December Park(58)

On my walk home, I paused at the foot of Adrian’s driveway and stared at the house. I felt a cold disquiet settle all around me like a shroud. The prospect of knocking on their front door and having it opened by Adrian’s haunted and pale-skinned mother did not sit well with me. Instead, I lingered for a few minutes, kicking pebbles into the gutter, in hopes that I’d catch a glimpse of Adrian in one of the upstairs windows.

But he never appeared, and I eventually went home feeling strangely empty.





Scott’s neighbor Martha Dooley went to Girls’ Holy Cross and had been one of Courtney Cole’s classmates. She was a short brunette whose unfortunate complexion resembled, in both hue and texture, the granulated surface of a brick. She also had an unfaltering crush on Scott and therefore did not question his motive when he asked if he could borrow her yearbook for a couple of days. She handed it over without hesitation.

In her little rectangular yearbook panel that in hindsight seemed all too much like a coffin, Courtney Cole looked very pretty and blissfully unaware that her life was quickly nearing its conclusion. It was the same picture as the one in the newspaper, though much clearer and in color. She wore a black gown cut low at the shoulders, exposing the soft tapered lines of her collarbones. And indeed, she wore a slender chain around her neck, but the charm that hung from it was not a heart-shaped locket; it was a gold crucifix.

“Well, there you go,” I said. The two of us were in his basement, listening to one of the Use Your Illusion albums on the stereo and chugging cans of Jolt while Martha Dooley’s yearbook sat spread out on the floor between us.

“I can’t believe it,” Scott said, slowly shaking his head. “I was so sure it would be the same necklace with the goddamn heart locket.”

“That’s because you’re a morbid little freak show, buddy,” I told him, though admittedly, I was a little bummed about the discovery myself. I had actually begun to psyche myself up about the possibilities: what if it really was her locket? What did that mean for us?

It had been three days since I told my friends about Adrian’s find and an equal amount of days since I’d seen him. He hadn’t returned to school all week. I still hadn’t summoned the courage to knock on his front door, but things were getting ridiculous. My friends kept asking where he was, and Scott even suggested that perhaps our strange little friend had become the Piper’s latest victim. The rest of us chuckled uneasily, hoping our uncomfortable laughter would turn Scott’s very real concern into a joke.

Despite my reluctance, I knew I had to march up to Adrian’s front door and knock on it. And if his mother opened it and stood staring at me from the other side like some lifeless crypt keeper, I would have to resist the very natural, very instinctual, very understandable urge to run.

Finally, after school let out Friday afternoon, the four of us stood at the foot of Adrian’s driveway, staring at the dark and brooding Gardiner house. I was shaking and only partially from the cold weather. We had unanimously agreed that we needed to share the yearbook photo with Adrian, so he wouldn’t go on thinking the locket belonged to the Cole girl.

“I don’t think we should all go up there together,” Peter said, breaking the silence.

“How come?” I said. I had Martha Dooley’s yearbook under one arm.

“He told you about the locket, but he didn’t tell us. Maybe he didn’t want us to know.”

“Yeah,” Michael said. “You should go alone, Angie. We’ll wait in your backyard.”

“You guys are just too scared to knock on that door,” I suggested.

No one disagreed.

After they’d gone around the back of my house, I took a deep breath and walked up Adrian’s driveway. The windows were dark and partially shaded. The shrubs surrounding the front porch were dead; they looked dangerous and predatory in their prickly leaflessness. On the roof, a large crow peeled one of the shingles away with a sharp black beak.

I knocked on the door and steeled myself.

The door opened and Adrian stood on the other side. His glasses were off, and he looked somehow less present without then. I thought of blind baby rodents and the fused eyelids of featherless birds.

“Hey, man!” I said, overcompensating so that my voice came out sounding nearly maniacal with joviality. “Where’ve you been?”

“Sick,” he said, a rasp to his voice. “I’m feeling a little better now, though.”

“The guys have been asking about you.”

“Yeah?” He hoisted one pointy shoulder and just looked bored. He opened the door more widely. “Come on in.”

“Is your mom home?” I said, walking through the front door and glancing around. The false joviality was gone, the truer ring of apprehension back in my voice.

“No. She’s at work.”

I followed him through the main hallway. Amazingly, even all these months later, very little had been unpacked. Towers of cardboard boxes still lined the hallway and the living room. Clothing remained draped over the stairwell banister.

In the kitchen, a few pots and pans littered the Formica countertop, and there was a small table with only two chairs by the bay window that looked out onto the backyard. From this window I could see my own house and the three slouching shapes of my friends perched atop the woodpile. Around me, the Gardiner house was infused with that nonspecific staleness in the air, the same that I had registered on that day I’d dropped off my grandmother’s cookies.