All We Know of Heaven (21 page)

“I tripped in the cemetery,” Maureen told them.

“Your neighbor across the way has filed a complaint against Maureen, saying she tried to strike her with her cane at the cemetery,” Colette said. He pulled up one of the side chairs and sat down. Maury sat on the bench near the telephone. Her parents had one of the only wall telephones still in existence.

“What happened, Maureen?”

“I was putting flowers at Bridges. On Bridges. At. At.

At,” Maureen said helplessly. “Slow down,” Patrick told her.

“Kitt pulled my hair. She called me names. She slapped my hands, and she tried to stop me from getting in my car.”

“Did you hit her with the cane?” asked Colette.

“No! I tried to push her aside. Gently,” said Maureen. “So I could get to my car. She was screen. She was scream. She was screaming at me. About Danny and Bridget and saying I was a . . . pit. A pin. Pin. Pig.”

“Huh,” said Henry. “Do you think you could just talk about this with them, Bill?”

“Hank, we’ve tried. Jeannie and I. Kitt’s not herself,” Bill said politely.

“Well, how are we going to deal with this?” “My daughter isn’t violent, Hank.”

Colette said, “I heard her myself tell a whole crowd when she gave that speech that she threw her books and broke plates and yelled at her parents. Heard her on TV, too.”

“That’s because of her brain injury. You don’t think . . .” “Mrs. Flannery said she was knocked down. Hurt her

arm and her back.”

“She’s a drunk, Hank,” Bill said. “She drinks all day long. Not that I blame her. There were times when I thought Maureen was gone that I could have gone that way myself, if I were a drinking man. The truth is, that woman hates Maureen because she is alive and Bridget isn’t. Maureen spent more than half her life in that house, Hank. You can see why Maureen just living drives her out of her mind. Kitt doesn’t come outside now except to get a new bottle or go to the grave. You ask anyone. My daughter’s a child. You’re saying she assaulted a grown woman and beat her with a cane?”

“No, I don’t think that, Bill. But I have a problem. People have seen Maury lose her temper. Kitt says all she did was ask her not to leave metal on the grave . . .”

“Metal?” Maureen asked. “She said you had metal . . .”

“A silver wire from my prom corsage. I wrapped flowers in it! For Bridget! You can look. . .”

Colette continued, “Then she said you took a swing at her. She has a big bruise on her arm.”

“She fell! She was drunk! You could smell it!” Maureen told him. “She tried to hurt me! Why don’t you believe me? My blood? Blame? Brain? My brain?”

“Hank, please keep this out of the papers,” Jeannie pleaded.

“Too late. They’ll be calling,” Colette said. “She’s already called up Jerry Russo at the
Beacon
and raised a big stink about Maury being dangerous. Now, I’ve told him that he dare not write a word about a minor like Maureen when no charges have been filed. But she’s only seventeen, Bill. Eventually she’ll be an adult under the law. She is now, for most purposes. I got Jerry to back off for now, but I don’t know that he’ll back off for good unless we figure out a way to handle this. I’m sure I don’t want it to turn into a ‘she said, she said’ thing and neither do you. I want to go fishing next month, Bill, not mess with this. But Mike Flannery is all up in arms. Says Maury’s a danger to his children.”

“Damn it, Hank. That woman took a bat to Maureen’s car the day after she got it. You know she did. I didn’t say a thing. She left a letter Jeannie wrote her torn up with mud all over it on our mat. Our steps were deliberately iced back at Christmas.” Bill got up and threw down his sandwich. “I’ll go talk to Mike myself.”

Colette said, “Well, it can’t hurt. But I’ll go with you.”

When they returned an hour later, Danny had joined Jeannie and Patrick at the table, but no one had eaten an other bite.

“Well,” Bill told them. “She agreed not to press charges if you stay a hundred yards away from Sarah and Eliza at all times and if . . . and if . . . if you don’t drive.”

“Let her press charges then,” Patrick said. “She has no right to take Maury’s life away.”

“It will be her word against Maureen’s. If this gets into the papers . . . I told her you . . . I said you wouldn’t drive until next summer.”

“Daddy!” Maureen shouted. “That’s wrong!”

“It’s all wrong, but it’s better than you being exam ined by a court-appointed psychologist, Maureen! Maybe getting your license taken away! Kitt told me to my face, ‘That girl is promiscuous. That girl is dangerous. That girl shouldn’t be out alone.’ If she’s told me, she’s told others. When I went over there, she didn’t smell of booze. She was all dressed up in a pink skirt and blouse with her arm in a sling!”

“I’ll drive you around,” Danny said helplessly.

“That’s not the point,” Maureen told him. “It’s my car! I earned it! I love my car! I want to be like everyone else!” Maureen cried. But the downcast eyes around the table told her she had lost this battle. She scampered up the stairs. Danny got no answer when he knocked at her bedroom door. In the end, he went to buy his suit alone.

That night Danny’s father asked him into his den for a closed-door talk. Surrounded by Danny’s, Dave Jr.’s, and Dennis’s sports trophies, he laid down the law. This was enough. Danny was not going to forfeit his future for some

foolish small-town scandal. If his feelings for the girl were strong, they would survive.

“Survive what?” Danny asked, terrified that his father had found a way to send him to military school or some thing.

His mother came into the room. She nodded as his fa ther told him he was going to Sky, Montana, for the rest of second semester. He would live with his uncle, his father’s brother, who had two boys, one a year older than Danny, one a year younger. He’d work on his uncle and aunt’s ranch; and if he wanted to play baseball in the spring out there, he could play.

“What about Maureen?” Danny asked.

“She has plenty on her plate,” his mother said. “Kitt Flannery is saying terrible things about Maureen. Now, I’m not saying that they are true; but I’m not having you be part of a huge scandal, Danny. I’m not having our family made to look foolish. I agree with your father. It’s a break; that’s all. You’ve done your season. And if it’s real, it will last.”

“The semester is half over!” Danny said.

“Your uncle talked to a counselor in Sky. The credits will transfer back.”

His father told Danny he was leaving in three days. His mother had already started packing.

“This is ridiculous. It’s bogus and you know it,” Danny told both of them. They didn’t blink an eye.

The next night when he told Maureen, she began to cry and, of course, blamed herself. Exhausted, Danny tried

to bolster her confidence. He suddenly felt as though he’d done nothing else for his whole life.

“Now I’ve lost my car and you, and everything,” she said. “People in town think I’m crazy and a slut . . . and practically everyone wants you to stop seeking me,” Mau reen told him as they lay in the basement at Evan’s house. She sighed. “I mean they want you to stop seeing me. I’m so sick and tired of correcting myself. I’ve probably said twice the number of words I intended to ever say in my entire life.”

“I told them nothing would do that. But they want me to look at the college out there, which I do want to do. Or the college wants to look at me. In Montana. My uncle’s going to make sure I go over to look at Colorado at spring break. So it’s not all a loss.”

“Just for me,” Maureen said. “You’re not even coming back for spring break?”

“They say they can’t afford it,” Danny said murderously. “You could drive,” Maureen said.

“But if I did, I’d have, like, two days here.” “I know,” Maureen said, resigned.

“Well, at least you have your music, and you could get a job,” Danny suggested. “You have Molly and school.”

“You don’t even care!”

“I do,” Danny said, and kissed her nose and eyes. “It’s only three months till summer.”

But in fact, he was weary, tired of fighting his parents day and night over something he could not explain and

they could not understand. It was so much worse since the underwear and TV show incidents. He was sick of gossip. He almost looked forward to being away from the constant tension, from Maureen’s fragility. He thought of riding his uncle’s horses and skiing his uncle’s hills, and it didn’t sound all bad. A break, that was all. Like his mom said. He didn’t think Maureen would go out on him. With a guilty gulp, he realized that he didn’t think anyone would ask her.

But when he tried to look at her with unfamiliar eyes, he saw that she was beautiful. She was desirable again, even if she was still too skinny. And if he could get past those things about her that bothered other people, so could an other guy.

Ev, for one, said that once you knew Maureen, you didn’t even notice them anymore.

“I have something for you,” Maury said. “What?”

“Music,” she said, handing him a CD. “What’s this?”

“Music to your song, that you wrote back then. I got a mike for my computer. Or, I’m sorry, there’s a microphone in my computer.”

“My one song. I was going to be the new Vince Gill. You remember that?”

“Funny, huh? I didn’t remember. Didn’t. Mine. Mine.

My own. My father, but I remembered this.”

. . .

All the way out to Montana on the plane, he listened to Maury’s CD, to her pure, high voice singing, “I won’t be the one who goes. You will. / Your hand will crush the sweet est rose. You will. / Your heart is restless and it shows, and everybody knows. / You will, you know you will.”

And Danny thought,
This makes no sense.

parting
‌

After the one-two punch of Kitt’s attack in the cemetery and the abrupt loss of Danny, Maury would gladly have spent the rest of the school year in bed.

As much as she wanted to deny it, Kitt’s words in the cemetery sounded a cruel, hollow gong of unwelcome truth. She knew that what Kitt said about her was only what other people thought.

Maureen would always be an object of pity and suspi cion.

A weirdo. On display.

The killer crip, who should have driven her own car and killed her own stupid self instead of her best friend.

Why would Danny’s parents want him to be with her? Whose parents ever would?

If she got married, she’d forget to turn off the gas and blow up at her husband, or go off on him for getting the wrong kind of bagels. She’d done it to her mother! How could she be sure if she had a baby that she wouldn’t forget and leave it outside in the rain? Danny understood. No one else ever would.

Who knew how long he would be gone? What if he had to stay for the summer? How many girls would he meet—girls who didn’t need a cane and didn’t show up at school wear ing one blue shoe and one black shoe? Sure, he had turned to her in the terrible days after Bridget died. But out there? With new people to meet who might think Minnesota was actually interesting because they’d never been there? Who wouldn’t start over?

But she soldiered her way through the days until spring break. “It’s like some horrible Romeo-and-Juliet thing,” Molly said one night when she and Britney dropped over to play the cheer squad’s new dance music for Maureen. A big competition was coming up, and Eddy had hopes that Taylor had improved enough as a tumbler that Bigelow could at least place in the top three. The girls were only trying to make her feel part of them. Maureen knew that, and clapped and smiled when they showed her pieces of the complex dance. It was torture, though. She could still feel the dance moves in her legs, legs too watery and weak to obey her. “It’s not like you won’t wait for him. You

totally love him. But why do the Carmodys have to be such idiots?”

“It’s not just him. We’re seventeen. We’re just kids,” Maureen said. “We thought it was love because we went through so much together. But I don’t know if it really was. And his parents obviously don’t want him to be around a . . . well, a handicapped girl.”

“You’re not handicapped!” Britney squeaked. “You’re only a little different! No one who didn’t know you could tell!”

“Same distance,” Maureen said.

“You mean, ‘same difference,’” Britney went on. “See?” Maureen asked with a shrug.

“Danny doesn’t think like that. Danny thinks you’re a goddess,” Molly added.

“I’m so snot,” Maureen said, and burst out laughing de spite herself. “I mean, I’m so sure. My words have been mixing up much . . . much . . . mix much again more . . . again since he’s been gone.”

“It’s so romantic,” Britney said. “You’re totally falling apart. He’s probably up on a mountaintop right now, on his horse, thinking of you.”

In fact, at that moment Danny was at the trail open ing of the road to Wolf Face Mountain. But he was in the steamed-up cab of his cousin’s truck with Lindy Lassiter, a leggy, red-haired senior. In Sky, the whole senior class was only twice as big as one of the English classes back home. Bigelow was a small town. But there were at least fifteen

kids in a class. In Sky, kids came from eight ranches and two streets of houses plus the apartment where the Car son kids lived over the grocery store, there were only fifty seniors. Danny, a junior, was flattered. A senior with guys running after her from all over the county, Lindy played basketball. She was fully as tall as Danny and could beat him when they went running. Her hair fell to her waist in natural corkscrews like some rock singer, making her as hot as any girl he’d ever seen anywhere, including the Twin Cities. She had a complete crush on him, too. They worked out every day, and he went to see her in the play-offs when Sky’s team won. They rode up to Grave Creek Ridge and hung out in a hunting cabin up there, drank beer, and danced to somebody’s million-year-old CD player. Lindy was as wild as the Montana wind. And she was eighteen, almost nineteen. He could do whatever he wanted.

In the coyote-wild darkness with Lindy—his shirt off and Lindy’s bra unhooked—it was hard to hold back. But Danny did. The thought of Maureen, so trusting, so com pletely his, held him back when he was with Lindy.