I glanced back and saw him whispering in her ear. She nodded and smiled and then they turned and went into the living, room. I looked in on Mrs.
Westington and Echo, who was already in the bathtub, the water runnin g.
"Come here," she said, bringing me over to the tub. "Just look."
She pulled some strands of Echo"s hair apart and I could see the bugs.
"This is what wants to turn a new leaf and be a mother. Lord, give me the strength." She poured the shampoo into Echo"s hair and began to scrub.
"I can do that for you. Mrs Westington. Please.
Let me," I said.
She thought a moment and then stepped back. I shampooed Echo"s hair and rinsed it with the shower hose. Mrs. Westington stood by with a towel and wrapped her as soon as she stepped up and out of the tub.
"Let"s get this child to bed," she said. She told me where to find her pajamas. Echo put them on and Zot into bed. She still looked confused. dazed. Mrs.
Westington arranged her blanket and gave her a kiss.
"I"m going to sleep," she told me. She started out.
"Are you all right?" I signed to Echo.
Through her fatigue, she smiled and then brought her hands out from under the blanket to tell me.
"I had dinner with my mother. And she said she was sorry she left me," Echo told me. "She said she would never leave me again. Never."
Her happiness not only disappointed me, it frightened me. She was being set up for a great fall. I was positive, but I dared not contradict her or Rhona directly.
"People say things sometimes and forget," I told her.
"No," she said, and shook her head vehemently.
"She won"t forget. She promised."
All I could do was smile and nod. I kissed her on the forehead and told her to sleep tight. She nodded and hugged Mr. Panda to her.
When I stepped out into the hallway. I could hear Rhona"s and Skeeter"s laughter below. They had put on some music, not caring how loud it was and if it would disturb me or Mrs. Westington. I thought I heard the sound of something being knocked over, too. Their laughter stopped and then I heard Rhona moan. Skeeter laughed and Rhona cried out pa.s.sionately. They"re probably making love right on the living room floor. I thought, For a moment I was tempted to go look. I went into my room instead and closed the door.
I stood there in the darkness. trembling. How horrid all this had become. How sorry I felt for Mrs.
Westington. I was sure she would be having a troubled sleep tonight.
"Uncle Palaver," I whispered, "you taught me how to make coins and cards disappear. You even showed me how you could make me disappear after I crawled into your magic box on the stage. But you forgot to show me how to make a horrid person disappear."
That"s a bit of magic I"ll have to learn on my own. I thought, and went to bed dreaming that somehow, maybe through Destiny, I would find the way.
8.
Caught Naked .
Rhona and Skeeter didn"t come down for breakfast. They made lots of noise going up the stairway very late at night, completely inconsiderate of Mrs. Westinton and me, especially me. I heard Skeeter growl at my door, in fact, because he woke me and then I heard them both laughing. If Mrs.
Westington heard anything, she didn"t mention it. In the morning Echo kept looking for her mother to came down and even asked me if I thought she should go up to see if she was awake.
"They went to bed very late." I told her. "Let them sleep." Let them sleep forever. I thought. Maybe that was mean. but I couldn"t help it.
Just as I sat down to have breakfast with Echo and Mrs. Westington, the phone rang. She told me it was Tyler Monahan calling for inc. Echo didn"t know it was Tyler and I wasn"t about to tell her.
"How are things today?" Tyler asked. I told him what had happened the night before with Echo and how upset Mrs. Westington had been and still was.
"I guess this wouldn"t be a good time to bring up my leaving." he said.
"No. it wouldn"t. Tyler."
"Can you meet me tonight in your motor home after Echo goes to sleep?" he asked, confirming his promise to return.
Excitement trickled through me like a low voltage shock. I knew why he wanted to meet, of course, and it wasn"t to improve my academic skills for the equivalency exam.
"I suppose,:" I said.
"And could we turn that doll around?"
I laughed. "You"re the one who keeps saying it"s just a doll. Tyler."
"That"s not just a doll," he said. "Okay. I"ll put her in the bedroom."
"No, maybe leave her out of the bedroom.
That"s the one place I don"t want her to be," he said. I could feel myself blush. "One other thing. I think it might be better if I parked on the road and walked to the motor home. No need to let anyone else there know I"m around."
"Okay," I said. although I wasn"t comfortable with us sneaking about the property. Was he trying to keep all this secret from the people here or from his mother?
"I"ll be there about nine-thirty, waiting for you,"
he said.
Mrs. Westington looked curious about the phone call, but she didn"t ask me anything after I hung up and I didn"t volunteer anything. It"s better to say nothing rather than lie. I thought, and returned to the breakfast table to join Echo. Trevor hadn"t shown up for dinner the night before and had not come to breakfast either. I imagined he just didn"t want to see much of Rhona. As it turned out, he wouldn"t have risked it this particular morning. She and Skeeter didn"t come downstairs until nearly noon.
When they finally appeared, they were both dressed to go out, Rhona wearing one of her old dresses and a light blue leather jacket I had wished would fit me. and Skeeter in a relatively clean-looking pair of jeans, a blue shirt, and a jean jacket with all sorts of emblems with silly things written on them like Down with Milk. Mrs. Westington was in the kitchen. Echo and I were in the living room reading and working on some of her English grammar problems in preparation for her tutoring session the next day..
"Don"t bother making any breakfast for us.
Ma," Rhona called to Mrs. Westington from the hallway. "Skeeter and I are going to eat at the Mars Hotel in Healdsburg and then look at some properties we found out about last night. We"ll see you later.
Maybe Echo wants to go," she added.
"That girl needs to do her homework for tomorrow"s lessons,"
Mrs. Westington replied quickly.
"Oh. Well, we don"t want to interrupt that now, do we. Skeeter?"
"Absolutely not, Maybe we"ll take her to a movie or something tonight."
"A movie? How do you expect her to enjoy a movie if she can"t hear a word?"
"People used to go to silent movies. Ma,"
Rhona said. "You probably did," she added, and they both laughed.
"Silent movies were made differently." I offered from the doorway of the living room. "They had written words and the actors performed differently."
"Who said that?" she cried, pretending it was a voice from out of the blue. She turned and looked at inc. "Oh, you"re still here?" She turned her back on me and then marched to the front door. "C"mon. Skeeter, we have work to do," she called back to him.
He smiled licentiously at me and moved his tongue over his lower lip. Then he laughed and joined her at the door. They both laughed at something he whispered and then they walked out. I looked back at Echo. She hadn"t realized they had come down and I wasn"t about to tell her.
A short while after they had left. Trevor came in to see how things were and Mrs. Westington gave him an earful about the night before. He listened, shook his head sympathetically, and urged her not to let herself get too upset. She told him all about their request for money and why.
"I got a very bad feeling about those two," he told me when Mrs. Westington went upstairs. "I don"t think they"re here for the real estate business prospects they claim. Before they left yesterday, two men drove up and spoke with that Skeeter fellow, and both looked like they had been dragged out of a swamp.
My guess is they need money, but not to buy old houses to fix up. They have serious debts with bad people."
"What are we going to do?" I asked him.
"Nothing right now. All I got to go on is a feeling, but you watch and wait long enough and the rat comes out."
"To me it already has." I said.
He nodded and went out to the winery.
Meanwhile. Echo, impatient now, went looking for her mother and discovered she was gone. A look of panic came over her when she found out they had left.
Her hands were flying about like small birds trying to draw diagrams in the air. "Where were they? When did they leave? When were they coming back?"
"They have business here and had an appointment," I told her.
Maybe I was pa.s.sing on a lie as Trevor thought, but I didn"t want her worrying. I saw she couldn"t concentrate on our work. She was constantly thinking about her mother, looking alit the window for her and Skeeter"s return, so I asked Mrs. Westington if it would be all right to take Echo for a ride. "We"ll return to the mall," I told her. "I need some other things and Echo enjoyed it so."
She thought a moment and nodded. "It would be good to keep her mind off you know who," she said, reading my mind. "And I know you"re responsible and trustworthy enough to look after her."
When I told Echo, she was bright and happy again. This would actually be the first trip she had ever taken without her grandmother and Trevor Washington. I unhooked my car from Uncle Palaver"s motor home and brought it around to the front of the house.
"Where you headed?" Trevor asked. I told him and explained why.
"Can"t blame the girl. I guess," he said. "After you lose someone you love or someone who loves you, you"d forgive them all their sins and imperfections if you could have them back. You"d even make a deal with the devil."
"That"s who Echo would have to speak to about her mother," I told him, and he laughed.
"Have a good time," he said, and returned to his favorite work. I realized it was work that kept him in close contact with the best memories of his life. It was truly a labor of love, and despite all the complaining Mrs. Westington voiced about it, she was happy for him, maybe even envious. I wished I could find a way to reconnect with my good memories, too, reconnect without all the baggage of sadness that accompanied them.
I honked the horn and Mrs. Westington brought Echo out. She had helped her choose one of her new skirt and blouse outfits and she did look pretty. It was a partly sunny day with high brisk winds smearing the clouds over the blue sky so that they thinned out and spread like tattered white cloth toward the southwest.
Sunlight brought a brightness to her face the way it would open a flower.
Echo got into the car. She was very excited now, the short trip truly a major adventure in her eyes because it was just the two of us. She watched me drive and then told me Tyler had promised that soon he would teach her how to drive so she could be ready for her driving test when she was of age. She showed me some of the signing related to driving that he had already taught her, such as the signs for right and left turn, speeding up and slowing down. -Wasn"t it wrong to make such promises to her knowing he was inevitably going to leave much sooner than she ever imagined he would? I made a mental note to ask him about that later.
By the time we arrived at the mall, school had ended for the day and many of the students were already gathering at their favorite mall stores, pizza hangouts, and the arcade. I took Echo directly to the shoe store first to buy myself a new pair of running shoes. I remembered all the things Brenda had told me about good running shoes and sought them out, Afterward. I bought Echo a bread pretzel and a soda and just had a diet soda myself. She was intrigued by the other girls her age and couldn"t take her eyes off them while they flirted with boys and giggled. The worst wallflower wasn"t as outside of teenage society as poor Echo was. I thought. I should know. I had been one.
Once again, she was fascinated by the kids in the music store listening to music and riffling through CDs. To my surprise she wanted to go in. I had no idea what we would do there. but I agreed. She went to the racks and, watching how the others were doing it, began to sift through them, picking one out and reading about the artist or the band as if she was really thinking of buying it. I stood by smiling to myself until, imitating the others, she put a CD on a player and then put a pair of earphones on herself, too. How sad. I thought. If my heart were made of gla.s.s, it would have shattered in my chest.
When I tried to sign to her, she turned her back on me quickly so the others couldn"t see and discover she was deaf. She nearly pulled it off, too, but she caught the eye of a boy about a year or so older than she was and he sauntered over to her. He smiled at her and began to talk about the music she was playing. I could see her desperately trying to read his lips, but her fear of speaking poorly and his slightly turned head made it impossible for her to go on with her fantasy much longer. I saw the confusion in his face and so did she. She turned to me quickly in desperation and I had no idea what to do or say.
Instead. I moved in quickly and took the earphones off. stepping between her and the boy.
"What are you listening to?" I asked her, and put on the earphones. I grimaced. "You think this is good?" I asked the boy.
He glanced at Echo and then at me, his face filling with annoyance.
"I wasn"t talking to you." he said. "I was talking to her." He then sidestepped to ignore me and asked Echo who she was and where she went to school. He wanted to know why he hadn"t seen her before. Was she a new student?
I tried to prompt her, but she was too nervous to pick up the signals and he immediately caught her looking at me instead of at him.
"What the h.e.l.l"s going on?" he asked, his suspicions building.
"Nothing. Bug off," I said. I signed to Echo that we should leave quickly.
He caught my hand movements and his eyes widened.
"What are you doing?" He looked at her and then at me. She can"t hear?"
"That"s right, smart a.s.s." I said.
"Then why was she... what are you, both nuts?"
He shook his head and backed away as if we could infect him with some strange new disease.
I hurriedly put away the CD and seized Echo"s arm to turn her toward the door. The boy was already describing us to his friends, who all looked our way. I heard their laughter. Echo looked back and saw their faces of ridicule. Her face quickly fell into an expression of total embarra.s.sment. For her it was truly as if she had been caught naked. I tried to walk us down the mall corridor faster, but it was too late. The small group of teenagers decided we were to be their entertainment for the afternoon. We were too unusual to be ignored and a great alternative to their ordinary mall activities. They charged out of the music store behind us, a small clump of kids, laughing and hooting, which only attracted more attention and more of their friends.
No matter where we went, they tagged along, anxious to catch me signing to Echo, who by this time was so frightened and confused, she was trembling. I searched desperately for the nearest exit and directed her to it, hoping that when they saw we were leaving, they would get bored and return to their own interests.
But they were probably bored with themselves. I thought, for they weren"t discouraged. By now there were nearly twenty or so of them following us and the scene was attracting everyone"s attention, store clerks, adult customers, and security guards. Like nails to a magnet, other teenagers joined the moving mob.