She had come to Aunt Bett’s for a few days, bringing Ollie of course, though Aunt Bett was not overjoyed at having a dog in the house. It was just two weeks after Bethany’s twelfth birthday, and she wore her new red coat. Mama was wearing her yellow suit, and Papa looked very handsome as they kissed her good-by. After dinner she watched Colin unfold his bed from the living room couch—Colin didn’t have a bedroom— then, in her pajamas, she had curled up on her bed and watched Marylou brushing her pale hair so it shone like the flashing wing of a bird. After Marylou was asleep, she had lain in the darkness staring at the silver square of mirror over the dresser, wishing she could turn on the light and read, wishing she could sneak Ollie in from the service porch to sleep with her. She could feel the cluttered house all around her, as if everything in it, the people included, were packed in too tight and there was no room to move or to breathe.
Finally she slept, but she woke in the middle of the night shivering with cold. The square mirror did not hang before her, she was not in bed. She was standing in the rain. Standing on a dark highway with the cold rain pelting down, water streaming down her soaking nightgown. She shivered uncontrollably. Water swirled across the pavement, making small eddies around her ankles. There were no cars on the highway, and no lights except one that shone dimly from around a curve, shooting up into the rain-driven sky. Confused, she started toward it.
When she rounded the curve she could see that there were two lights. They came from an overturned car.
Mama lay pinned beneath the car. Her yellow suit was bloody and soaking up mud from the ditch, and her face was turned away. She was dead. Bethany knew that she was dead. For a moment she could not move, hard as she tried. Then something shifted subtly, as if the world itself had shifted, and she was kneeling over Mama.
Papa was on the other side covered by the car. He could not have lived. At last Bethany turned from them and stood still in the center of the highway. The world was falling away from her, she could feel it dropping, and herself with it. Her stomach churned. Faint and dizzy, she threw up on the highway. Then she began to scream.
Suddenly she was back in bed facing the mirror, still screaming.
The light flared on. Marylou was shaking her. Aunt Bett put her arms around her. But Bethany could not stop screaming: terror held her, she knew if she stopped she would fall. Even when Aunt Bett slapped her, she didn’t stop. Finally, though, she did stop and stared at the frightened faces of her aunt and uncle and her cousins. “Mama and Papa are dead!” she shouted at them, hating them because they couldn’t understand. Then she began that hard, searing scream again.
And the next day, of course, everyone knew.
They came to look at her—Aunt Selma, Jack, the neighbors—to stare with a strange fascination.
Aunt Bett said, “It was a dream the child had. She runs to bad dreams; she’s a peculiar child. It was only a dream, a coincidence.”
Bethany could not remember much about those first weeks. Aunt Bett tried to help her, but Bethany wouldn’t have it, she wanted only to be left alone. It was many months that she was morose and silent, refusing any attention, responding to nothing. She would sit in the empty, midday living room alone, huddled in a dim corner between the fireplace and the couch, holding Mama’s wooden jewelry box in which she kept her treasures, fingering the two birds carved on its front. She could not remember, now, what her thoughts had been, but she could remember clearly being there, in the silence.
It was a hard time for Ollie, too; he was too big for the house, and he was made to sleep on the service porch among the sacks of potatoes and empty pop bottles. He was always underfoot, and as miserable and lonely as Bethany, but she was too unhappy to think of him, and she supposed there was a good deal of grumbling about him before she awakened to the fact that they were talking of getting rid of him. That was the best thing that could have happened to her: it shocked her out of her lethargy so she went off in terror with Ollie. The big dog ranged far from her, ecstatic to be out with her at last; but she slogged along feeling so tired that she was close to weeping. She thought melodramatically that she might get lost in the dunes and die and they would find her and Ollie, two bodies. Or two white skeletons in the sand.
When she looked up at last, she saw the grass tower, and knew she was headed there, though she had always been a little afraid of it. It seemed to draw her now, the strange brown hill. Tall as a castle it rose, thrusting up from the pale dunes. The wind rippled the grass around its sides in great coiling waves as if immense snakes crawled there; and its sharp peak above the dunes, its shaggy dark aliveness in that pale expanse of sand, made an excitement stir in her. She knew, suddenly, that she must climb it.
The grass rose tall above her head as she plunged in, and closed around her. She shivered. She could see nothing but the blades pushing at her face, making a light-shot roof overhead. In the fingering wind, the grass spilled its seeds down her neck as she pulled upward through the dimness; the sword-sharp spears cut her bare hands; little bugs clung to her skin and darted into her eyes. She was frightened of what she might meet in the grass ahead of her, but she knew she must reach the peak. Her fear and her determination were the first real emotions she had known in many weeks.
Finally she stood on the peak, looking far down at the white dunes. The wind brushed her body and pushed at her, and she felt the dizziness of height, as if she were suspended. Ollie came up finally, ranging through the grass like a hunting lion, and she settled into the grass with him, pushing the blades down into a nest. He licked her arms and face, and she hugged him close to her.
She could not remember later what she thought or dreamed, but she knew that something had happened to her there. Sitting in the sky with the world so small below her, she began to change; a new Bethany began to be born out of her younger self. Not so very different —she was still twelve—yet different entirely. She put the death away from her that day, put it in a place where she could touch it, but it would not suffocate her. The thick, hypnotized state she had been in all those weeks began to lift away, and the world pushed in at her to make itself felt.
She thought then about her parents. Where had they gone when they died? They could not be nothing, that was not possible. Aunt Bett said they went to heaven, but Bethany didn’t understand what heaven was. She tried to make herself think of graves and decay, but this self-inflicted pain was so horrible that her mind would not accept it; she could see no picture save the dead faces of her mother and father.
She thought about the mind, about the fact that she could reach into the mind of another, even see what another person saw in a place far removed from where she was. This part of a person, that could do this, was not trapped in a body. Uncle Zebulon had told her once that the mind and the brain were not the same thing, that the brain was only a temporary dwelling place, like a house, for the mind for as long as it would need such a place. She thought of Uncle Zebulon, and she felt warm and comforted.
She slept. When she woke, it seemed to her she had traveled a long way and seen things she could not comprehend. But she woke refreshed, and somewhere in her middle, a feeling of quiet contentment had been laid gently over the sadness.
Her parents’ death, it seemed to Bethany now, looking back, seemed to have divided her life in two. Before, she had been, though wholly herself, an extension, in a way, of her parents—when there was something she could not face alone, they had been there to reinforce her, giving her strength. But afterward, first in her terrible seclusion, then later, she had been utterly on her own.