Waiting for Christopher Read online

  waiting for christopher

  a novel by

  Louise Hawes

  Waiting for Christopher

  All Rights Reserved © 2002, 2013 by Louise Hawes

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the author.

  First Edition published 2002 by Candlewick Press. This digital edition published by Halcyon Hall c/o Authors Guild Digital Services.

  For more information, address:

  Authors Guild Digital Services

  31 East 32nd Street

  7th Floor

  New York, NY 10016

  ISBN: 9781625360618

  For Lily, born in love

  You will not come? You will not be my comforter, my rescuer? My deep love, my wild woe, my frantic prayer, are all nothing to you?

  —Charlotte Brontë, JANE EYRE

  She didn’t read books so she didn’t know that she was the world and the heavens boiled down to a drop.

  —Zora Neale Hurston, THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD

  contents

  prologue

  one

  two

  three

  four

  five

  six

  seven

  eight

  nine

  ten

  eleven

  twelve

  thirteen

  fourteen

  fifteen

  sixteen

  seventeen

  eighteen

  nineteen

  acknowledgments

  a note from the author

  about the author

  prologue

  Whenever she could, Feena brought Christopher something from outside. She sneaked in when he was supposed to be napping, when the steady thump thump thump of the washer meant their mother was in the basement, folding warm sheets, baby clothes and diapers, T-shirts that said things like I MY CAT or U.S. BREATHING TEAM. Feena knew what the shirts said, because she’d asked over and over until she’d learned them all by heart. Which made her mother smile and her father laugh and pick her up. “Forget kindergarten,” he’d tell her. “You’re going straight to college.”

  Sometimes she brought her brother little things, like a moth wing or an elderly dandelion, all whiskers and silk. They were pieces of the world she knew he needed to look at and touch, things her mother didn’t allow in the nursery. She slipped them between the bars of his crib, then pushed them to where he could see.

  Bigger presents, like the rusty sand pail she’d found, with a yellow handle and a circus seal painted on the side, she would drag with her to the top of the crib rail, then throw herself over, landing beside the baby, both of them laughing loudly until she put a hand over his mouth. “We’ll get time-outs,” she’d warn him, suddenly stern. “If you don’t be quiet, I won’t get you any more stuff.”

  But as soon as she uncovered his mouth, Christopher would start giggling and wiggling again, like a wind-up toy you couldn’t stop. Feena figured he smiled at her so much because she was the only one who guessed how awful it was not to be able to walk around by yourself. Because she brought him bits of life that hadn’t had the fun washed out of them.

  She knew she was four years older than Christy, so she decided she would have to wait that long for him to catch up. But that was okay. It was worth it. Because when he got to be as old as she was, Feena wouldn’t need to be a big sister anymore. She’d never have to Wait just a minute or Keep those dirty hands to yourself or Let the baby sleep, for God’s sake, can’t you see I’m tired.

  As soon as her brother could walk, she’d show him the dead bird behind the garage, a wet, ragged hole where one of its eyes should be, its feet curled so tight you couldn’t open them no matter what. When he learned to talk, she’d tell him about the sneakers with red laces in the store that had elevators. Feena knew he’d be mad at Mommy. “She was bad,” he’d say, “not to let you buy those beautiful sneaks. Your feet grow fast; they’ll be big enough soon.”

  The day she found the pinecones, she waited a long time, hoping her mother would come out of Christy’s room and go downstairs. She stood just outside his door, opening and closing her hands over them. She guessed he would like the way they smelled, but she worried they might leave sticky patches of brown sap on his cheeks, like the ones inside her palms.

  Why was her mother taking so long? Wasn’t there any laundry to do? She squeezed her fingers over the sharp, shaggy points of the cones and watched tiny half-moons appear and disappear in her skin. Was Christy going to skip his nap today? She tried to see through the hair- thin crack between the door and its frame, but it was dark in there, as if she’d closed her eyes and was looking through her lids. When she heard someone crying, she knocked on the door, but nothing happened. The sobs grew heavy and hard, not at all like her brother’s high, stuttery wail. That was when she’d jammed all three pinecones into one hand and pushed open the door.

  Some surprises are good, like a ponytailed doll for your birthday. And some surprises, like the time Daddy spanked her and left the red mark of his hand on her leg, make you feel as if you’ve swallowed too much ice, as if you’re going to stay cold forever. Now, standing just inside the door, Feena saw so many people in Christopher’s room, she couldn’t tell which of them was crying. How had they gotten there? Had they all tiptoed upstairs while she was watching cartoons?

  At first, she thought it might be her mother who was crying. She tried to see past the forest of trouser legs and jeans and shimmering nylons to the baby’s crib. He would be scared, she knew, with so many visitors at once. She pushed her way through a few of the clustered adults but was stopped before she could reach her brother. A woman with very red lips and a scratchy jacket picked her up. Feena arched back over the woman’s shoulder, stretching toward the crib. “Christopher?” she called, dropping two of the pinecones. “Where’s Christy?”

  “Your brother’s not here, dear,” the woman told her, holding Feena’s legs too tight, carrying her toward the door. “Aunty Bell’s going to take you outside for a bit. Would you like that?”

  From her uncomfortable perch, Feena considered the woman’s face, its porous, vaguely familiar contours. Then she stared down at the single pinecone left in her hand. It was probably too prickly, anyway, she decided. She would bring him a tuft of the shiny green needles instead. “Where’s Christy?” she asked again.

  “He’s gone to heaven,” the woman said, mashing Feena against the hairy jacket. “He’s gone to heaven to play with the angels.”

  But Christopher wasn’t playing with angels. Her mother explained things to Feena later, after the crying had stopped and everyone who didn’t live with them had gone back to their own houses. She told Feena that sometimes babies stop breathing and no one knows why. Even though it’s usually old people who die, she said, every once in a while, a baby dies, too. When Feena remembered the bird she’d found and asked if Christopher still had both his eyes, her mother made a strange, thin bleating sound. Feena had never heard anything like it before, and she tried to make it herself, rocking back and forth in the dim light from the hall, before her father came to put her to bed.

  Usually they read a book, but that night Daddy didn’t open the one they were already halfway through. Instead, he sat beside her in the dark and told a story, a story about how Christopher was going to sleep under the ground. About how the three of them could go and talk to him, even though they wouldn’t be able to see him or pick him up or play so-o-o-o-o big.

  And that’s what they did—every Friday, as soon as
her father got home from work. She knew when it was Christy’s day, because Daddy didn’t walk into the kitchen and open the refrigerator and drink right out of the orange-juice carton. He didn’t yell, “Feena, Feena, where you beena?” and pull her onto his lap. Instead, he stayed in the car and honked the horn until Feena and her mother had grabbed their sweaters and gotten in beside him.

  Each time they drove to the cemetery, she brought along something for her brother to play with. The day she remembered about the pine needles, her father helped her scatter them around the stone with Christopher’s name cut into it. “How will he get them?” Feena worried. “How will he know they’re here?”

  Her father’s forehead was so pale, she could see a spider web of blue veins under his skin. “He’ll know,” he told her. He patted the ground once, then stood up. “He has to, Feenie. He just has to.”

  But Feena wasn’t so sure. The only thing she knew for certain was that her brother was to be pitied now more than ever. Being in a little cage with arms and legs that hadn’t learned to work yet was bad. Lying still behind the garage, with only one eye and feet as blue as nails, that was horrible, too. But sleeping under the ground, cold and alone and afraid of the dark—that was the worst thing she could imagine.

  “No,” she said, when her father tried to pull her to her feet. She folded her arms, turned away from him.

  “No,” she insisted when her mother doubled back from the car and stooped beside her, patting her shoulder, smoothing her hair. “I’m not going.” Pine needles pricked her legs, and tears, warm as baby’s milk, worked their way to the corners of her mouth. “I’m waiting for Christopher,” she said. “I’m waiting right here till he wakes up.”

  one

  Moving from Connecticut to Florida had sounded like a good idea last year. But last year, moving to Katmandu would have had its appeal. After skipping eighth grade and going straight to high school, after being catapulted from the few friends she’d made at Byrd Middle School into the relentless fashion-and-personality meat grinder of Edgemoor Senior High, Feena would have gone to the ends of the earth to escape another semester of humiliation and loneliness.

  That, of course, was before she’d seen the house her mother had rented for them. “It’s a little out of the way,” Lenore Harvey had explained, slipping coffee mugs into blister packs, nesting them in one of the cardboard cartons they’d talked the A&P manager out of flattening. “But it’s got two bedrooms and it’s affordable and”—a rare half smile—“we’ll never be cold again!”

  None of this had been a lie, Feena conceded now, studying the sliver of grass and the tiny box-shaped house with its arched door like the brick oven in a pizzeria. She had laughed when she’d christened their new home “the Pizza Hut,” but it was hard to look at it without wishing she were anywhere else, even back in Connecticut.

  Inside, the house was mean and cramped, with three small rooms that were nearly identical: same shape, same color, same postage-stamp window half filled with an air conditioner that proved next to useless against Florida’s roiling, steamy heat.

  And the outside was worse. Much worse. From the moment she’d seen it, Feena knew the Pizza Hut would seal her fate, confirm her role as social outcast. No matter how sophisticated or funny or charming she made herself, no matter how much mousse she used or how well she fitted in at her new school, she was bound to be a Loser with a capital L as soon as anyone found out where she lived.

  The tiny house was squeezed between a large asphalt parking lot—where Feena now sat in their ‘89 Chevy, running the air and reading her favorite novel for the umpteenth time—and Ryder’s Fun Land, where six giant flying teacups were just slowing down, the one with the red handle, like always, finishing on top. In front of the house was a narrow strip of earth in which, before she knew better, Feena had tried to grow a garden, had spent weeks propping up seedlings, watering, weeding.

  …Amidst the drenched piles of rubbish, spring had cherished vegetation: grass and weed grew here and there between the stones and fallen rafters. And oh! where meantime was the hapless owner of this wreck? In what land?

  As Jane Eyre pondered the blackened remains of Thornfield Hall, Feena had only to raise her eyes a few inches to find a far less romantic ruin. It was an overstatement to call Ryder’s an amusement park. A ten-hole miniature golf course and three kiddie rides on a backwater highway were a joke, but nobody Feena knew was laughing: not Feena, when stragglers trooped across their yard, crushing the watercress shoots and baby lettuce as soon as they showed aboveground; not old Peter Milakowski, who’d bought the park when Route 56 was the only shore road out of Ocala, and who’d watched the new four-lane thruway make him a failure overnight; not even the handful of sticky, whiny toddlers whose mothers scooped them out of shopping carts and car seats and highchairs, only to plop them into fiberglass tugboats and fire engines and teacups.

  As for the golf course, Feena had never seen anyone besides Mr. Milakowski set foot on it. Every morning, he swept the strip of green carpeting, then put out three rows of golf clubs, their silver shafts glinting from under the roof of the small ticket booth. Carefully, he arranged pencils and scorecards, enough for a dozen players.

  Who never came. Each night, Mr. Milakowski turned off the machine that moved a plastic tiger’s tail back and forth, back and forth across the narrow opening to the tenth hole. He pulled all the clubs inside the booth, and locked the door. “Gulf,” he told Feena whenever she helped, matching the careful pace of his arthritic fingers, slipping the clubs one by one into the storage stand. “Where is a kid who really likes this gulf?”

  “Only if I pay for fancy volcanoes that are shooting steam. Only if I buy talking robots and pirate ships does anyone care to play this game.”

  But in his countenance I saw a change: that looked desperate and brooding—that reminded me of some wronged and fettered wild beast or bird, dangerous to approach in his sullen woe. The caged eagle, whose gold-ringed eyes cruelty has extinguished, might look as looked that sightless Samson.

  Her mother would be furious if she were to come home early from work and find Feena running the engine like this. But it was such a relief to feel the rush from the vents, to read as the air conditioner hummed, to let the tragic story in her book overwhelm the comedy of living where she lived, being who she was.

  And who was she, anyway? A fourteen-year-old misfit with too much red hair and skin so pale it looked as though she spent her days under a rock (which, if she wanted to avoid being blistered by the Florida sun, wouldn’t have been a bad idea). While other girls were confident and quick, with knowing, fluid bodies and an endless supply of MTV patter, Feena felt trapped by her chalky flesh, her cautious, unreliable brain that arrived at the perfect retort, the ideal comeback after it was too late and nobody else cared.

  “How come you’re always alone, Feen?” Feena knew exactly what her mother would say if she found her here. “Aren’t kids your age supposed to run in packs? You never do anything but turn pages.”

  Was that any worse than watching television every waking second?

  How many times had Feena had to compete with Days of Our Lives or As the World Turns? How many confessions had she made, how many jokes had she told, to the back of her mother’s head?

  “Can’t you see I’m tired?” Lenore would ask, her eyes velcroed to the big screen Sony. “Honest, Feen. Weekends are the only time I’ve got to relax. Can’t you just leave me be?”

  Rochester and Jane. Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Angel. Heathcliff and Cathy in Wuthering Heights. Maxim de Winter, haunted by the mysterious Rebecca. Maybe, Feena admitted, the characters she adored were just as storm tossed, every bit as overblown as the soap opera stars her mother followed. But at least they were partly Feena’s creations, their faces and bodies and voices filled out by her imagination. She could even take them with her, read them into life in an idling car or a boring class. There was no limit to when or where or how much she could love them.

&nb
sp; Love wasn’t too strong a word for it, either. Whether Edward Rochester was real or not seemed irrelevant in the face of how much he meant to her. While everything around her—her brother, her father, her home—had faded away, Rochester remained, fixed and bright. She couldn’t remember Christopher’s face anymore, could hardly reconstruct her father’s. But Brontë’s hero was easy to see, to call up whenever she needed him.

  He was much older than she was, of course, but not as old as Mr. Milakowski. Probably her father’s age. Broad-chested, craggy, tortured. Even though the one photo her dad had sent in the eight years since he’d left showed a slender-bordering-on-skinny man with a sloppy smile that didn’t remotely suggest tragedy, Feena always pictured Rochester with her father’s storm-green eyes and uncombable copper-colored hair.

  And if Tyler Harvey—tall and funny, with a laugh like deep water—could look at Feena the way he used to when she was little, could hold her to him, then push her away and lock on to her eyes as if what he saw there answered all the questions he’d ever had, why then, that explained how Rochester could fall in love with his plain Jane.

  The muscular hand broke from my custody; my arm was seized, my shoulder—neck—waist—I was entwined and gathered to him.

  “Is it Jane? What is it? This is her shape—this is her size—”

  “And this her voice,” I added. “She is all here: her heart, too. God bless you, sir! I am glad to be so near you again.”

  “Jane Eyre!—Jane Eyre,” was all he said.

  How strange to sit here, Feena thought, to glance up from the page where Rochester, blind and helpless as a wounded lion, stood once more beside his little Jane—to peer through the dust-specked window of the Chevy at the amusement park. She closed the book and watched the whirling tea cups slow, watched three mothers lift three cranky little girls from their perches.