Black Diamond (29 page)

She made herself some real coffee and had a large, thick piece of toast with butter and honey. The bread was from a homebaked loaf – the kind of thing that was probably as fattening as cake. She put extra milk in her coffee. She didn’t turn on the radio or the television, or bother to open the paper. The only sounds to be heard were of her chewing and swallowing. It seemed as if the rest of the world had disappeared. She wondered suddenly why her aunt didn’t have a pet. Dogs could be too much trouble: you had to walk them and they pined if you left them. But a cat wouldn’t mind being left on its own, or being fed and patted by strangers. She thought that she might give her aunt a kitten. She’d have to find out first, whether it would be a good idea. There were many people, more than you’d think, who didn’t like pets, and who believed that life with a pet carried the same demands and responsibilities as life with another person.

She went for a walk. She stepped out of the door and into a world that seemed to be abandoned by the human race. The birds were still there and a lone dog trotted purposefully, tail-up, in the distance. But no people came into view, not even children. Everyone must have listened to the weather report, considered it
believable, and decided to drive away to other places: to see friends, to visit relatives, to search for the more beautifully leaved trees that must be somewhere, although no one had seen them that year: any place, different but the same.

She started out in the direction of the pioneer statue. Her feet, her whole body felt light and unusually flexible. A wonderful day could really be better than people.

The road she was walking along led her through a
neighborhood
where the houses were small, as were their front yards, but there was no indication of poverty. On the contrary, houses and gardens alike were well tended. Aunt Marion would have lived in such an area if she’d moved into a house forty years later than she had. When she’d married, these houses wouldn’t have been where they were. They came after the days of large families.

Two turnings brought her down to the end of a long road that, as far as she could guess, curved back towards where she’d hoped – the day before – to find the statue. When she got to the point where she expected to see the beginnings of the road she remembered, there were three branches: one kept on, the other turned off down a hill and the third seemed to go back in the right direction, but uphill and at an angle that, if unchanged, might lead her eventually to the other side of town. She was lost again. She was also getting tired.

Where had she made the mistake? Or had she taken more than one wrong turning? She stood still for a minute, thinking that there was no way of guessing which way the roads went, especially for someone with such a poor sense of direction.

As she was looking ahead and to the right, she noticed smoke coming from somewhere. At least one person was at home and out in the gardens around her, burning leaves. The smell was faint, and gone away, back again and then lost. It might be coming from a long way off. At that moment a man appeared in the road that ran from the top of the hill. She turned around. She decided to retrace her steps. It wasn’t exactly that she felt nervous, but she didn’t know the neighborhood, nobody else was nearby, and the locality from which the stranger came was unknown; he was therefore to be avoided, whereas if she had
seen a man raking leaves in a yard, she’d have gone up to him and asked how to get back to the street her aunt’s house was on. A man standing by his own house was fixed, identifiable and as safe as if he were wearing a nametag. Strangers could come from anywhere. She forgot that she too was a stranger.

She was almost at the end of the row of houses and
approaching
to another fork in the road – hoping that she’d remember it – when she heard someone calling her name from behind her. She turned. The man from the top of the hill was coming up to her at a slow run. She didn’t recognize him until he called her name again and waved. It was Roy, Eric’s father, from the night before. He looked different. He was wearing a pullover and a pair of chinos. He might have been a student or even a teenager.

‘Hi,’ he said. ‘I waved at you from back there.’

‘I didn’t see,’ she said. ‘I was trying to figure out what road to take. I’m lost.’

‘This one goes back to your house.’

‘I wanted to get to the statue of the pioneer woman.’

‘Oh. Sure. Wilhelmina.’

‘Is that her name?’

‘No, that’s just what we call her.’

We
? Did that mean him and his son, or him and the wife he was divorced from? Or a new girl he was going out with?

‘It’s a long walk up the hill,’ he said, ‘or back to Trellis Road, and then you jog left.’

‘That’s where I went wrong.’

‘I’ll walk you back.’ He started to move forward, putting his hand on her arm for a moment as he did so. She fell into step beside him.

‘It’s a beautiful day,’ she said.

‘One of the few. It’s been a lousy year. Even now: I hear it’s still raining just about everyplace else.’

‘Well, I guess we need it, after the drought. The trees look so sad.’

‘Yes. Everything looks wrong.’

They passed a yard where someone had been burning a pile of leaves. Whoever it was had gone back inside.

‘How’s Eric?’ she said.

‘He’s okay. Quiet. It follows a pattern. I guess you’ve seen him around here before. He’s been going off like this for – oh, a year and some. Usually he comes home of his own accord.’

‘Oh?’

‘It’s hard to know what to do. I keep hoping he’ll grow out of it.’

‘Have you asked a doctor about it?’

‘He doesn’t need a doctor. He needs a mother.’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘he’s got one, hasn’t he?’

‘What he had was worse than having nothing.’

‘There’s something I ought to tell you.’

‘Yes?’

‘He threatened me with a knife.’

‘Oh, God. I’ve always thought most of what he does is for show. And a lot of talk.’

‘I don’t know how serious it was. The knife was just an ordinary table knife. But it could have been a sharper one. He yelled at me not to phone you and he held it like this. Right? I couldn’t tell if he meant to do anything, because I don’t know him. But it’s a bad sign. Especially since – well, at the moment he’s too young to be dangerous. But what’s going to happen later? He’s smart and he doesn’t like people.’

‘He likes you.’

‘Oh? But I’m the one who betrayed him. I handed him over to you.’

‘I guess you made him realize that it was necessary.’

They came to the point where the neighborhood changed. She saw that there was a road running around to the back of one of the houses; she hadn’t noticed it and, if she had, she’d have assumed it to be a private driveway. Now that she was seeing from another angle, she remembered that it was the road to the statue. ‘We’re here,’ she said. ‘This is it.’

‘Do you want to go see it?’

She looked at her watch. ‘I’d like to,’ she said, ‘but I don’t know what time my aunt – she said she’d be back on Sunday afternoon. That could mean one minute past twelve.’

‘That’s a long way off.’

‘Yes. Okay, sure. I’d like to.’ They walked up the road she’d missed. He talked about the neighborhood: he’d moved there around the time when he was at college. He said, ‘So you live with your family? That’s nice. Hardly anyone does any more.’

‘Oh, I don’t, either. I live in town. I’m only keeping an eye on my aunt’s house while she’s away for the weekend.’

‘In that case, it was incredibly lucky that you were there.’

‘I don’t know about that.’

‘Oh yes – definitely. Ricky doesn’t respond to everyone. In fact, he’ll hardly speak to anyone. I think he sort of opened up to you. He keeps talking about you.’

‘What does he say?’

‘How nice you are.’

‘Well. I was just thinking last night that my great-aunt would have handled the whole thing a lot better. I don’t know much about children.’

‘Christ, who does? They seem to do certain things at set ages, so there’s a general standard you can measure their behavior against, but that only works if you’ve got one of those so-called average children. I’ll tell you one thing: the worst advice you can get about them comes from people who are supposed to make their living out of it. Teachers and those behavior people. Especially when they’re faced with a boy like Ricky. Aside from everything else, he’s simply a lot more intelligent than any of his teachers. And the ones who can see it, don’t like that. Most of them are too dumb to register. They’ve got a format that somebody’s handed them, and they go ahead and shove until every child’s been squeezed into it. They tried to do the same with me. Of course, he’s not helping things. I think about a year ago he figured out that there’s just about nothing they can do to you, if you refuse to cooperate. I wasn’t smart enough to get that far until I was in my teens. And by that time I wanted all the things I was being bribed with. He doesn’t want anything. He’s got nothing to lose. Oh, hell. I’m sorry to dump all this on you, especially on such a fantastic day. Look at that.’

They’d reached the top of the hill, from which further wooded
lands – in front and to the sides – stretched away. If the trees had been in their normal autumn colors the sight would have been staggering. Even as it was, the air glittered, houses to the far distance were picked out crisply; you could see right back to the next town, miles away.

‘Not bad,’ he said.

‘It’s wonderful. I only saw it like this once before, when I was in school.’ She looked down on the roadways ahead. They were laid out as clearly as if on a map. Although she couldn’t see the statue, she could make out the spot where it stood, among evergreens. When she turned back to him she knew that while she’d been absorbed in the view, he’d been looking at her. On his face she caught the last of the expression that had been there: concentrated, possessive. It made her self-conscious; she wanted to move on. ‘It’s over there, isn’t it?’ she said.

He nodded. They began to stroll to the fork in the road.

‘Maybe,’ she said, ‘you could find one of those schools for gifted children, where he’d be able to meet other kids and teachers that didn’t make him feel so bored and out of step.’

‘I could. It would mean sending him away. I don’t want to do that. Unless he starts asking about it himself. That might happen in a few years. That would be great. But so far, I figure: he’s been rejected by one parent – I don’t want him to get the idea that the one he’s got left is trying to get rid of him, too. Poor little squirt. I was just the same at his age.’

‘You?’ She couldn’t believe that a man who looked so open, athletic, handsome and successful, had ever been anything other than a miniature version of what he was at the moment.

‘Just exactly,’ he said. ‘I thought they started off, right at the beginning, thinking I was a freak. It didn’t seem to me that they were doing anything to help. Or that they wanted to. It takes a long while to understand that there’s not really much you can do when a child’s unhappiness is caused by not fitting in. You’ve either got to grow out of it, or move away.’

They came to a second turning. The road started to go downhill. Soon they were surrounded by fir trees. She said, ‘He could
become
a member of one of those groups for people with high IQs.’

‘He’s done that already. They all have endless games with each other. Playing chess on the computer and doing those wargames where you conquer the world.’

‘He likes those computer things?’

‘Sure. So do I. It’s part of my work.’

‘Oh? He said your job was doing the advertising for toys.’

He stopped walking, and laughed. He said, ‘That’s one way of putting it, I suppose. I’m in aeronautics. What else did he say?’

‘Oh, lots of things.’

‘Such as?’

‘Maybe he wouldn’t like it if I repeated them.’

‘You’re kidding. I’m his father.’

‘I’ll tell you something: I can remember a family Christmas, when I was about five, and one of my grown-up relatives teased me about something I’d put on my letter to Santa Claus. I was just mortified. Everybody else was fine – they didn’t say a thing. But it only takes one. So, I know that children can be funny, but sometimes they just don’t hide what they think. And that’s not really funny. It’s –’

‘It’s just artless. Without guile.’

‘Right. So to get together and laugh about something that might be a secret dream somebody told you in private – you see what I mean?’

‘Of course,’ he said.

‘You’re laughing.’

‘I’m wondering what you asked for.’

To the left, beyond him, she saw the break in the trees. She skipped towards it. He followed. The statue stood at the end of a narrow path lined with plants that had flowered earlier in the year. Only the green showed now. She hadn’t remembered them, nor the enclosing height of the pines and hemlocks, nor the fact that the statue itself, up on a plinth, was so small.

‘It looks different,’ she said. ‘I don’t remember those lines of flowers or anything.’

‘How old were you the last time you saw it?’

‘The only time. About eleven, nearly twelve.’

‘That might explain it.’

‘But I was almost as tall as I am now.’

‘Well, the flowers have been there for six years. And the trees would have grown. And you only saw it once.’

‘Oh, I like it just as much now, but I don’t like the idea that I could remember something all wrong. Why should that be?’

‘You’ve fitted it in with the other things you’ve seen since.’

‘I see.’ The statue hadn’t changed; she had. She liked that idea even less than the thought of being wrong. If you weren’t what you were, what were you? Who were you?

‘It’s a pretty little statue,’ he said.

‘Yes. And I like the story. It’s supposed to be true, too, although I never heard if she got back to her family afterwards, or even whether or not she found her husband.’

‘That’s not important. In all those stories the main thing is the endeavor. If you’re going to wonder about reality, none of it makes sense.’

‘Why not?’