Crooked Read online

  Amos glanced at Eddie, who’d somehow hidden his utility knife and was now leaning close to the mirror and combing his hair with elaborate casualness. He’d pulled down his jacket sleeve to keep the bloody cut on his arm out of view. “Nothing,” Eddie said, and Amos, sliding behind the teachers and heading for the door, said he was just cleaning his glasses and needed to get back to World History.

  “Well, then, git,” one of the teachers said, and the other one, turning toward Eddie, said, “And as for you, Mr. Tripp, where do you rightfully belong at this hour?”

  Amos was gone so fast he didn’t hear Eddie’s reply. Amos almost ran back to class.

  By the end of the period, not only was Amos’s heart beating normally again, but he was beginning to think he’d cheated Eddie Tripp out of some satisfaction. When, between classes, another boy asked why Amos had looked so freaked out when he came back to fifth period, Amos said, “Eddie Tripp paid me a visit in the west-wing head. He told me he wanted my Carreras.” Amos smiled and tapped his sunglasses meaningfully, as if to say, “And look who’s still got ’em.”

  But even while he spoke, Amos was keeping an eye out for Eddie.

  Amos hadn’t seen Clara all day. Hour upon hour, while teachers droned on about circumference and tangents, tobacco and respiratory tract cancer, Muslims in Pakistan and Hindus in India, Amos imagined what Clara Wilson would think if she heard that Amos MacKenzie had been driven to school by high school jocks. And maybe someone would’ve told her about the note Mr. Duckworth had read and she’d see that he wasn’t such a bad catch after all.

  When Amos opened his locker after last period and found an envelope with his name written on it in Clara’s handwriting, he felt his heart break into a gallop. He glanced around for Eddie, then opened the envelope with an air of extreme casualness, leaving his aviator sunglasses on, which made reading more difficult. The note was written on white stationery. The date and Clara’s address were at the top, as though she were writing to a pen pal in a distant country. But the message was shockingly brief. Thank you for your letter, it said in rushed pencil. I believe you, not that it matters now. Clara Wilson. Without thinking, Amos took off his sunglasses, and as he read the note again, he began at the same moment to feel both hot and foolish. He felt his face reddening, put on his sunglasses, and, ignoring first one, then another student who called out his name, made for the front door and descended the long set of steps to the street.

  A horn was honking.

  Buses filled the air with the smell of diesel fuel, kids yelled and skuttered here and there, and the sun’s reflection off the snow was sharp, almost blinding.

  The horn honked again. “Amos, you little jerk! Don’t pretend you don’t see me!”

  It was his sister, Liz, double-parked in the rusted-out Econoline their father had bought for $200 from the dairy. Beneath a thin application of white paint, it was still possible to read the words Cosgrove Dairy—We Still Deliver! It seemed to Amos that all activity around him had abruptly stopped when Liz had called out to him, that every set of eyes now followed him as he walked down the grade toward the old van. Curbside, he slipped for just an instant on the ice, and though he caught himself, Amos thought he heard someone snicker.

  “Just get in,” his sister said. “I don’t like driving this thing in public either.”

  Amos slouched a little and made a point of looking away from the school grounds. “What’s going on?” he said when Melville was safely behind them.

  “Oh, Mom’s in hyperspace. She called me out of school and told me to pick you up so we can visit Dad in the hospital. Which, considering the fact that he’s supposed to come home tonight, seems pretty mongoloid, but there you are.”

  They rode along in silence, Amos staring out at the dirty snow and ice through his Carrera sunglasses. He felt in his pocket for Clara’s note and fingered its edges. He wanted in the worst way to take it out and try to make some sense of it, but he didn’t want his sister to see him do it.

  “So I heard they got the guy who hit you with the bat,” Liz said.

  Amos nodded and looked away.

  “Charles Tripp,” Liz said. “The usual suspect.” She shot Amos a look. “Was he the guy who did it?”

  “I guess so,” Amos said in a low voice. “If that’s what the police say.”

  “What do you say?”

  “I don’t. It was too dark to tell.” Then, “I guess it could’ve been the Tripps.”

  Liz turned sharply. “The Tripps. Plural?”

  Amos shrugged. “Maybe.”

  A block passed before Liz spoke. “Well, if it was Eddie, too, you should tell the police. He might not be quite the convict his brother is, but give him time and he will be.”

  Amos stared ahead. A few minutes passed in silence. Then, after the Econoline backfired three times coming to a stop, Liz said, “You’d think Dad would at least get the muffler fixed.”

  Amos didn’t speak. Whatever it was that had pumped him up and floated him through the school day had leaked out and left him completely flat.

  Liz, glancing to her left at a stoplight, looked suddenly stricken. “Oh, God, there’s Eric Bradstreet,” she said, and Amos, peering around her, saw the very Jeep he himself had ridden to school in that morning, driven by the same handsome, thick-haired boy who owned it. Before he knew it, Amos ducked back, too, and, like his sister, stared frozenly ahead.

  St. Stephen’s Hospital was situated on the floor of Jemison Valley, and most of it was already shadowed by the hills behind it. Only the uppermost stories of the main building still caught the late-afternoon light, which gave the white walls a comforting, buttery color.

  Inside, however, the lobby was anything but comforting. It made Amos think of an airport in bad weather—a lot of tired people sitting around waiting for announcements they feared would be bad. It took two different people at the reception desk to even determine their father’s room, and another twenty minutes before someone from another floor telephoned to say that their mother would be down in a few minutes.

  Amos and his sister gravitated toward a lounge area that had televisions mounted on three walls, each of them showing something different. Almost nobody was watching them. Amos sat down and flipped through a Jemison Star, but the sports page was missing. His sister picked up a People magazine and, to nobody in particular, said, “Who cares how many hats celebrity moms have to wear?” Nearly an hour passed before a nun approached them and explained that their mother would be detained a few more minutes yet.

  “Fine,” Liz said. “Not a problem.”

  Amos knew she thought it really was a problem, but he was glad she wasn’t showing it. Or maybe she’d caught on to something Amos was still missing. He watched her closely, but she seemed unanxious. She glanced at a couple more magazines, stood up, and, while stretching, cast an eye around for boys. Then, finding no one of interest, she settled back into her chair, stretched her legs onto the coffee table, and fell asleep.

  Amos pulled the note from his pocket. Thank you for your letter. I believe you, not that it matters now. He read it four or five times, then folded it back up and slipped it back into his pocket. It was icy, barely civil. It was not a good sign.

  Amos was seized by sudden remorse. It was like sometimes in the middle of the night, when he was wide awake and all he could think about was the many little unkind things he’d done to people. Why hadn’t he worried about his father all day instead of acting like some kind of fathead hero? Had he thought of his father even once? Amos went back through his day. No. Not once. Had he spent one minute worrying about Crook? The Goddards? His mother at the hospital? No.

  Amos walked over to the row of telephone booths and dialed Bruce’s number. Nobody answered, but he didn’t hang up. It was still ringing when he saw the elevator doors open on the other side of the lobby. A lone woman walked out wearing a familiar navy blue dress and carrying a familiar brown purse. It took Amos a full second to realize it was his mother. Yet it was not q
uite his mother. She seemed like a foreigner. Later, this would seem to Amos like the moment he should have known something was wrong. A nun came over and held his mother’s elbow and pointed toward Liz, still asleep in her chair.

  Amos hung up and walked across the lobby. His sister was standing up now, wide-awake. “What?” she said.

  Their mother seemed in some sort of daze. “He can’t see you tonight. They’re keeping him and we can’t see him tonight. Where’s the car?” She looked around the lobby as if she expected to see it there.

  “Are you okay?” Liz asked.

  “Yes,” Amos’s mother said, and looked around again.

  “We could take the van,” Amos said.

  His mother nodded.

  She didn’t button her coat against the cold as they walked toward the door, didn’t look around, didn’t say a word until Liz began shaking her purse looking for the keys. Then Amos’s mother said, “I’ll drive.”

  She started the van, looked over her shoulder past Amos, and, hitting the gas, drove forward. The van jumped the restraining bumper and rammed a concrete post. Glass tinkled. The motor stalled. Amos’s mother sat there looking confused. The van was so cold that Amos could still see his breath. Something had gone wrong with his dad. He felt it in his bones.

  “I’ll drive, Mom, if you want,” Liz said in a soft voice. She got out and came around. Their mother slid over, rubbed her forehead, and then decisively opened the passenger door. “I’ve changed my mind,” she said. “I can’t leave. You go home and I’ll call you in a couple of hours.”

  “Maybe we should come with you,” Liz said.

  “No, you go ahead. I just have to get back inside right now.”

  Amos leaned forward from the backseat and knew he ought to say something, but he wasn’t sure what, and so was relieved when Liz asked, “What happened, Mom? Did something go wrong with Dad’s surgery?”

  Mrs. MacKenzie didn’t answer. She was standing by the van in the full dusk. A line of taillights stretched out below the hospital. A car leaving the parking lot fishtailed slightly, then recovered.

  “Mom?” Liz asked.

  “Something went wrong,” their mother said in a dull voice, “but everything will be okay.” She shut the door. They could barely hear her through the windows as she said it again. “Everything will be fine.”

  17

  AN EMPTY HOUSE

  Clara, home after delivering newspapers, thought she smelled baked potatoes. When she opened the oven, there were two brown potatoes on the rack, looking wrinkled and forlorn. Her father’s idea of dinner, she supposed. She climbed upstairs, where the door to the study was wide open and the computer made a slight ticking noise as a spray of animated snow fluttered across the light blue screen, followed at last by a red snowplow. “Dad?” she called. Tax forms were spread over the table, and a cup stained with coffee sat on a coaster, proof that her father had also not given up her mother’s rules.

  Thurmond L. and Angelica W. Wilson was written at the top of one of the forms; Husband and Wife. These people, with their formal-seeming names, were the ones who were married. Monty and Angie, Clara’s mom and dad, were also married, but only barely. Thurmond. Her father’s friends called him Monty, but her mother always called him Thurm.

  “Dad?” Clara called again, but no one answered.

  Ham was also gone, and the gleam from the lamps showed a fine layer of dust on the computer screen, the glass face of the clock, and the shelves in her father’s office. Clara opened a drawer and found her father’s stash of Good & Plentys. Clara chewed a couple. They were worse than chocolate but better than, say, taffy.

  On the edge of the desk, under a shuffle of papers, Clara spotted the photo album her mother had brought from the shed. She opened it and looked at the photos of thin men in very thin ties, girls in taffeta, athletes in peculiar shorts.

  Clara was studying a pair of girls who were kissing her father on the cheek when the telephone rang. She located the phone beneath a pile of receipts, and her mother said, “Hi, sweetie. It’s me. Your mother.”

  Clara felt mixed up. The last time she’d talked to her mother was nearly five days earlier, on Thursday before school. So she was relieved to hear her mother’s voice, but she was also angry that she hadn’t called sooner and was still gone. In a low, hollow voice, she said, “Oh, it’s you.”

  “I left you messages,” her mother said. “Did you get my messages?”

  “No,” Clara said. “I didn’t. When did you leave them?”

  “Well, maybe your father erased them,” her mother said. Then, trying to sound cheery, she said, “Or maybe that machine ate them.”

  “Maybe,” Clara said.

  A pause. Then her mother said, “I guess you’re mad at your mom, huh?”

  Clara, to indicate this was true, said nothing at all.

  After a moment, her mother said, “How’s play practice going? What’s it called again?”

  “The Smiling Gumshoe,” she said in her low, bland voice. “It’s going fine.”

  This time the silence on the line stretched longer. Finally her mother said, “What’re you thinking, sweetie?”

  Clara deliberated. Then, in her stony voice, she said, “You’ve been gone eight days. Eight days is a long time.”

  Her mother’s voice softened. “I know, sweetie. It’s an awfully long time.”

  “So when are you coming home, inny...”—she corrected herself—“anyhow?”

  Another long pause. “I’m not sure. I know it’s hard for you to understand, but I’m not sure of anything right now. Except how much I love you.”

  Her mother’s voice had cracked as she said this, and Clara said in a soft voice, “I love you, too, Mom.”

  For a time, her mother said nothing, but from the other end of the line, the faraway Dalton end of the line, Clara could hear snuffling. When her mother finally spoke again, she was more composed. “How’s our old Hambone?”

  “He’s fine.”

  “And Gerri?”

  Clara considered telling a white lie but decided against it. “She took a new friend skiing with her last weekend, and now she’s avoiding me.”

  “Oh, honey, I’m sorry.”

  Clara again decided to be truthful. “Me, too.”

  “What else is new, then?”

  Clara thought at once of Amos, of the nice letter he’d written, but it was better to tell things as they happened, before the first impression had worn off. Now it was old news, and Amos had been so cocky at school, wearing super-expensive sunglasses and acting like a fathead. She’d hardly wanted to give him any message at all, and the first letter she’d written seemed too gushy, so she’d torn it up and scribbled something during history. Thinking of all this made the world seem small and mean, and all of a sudden she said to her mother, “I don’t like school very much anymore.”

  This, as she expected, got her mother’s attention. “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just like all the subjects and assignments that used to seem important just don’t seem important anymore.”

  “Oh, sweetie. It is important. It’s so important. It’s what will give you all the opportunities and choices to make the kind of adult life you want and deserve.”

  Clara said nothing. Among the adult human beings, she thought. She would never live among the adult human beings. She would simply refuse, like Peter Pan.

  “Clara?”

  “How come you left Kaufmann’s that day?” Clara said without thinking. It was just what came sourly to mind.

  Her mother took a second to respond. “I don’t know. I’d just finished folding a whole display of designer towels—all in shades of white—and a man on the other side of the table waited until I was done and then came around to the table I’d just neatened. He reached in and unfolded one towel, and then another, and then another. And then he left them there in a mess and walked away.”

  Clara didn’t get it. “And that was it?”

&n
bsp; “Yeah, that was it. But if it hadn’t been that, it would’ve been something else just as tiny. It was just that I didn’t feel that my life was mine anymore, sweetie.”

  Clara looked out the window into the darkness. Downstairs, the front screen door squeaked open.

  “I heard the door. It must be Dad. You want to talk to him?”

  “No, not right now, sweetie.”

  Clara thought, She’s avoiding him just like Gerri’s avoiding me. She listened for other sounds downstairs. There were none. There had been only the screen door, and then nothing.

  “Maybe next weekend you can come visit me here in Dalton,” her mother was saying.

  Clara doubted it. “Maybe,” she said, and then, “I better go downstairs and help Dad with dinner.”

  But when she reached the bottom of the stairs, she saw that Amos MacKenzie, not her father, was standing between the open screen door and the glassed front door, his face looking as surprised as her own.

  18

  LOST

  Amos watched numbly as Clara Wilson approached. Only when her arm extended for the doorknob did he instinctively step back. The screen door slipped and banged shut, but Amos hardly heard it. He kept staring blankly at the door while backing away from it until finally the porch gave way and he went tumbling into a snowdrift. Amos didn’t feel the fall. He didn’t feel the cold. He stood up and looked around. From above him, a pleasant, tinkling laughter spilled into the cold night, but when he turned, the sound ceased. Clara Wilson stood on the porch covering her mouth, trying not to laugh anymore.

  “Whoops,” she said, remembering too late that in the hospital, his head had been in a bandage. He still had black eyes, too. Maybe she was laughing when she should be calling an ambulance.

  “Sorry,” Amos heard himself say, and when she saw he wasn’t laughing, Clara’s face turned serious. She carefully descended the slick steps.

  The sweetness of Clara’s breath—of licorice or black jelly beans, Amos thought—hung in the freezing air. He wasn’t even sure what she’d said. She seemed to expect an answer. He nodded very slightly.