Agnes Mallory (9 page)

As I started upstairs, I was already wondering what I could find to watch on the TV in my parents' bedroom, but I did hear my father say softly behind me, ‘Well, these things happen, Claire. You can't protect him from everything. It's only life.'

She moved into the guest room, down the hall from me, right across from Mom and Dad. I didn't like it much; she was a stranger among us. That room – and the bathroom too – she made them alien territory. Scented atmosphere, stockings and frilly brassieres in plain sight, blouses bright as gardens – thrilling, you know, but foreign, invasive. She would come out of the bathroom some mornings in a cloud of steam with her hair in a towel and her leg flashing from her bathrobe and the white V beneath her throat showing. She would sit at breakfast and say, ‘Oh, it's so peaceful here,' and stretch with her hands intertwisted high above her head. She would talk about Hollywood, which bored me, but the whispery flute of her voice was so light it made everything else around her seem heavy and harsh. My parents' very jowls sagged as they listened to her. They seemed to sit around her like those Bronze Age monoliths, those squat boulders plumped upright.

I heard the hiss of her shower in the morning sometimes and lay in my bed an extra few minutes, dreaming of dominion, stretching, arching, playing my dick like a trombone – not masturbating yet, just tugging at it. And once, when May asked me to run upstairs to her room to fetch a book, I left the lights off and just stood there; just breathed the alien air, the perfume. Then I crept to her closet; I reached inside; I rubbed a slip of hers between my finger and thumb. It was so sheer it seemed to catch on the ridges of my fingerprints. My little heart played rock 'n' roll.

With no camp till August, I had a free July. Breakfast in front of the TV. Reruns by daylight –
My Little Margie, Topper
, all the mindless greats. The humid torpor of it, the rancid PJs, the mental drone; ah, whither are such summers fled! Most of my friends were gone during the day in one kind of camp or another, and I was prince of all their territories, running free from backyard to backyard, full of fantasy, alive with summertime and basically, yeah, bored out of my head. Luckily, stumbling through a hedge one morning, scratched nearly blind, I managed to discover an enclave of younger kids, some seven – and eight-year-olds, playing pirates in a lawn sprinkler. They were wary of me at first, but when I showed peaceable, they were sort of honored to let me tromp and splash around with them a while. I went back there most days to be with them. We played soldiers together and I taught them everything I knew – which was that Pickett charged with his hat on his sword, Civil War guys had to have their legs cut off without being unconscious, and Japs shot you in the back just when you thought you'd cleared the island of them. Slowly, indignant at the injustice of the world and the oppression of the weak everywhere, I organized these young scallywags into a band of right-seeking outlaws known forevermore as Harry's Raiders. Our hideout was a teepee of old lumber in one of their backyards. Our exploits were trumpeted far and wide. We once stole an entire box of toybox cookies right out of Mrs Zimmerman's kitchen while she was on the phone in the next room. Then, descending like the wind on the Allenwood Park playground, we distributed these, and mothers be damned, to a group of five-year-olds playing there in the sandboxes. One of these tots actually hugged me for it. ‘That's all right, son,' I said, squinting into the middle distance, ‘just thank … Harry's Raiders.' Whereupon I vanished, followed by my merry band, into the woods, and legend.

In the afternoons, after four o'clock, when I knew she'd be home from camp, I'd usually wander up to Piccadilly Road and climb down to the stream to see Agnes. Sometimes, I would get there first and wait for her, skimming stones, floating sticks. Other times, as I sauntered down the bank from the culvert, I would hear her there already through the low overhang of summer leaves, chattering girlishly to her figures or, better yet, gutturalizing hellish incantations echoed by the softer gutturals of the water.

Sometimes I didn't see her at all, or couldn't come, or came too late, like the night I arrived as dark fell, and climbed up the bank and struggled through dense maple and hickory boughs, and came to the very edge of the treeline, my hand resting against shagbark, and saw her through her house's glass doors in back, spied on her there. Not that I witnessed anything too shocking. They were lighting the Sabbath candles, the three Soles. The dining room amber around them, the candelabra set on a corner table. Agnes with a shawl over her hair, furrow-browed with concentration, looking like an old peasant woman as she stretched the match out unsteadily to draw a tear-shaped flame from each wick in turn. Her mother hovered over her, likewise shawled, and apple-cheeked and attentive, the firelight in her eyes. And the old doctor, on the far side, chewed his wrinkled lips and looked about the room impatiently.

I watched a while, then, lonesome, melted back into the territory of shadows whence I'd come.

‘In March – that's when my birthday is – Gemini is right there, right in the middle there.'

We were on her star rock at the edge of the vacant lot at the very beginning of a night soon after. She was pointing straight above us to where she'd just sketched Bootes, which I couldn't really make out, and the star Arcturus, which was neat because it was orange.

‘Gemini is the twins,' she said, bringing her arm down, wrapping it round her knees, resting her chin on her scabs. ‘One twin was regular, and one couldn't ever be killed because his father was one of the gods. Then, one day, the regular one, Castor, was hit by a spear and he died. So Pollux, the god one, he asked his father – I can't remember his name – if Castor could live in his body one day and Pollux would be dead, and then the next day, Pollux would live in the body and Castor would be dead. And the father said yes. So that's how they lived forever after that.'

She paused. I nodded appreciatively, though of course she was gazing off mystically God knows where. Still, it was a pretty cool story and, boy though I was, I wasn't too proud to admit that I'd never heard it before – or seen Bootes before or Arcturus. I wasn't too proud about any of that with her anymore these days. In fact, I could almost admit to myself how much I liked to have her tell me such things. I was almost conscious of feeling close to her when she did, and when we sat like this together, with the warm, quiet darkness of the lot lapping at our rock and then stretching away as far as Middle Neck Road where streetlights beamed and headlights hissed softly past. That evening, I guess, that was probably the best of us. That was our peak before Aunt May said what she did.

‘One night, we were in our village,' Agnes said then, ‘and policemen came.' She had dropped her voice to her ghostly whisper, and I perked up, my spine going icy.

‘What?'

She swung her huge, spiraling glare on me. ‘They took all the children out of the houses and made them march down to the river. And if the mothers and fathers tried to stop them, they hit them, or they shot them with their guns.'

I snorted. ‘Come on. What do you mean? That can't even happen. Policemen don't shoot good people.'

‘This was in another country where the police were bad,' Agnes intoned. ‘And they made the children line up at the edge of the river, and then they pushed them in – even the babies. And all the children drowned in the water, even the ones who could swim, because the policemen wouldn't let them come out. We just had to do the dog paddle in the river until we got so tired we drowned too. It was night and so dark. I kept crying for my father, but he couldn't come because the police wouldn't let him. He wanted to, he wanted to a lot, but they wouldn't let him. And the river was so cold. And it was black, it was blacker even than the blackest night you could imagine.'

She paused to swallow. She swallowed hard, swallowed her own terror it sounded like.

‘Well, I'd have killed them first,' I said.

She shook her head. ‘You couldn't, because they had guns. They were the police.'

‘You can't be the police, Agnes, if you shoot good people. I'd have gotten my own gun, anyway, and shot them back.' I thought about this a second, and felt very sure of it. ‘You know what I would do if I lived in a country like that? I would get a band of outlaws, and we would hide in the woods and then if stuff like that happened we would come out suddenly and rescue people.'

For a moment, her round, worried face just hung there dimly in the night, still inner lit and full of witchery. Then, all at once, she burst out: ‘I wish I were like you, Harry! I wish I could be a hero like you!'

I was surprised at that, completely. And pleased: well, I swelled like a bullfrog, I was that pleased. But even as I shrugged modestly, full of myself, a bulb went on in that dim bean of mine, and a frightening thought took half the wind right out of me. ‘Well, wait a minute,' I said. ‘Like, what is this? Is this something real? Is this, like, what happened to your sister or something, to Lena?'

And in the same anguished little voice Agnes cried, ‘Sometimes I
am
my sister, Harry.' She swallowed again. She went on breathlessly: ‘My father is so sad. My mother says he's so sad and misses her so much. So sometimes – sometimes I let her live in my body – so she can be alive too, like Castor and Pollux. And then I have to go and live in a coffin in a grave until she's ready to come back. And then I can live again.'

I looked at her, and she at me. I think I can safely say that was just about the spookiest thing anyone had ever said to me. One faction of the inner Harry was lobbying hard for flight, but another … no. As scared as she made me, as big as she made the dark around me seem – well then, we were that much more together on our star rock island, weren't we? In fact, I do believe I wanted to be even closer to her then. I wanted to throw my arms around her, to hold her tight. To do
something
, anyway, I didn't know what. I didn't know much about sex – for all the bare-assed slaves who paraded through my imagination, I still had only a technical sort of inject-the-baby notion of it – so the impulse flooded through me as an inarticulate ache to be nearer, nearer than near, to her frail, creepy being and I wanted … what goodness for myself of her, what protection for herself in me I really couldn't have begun to say. And I really couldn't have begun to know whether I was bursting like this in solitude or whether she felt it too or – or what. We just gaped there at each other with a wild surmise.

And then I said quickly, ‘Wulp, guess I better be getting home.' And pushed to my feet, dusting off my bottom.

We were out later than usual that night – yes, it was the best of us, no question. I walked her back up to her house even though she said I didn't need to. I saw her inside manfully and then – not for a moment about to go back into those scary woods the way I felt – ducked my head and sneaked past the side of her house and over her front lawn to Piccadilly Road.

I began walking home, hands in the pockets of my shorts, whistling tunelessly for fear of the night around me. The looming tree silhouettes, the spidery alleyways of hedges and grass between the houses: each seemed spring-loaded with potential horror. The ghost house – the abandoned shack lurking in overgrowth at the top of the hill – peered out at me with broken windows. I jogged past that, I confess. But then, as I came round the corner onto Wooley's Lane, as I started down into the gracefully descending prospect of homes and oaks and willows, that sensation welled in me, as it did so often when I'd left Agnes in one of her weirder moods, that sensation of terror and intimacy somehow working to produce a dizzying clarity of vision. The inner monologue quieted and I became aware – swimmingly aware – of the silken warmth and blackness of the night, the ragged borderlines of leaves against the sky, the depth of the stars beyond them, the whole reality shebang. And, startled, I became aware too that someone was walking on the road before me.

In the normal way of things, that might have made me nervous. It was a grownup – a man – about twenty yards ahead. I might have been cautious of him and held back. Instead, in that queer post-Agnes state in which I halfway seemed to become whatever I beheld, I fell in with him – mentally, I mean. Strolling along behind his slumped, brooding figure, observing all, in with the spirit of all, I entered into his rhythm as well, his progress, the very fact of his being there together with me on the sloping road in the vasty night. Sometimes there was simply a peaceful unison with him, knowing we meditated over the same pavement or heard the same electric frizz of cicada from a pacysandra patch nearby. And at other moments, I do declare, there were rushes of dissolution, almost passionate release, in which my goofy nine-year-old self seemed to extend to him, to envelop him, to balloon through him to global dimensions – and I loved him, to use the right word for it, I loved that man on the street ahead of me, downright fearlessly.

And so I tagged after him, loafing through these emotions, all the way to Plymouth Road, and around the corner to the short connector lane called Andover and thence finally to the bottom of Old Colony Lane and to my own house where I hung back only long enough to let him go through the door before me, and then followed him in, wondering what was for dinner.