She ran back down the hall, picked up her bag, and quickly overtook Calvin, who was never in such haste that he didn’t walk along the narrow line of railroad ties that bordered both sides of the driveway. Jemma opened the door, threw her bag in, and clambered in after it.
“Hey kiddos!” said Deb, not turning around to look at them but smiling into the mirror. From where she was sitting Jemma could see an eye and a cheek, some teeth and a portion of her maroon lips.
“We’re kind of late,” Jemma said. Calvin climbed in beside her, hauling on the door with both hands to slam it enthusiastically.
“Don’t jostle the old lady,” Deb said, meaning the car, which was very old, but had broken down on just one occasion, back in the winter. Deb was old, too. She was the wrinkliest person Jemma knew, and had old eyes with big rims of wet pink on the bottom, caught between her white eye and dark eyeliner. She had a head of springy gray hair that was always pushing her hat up off her head, a baseball cap she wore all the time, sometimes under a wool stocking in winter. She’d got it, she told them, by sending in a hundred proofs of purchase from her cigarettes. It had been white, but now was a very lived-in sort of yellow, and said in blue letters across the front, Oh Yeah! “We’ll get there, little Jemma,” she said. “Mary Ann can hurry when she has to. Can’t you, honey?” She patted the dashboard, raising a little cloud of dust that floated with the cigarette smoke in the columns of sun that came through the windshield. “How ’bout this weather?” Deb asked them, turning around as they crested the hill and started to go down. “Like trying to breathe with a wet washcloth stuffed in your mouth, huh?”
“It’s an affliction,” Calvin said.
“Not so bad as that,” she said, turning back around as they drifted a little into the grass. “An affliction would be the summer of ’73. Or ovarian cancer and diverticulosis and a no-good husband.”
“That’s worse,” Calvin agreed. Jemma began to look on the floor for something interesting. She had found all sorts of things before, a broken calculator, a gold pen, various lipsticks, all sorts of change, and a condom, once, though she hadn’t known what it was till after she lost it, when she described it to Calvin. She’d unpeeled it from the floor mat and stuck it in her pocket back in March, while Calvin and Deb were having a conversation. She’d brought it out to examine it every now and then, not sure what it was but knowing it was important. She had planned to show it to some people at recess, especially Andrea Blake, a girl with whom she would have liked to be friends, but who always ignored her, and to whom Jemma never knew what to say. Now she would know. She’d ask her if she wanted to see something neat, and it would all begin from there. Years later Andrea would say, “Do you remember when you showed me that wonderful thing? That’s when we became friends.” But, like a living creature, it worked its way from her pocket during a game of tag — she was always it, and never able to pass on the condition to anyone else. She didn’t look for it long. If she’d looked longer she might have found it before Andrea, who named it a snakeskin, and dutifully informed Sister Mary Fortuna of the likely presence of a poisonous reptile in the schoolyard. It was shortly surrounded by an impenetrable ring of nuns. They came pouring out of the school to form an Ursuline condom-disposal squad, one ring standing facing out toward the children while an inner ring gathered it up for destruction. Sister Gertrude came out in yellow rubber gloves to pick it up and carry it to the boys’ bathroom, while Andrea made the observation that it must be a very poisonous snake whose skin caused such a fuss. Today there was only a penny, stuck with a trace of gum to the floor. Jemma put it in her pocket.
“Did you hear,” Deb asked, “the latest about the Strangler?” There was a murderer abroad around the river and the bay, who killed whole families, more by stabbing and shooting than by strangling them, but he always left bruises around their necks. “He strangles you,” Deb and Calvin had told each other while Jemma tried not to listen, “after you’re dead!” He’d been killing all summer.
“Was there something in the paper?” Calvin asked, sitting forward into the space between the front seats.
“Nothing. Not a word. That’s the latest — nothing. How many days is that without a word?”
“Twenty-nine,” said Calvin.
“I think he’s moved,” said Deb.
“I hope so,” said Jemma. She’d had nightmares about him and his big white hands, as big and white as the hands of Mickey Mouse, soft but strong and deadly.
“I bet he’s gone on to Buffalo,” Deb said with a sigh. “Or down south, to another bay. Down to Tampa.”
“Or San Francisco,” Jemma said. “That’s a bay.”
“Oh I bet he’d like it there. He’s probably one of those.”
“Those what?” asked Calvin.
“Nothing.”
“Those what?” Calvin asked again. He’d already showed Deb how angry he could get if he thought an adult was hiding something from him.
“Forty-niners,” Deb said. “Gold-diggers. There’s gold out there, you know.”
“Cape Cod,” Jemma said. “Boston. Honolulu. They’re all on bays.”
“Anyway, he moved on. To Buffalo, you wait and see.”
“Do they need killers there?” Calvin asked.
“No more than anyplace else,” said Deb, and started to talk about the weather again, and how it gave her trouble with her emphysema, and made her awful phlegmy. Jemma scooted down in her seat, curling her knees up and falling to the side, so her cheek rested against the peeling leather seat, and she could see out the rear window. The familiar procession of objects — the tall trees alongside the long road out of the forest; the telephone wires strung alongside General’s Highway; the aerials on the houses just outside of town — passed more quickly than usual. Mary Ann sped along faster than ever before. As they went faster, Jemma felt calmer. She reached a hand up to the open window and spread her fingers against the rushing air, listening to her brother and Deb talk of murder and baseball and the heat.
“Let me drop you off in the courtyard today,” Deb said as they turned at the statehouse and passed down School Street.
“No thanks,” said Calvin.
“Come on,” she said. “I’ll honk the horn and you can wave to all the kids. They’ll all die of jealousy. They’ll just all drop down dead.”
“The usual place will be fine,” Calvin said.
“One day I’m going to drive you right into the lobby,” Deb said, and laughed so hard she started coughing, and pulled over a half a block from the tree where she usually let them out, so she could double over the wheel and hack and hack. Jemma stood on her seat and peered over the armrest, but Deb waved her out, gasping “I’m fine!” Calvin helped Jemma out of the cab, and held her hand till they were a block from school. Deb drove by just as they were passing through the iron gate. She honked and waved and cackled, drawing stares from every other child in the yard, but Jemma and her brother kept their heads down and their eyes on the ground.