asked. “Besides working with the orphans or helping critters or reading the Bible, I mean?” It sounded ridiculous, even to me, I admit, but
that’s what she did.
She smiled at me. I think she was surprised by my question, and even more surprised at my interest in her.
“I do a lot of things. I study for my classes, I spend time with my dad. We play gin rummy now and then. Things like that.”
“Do you ever just go off with friends and goof around?”
“No,” she said, and I could tell by the way she answered that even to her, it was obvious that no one wanted her around much.
“I’ll bet you’re excited about going off to college next year,” I said, changing the subject.
It took her a moment to answer.
“I don’t think I’m going to go,” she said matter-of-factly. Her answer caught me off guard. Jamie had some of the highest grades in our senior class, and depending on how the last semester went, she might even end up valedictorian. We had a running pool going as to how many times she would mention the Lord’s plan in her speech, by the way. My bet was fourteen, being that she only had five minutes.
“What about Mount Sermon? I thought that’s where you were planning to go. You’d love a place like that,” I offered.
She looked at me with a twinkle in her eye. “You mean I’d fit right in there, don’t you?”
Those curveballs she sometimes threw could smack you right between the eyeballs.
“I didn’t mean it that way,” I said quickly. “I just meant that I’d heard about how excited you were to be going there next year.”
She shrugged without really answering me, and to be honest, I didn’t know what to make of it. By then we’d reached the front of her house, and we stopped on the sidewalk out front. From where I was standing, I could make out Hegbert’s shadow in the living room through the curtains. The lamp was on, and he was sitting on the sofa by the window. His head was bowed, like he was reading something. I assumed it was the Bible.
“Thank you for walking me home, Landon,” she said, and she glanced up at me for a moment before finally starting up the walk.
As I watched her go, I couldn’t help but think that of all the times I’d ever talked to her, this was the strangest conversation we’d ever had. Despite the oddness of some of her answers, she seemed practically normal.
The next night, as I was walking her home, she asked me about my father.
“He’s all right, I reckon,” I said. “But he’s not around much.”
“Do you miss that? Not growing up with him around?”
“Sometimes.”
“I miss my mom, too,” she said, “even though I never even knew her.”
It was the first time I’d ever considered that Jamie and I might have something in common. I let that sink in for a while.
“It must be hard for you,” I said sincerely. “Even though my father’s a stranger to me, at least he’s still around.”
She looked up at me as we walked, then faced forward again. She tugged gently at her hair again. I was beginning to notice that she did this whenever she was nervous or wasn’t sure what to say.