Hearts of Sand(94)

But no, Hope didn’t remember that. Everything fell apart in June that year, she was sure of it. The robberies. The accident. Marty’s funeral out at the New Hope Cemetery where the reporters all wanted to take pictures of Chapin instead of Marty’s parents. She could remember standing at the edge of the grave with that big hole dug into the ground and somebody droning on and on about an eternal life nobody really believed in. She had a bandaged arm. She had bruises all over her face. She looked a mess, and her mother told her so, even as she was making everything ready for a decent funeral appearance.

“You don’t see Chapin all battered up like that,” her mother had said. “You don’t see Virginia all battered up, either.”

“They were in the backseat,” Hope had said.

This was true. Virginia and Tim and Chapin were in the backseat. Marty and Kyle and Hope herself were in the front. It was an old car, which her mother called “vintage,” because she didn’t want to admit that Marty could barely afford anything else. There was a long front seat without any buckets. None of them ever wore seat belts.

“I don’t care where you were,” her mother had said. “What will the Warings think of us?”

It was years before Hope understood how odd that sentence had been—how odd it was for everybody to worry about the Warings, and the Brands, but not about the Veers, who had lost a child. She remembered Evaline at the funeral, standing close to the casket with a furious, mulish scowl on her face, not looking at anybody. It was years afterwards before Evaline would talk to any of the people who had been her brother’s friends. The first person she talked to was Hope—because, she said, Hope was the only one of them who had ever cared if Marty lived or died.

The parade was over, and Hope didn’t remember any of it. She didn’t remember the marching bands. She hadn’t even heard them. She didn’t remember the floats or the Girl Scouts or anything else. The road all around her was nearly devoid of people. Everyone was going on to one of the picnics. Or maybe it was earlier than that. Maybe the speeches were still going on at the War Memorial.

She waited for a while and then stood up. She had to. She couldn’t sit all day on this bench, with nobody else around. She started up Beach Drive and back toward town. It was very hot, and she felt very dizzy.

If she was honest with herself, she had to admit that everything had started to fall apart long before Marty died, and long before the robberies became a public issue. Only Chapin looked as if she didn’t care one way or the other.

Hope looked around. She had reached a street she didn’t recognize. It was a “nice” street, with houses set back from the sidewalks. The houses were smaller than the ones on Beach Drive, but most houses anywhere were smaller than those. The houses were also newer than the ones in Hope’s own part of town, but that wasn’t strange either. The houses in Hope’s part of town were some of the oldest ever built on the Continent.

Hope wished she knew more or less where she was. There had been so much construction in Alwych in these last thirty years. The lots were smaller and the houses were bigger, and the houses were full of people nobody had ever known.

It was so hot, the air felt thick and patterned. It would be better if there were a bench somewhere along here, but Alwych didn’t have benches except in the middle of town. Why had she come out here to begin with? She wasn’t sure.

It was really very hot. It was very, very hot. Hope’s head hurt, but it felt as if it were floating about her neck, way into the stratosphere, so that it had nothing to do with her. She was nauseated, but the nausea was halfway up her chest, not in her stomach. She needed to stop moving and sit down. If she didn’t do that, she was going to fall down. She felt enormously stupid. She hadn’t had to walk all the way to Beach Drive. She could have walked to the train station. The War Memorial was only a little ways from there. She could have stayed home. That would have been an even better idea.

Hope stopped still and closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She was swaying. She could feel it. She didn’t know what would happen if she fell down. She didn’t know if anybody in any of these houses was at home. She had her cell phone, but she wasn’t sure if it was working or not.

On the day of Marty’s funeral, Hope had thought she was going to pass out right there in the church. She had stood in the pew for the singing and Chapin had been there right beside her, with that horrible smirk on her face, that horrible smirk that said she knew everything that had happened, and that nothing she didn’t know mattered at all.