Somebody Else's Music(9)

“Liz,” Jimmy Card said, angry now, “refuses to believe it.”





TWO





1


Somehow, when Liz Toliver had dreamed of coming back to Hollman, what she had imagined was a kind of triumphal march: she would arrive, not only famous but impossibly rich, sitting in the back of a pitch-black superstretch limousine, driven by a driver in livery with her initials on his jacket. Well, she thought now, as she turned off the two-lane blacktop onto the first of the narrow country roads that lay between her and Hollman like a tangled mess of capillaries, that probably wasn’t how she had really imagined it, at least not since she was seven or eight years old. Maybe the problem was that she had not imagined coming back at all. There was, Liz thought, no point to it. It had been so long since she had lived in this place, so long since she had even visited it, that it sometimes seemed to her to be one of those mythic archetypes they had studied about in Dr. Weedin’s course in Shakespeare. This was not her life. This was a universal expressive form, meant to mirror the reality of all people everywhere: the ugly duckling emerging from a pond of prettier ducklings, with the pond inexplicably populated by snakes. Liz liked that idea better than she liked the one that had been nagging at her since they left Connecticut this morning, and that was that she was fundamentally a coward. She had not come back because she was afraid to come back, and because she knew—as well as she had ever known anything—that she had not really changed at all. The more familiar the roads got, the stronger the feeling got. She didn’t have to dig through her tote bag for the copy of the Hollman High School Wildcat, 1969, to know what she was really like. She looked at the backs of her hands on the steering wheel and half expected the nails on them to split and go ragged, the way nails do when you bite them, day after day. She found herself expecting the car to change, too, so that instead of this ridiculous Mercedes—$140,000 before sales tax, right off the showroom floor—she would be driving the little blue Ford Escort wagon she had had the year after Jay died, when everything was falling apart, and they had had no money at all. That, God help her, didn’t make any sense, because there hadn’t even been any Ford Escorts when she was living in Hollman, and it didn’t matter what there had been, because she hadn’t had a car at all. Besides, she’d actually liked the Ford Escort. It had been the one thing in her life that year that had gone more right than wrong, and when she had walked back to it across the parking lot at the supermarket or the mall, she had always been relieved to see how shiny and new it looked. It was a kind of camouflage. Her life that year, their lives that year, had been anything but shiny and new. They had been living in a rented cabin out at Lake Candlewood, because they’d lost the house, and there were cracks and leaks in every room. When it rained, water came in through the roof and soaked the living room. When anyone took a bath, the water leaked out of the bathtub and turned the bathroom floor into a lake. The only dry space in the whole cabin had been in the little corner of the kitchen where she had set up her computer. After a while, that space had become holy. They had all worshiped at the altar of it. If their lives were ever going to change, if they had a hope in hell of getting back to being the way they were before Jay got sick, then the change was going to come from that corner. That was why Geoff was not allowed to touch the computer keyboard, ever, and Mark was only allowed to touch it when he had an important report for school, the kind that needed illustrations and charts that had to be taken off the Net. God, Liz thought, she ought to remember that better than she did. She ought to have nightmares about the foreclosure or the Christmas they’d spent with two candles, no tree, and presents that consisted of exactly one small box of Russell Stover candy for each of the boys, wrapped in aluminum foil. Instead, she woke up not only obsessed by snakes, but obsessed by trivialities. She had nervous breakdowns remembering the way Emma Kenyon—who’d always had expensive things mail-ordered from Philadelphia, even though the Tolivers had far more money than the Kenyons ever would—laughed at her clothes.

They were passing a road called Watler Marsh, with an empty field on the corner that looked as if it had sunk in the middle. That used to be a pond, Liz thought, and the school bus stopped on that very corner to let off a girl named Penny Steele, who was fifteen and going out with a boy in the army. The next year, the boy came back from the army and decided to marry her. Penny stayed in school right up through the week before the wedding, bringing Polaroid pictures of her wedding dress onto the bus to show all the other girls what she would look like when the day came. The wedding was held on a Saturday afternoon in late April at St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church in town. The honeymoon was a week at a resort in South Carolina. Liz had no idea what had happened to Penny after that. She did know that if she took this turn to the right and went to the end of that road, she would come to Belinda Hart’s old house, where, one afternoon when they were all eight years old, Belinda and Emma had pushed her headfirst into a rain barrel full of bugs and slime and rotting fall leaves that had stuck to her skin like face paint.