Dad hung up.
And though I wasn’t in the kitchen with him, I knew he didn’t slam down the phone, but gently returned it to the wall, much in the manner of putting a maraschino cherry atop a sundae.
Well, I did have concerns. And Dad was right; I had no intention of sharing them with Deb. I had to share them with Jade, Charles, Milton, Nigel and Lu. The need to explain to each of them what had happened from the moment I left the campground to those seconds I saw her dead was so overpowering, I couldn’t think about it, couldn’t attempt to outline or ABC it on note cards or legal pads without feeling dizzy and dumb, as if I were trying to contemplate quarks, quasars and quantum mechanics, all at the same time (see Chapters 13, 35, 46, Incongruities, V. Close, 1998).
Later that day, when Dad left to go buy groceries, I finally called Jade. I estimated I’d given her enough time to recover from the initial shock (perhaps she’d even continued on, loving each day, as Hannah would’ve wanted).
“Who’s calling please?”
It was Jefferson.
“This is Blue.”
“Sorry, honey. She’s not taking calls.”
She hung up before I could say anything. I called Nigel.
“Creech Pottery and Carpentry.”
“Uh, hello. Is Nigel there? This is Blue.”
“Hey there, Blue!”
It was Diana Creech, his mother — or rather, adopted mother. I’d never met her, but had talked to her countless times on the phone. Due to her loud, jocular voice, which snowplowed everything and anything you said, whether it be a lone word or the Declaration of Independence, I envisioned her as a large, cheery woman who wore men’s overalls covered with clay smears from her own gigantic fingers, fingers that in all probability were wide as naked rolls of toilet paper. When she talked, she took big bites out of certain words, as if they were bright green, solid Granny Smiths.
“Let me go see if he’s awake. Last time I looked in on him he was sleeping like a baby. That’s all he’s been doing for the past two days. How are you?”
“I’m okay. Nigel’s all right?”
“Sure. I mean, we’re still in shock. Everyone is! ’Specially the school. Have they called? You can tell they’re nervous about a lawsuit. Obviously we’re waiting to hear what the police say. I told Ed they should have made an arrest by now or come forward and said something. Silence is inexcusable. Ed says no one has a clue what happened to her and that’s why they’re holding out. What I will say is that if somebody did do it—’cuz I don’t want to think about the other possibility, not yet — you can be sure he’s on his way to Timbuktu with a fake passport in a first-class seat.” (The few times I’d spoken to her on the phone, I noticed Diana Creech always managed to stick the word Timbuktu into the conversation as many youths stuck in like or whatever.) “They’re dragging their feet.” She sighed. “I’m sad about what’s happened, but I’m thankful you guys are safe. But you turned up Saturday, didn’t you? Nigel said you weren’t with them. Oh, here he comes. Hold on, sugar.”
She put the receiver down and walked away, the sound of a Clydesdale trotting down on a cobblestone street. (She wore clogs.) I heard voices and then the hooves again.
“Mind if he calls you back? He wants to eat something.”
“Sure,” I said.
“You take care now.”
No one answered when I called Charles.
At Milton’s, the answering machine picked up, a whine of violin accompanied by a woman’s fanciful voice, “You’ve reached Joanna, John and Milton. We’re not home…”
I dialed Leulah. I sensed she’d be the most unglued out of all of us, so I hesitated calling her, but I had to talk to someone. She answered on the first ring.
“Hey, Jade,” she said. “Sorry about that.”
“Oh, it’s Blue actually.” I was so relieved, I oil-spilled. “I’m glad you picked up. How are you? I–I’ve been going crazy. I can’t sleep. How are you?”
“Oh,” said Leulah. “This isn’t Leulah.”
“What?”
“Leulah’s asleep,” she said in a strange voice. I could hear, on her end, a television. It was thrilled about house paint, only a single coat necessary for total coverage, Herman’s Paints are guaranteed to last five years regardless of exposure to rainfall and wind.
“Can I take a message?” she asked.
“What’s wrong?”
She hung up.
I sat down on the edge of my bed. The bedroom windows were crammed with late-day light, soft, yellow, the color of pears. The paintings on the wall, oil landscapes of pastures and cornfields, looked so shiny they might have still been wet. I might have run my thumb through them and made a finger painting. I began to cry, dumb, lethargic tears, as if I’d cut into a scarred old gum tree and the sap could barely leak out.
This, I remember distinctly, was the worst moment — not the insomnia, not my wasted courtship of the TV, not the endless chanting in my head of a certain hysterical phrase that became less alive the more I said it—someone killed Hannah, someone killed Hannah—but this awful desolate feeling, desert-island aloneness. Worst of all, I knew it was the beginning of it, not the middle or the end.
Bleak House
In 44 B.C., ten days after he stabbed Caesar in the back, Brutus probably felt the same way I did when the student body returned to St. Gallway for the commencement of Spring Term. Brutus, strolling down the dusty roads of the Forum, doubtless came face-to-face with the harsh realities of “Corridor and Country Road Ostracism,” with its principal tenets, “Keep a wide girth,” and “As you come closer, fasten your eyes to a point immediately north of the leper’s head so for a second he/she thinks you’re acknowledging his/her pitiable existence.” Brutus most likely became well versed in “Modes of Seeing Through,” the most startling of which were the “Pretend Brutus Is a Diaphanous Scarf” and “Pretend Brutus Is a Courtyard-Facing Window.” Though he once drank watered-down wine with the perpetrators of this unspoken cruelty, once sat next to them at Circus Maximus and rejoiced in the overturning of a chariot, once bathed with them, naked, in both the hot and the cold pools of the public baths, these things meant nothing now. Because of what he’d done, he was and always would be their object of disgrace.
At least Brutus had done something productive, albeit controversial, carrying out a meticulously laid plan to seize power for what he believed to be the continued well-being of the Roman Empire.
I, of course, had done nothing at all.
“See, if you remember, everyone thought she was amazing, but I always thought there was something hair-raising about her,” said Lucille Hunter in my AP English class. “Ever watch when she’s taking notes?”