“You must have,” I cried, “if you are part of me. If we’re linked back to the Bright Beginning you must remember!”
Low turned the dime slowly. “It’s a joke to you. Something to laugh at.”
“A joke!” I moved closer to him and looked up into his face. “Haven’t I been looking for an answer long enough?
Wouldn’t I belong if I could? Would my heart break and bleed every time I have to say no if I could mend it by saying yes? If I could only hold out my hands and say, ‘I belong …’ ” I turned away from him, blinking. “Here,” I sniffed.
“Give me the dime.”
I took it from his quiet fingers and, sitting down again, spun it quickly in the palm of my hand. It caught light immediately, glowing stronger until I slitted my eyes to look at it and finally had to close my fingers around its cool pulsing.
“Here.” I held my hand out to Low, my bones shining pinkly through. “It’s glowed.”
“Light,” he breathed, taking the dime wonderingly. “Cold light! How long can you hold it?”
“I don’t have to hold it. It’ll glow until I damp it.”
“How long?”
“How long does it take metal to turn to dust?” I shrugged.
“I don’t know. Do your People know how to glow?”
“No.” His eyes stilled on my face. “I have no memory of it.”
“So I don’t belong.” I tried to say it lightly above the wrenching of my heart. “It almost looks like we’re simultaneous, but we aren’t. You came one way. I came t’other.” “Not even to him!” I cried inside. “I can’t even belong to him!” I drew a deep breath and put emotion to one side.
“Look,” I said. “Neither of us fits a pattern. You deviate and I deviate and you’re satisfied with your explanation of why you are what you are. I haven’t found my explanation yet. Can’t we let it go at that?”
Low grabbed my shoulders, the dime arching down into the spring. He shook me with a tight controlled shaking that was hardly larger than a trembling of his tensed hands. “I tell you, Dita, I’m not making up stories! I belong and you belong and all your denying won’t change it. We are the same-“
We stared stubbornly at each other for a long moment, then the tenseness ran out of his fingers and he let them slide down my arms to my hands. We turned away from the spring and started silently, hand in hand, down the trail. I looked back and saw the glow of the dime and damped it.
“No,” I said to myself. “It isn’t so. I’d know it if it were true. We aren’t the same. But what am I then? What am I?” And I stumbled a little wearily on the narrow path.
During this time everything at school was placid, and Pete had finally decided that “two” could have a name and a picture, and learned his number words to ten in one day, And Lucine-symbol to Low and me of our own imprisonment-with our help was blossoming under the delight of reading her second pre-primer.
But I remember the last quiet day. I sat at my desk checking the tenth letter I’d received in answer to my inquiries concerning a possible Chinee Joe and sadly chalking up another “no.” So far I had been able to conceal from Low the amazing episode of Severeid Swanson. I wanted to give him back his Canyon myself, if it existed. I wanted it to be my gift to him-and to my own shaken self. Most of all I wanted to be able to know at least one thing for sure, even if that one thing proved me wrong or even parted Low and me. Just one solid surety in the whole business would be a comfort and a starting place for us truly to get together.
I wished frequently that I could take hold of Severeid bodily and shake more information out of him, but he had disappeared-walked off from his job without even drawing his last check. No one knew where he had gone. The last Kruper had seen of him was early the next morning after he had spoken with me. He had been standing, slack-kneed and wavering, a bottle in each hand, at the crossroads-not even bothering to thumb a ride, just waiting blankly for someone to stop for him-and apparently someone had.
I asked Esperanza about him, and she twisted her thick shining braid around her hand twice and tugged at it.
“He’s a wino,” she said dispassionately. “They ain’t smart. Maybe he got losted,” Her eyes brightened. “Last year he got losted and the cops picked him up in E1 Paso. He brang me some perfume when he came back. Maybe he went to E1 Paso again. It was pretty perfume.” She started down the stairs. “He’ll be back,” she called, “unless he’s dead in a ditch somewhere.”
I shook my head and smiled ruefully. And she’d fight like a wildcat if anyone else talked about Severeid like that ….
I sighed at the recollection and went back to my disappointing letter. Suddenly I frowned and moved uneasily in my chair. What was wrong? I felt acutely uncomfortable. Quickly I checked me over physically. Then my eyes scanned the room. Petie was being jet planes while he drew pictures of them, and the soft skoosh! skoosh! skoosh! of the take-offs was about the only on-top sound in the room. I checked underneath and the placid droning hum was as usual. I had gone back on top when I suddenly dived back again. There was a sharp stinging buzz like an angry bee-a malicious angry buzz! Who was it? I met Lucine’s smoldering eyes and I knew.
I almost gasped under the sudden flood of hate-filled anger. And when I tried to reach her, down under, I was rebuffed-not knowingly but as though there had never been a contact between us. I wiped my trembling hands against my skirt, trying to clean them of what I had read.
The recess bell came so shatteringly that I jumped convulsively and shared the children’s laughter over it. As soon as I could I hurried to Mrs. Kanz’s room.
“Lucine’s going to have another spell,” I said without preface.
“What makes you think so?” Mrs. Kanz marked “46 1/2 %” on the top of a literature paper.
“I don’t think so, I know so. And this time she won’t be too slow. Someone will get hurt if we don’t do something.”
Mrs. Kanz laid down her pencil and folded her arms on the desk top, her lips tightening. “You’ve been brooding too much over Lucine,” she said, none too pleased. “If you’re getting to the point where you think you can predict her behavior, you’re pretty far gone. People are going to be talking about your being queer pretty soon. Why don’t you just forget about her and concentrate on-on-well, on Low? He’s more fun than she is anyway, I’ll bet.”
“He’d know,” I cried. “He’d tell you, too! He knows more about Lucine than anyone thinks.”
“So I’ve heard.” There was a nasty purr to her voice that I didn’t know it possessed. “They’ve been seen together out in the hills. Well, it’s only her mind that’s retarded. Remember, she’s over twelve now, and some men-“
I slapped the flat of my hand down on the desk top with a sharp crack. I could feel my eyes blazing, and she dodged back as though from a blow. She pressed the back of one hand defensively against her cheek.
“I-” she gasped, “I was only kidding!”
I breathed deeply to hold my rage down. “Are you going to do anything about Lucine?” My voice was very soft.
“What can I do? What is there to do?”
“Skip it,” I said bitterly. “Just skip it.”
I tried all afternoon to reach Lucine, but she sat lumpish and unheeding-on top. Underneath violence and hatred were seething like lava, and once, without apparent provocation, she leaned across the aisle and pinched Petie’s arm until he cried.
She was sitting in isolation with her face to the wall when the last bell rang.
“You may go now, Lucine,” I said to the sullen stranger who had replaced the child I knew. I put my hand on her shoulder. She slipped out of my touch with one fluid quick motion. I caught a glimpse of her profile as she left. The jaw muscles were knotted and the cords in her neck were tensed.
I hurried home and waited, almost wild from worry, for Low to get off shift. I paced the worn Oriental rug in the living room, circling the potbellied cast-iron heater. I peered ! a dozen times through the lace curtains, squinting through the dirty cracked window panes. I beat my fist softly into my palm as I paced, and I felt physical pain when the phone on the wall suddenly shrilled,