Speak Softly, She Can Hear Page 8

  She hiked up her sweatshirt and turned sideways to the mirror. She always looked a little slimmer that way. She slid her fingers into the waistband and found that it was looser. She smiled at this, but only her mouth moved. Her eyes wouldn’t follow suit. The man on the train that day. Tom. He’d thought she was a girl named Celia, pre-med at Vassar. The memory of that lie pleased her unexpectedly now. She’d done it automatically, without agonizing at all because he was a total stranger and it didn’t matter if he believed her or not. So it was possible to lie. Easy, even. And nobody was the wiser. She saw her lie to Tom as a sort of test run. Telling her father she’d gone out to get papers when she’d really been at Grand Central calling Naomi, and having him believe her—that was the proof.

  Chapter Four

  It snowed heavily on the first day of school, big flakes that clogged up the city like wet cake. The bus lumbered up Madison, packed full and smelling of damp wool and cigarette smoke. Carole got off at Ninety-first and jaywalked across Madison.

  She was early. It was a good half hour before she usually got to school, and the place was dark except for the sconces in the main lobby that spilled a weak light over the heavy furniture and parquet floors. She took the stairs to the fifth floor, where she sat alone in homeroom with the lights out. It was so quiet, and it smelled of clothes and books and antiseptic. Over vacation, the desks had been organized into a tidy square in the middle of the room, five across and five deep. The walls had been stripped and the blackboards washed professionally so that they were exceptionally dark. Little by little the noises began on her floor. Teachers coming in after the weeklong break, chatting, commiserating about being back. They didn’t know she was in there, of course. They were as bad as the kids, grumbling about how much they didn’t want to be here. Someone flicked on the lights, which came up haphazardly across the ceiling. “Hey!” It was Amanda. She went to her desk and plopped down her books. “How come you’re sitting in the dark?”

  “I like it,” Carole said.

  “You would,” Amanda said. “I went to Bermuda over break. See?” She held out her arm and shoved up the sleeve. It was brown as a nut.

  “Bully for you.”

  The room filled up quickly. Girls everywhere. They’d covered the globe. Florida, the Caribbean, even Paris. But no Naomi. When the bell rang for assembly, Carole was swept along with the thundering rush down the stairs. In the gym they lined up with the lower grades first, kindergarten through six, then the middle school, and then the upper school, with the twelfth grade last. Carole stood alone at the end of the twelfth-grade line, watching the door for Naomi and unable to breathe in the noise and heat. She was desperate to talk to Naomi, to find out if anything had happened.

  The music started up in the assembly room, Miss Polivka pounding away. A Sousa march. Miss P had a sense of humor, Carole always thought. The sound traveled across the mezzanine and into the gym, the signal to be quiet. That was when the stairwell door flew open and Naomi made a run for it across the polished floor, sliding into line. In that outfit Naomi drew attention to both of them, a shocking-pink sweater with thick embroidery all over it. Elayne and Daddy must have been in South America again.

  Naomi, on tiptoes now, a big grin on her face, leaned up to whisper to Carole as they shuffled around the three walls of the gym behind the others. “God, what a week,” she said. “I got blitzed every night. I had a ball.” A ball? Was Naomi crazy?

  Mrs. Danzig was posted at the door to assembly, mouth pursed in a tight, unhappy smile, welcoming everybody back and making sure they were not talking.

  They filed into rows of folding chairs. Miss Steen, the headmistress, came to the podium. She was like a cartoon old lady in her long dress and oxford shoes, and Carole really liked her, liked the big smile on that homely old face. Miss Steen raised her hands, the signal they should sit. Naomi opened a hymnal and wrote in pencil on the inside back cover, “He wants to see you.” She showed it to Carole, then erased the words. Carole shook her head. No way. Never again. Naomi opened the hymnal to another page. “Got to,” she wrote. “Eddie said.”

  The piano pounded out a prelude, and they stood to sing “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.”

  “No,” Carole said, pulling the hymnal from Naomi’s hands.

  “You have to get your stories straight,” Naomi hissed over the singing.

  “What do you mean, stories?” Carole said. “He said nobody would find out.”

  Suddenly the room was quiet. A few girls in the row ahead turned to look. Others giggled. Mrs. Danzig motioned the other girls to sit, but Carole to remain standing. “Carole,” she said. “Please tell us all what you and Naomi think is so important to discuss during the singing.”

  The whole school was staring at her. “Something that happened,” Carole said.

  “Well, of course, dear,” Mrs. Danzig said. “But we’d all like to know what.”

  “Just something.” Sometimes Danzig would make a girl stand there for three or four minutes until she told.

  Miss Steen came to her rescue. “Well, it’s our first day back, so we’ll let it pass, but please let’s not talk in assembly again, Carole. You may sit.”

  She didn’t hear a word of what went on afterward, or all that morning. She went from class to class in a stupor. She’d never been singled out like that. And it made her doubly sure she wasn’t going to see Eddie. No way. She’d already put a week between him and her. If she saw him, she’d have to start all over again keeping her mouth shut.

  But at lunch Naomi slipped into the empty seat beside her. Across the table, Shelly, Amanda, and Deirdre had just been comparing tans and ignoring Carole. “This isn’t funny, Carole,” Naomi said. “You’ve got to go see him. I promised you would. After all he’s done for you. God.” Naomi’s little face was all bunched up.

  “If it wasn’t for him—” Carole began in a fierce whisper. “Oh, forget it. I thought the whole point was to keep our mouths shut.”

  Naomi was quiet for a few moments, spooning up a dessert. “Look,” she said in a whisper. “Eddie is a wreck. He’s so worried about you, so worried about anybody finding out. He really cares about you. We went up there, up into the woods. The first time right after you left and then again during the week. It’s okay. You can’t see anything. And nobody asked at the motel or anything. But he said you had to go see him. Just once, just to make sure you have your stories straight.”

  Across the table, Deirdre raised her perfect eyebrows and tipped her head. “What stories?”

  “Why don’t you mind your own—”

  “Beeswax?” Deirdre and Shelly gave each other looks and then doubled over laughing. When they lost interest in Carole and Naomi, Naomi continued. “He’s doing the stuff you should have done yourself, you know,” she said in a whisper. “He packed up all that woman’s stuff. He couldn’t risk throwing it away up there because somebody might have found them. Cheap crap. He brought it home in his luggage so he can throw it away here. You’re really lucky, Carole. He’s thorough. He’s a genius.”

  “He got kicked out of all those schools,” Carole said, but she felt guilty about the clothes. She’d never even considered things like that. What if there was more? What if there were things she should have done like that and didn’t think to do?

  “The point is, he got into those schools,” Naomi said.

  “Big deal.” Carole remembered what he’d said. He got kicked out for being with girls like her.

  “He absolutely forced himself to stay in Stowe all week.” Naomi tossed her long hair over one shoulder. “I guess it didn’t go so well with him and you.” She glanced down at her manicure. First one hand and then the other. “He told me some of it.” She paused. “Well, at least you’re not a virgin anymore,” she whisped, but Amanda must have heard.

  “You’re not?” Amanda said from across the table.

  “Naomi didn’t mean that.” Carole picked up her tray and left the table, blushing crimson. Naomi came after her.
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br />   “Why did you have to say that?” Carole asked.

  “All I said was you’re not a virgin. Neither is she, for God’s sake.”

  “You had no business.”

  “Okay, okay. But look. You’ve got to do this. He’s staying in somebody’s house. It’s what he does. House-sits. I’ll give you the address. Wait till you get a load of it.”

  There were only three hours until school let out, and one of those was gym. They chose sides, and she was the second to last chosen, just before Lucille Stoddard, who had one leg shorter than the other. Each team always got one of them. The fat one and the lame one. The game was dodgeball, and the other team split and lined up, one half on each side of the gym. Then they pelted Carole’s team with the ball. They always went after her first, the easiest one to get out, but today they were especially bloodthirsty. They stepped over the lines, they fouled with every throw, and the gym teacher didn’t stop them. Nobody blew the whistle. It made Carole so mad, she felt like fighting back. She got this idea, after she’d managed to stay in longer than usual, that the longer she could stay in without getting hit, the better her luck would become, the less the likelihood that anyone would ever find out what she’d done in Stowe.

  Amanda and Shelly threw the ball with both hands overhead, hard. The big miracle was that everybody was getting hit but her. And the next big miracle was that the rest of her team, the ones who’d been struck out, were screaming for her, cheering her on. Finally, she was the only one in. This had never happened before. She felt light and strong because she wasn’t eating. She darted and jumped. She thumbed her nose at the other team. And then out of nowhere came the image of Rita’s shoulder, fat and pink with pimples on it. She stopped dead at the memory, and the ball hit her square in the breast.

  The town house where Eddie was staying was on Sixty-sixth Street between Park and Madison, only four blocks from her apartment. It was the biggest one on the block, four stories high, made of a pale, pinkish stone with thick carvings around the door and windows. Scaffolding hung from the two upper floors, and workmen sandblasted around the windows, the sound deafening. Carole rang the bell and saw that her hand was shaking.

  After about a minute an inner door opened, and Eddie stood in front of her, behind the barred glass. He just looked at her blankly, as if he didn’t know who she was. He was dressed in a yellow sweater with a paisley scarf at his neck like that stupid Fred Astaire or something. Lord of the manor. He finally opened the door and pulled her into the foyer, his grip so tight on her arm that it hurt. One door and then the other slammed behind her, and suddenly it was silent. Eddie gave her arm another mean squeeze.

  “Ouch,” she said. “Let go of me.”

  “You little bitch,” he said. “You leave me up there to pick up after you, and you skip home like the spoiled piece of shit you are.” He spat when he talked. How had she ever thought he was cute? He made her skin crawl.

  “Naomi said you wanted to talk to me, or I never would have come over here.”

  “Let’s get one thing straight.” He waited for her to meet his eyes. “You do what I say.”

  “Oh, sure,” she said, trying to sound tough, to hide her fear.

  He grabbed her arm again. “You’re in the big leagues now.”

  She looked away, keeping her mouth shut. She hated him so much.

  “Have you talked to anyone?”

  “I talk to people all the time.” She rubbed her arm, which still felt sore where he’d grabbed her.

  “You know what I mean.” He stepped closer.

  “Of course not.”

  “I took care of everything. The room was clean. Not a trace of what’s-her-name.” He was scanning Carole’s face. People did it all the time; her eyes were so pale they didn’t give people a place to land. But this was different. It was intimate, like he was looking for something, some weakness or something. It gave her the creeps. “You know what I worry about? That you’ll get religion or something. That you’ll think it’s better to confess when it’s not. Look at me.” He took her face in his hand, hard, so she had to look at him again. “You’re naive. What you don’t know is that shit happens all the time. People die. People get killed.” He was nodding, as though he agreed with himself. “You didn’t mean to do it. If it ever comes to that, I’ll swear you never meant to do it. I’ll tell them what happened. About your strength, you know? How I saw you there. Pushing on her. I tried to stop you.”

  “You did not.”

  He shook his head. “You just don’t remember. You were putting away that scotch pretty good. You were like this split personality. Nurse Jekyll and Mrs. Hyde.”

  “Was not.” But she had been. She knew that, and she knew that her memory of the night was not clear. She could never get a grip on the order of what had happened or how long anything had taken. She could not remember about Rita’s neck at all, even though that was exactly the thing she had to remember.

  “You blocked it out, Carole.” His voice was suddenly, unexpectedly calm. “It happens. You got carried away. You were into it big-time.” His voice was almost loving now. He toyed with the edge of her jacket. “I can see it just like it was a movie. God, you were enjoying yourself. Don’t pull away.” He took a deep breath. “You know you did this. And it can be proved. There are ways, if it ever comes to that.”

  There were? That was such terrifying information she didn’t dare to ask what those ways were.

  “We need to be clear, you and me. You need to be clear. Because if you’re not, I’m afraid for you. Don’t mess it up. I want to hear you say it.”

  She nodded.

  “Speak up,” he said. “Say it.”

  “Say what?”

  “I broke her neck.”

  “But I didn’t mean to.”

  “Say it.”

  “I broke her neck,” she whispered.

  “That’s right,” he said. “You didn’t mean to, but you did.” He sighed and sat back on the couch, arms and legs splayed, breathing like somebody who’d just run a race, sweating at the edges of his perfect hair. He took off the silk cravat and wiped his forehead with it. He smiled at her. “Hey,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You don’t really hate me.”

  She looked away.

  “You were a tiger that night,” he said. “Now that we’ve got our little bit of business out of the way, I can tell you this. I can’t stop thinking about our night. Come here.” He patted the couch next to him.

  “No,” she said. The thought made her stomach turn.

  “Oh, come on. You liked it. Admit it. I was your first guy. There’s so much more to show you.”

  “When hell freezes over.” She turned to leave, but he was right there again, grabbing her arm.

  “You were going to get me that cigarette box, remember?” She thought he was talking about something in the motel room. Maybe something that could give her away. It was terrifying the way the panic could slide up her throat so suddenly. “You promised.” He flashed a smile. “A souvenir.”

  Then she remembered. The one in her apartment. He made her describe it. “I can’t,” she said. “What if my mother notices?”

  “Just give it to Naomi, and she can give it to me.” His face was very close to hers. “I’ll keep it closed up tight.” He grinned meanly. “It’ll remind me how we’re all keeping our mouths shut.”

  That night she stole some of her parents’ sleeping pills, eight in all. Four white (her father’s) and four red (her mother’s). She arranged them in piles of two. Six would be enough, she thought, but just to be sure, if she did it, she’d take all eight. No. Maybe she’d need more. She’d wait until the prescriptions were refilled and then steal more. It was a luxurious feeling to know there would be enough. She’d tried one of the red ones once to find out what it did. It had made her feel very strange, as if she were two people, one of them going about her business as usual, the other one floating alongside in a fog. Multiply that feeling by six and she was pr
etty sure it was plenty. Not that she wanted to kill herself. Far from it. It was just that if the police came to the door, or if anybody called the apartment to ask about Rita, she’d just march right in here and take them. No, wait. She’d go to the basement. Nobody ever went down there. It was dark and cold. She could take all the pills and die. It would be weeks before they found her. It was such unexpected comfort, like the traffic on Lex.

  And it wasn’t just the pills and the traffic. She imagined how it would be to fall from the highest point of the bridges in the city. At this time of year, the water in the East River was so cold that if the fall didn’t kill her, the icy temperature would. She leaned out the window of her apartment and looked down at the street. Oh, man, there were so many ways it was a wonder anybody stayed alive. If one thing wasn’t available, others would be. And what amazed her was that these thoughts weren’t morbid. In fact, the thought of suicide cheered her. Whenever she thought about it, she felt relief.

  The next morning at breakfast the telephone rang. Carole and her parents were at the dining room table, separated from one another, as always, by an acre of mahogany. Her mother disappeared into the kitchen, picked up the phone, and reappeared in the doorway, the cord stretching out behind her. “Emily,” she mouthed to them. Her mother’s conversations with Emily were always the same, long stretches of silence at this end while Emily talked. Usually Carole and her father made faces at each other, but she was too scared to do that now. “I don’t know,” her mother said at last. “I’ll ask her.”

  She covered the receiver. “She wants to know who a Rita Boudreau is.”

  Carole had just picked up her spoon, but she was so shocked she dropped it and it clattered back onto the plate. Her mother’s face was a pale moon hovering. They’d found out. “Who?” she said in case she hadn’t heard right, in case there was any possibility.