Lippman, Laura by What The Dead Know (V1.1)(Html) Read Free Book Online Page A

expected to remember anything about that time. That was the tricky part. Not knowing what she should know but remembering what she
wouldn’t
know.
    What else? School #201. Dickey Hill. Predictable jokes about the name. A newer building at the time. Jungle gym, chin-up bars in three heights, a slide that became hot to the touch on June days, hopscotch and foursquare grids painted in bright yellow. There had been a merry-go-round, not the kind with horses but one of those rickety metal ones. No, wait, that hadn’t been at the school but somewhere nearby, some-place vaguely forbidden. In the Wakefield apartments that surrounded the school? In her mind she remembered the dirt track first, because she pushed more often than she rode. Head down, like a horse in harness, she had lined up behind the boys, linking her left arm into the metal bar and beginning to run, making the riders scream with delight. She saw the toe of her—she needed a second to remember the shoes. Not athletic shoes, which is why she got in trouble. She was wearing her school shoes, brown, always brown, because brown was practical. But even practical brown couldn’t stand up to the orange dust of that playground, especially after the April rains. She had come home with dirt caked onto the toes, much to her mother’s exasperation.
    What else could she tell them? There were eight sixth-grade teachers that year. Heather had the nice one, Mrs. Koger. They took the Iowa Basic Skills Test, and she was in the ninety-ninth percentile in everything. They did science projects that fall. She had netted crawfish from Gwynns Falls and put together an elaborate aquarium, but all four had died. Her father theorized that clean water was a shock to their systems after the murky, polluted stream and her exploration of that thesis had earned her an A anyway. Thirty years later she was beginning to have a clue how the crawfish had felt. You knew what you knew, you wanted what you wanted, even if it was literally scum.
    But, of course, this was not what they would demand of her. They didn’t want the story of Heather Bethany
before
1975. They wanted to know about the subsequent thirty years, and small details would not satisfy. She could not placate them with anecdotes about, say, her boxy little tape recorder. It was the first purchase she was allowed to make, a reward for six months of living by their rules, for proving her trustworthiness. They were okay with the tape recorder but appalled by the handful of tapes she bought as well. The Who, Jethro Tull, even some of the earlier punk bands. She would lie on the bumpy chenille bedspread, still in her school uniform, and listen to the New York Dolls and, later, the Clash. “Turn it down,” she was ordered. “Get your shoes off the bedspread.” She would obey, but everyone was still appalled. Perhaps they knew that she, like Holly in the Lou Reed song, was plotting to get on the bus and go take a walk on the wild side.
    The irony was that
they
put her on the bus, sent her away as if she were the criminal. They meant to be kind. Well, he did. Her?
She
was glad to see her leave. Irene had always resented her presence in the household—not because of the pretense required in the external world but because of the reality of what happened within the house.
She
was the one who carped about the shoes on the bedspread and insisted that the music be turned down to a whisper.
She
was the one who offered neither solace nor salve for the bruises, wouldn’t even help concoct a reasonable cover story for those badges of occasional resistance—the cut lip, the black eye, the hobbled walk.
You got yourself into this
, Irene’s placid manner seemed to suggest.
You brought this on yourself and destroyed my family in the bargain
. In her head she shouted back,
I’m a little girl! I’m just a little girl
! But she knew better than to raise her voice to Irene.
    The music drowned it all out. Even when it was turned down to whispery