Somebody Else's Music(10)

Mark stirred in the passenger seat beside her, moving his copy of Metamorphosis from one leg to another. He was only fourteen, but he was as big as most grown men—nearly six feet tall, and massive, the way Jay had been, but without the tendency to go to fat. Geoff was in the back, secured in a seat belt and a safety harness, fast asleep. Liz found herself wishing that she still smoked cigarettes. It would give her something to do with her hands, and something to distract her, so that she wouldn’t still be thinking about the rain barrel and about Belinda trying to seal it shut with the side of a big cardboard box she’d found lying against the garbage cans along the back of the house.

“Are you intending to drive this car, or do you mean for Scotty to beam us up the rest of the way?” Mark said. He had put his book down. It was dog-eared and half destroyed. Liz thought of the set direction at the beginning of A Long Day’s Journey Into Night. You knew the people in that house really read books, because the books did not look new.

“Earth to Elizabeth. Earth to Elizabeth. Are you okay?”

Geoff stirred in the backseat. He always woke up when the car stopped.

“Are we there?” He was going to say “are we there yet?” but stopped himself just in time. He had heard enough, from his mother and his brother, to know that was something you never said. It was worse than saying “shit.”

“Not exactly,” Mark said. “What about you?” he asked Liz. “Are you all right? You’re looking a little green. You could always change your mind, you know. We could always turn around and go right back to Connecticut—”

“I’m hungry,” Geoff said.

“We could eat on the road. We could get a motel room for the night. We could use that nifty cell phone you’ve got and call Jimmy to come and get us—”

“Cell phones don’t work up here,” she said. “The mountains are too high.”

Liz took her foot off the brake and let them roll slowly forward. She hadn’t realized, until Mark had pointed it out, that they had stopped. The field that had once had a pond in the middle of it glided past them, along with the side road it bordered and the side road’s destination, a big white ranch house with green shutters and the first three-car garage Hollman had ever seen. Liz had a distinct memory of Belinda talking about it at school while it was being built, and the girls talking behind her back about it in the lavatory, because she never mentioned the real reason it was going up: Belinda’s father was an undertaker, and Belinda’s mother couldn’t stand it one more minute, living in the same house as the funeral home, with the dead and embalmed bodies in the basement.

“Driving usually requires you to put your foot on the gas after you’ve taken it off the brake,” Mark said.

Liz put her foot on the gas, but not very hard. “I was thinking about this girl I knew in school. Belinda Hart—”

“Is this one of the vampire nation?”

“What a way to put it. Anyway, yes. The thing is, her father was an undertaker. Funeral director, she said, and we all had to say it, too, you know, because she was powerful as hell, even more powerful than Maris, and we were all afraid of her. But I was thinking, in most places, that would have gotten her killed. Having a father who was a funeral director, I mean, and living in a house with dead bodies in the basement—”

“They did? Cool.”

Liz sighed. “They moved. Down that road.” She tossed her head in the direction of the side road they were rolling away from. “That’s why I was thinking of it. Are you like this all the time? Are you like this in school?”

“Yep.”

“That must have an interesting effect on your social life.”

“My social life is fine. It’s incredible how much mileage you can get out of just not giving a—damn. I wasn’t kidding at all about going back. I think you’re nuts to be here. I don’t get what you think you’re doing at all.”

“I’m taking care of your grandmother.”

“My grandmother is senile. You could send Batman in a cape and she wouldn’t know the difference.”

Liz picked up the pace a little. “I was thinking about that year we spent in New Milford, do you remember? About how we had tuna-fish sandwiches on toast, and I felt like a fool, like I’d ruined Christmas for you and Geoff because I was just so damned arrogant, so—I don’t know—prideful …”

“You have the pride of a sea slug.”

“Be serious.”

“I am serious. I don’t know how I’m ever going to get this through to you, but I loved that Christmas. Okay, we didn’t have a turkey and we didn’t have a tree and we didn’t have much in the way of presents—although I still love Russell Stover, let me tell you, if my soccer coach would let me eat chocolate—”