Swoon 02 - Swear Read online

  I nod, keeping her in my sights as she takes two shallow breaths in and out.

  Then, woodenly, Marsh fills me in about the Saturday night before Crane disappeared. The place: the Spot at Swoon Lake.

  The reason: a little makeout session. Yet as the night went on and neither one wanted to go home, they drifted off in each other’s arms, on their blanket by the shore. And Crane started talking in his sleep. Mumbling, more like. Groaning. Until all at once he shot up, waking Marsh with a start, and yelled the name “Antonia!”

  IX

  A bond betrayed . . . with a dead girl? Oh, to wave my hand with a cavalier “pshaw!” Trouble is, I know for a fact that phantoms can be seriously persuasive, and a lot firmer than Casper the Friendly would have you believe. If Crane was cheating with Antonia Forsythe, isn’t it conceivable he willingly went AWOL? Maybe the rock Duck spied wasn’t intended for Marsh at all, which actually makes sense—in the 1700s, it was common to put a ring on it at an early age.

  It’s almost as if my thoughts ticker across my forehead.

  Marsh pushes out of her chair and bolts. I tear out after, to find her losing her lunch behind a hedge. Lunch lost, she assures me in a quiet voice that she’s fine, she’d just like to go home—she needs to clean up before her shift at the Double K. On the way, she keeps mum; I can only imagine what’s raging behind the big round sunglasses that swallow her face.

  Finally, as we turn onto Daisy Lane, Marsh says, “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t discuss what we dug up today with Duck or Pen . . . or anybody.” Too upset even to look at me, she stares straight ahead. “Not yet . . . I just want . . . I don’t want . . . I need to process . . .”

  “Marsh, of course.” The promise springs automatically, yet soon as it does, I wonder how I’ll manage to keep it. Following the questions has momentum, like rolling down a hill. Still, a few days shouldn’t matter much—in fact, it ought to be beneficial. Marsh is in disaster mode; she needs to chill, see things rationally, remember that Crane’s been crazy about her from the get. So I stuff the idea of some eighteenth-century hussy turning his head. “Whatever you say,” I vow, though I, too, talk to the windshield.

  Once Marsh goes to work, I push the day’s research away.

  Knock out some easy homework, check the progress of my garden, pop in a yoga DVD. But a girl can only putter so much, and the prospect of Antonia Forsythe lurks around the nooks and crannies of my gray matter. Maybe I should eat something . . . or, no, I know: I plug iPod into laptop and start a blues playlist, stuff I could see Bruise Blue doing. Tosh had mentioned Big Mama Thornton; she’s kind of an idol. Made

  “Hound Dog” famous. Everyone thinks Elvis, but no. Plus, she recorded with Muddy Waters and—the phone jangles, and I scowl at an unfamiliar number.

  “So what are you up to?” Tosh asks, like he’s interested, not as a figure of speech. How quick the scowl reverses.

  “Making a playlist, actually.” Pacing as I speak—not nervous, just . . . energized. “Blues we could do.”

  “Great minds think like mine!” He laughs when he says it, to show it’s a joke, not a gesture of ego. “And it is funny because—well, have you heard the latest? About Duck?”

  “That they hired a private eye? That a Crane-like individual was spotted in the Waterbury vicinity?”

  “That’s so this morning,” he informs me. “No. The father got the rent-a-cop, but the mother was against it. She figures New York is where a young man goes to ‘find himself,’ so she’s off to the city to snout him. Took Duck with her. He just called me from the Trump SoHo. Him and Mummy booked a suite.”

  “Yeah. Huh.” Flopping onto the couch, I feign disinterest.

  Get him off the topic so I won’t be tempted to bring up the fact-finding mission that occupied most of my day.

  “Which is why I’m calling.”

  Uh-oh . . .

  “This might sound cold, but I can’t let the trials and tribs of the Williamses dictate my life. So what I’m saying is, I’ve got a cheap Strat and a Thursday off, and you’ve got that rocks-into-butter vocal prowess, so what do you say we hang out and see what we can accomplish together? As a duo. Even if just for the interim, till those dudes get back.”

  Snuggling into the cushions, calf atop kneecap, foot bouncing. A “rocks-into-butter” voice, huh—is that what I have? I say, “Thursday . . .” Three days from now, acceptable advance notice. “Sure, I can do Thursday.”

  “Cool.”

  I can hear his grin. It keeps me plastered to the sofa awhile, happily contemplating the ceiling. Then I leap up, back to computer, cranking tunes as soon as I can download them, scoping lyric sites, running to the kitchen for a wire whisk microphone. RubyCat demands kibble, and I oblige, but I’m not hungry myself at all. I’m busy. I’m buzzing. I’m bluesing . . .

  X

  “You didn’t eat, did you?” Tosh, on the front porch of 12 Daisy Lane. In his hands, this enormous stew pot. At his feet, a bulg-ing shopping bag. Both exude an irresistible mingling of spices and tang.

  “You brought dinner.” I hold the screen door, nose-nodding toward the kitchen, then follow with the paper sack. I haven’t eaten, haven’t even thought about it, but all at once my appetite is turbocharged.

  “No big thang,” Tosh says. “It’s what I do.” I’m already pawing the packages, arranging containers on the counter. “Oh my God, I haven’t had a beef patty in the longest.” Am I visibly drooling? “Ooh, and roti. What you do, Tosh, is rock.” He puts his pot on the stove, looking a little disappointed somehow. “I suppose you’re into oxtail too, then?” he complains with a half pout. “Here I was, thinking I’d introduce you to a whole new culinary experience.”

  Bowls, forks, spoons, napkins, lots of napkins. “Sucks, huh?” I say, grinning. “Come on, Tosh, don’t tell me you took me for a native Swoonie?” I fill tall glasses with brewed ice tea. “There’s not a blond hair on my body, not a polo shirt in my wardrobe—and any plaid is meant to be ironic.”

  He laughs. “Yeah, dummy me.”

  Then we’re at the table, me moaning my compliments to the chef and him eating them up with as much gusto as we’re going at the food. We’re chatting about this and that, filling in details of our NYC selves (me: Upper West Side forever; him: Fort Greene via Toronto), clowning, gesticulating with silverware. It’s hard to stop shoveling it in—the dude can cook, okay—but I’d rather not be too stuffed to sing, so I cut myself off after seconds. We clear, and load the dishwasher—an inherent rhythm to that as well. Then we look at each other.

  And he says, “Uh . . . bathroom?”

  I point him in the right direction, then wash up quickly at the kitchen sink.

  “I’m in the living room!” I call when I hear him emerge. He unzips his gig bag; I fiddle with lyric sheets, both of us all business.

  (Wouldn’t Ruby snicker, though: “Business. Mm-hmm.”)

  “‘Spoonful’?” I propose.

  “Cool,” he says. Then, “What, you didn’t memorize it?” The paper in my hand would indicate a no.

  “Come on, Dice, you don’t need a crutch.” I know what he wants—he wants me loose, to feel it, move with and be moved by the blues. And I can’t very well clutch a lyric sheet if we ever get the chance to perform.

  “If you forget, make something up.”

  He’s urging, not bullying, like he knows I can do it but it’s up to me. So I let the page go. Tosh delivers the riff of intro and then I let loose. Only I don’t wag it and brag it à la Howlin’ Wolf; I smolder on up to it, like a woman would: “Just a little spoon of your precious love satisfies my soull. . .”

  Enslaved to the song yet owning it too—this yin-yang, push-pull thing going on. Right about then, the we’re-not-alone feeling sneaks in like a vapor. Close as a whisper, and that hushed. Until it’s not so near, not so quiet. Thunk! on the front porch. Thunk!

  “What the?” Tosh pockets his pick.

  The thudding continues, and with it other noises—a scr
eech, a scrambling, a susurrant hiss. Something is out there. No, uh-uh, some things. Yet whatever’s in here—an amorphous pressure, a tantalizing nontouch—has me rooted to the spot.

  Peeling off his Strat, Tosh hurries to the window, then the screen door. He finds the light switch, plunging us into darkness to better see what’s happening by moonbeams. “Dice!” Back to the window—for a better view? a safer one?—he beckons.

  I want to join him. Too bad I can’t move. Until ultimately the ethereal emulsion floats me not to Tosh’s side but toward the door, and there they are. Owls and nighthawks perching on the porch rail. Bats like furry black pears hanging from the eaves. Brazen badgers and raccoons snag the best spots, front and center on their haunches, while shyer creatures—deer, skunks, possums—position in the cheap seats across the front lawn. The nocturnal audience stares in at us, beautiful, unblinking.

  “Are you seeing this?” Tosh needs confirmation. “It’s a casting call for Noah’s Ark out there!”

  “Yeah,” I say, or try to—I’m not sure sound comes out. Then I’m aware of a sweet, insistent throbbing, not just you-know-where but everywhere, the endless cavern gated by my sternum, the delicate nuances of my ears, those ticklish spots on either side of my knees. It makes me acknowledge that what’s going on isn’t simply animal but spectral. I shut my eyes to the birds and the beasts and open my heart to their sovereign, he who sent them, the one who wants to be here, with me, but cannot.

  A breath, a breath, and then the hold breaks into countless intangible crystal splinters. “Tosh, come on . . .” When he doesn’t respond, I step deliberately to the window and tug his elbow—the shock that greets my fingers not shocking at all. “Let’s just play.” So we do. We play great. Inspired by the confluence of our new fans—some fierce, some mild, all consummately wild—Tosh taps into this articulate yet aching place. As to my singing, well, he doesn’t know who I’m singing to; all he hears is the fathomless bruised blue yearning of a girl who lost her love.

  XI

  Do animals come and go over the next hour or so? I pay no attention. Only when car doors slam do I hear the roaring flutter of takeoff, the mad patter of hooves and paws. Then human voices, trilling, cursing, out-and-out bugging.

  “Uccch! Goddamn owll took a crap on me!”

  I know that voice—and I don’t like it. Teeth clench, dander rises as Marsh, Duck, Pen, and Kurt Libo spill through the front door. Ucch. While not opposed to partaking of his product now and then, I do not want Kurt Libo in my house. Of course, none of these people knows that. And judging by the look of them, they’re beyond the curve of explanation.

  “Hi, Dicey! Hi, Toshy!” Duck rushes up to embrace us both.

  Profusely.

  “Hey, Duck.” I wriggle free of his sweaty armpit. “Good to see you.”

  “Oh, you too!” he effuses. “I missed you! Both of you! So much!

  Oh, but look: You’re together! Lovely!”

  Tosh and I trade a glance, then survey our friends. A blissed-out Marsh drops her purse in the middle of the floor and swings our way to kiss me hello like we haven’t seen each other in eons. Pen, remarkably, isn’t eating, but sips, sloth-eyed, from a large water bottle and leans on Kurt, who looks at me obliquely under his Cro-Mag unibrow.

  “Heyyyyy, Dice.” Monkey Boy has the temerity to greet me.

  “Kurt,” I creak, as opposed to, say, launching myself at him, ninja-style.

  “Heyyyyy, guess what?” he asks with a leer.

  “You’ve got X.”

  “Whoa!” from Kurt. In fact, a chorus of whoas. Like I had to be precog to pick that up.

  I turn to Tosh. “You know this guy?” I refuse to make a proper introduction. “Swoon’s most celebrated dope dealer?” Tosh flattens his mouth with distaste—mirroring me—but one corner, and then the other, perks up.

  Meanwhile, Kurt bounds over, pumps Tosh’s hand, slaps him on the biceps. “Hey, whoa, nice axe! Yours, man?” Marsh, having picked up the Strat, attempts to either tango with it or strangle it. Then Pen approaches and they both tangle up in the strap. Tosh notices but seems more amused than alarmed—he’d called it cheap, but still.

  Kurt slings an arm around Tosh and leans toward me. “So, Missy Madame Smarty-pants . . . want a hit? Come on, on me.”

  “Perhaps you don’t realize this is a school night.” “Perhaps you don’t realize that phenylethylamine turns the brain into Swiss cheese.” “Perhaps you don’t realize how much I hate, loathe, and abhor you.” I could say any of those things. Instead, I say, “Okay.” Having readily succumbed to peer pressure, Tosh and I catch up to our friends’ ecstatic mind frame about twenty minutes later—but thanks to mass quantities of Jamaican food still in our digestive tracts, our experience is mellower. Still, we join in for the requisite dancing, and then everybody wants to cuddle R.C., marveling over the softness of her fur. And by now we’ve paired off. Duck and Marsh, on the living room floor, spinal columns to the couch and heads bent together like wilting flowers, console each other with Crane stories. Pen and Kurt cavort at the old tire that dangles from a backyard elm. Time was, those two might have gotten physical, but no amount of “love drug” can resuscitate that, not with the twenty-pound walls Pen’s put up.

  The least odd couple sits on the front-porch swing. We’re quiet, and for a moment I forget Tosh is here. A pervasive nostalgia sweeps over me—for the swing, the porch, the house, and yes, for Swoon.

  My mother’s recent visit had her meeting with a realtor; the place is on the market now, which makes sense, what with my imminent return to the city for college. Much as I want that, something binds me to this balmy night in the country, with beasts of the field and the essential soul-spark of my true love so close.

  “So can I ask you something?”

  Hmm? What? Oh, Tosh. “Sure.”

  “You don’t . . . do you have a boyfriend or anything?” Boy, when he asks a question, he doesn’t dick around. “No,” I say. I could leave it at that, but if Tosh is going there, don’t I owe him, oh, I don’t know, a big sign with flashing lights reading: danger! So I add, “Not really. I mean, I did, but . . .”

  “One of those on-and-off things, huh. Me and Tasha—my ex, yeah, we were Tosh and Tasha, if you can believe—anyway, we were like that for a minute. Then she went away to school and I moved here, and we never officially broke up but . . . we both know it’s over.” He can be so open about it. Nice for him. “She has an agenda, you know. A checklist. I can’t get with that, and besides, I’m more than a few requirements shy.”

  Musing, I say, “She’s lucky. She knows what she wants.”

  “You don’t?”

  Have I mentioned how adorable Tosh is? “Ha. Not a clue.”

  “Yeah.”

  We hydrate. We stare at nothing. We glide the glider.

  “So can I tell you something?”

  This is Tosh being coy. It’s dark; I wonder what color his eyes are.

  “No,” I say. “Just kidding. You can tell me anything.”

  “Good, because I want you to know, it doesn’t bother me.” Maybe I missed something. “Excuse me?”

  “Your . . . you know, the rosebush ambush and the piano prodigy thing, and let’s not forget the beastie bunch tonight. Some people would be freaked by it. Someone else might be into it. But to me, Dice, that woo-woo bugaboo stuff is a facet of who you are.

  I don’t like you in spite of it, and I don’t like you because if it. I just like you.”

  Good to know. And clearly this is where I’m supposed to say,

  “I like you, too.” And I do. But I don’t. I mean, I do like him, but I don’t tell him. Since what if it’s the X talking? We both believe we’re sincere in our sentiments, spoken or un-, but we do have some mighty chemicals coursing through our bloodstreams and pitchforking our brain pans, so right now we’re both suspect.

  The window of opportunity for me to speak must shut with a bang, since Tosh gets off the swing and walks to the rail. I feel li
ke an ass. He likes me, I like him—ergo, kissing should ensue. I stand to go to him, then whirl around—a verbal commotion from the house.

  “Marsh, how could you!” Duck whines.

  Tosh and I head in.

  “Don’t be mad at me, Duck!” Marsh wrings her wrists.

  “But this is crucial information! And you’ve been holding out on me for days!” Pacing, pink in the face, Duck rants on. “Why didn’t you call? You could have called!”

  “I know, I don’t know,” Marsh says desperately. “I was, I’m confused. I mean, if Crane were cheating with some girl from school, I could compete. But if he left me for Antonia Forsythe—I didn’t know what to do. I still don’t.”

  “Who’s Antonia Forsythe?” Pen is on the scene, and she must be coming down, since she asks this while poking around the fridge.

  “And you!” Duck turns his ire on me. “You knew too. This is my brother’s life at stake.”

  “Who’s Antonia Forsythe?” Pen asks again, sniffing a cold patty.

  “Antonia who?”

  Latecomer Kurt, T-shirt grass stained and eyes bleary, means we’re all present and accounted for. So I might as well bring everyone into the loop. “The historical society. Marsh and I went, checking for destruction and upheaval. We found out that Duck’s house was originally called Forsythe Manor, and Antonia Forsythe was, as they say, to the manor born. And also to the manor died. A fire in the east wing. In 1769.”

  Pen chews a large bite of seasoned beef, swallows, and pats her lips. “Seventeen sixty-nine?” she says. “Isn’t that the year—”

  “Yeah, Pen, ding-ding-ding!” I look right at Tosh when I reveal the latest tidbit I figured out: “Antonia Forsythe died in a suspicious fire six months before her father ordered the execution of my ex?”

  XII

  The sun rises over Swoon, but Tosh and I don’t witness this everyday miracle a deux. He pretty much clears out upon learning that the former flame I don’t like to talk about had been dead a few centuries before I met him. Duck also takes his leave, though not till I agree to further explore the spectral situation in the east wing—news of Sin’s previous existence further stoking his fixation. Pen? Kurt? I don’t know; I don’t see them. It’s just me and Marsh, sitting atop the backyard picnic table, basking in the colors of a new dawn.