The Last Romantics(12)

The Pause could not go on forever. We knew this. There were dangers. We were children alone, the four of us, without protection or instruction, and while Renee played the part of quasi mother, she buckled under the weight. Unsustainable, I wrote later. Unsupportable, hazardous, perilous, unsafe.

The year that Renee turned thirteen, she grew high, round nubs on her chest and hair that went lank and greasy just days after her bath. She exuded a musty, earthy smell and was inhabited by a new atmosphere of churning activity like a spirit possessed. We had all seen the movie Poltergeist, and I thought that this was the only explanation for my sister: an otherworldly occupation.

One night Renee was late coming home. After cross-country practice, she always caught the late bus at five thirty, but it was now six fifty and dark, and still no sign of her. Joe and Caroline and I made ourselves cheese sandwiches for dinner and chewed silently on the couch, plates on our laps, watching the door. Twice Joe said he should call the school, but he hadn’t, not yet.

“What if she doesn’t come back?” Caroline said. She was ten years old and afraid of spiders, the kitchen garbage disposal, and the grrr sound Joe made only to frighten her. Nightmares still plagued Caroline and would well into her twenties.

I was undisturbed by Renee’s mysterious absence. Life without Renee was simply impossible. She made charts that listed our chores, homework, Joe’s baseball schedule, Caroline’s flute concerts, her own cross-country practices and meets. Renee ensured that we wore clean clothes to school, brushed our teeth, brushed our hair, caught the school bus, did our homework. Renee relit the pilot light on the furnace when it sputtered out. She forged Noni’s signature on checks and permission slips. She cooked spaghetti and frozen peas and pancakes from the Bisquick box. We had learned to exist without our mother, but we could not exist without Renee.

“Maybe,” Caroline said, “we should wake up Noni.” We hadn’t seen our mother today. We hadn’t seen her yesterday either.

“No,” said Joe. “I’ll go find Renee.” I saw in him the same air of responsibility, of taking charge, that he’d worn when Ace fell off the dam.

“I want to come,” I said.

Joe crouched down to look me in the eye. “Fiona, it’s better if I go alone. I’ll go faster. And you need to keep Caroline company. Keep her safe.”

I expected Caroline to dispute this, but she only nodded. “Yes, Fiona, stay with me. Please.” Caroline’s eyes were going red, her voice shook.

And so I stayed as Joe disappeared out the door, into the night. Caroline and I sat on the couch to wait. We did not talk or turn on the TV; we finished our sandwiches and listened intently for a sound, any sound, to come from Noni’s room.

Forty-five minutes passed, perhaps an hour, and at last the front door opened and Renee and Joe, both breathless and agitated, tumbled inside. Relief flooded me, a rush I had not known I was waiting for. Caroline burst into tears.

“What happened?” I asked. “Where were you?”

Renee pulled roughly at the curtains, clicked the lights off, and chased us all into the kitchen at the back of the house. Her manner was short and urgent. On her left cheek, there was a bloodied scrape, the skin swollen, and all at once, for the first time that night, I felt afraid.

“Sit down,” she ordered, and we sat at the kitchen table.

A car had been parked at the bus stop, Renee told us, a brown car with a man in the driver’s seat. An elbow out the window, sunglasses although it was dusk, the sun nearly gone.

“Baby,” he called to her. “I’ve seen you. Want a ride?”

It was a fifteen-minute walk from the bus stop to our house. Renee did not want a ride, not from this man, and she told him so, but he began to follow her, the car inching along the road. No other cars passed, and Renee felt cold and very weak.

“I didn’t think I could run fast enough,” she said. Renee, who was a natural runner, whose thighs were the circumference of my arm, who galloped along the rocky cross-country trail in meet after meet, winning medal after medal, the child of a mountain goat and a gazelle. She had never before said there was a race she couldn’t win.

“I didn’t know what to do,” she continued. “I was afraid he would follow me here, so I went down another street and then another, and then he stopped the car behind me, and I ran and hid in the Hunters’ backyard. There was a swing set with a slide—like in the yellow house, remember? I hid under the slide until I heard Joe calling for me.”

Joe had wandered the neighborhood, walking in circles away from our house, he told us, calling Renee’s name.

“But what about your cheek?” I asked. “Who hurt you?”

Renee gingerly touched the spot on her face as though discovering it for the first time. “Oh. I . . . um . . .”

“She scraped it on the slide,” said Joe. “She ran out so quickly she didn’t duck low enough. So she hit it.”

Renee nodded tentatively, then with more force. “Yes, that’s it,” she murmured, again touching her face. “The slide.”

The man who called Renee “baby” never returned. It was an isolated incident, but it infected us in a way I didn’t understand until much later. Renee stopped taking the late bus and would now wait until her coach was finished for the night and could drive her home. Caroline’s nightmares doubled in frequency and ferocity. I stopped roaming the neighborhood as freely as I once had. Perhaps this was for the best—a check on our behavior, a lean toward safety—but I remember it only as a chill up my spine, a dampness to my palms. The idea that someone was watching us. That we were unsafe.