The Clairvoyants(68)

At what point she’d arrived home I couldn’t say. Later, no one would have a clear memory of where we were, if we were in the pool or inside the house. No one would place David Pinney swimming that day at the pool at all. One moment David Pinney was hovering over Del, his suit down around his knees, and the next he had collapsed on top of her. She rolled him off, her eyes wide with shock. She lay there, unclothed, the pale places ordinarily covered by the bathing suit revealed in the flickering light, her hair tangled in the hay. I had taken a sharp breath in, and I felt the air in my chest, held, waiting for release. I had my grandfather’s hammer in my shaking hand. My arm throbbed from the impact of the blow. David Pinney’s eyes looked up from the barn floor, dark and empty. Around his head a blackish puddle had begun to form.

Outside, the leaves shuddered in the tall trees. The petals of my grandfather’s hydrangea scattered into the grass. Clouds covered the sun, and the light went out. Thunder sounded again, and I smelled the ozone in the air, the scent of hay and copper wire and chlorine. The rain hit the barn roof in a torrent. The sparrows cried out in the eaves, churee, churee. Once, near the spot where David Pinney and Del had lain, Sister Martha Mary had sat, cool and implacable, her hands clasped in the black folds of her lap. I didn’t know how long I stood there, looking down at David Pinney. Del had scrambled to pull up her suit, to fasten her top.

“What did you do? What did you do?” She was next to me, breathing in a high, panicked way.

I’d seen them together, and something had filled me—but what that was I couldn’t explain. I’d taken the hammer from the workbench. I’d been too late to protect her from him. I didn’t want him to ever look at me again with that mocking expression.

“He was hurting you,” I said.

David’s pants were still down, his limp penis pale against the dark hair. The hammer had grown heavy in my hand. Blood had splattered on my arm. Del’s face, her chest, were speckled with blood. I had to do something with the hammer, and I looked around the barn—at the tool bench, the boxes of copper rods and fittings, the stalls, the loft. Despite my daze, my trembling, I remembered the cistern. Up until the 1940s the cistern had been the source of water for the barn. My grandfather had shown it to me when I was a girl. I went to the back and opened the barn door. The rain fell from the eaves. The world beyond the dark barn was shimmering and wet and green. I went to the cistern, pried the cement lid from the top, and dropped the hammer in. I found I was still trying to catch my breath. Back in the barn, my hair matted to my head, and I bent down and tugged David’s pants up. Then I grabbed one of his arms and told Del to take the other. She looked at me, horrified, but took his arm, moving mechanically, taking his wrist, and pulling him. It took us over fifteen minutes to drag him through the barn’s back door, to draw him under the barbed-wire fence, to roll him beneath one of the golf course’s elegant weeping willows. The whole time it rained, watering the trail of blood into the pebbled drive, into the earth beneath the grass. The sky shuddered with lightning. We cleaned the barn floor with borax, scrubbing with brushes that we dropped, like the hammer, into the cistern.

No one came looking for us. Jane Roberts and the others had run up to the porch off the back terrace to wait out the storm, as we’d done so many times that summer. Since the porch was on the other side of the house, they wouldn’t see Del and me leave the barn behind the cover of the privet hedges and enter the house through the front door. My grandmother would be gone for another hour or more, eating tiny sandwiches, sipping iced tea. Our mother’s shift at the store ended at four o’clock. We went into the kitchen in our wet suits. Out on the porch, Paul Grant teased Jane, whose laughter rang out, a bell-like sound. Through the screen door I could smell the joint they’d lit.

Del and I stood dripping in the kitchen. Neither of us had spoken. I took two beach towels from the linen closet, and we wrapped up in them. I breathed in the smell of the kitchen—my grandmother’s bread, her cinnamon tea. I expected Del to look confused, but her eyes greeted mine with a glinting alertness. We needed to join everyone on the porch. The sooner we pretended nothing had happened, the more real it would seem that nothing had.

I went outside first. Jane saw me and called me over. I took the joint from her fingers, trying to keep my hand from shaking.

“Where were you?” she said, her eyes laughing. “You missed the drama.”

It seemed that a boy had nearly drowned, and Jane had saved him. He was a middle school kid, who sat on the porch steps, looking peaked.

I listened to the story, told by two or three people at once—how Jane had jumped in to drag him out, how she’d given him mouth-to-mouth. The kid looked so mortified, it was a wonder he didn’t run home. Del came outside then and sat on the railing. No one questioned us about our damp hair, the bits of straw in Del’s. The rain stopped, but none of us wanted to go swimming again, and eventually everyone left. Del and I were alone. When the sun came out I pictured David Pinney beneath the willow shade, his mouth on mine, the rough press of his dry lips. The moment in the barn pivoted on the horror afterward: his empty eyes, the sheen of sweat that remained on his skin.

That evening, a dog showed up at the kitchen screen door, a stray, scratching and whining to be let in. My grandmother, home by then, shooed it off the porch. But that night, the dog remained nearby, barking and howling. Below our bedroom window its nails scrabbled on the porch boards. Del had the first of what would become a series of sleepless nights, murmuring, sitting up in bed and pacing the room. She turned on the little milk glass lamp between our beds.