Rainy Season (13 page)

“Well, your mama’s on the porch, honey, if you need her. And I think your dad’s in the den with the other men,” says a lady whose name I’ve forgotten from when I met her at the last party. Her thick glasses shrink her eyes to the size of little gerbil droppings.

“I’m actually looking for Ted Tie,” I answer. The lady frowns.

“Is he part of that group of kids from the Zone who are here? I just saw them all come in for more food at the buffet.” She cranes her neck to look into the empty dining room. “They’re not in there anymore.”

“I declare it’s a mighty strange thing, having these Zone kids running loose in an adult’s party,” mentions another wife with a clown-orange tan.

“Zonians keep clear of military, generally speaking,” Mrs. Wagner says in a voice that seems to mean that Zonians are awed and scared of military. Mrs. Wagner likes thinking that everyone’s awed and scared of military.

“Your friend is most likely out on the porch with all the other Zone people,” says gerbil eyes. “If you see your mother, tell her that Arlene White—Colonel White’s wife—would love to get hold of the recipe for that yummy steak marinate.”

“I will. See you later, then. Good night, everybody.” I speed away from the wives with a sigh of relief. If they ever knew that Mom had the party catered, they’d go on about it for weeks. Better just let Mom win a few good points with the wives and let them all think she’s some great chef.

I
SEE COURTLAND AND
Hans sprawled in on the wide doorframe of the sliding glass door that leads from the living room out to the porch. They’re rifling through an orange crate of Dad’s record albums and arguing about what to put on the hi-fi next. I skirt past them. I don’t want to ask them about Ted. Ted himself is nowhere in sight. My nerves rattle like a box of tacks. If Ted forgot and already left the party, then how will I find Charlie?

The candles keep away the mosquitoes but not the dark, so it’s hard to pick out faces as I scout through the crowd. It seems like hundreds of Zonians have willingly crunched themselves onto the porch so that they can be with just each other and away from the army wives. I strain my neck above the crowd and almost bump into Jennifer Elwig.

She raises her plucked-to-dental-floss-thin eyebrows high and stares down at me like she’s never seen me in her life. My face gets red, knowing I have to talk to her now, and I’m glad for the darkness.

“Have you seen Ted Tie?”

“What?”

I cough. “Ted Tie. Have you seen him anywhere?”

“It’s not like I’m exactly looking for him.” She yawns. Ted probably wouldn’t be happy to hear her say that. Jennifer shakes her long feathered hair back behind her head. “You’re Abby’s oldest kid, right?” she asks.

“Yeah.” I’m wondering if I should tell Ted what she just said, or if I should keep quiet.

“Abby’s a scream. She’s over there, if you’re interested.” Jennifer points to the far side of the porch and I can just glimpse Mom’s spiky hair behind a clump of other ladies.

“I’m looking for Ted actually, just Ted.”

“Why do you need him? Hey, you got a crush on him or something?” An annoyingly sly smile begins to expand over Jennifer’s face. “He’s a cutie.”

“I don’t even—I mean I would never ever even …” Jennifer’s smile flusters me. I want to think up something clever, something Nancy Drewish, to say back to her. “Oh, Ted’s just a chum.” I try to laugh cunningly like Nancy. “I wouldn’t even imagine—”

“Okay, whatever.” Jennifer’s already scanning the crowd for better company. I mumble goodbye and duck away from her, skating through the crowd. “Chum!”—how did I let myself say that? It seems normal when Nancy Drew says it, but in real life it’s completely dumb. I could kick myself. Dumb old Jennifer Elwig.

“Whoa, Lane, what are you still doing up?” Mom catches my arm as I slide by. No Ted, no Ted anywhere. Where could he have gone? “Are we getting too loud for you, sweetie? Are you going to the Davidson’s? Aren’t you tired? It’s getting late.”

“I was just … um.” I began to bite at the skin next to my fingernails. I’m tired. The weight of the day feels like it’s collapsing on me. It would be nice to go sleep at the Davidson’s, where it’s quiet.

“I was just telling Alexa and Dee and Greta about the time Mina and Pops had the butterfly party.” Mom’s talk is happy and loose; she pulls me next to her and I am caught in her story. The ring of Alexa and Dee and Greta’s faces shine with drop-mouthed smiles, ready to laugh. Mom knows how to tell lots of funny stories, but I’ve heard this one before. It goes like this: A long time ago, way before I was born, Mina and Pops had a big garden party and shipped in hundreds of butterflies from some foreign country, but on the day of the party, when they released them from the boxes, the butterflies flopped out into the air for about two seconds and then dropped dead on all the guests’ heads.

When Mom first told Emily and Charlie and me that story, I remember it was summertime and we were sitting around the kitchen table, even Dad, eating wild raspberries. Charlie and Mom had laughed so hard, red berry-mouthed laughs—but Emily started pounding her fists on the kitchen table, hollering, “Why didn’t anyone punch holes? Why didn’t anyone remember to punch holes in the boxes?”

She got up from the table and slammed herself into the bathroom. Mom followed her and stood outside the bathroom saying, “Come on, please, Emmy, come out of there. It’s just a silly story. I’m sorry, Em. I should remember about you and animals,” while she and Dad made funny faces at each other like, isn’t she crazy? I just sat in my chair, splitting a raspberry seed between my teeth, feeling bad and keeping quiet.

Now I wonder if Mom remembers about Emily and the bathroom when she tells the butterfly story.

Alexa and Dee and Greta all end up laughing, but Greta keeps repeating oh, that’s terrible, that’s too terrible. Mom laughs, too, from the sheer comfort of talking about Virginia. Her million everyday wishes and casual memories spring from the root of her homesickness. I know this is true without her having to say anything to me. I hear myself tell stories about Rhode Island the same way.

“Mom, I have to go,” I whisper, unlatching her arm from around my waist. “I have to find Ted.”

Dee hears me. “Where is that son of mine?” she demands. “He’d been hotfooting to get over here to see Jenny Elwig and now there she is by herself, looking just as snide and snotty as her mother.”

“Ted’s our boy.” Alexa sips her drink, careful that her coral lips don’t press the rim of the glass. “He’s playing it smooth.” The women sigh with laughter. My gaze laps once more around the porch and then I retreat inside. The skin around my fingernails is chewed raw.

I check the den, filled mostly with men, some of whom are smoking Dad’s nasty Colombian cigars. The fumes choke me even from the doorway. It’s easy to tell the army men from the Zonians because the army men wear short sleeve shirts or T-shirts with their shorts or jeans but the Zonian men wear the traditional pleated and hand-smocked
guayabera
shirt, in either white or pale blue.

Turnip-nosed Captain Jacobs holds the floor. He reminds me of that part in the Santa Claus poem, about the smoke encircling his head like a wreath, except that Captain Jacobs never looks like a right jolly old elf; more like a right drunk jerk.

“I understand Carter wanting to phase it back to them eventually,” he’s puffing. “But why now, when they can’t even pay out their debt to us? This country’s so poor—it’s never gonna cover upkeep of running the locks without our help.”

The room fills with quarrelsome voices as everyone starts competing to explain their dumb old philosophies about the Canal; what it means to the world, who it really belongs to, blah blah blah.

I stand quietly and listen to this same old argument I’ve heard so many times since we moved here; who should control the Canal? Dad’s quiet, too. He swallows long from his drink and then blinks down at its surface, probably trying to figure out the right way to present his opinions; it’s another way we’re alike, I guess.

“Hey Dad,” I call to him. He looks up to where I am haunting the doorway. For a moment his face is all bewildered, like he can’t quite remember who I am. Then he frowns at me and mouths, “Go to bed.”

“Dad have you seen—?”

“Now.” He swings his arm loosely in my direction and his voice is loud enough to switch the focus of some of the others.

I give up and escape from the smoke and argument.

M
ARITA SITS IN THE
one chair of her room off the kitchen, folding laundry. Her eyes are bloodshot and her hair is starting to slip out of its ponytail. I notice she changed back into her cut-off jeans shorts and tank shirt. Linda is lying on Marita’s bed, asleep in her now crumpled beige uniform. When I enter her room after knocking, Marita touches a finger to her lips and tilts her head toward Linda.

“You are sunburned,” Marita whispers. I bring my warm fingers to my warm face and nod. Even at night, the sun figures out a way to sneak into my skin.

“Hey,” I say. “You should just do those clothes tomorrow. You look pretty tired.”

Marita massages the corner of her eye.
“Tal vez,
” she says. “I am waiting for your brother to come home.”

“How did you know he was gone?” I demand. “Did you see him leave?”

“Sshh,” Marita hisses. “I see him just before and he says he forgot his shoes by the
bohío
you all are building.”

“The war fort. He didn’t go there, though. He went to Ninth Street to go fight some kid, like he said at dinner. Like I told you he was going to do at dinner.” I can hear my voice accusing her.

“Well, what can I say when Charlie tells me he is back in fifteen minutes?” Marita hooks her hands together into her lap and her tired eyes fasten on me sternly. “You know this thing, you say nothing to Señor y Señora?”

I twitch my head up away from her gaze. “I wouldn’t rat on Charlie.”

“He will be home soon. You can wait with me if you want.” she says. “But no jumping around the way you do, like a
loco
monkey. Makes me jump, too.”

I try to relax and so I sit on the floor to do my meditating. Marita reaches down and turns on her standing floor fan. The breeze lifts the ends of my hair and cools my sunburn. Marita settles back in her chair and picks up her paperback from off the floor.

“What are you reading?” I ask her. “Another romance?”

“Mmm, a good one,” she says. “Very—ah—with lots of love.”

“Like, sumptuous, you mean?”

“I do not know this word,” she murmurs. She reads intensely, like the words are a feast—I know how she feels, since I bet it’s how I look when I read my Nancy Drews. I study the cover. The woman is very bosomy and the man behind her looks like he’s biting her neck. It definitely looks very sumptuous. I just learned that word myself.

“I know a poem about winter,” I say after a minute. I’m interrupting her reading but my meditating just seems to be making me more nervous. “Do you want to hear it?”

“Claro.
” Marita fixes her gaze to me and tucks her knees up beneath her, and for the second time today, I recite my poem. When I’m finished Marita’s face is just a blank.

“Pues, entonces
… I never saw winter and snow,” she says. “Except in movies.”

“It’s just a stupid nursery rhyme and sometimes it makes me sad but it feels good to say.” I shrug.

Marita picks up her book and starts reading again, but when she feels me looking at her she waves it at me.
“Escucha—
I will read you this,” she says. “Listen.” Marita opens the book and reads out loud from it. The strange, Spanish words don’t exactly stick to me, but when she is finished I’m quiet, because Marita’s eyes are far away, dreamy, and wistful like the girl on the cover of my journal. I wonder if she just read me a sexy part.

Linda’s body stirs, as if she understands the sense of Marita’s words even in her sleep.

“I only understand a little bit of Spanish.” I confess what Marita already knows. “But I am going to try to learn more. I know more than Charlie, that’s for sure.”

“Maybe then you teach it to Charlie,” Marita says. “He listens to you, sometimes.”

Charlie. Where is he and where is Ted? Marita’s room is beginning to feel way too warm.

“I need some water,” I say, getting up from the floor.

“No running off to find him,” Marita orders. “I don’t need two missing. He will be back soon.”

I close the door gently behind me. It hadn’t occurred to me that I should run off to find him without Ted until Marita slipped the thought into my head. Now the idea gradually shifts through me and I move slowly, like a zombie, from the kitchen to the front door and step outside to the concrete steps. But I don’t feel so good. My stomach’s kinked with worry and the sunburn’s heat on my face warms my cold fingertips. Maybe I really am sick. I wonder what the symptoms are for yellow fever.

Sounds of music and laughter from the house lap at me in waves. I look out over the yard, torn between the safe light leading to my house and the dim glow of the moon that might lead me to Charlie. Above me, a moth snaps into the small iron lantern that burns over our front door. I watch it until I can’t anymore.

All at once, tiredness pours through me, heavy and gray as concrete. I am stopped by the feeling, by its thickening in my feet, my fingers, around my heart and lungs. I lift a bare foot off the step, surprised that I can move at all, amazed at how I can fill each minute with so much worry that I feel like I’m always drowning. It’s a clear break of thought, and then the accident smashes through my mind in a thousand hurting pieces. I close my eyes but the noises don’t end; the police and ambulance sirens, the shouts through the darkness, the screaming. Again I can feel the cold cold air, the horrible weight of a body crushed over me, and then lifted away.

I leap off the bottom stair and start running.

I
T’S NOT SO MUCH
that I know where Charlie would go as I can reason out what he wouldn’t do. He wouldn’t want to run down Main Street, but would try to cut through as many people’s properties as he could, so that he could feel more covert and commando-ish. He also has less chance of being spotted and asked for ID by the night-patrolling MP’s if he keeps away from the paved roads.