Belle Falls by Sherri Vanderveen

Author:Sherri Vanderveen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Canada

TWELVE

Gardie showed up in the summer of 1972, her legs bruised and pale beneath her gypsy skirt and a shirt that was too big and dropped tent-like from her arms. She didn’t say anything, just stood as if she had all the time in the world to spend waiting. At first she didn’t even seem to focus on me, but swayed slightly, dancing to a private song.

I opened my door, stood back to let her pass. I was afraid to speak until she was safely inside, afraid that my words would make her bolt. She followed me to the kitchen, where I sat her down and gave her a cold glass of lemonade. She drank greedily, not stopping until the glass was empty and ice cubes crunched beneath her teeth. She wiped her mouth on her sleeve, licked her lips, and studied me.

“You never answered my last letter,” she said. I hadn’t wanted her to visit, not as messed up as I’d heard she was. And I didn’t trust her plea for money; I had no way of knowing how she would spend it.

“No.” I should have apologized, I suppose, but the words refused to come out. Instead, I just looked at her.

“Are you wearing a dress?” she asked.

It wasn’t an old woman’s dress, or at least I didn’t think it was. It was modern, flowing down from my hips in bright vertical stripes of green and gold. I thought it made me look slender and tall, like a willow tree, Theo had said.

“What’s wrong with that?” I asked.

She shrugged, twirled a piece of hair around her finger, made a face. “I haven’t washed my hair in eighteen days,” she said.

“Where have you been?”

She shrugged again. “Around.”

“Everyone’s worried sick about you,” I said. My mother’s letters were stacked upstairs, chronicling Gardie’s slide: I’m telling you, Belle, there’s something funny going on and I pray to God it’s not drugs again. And Gardie had written to me, asking to come visit, but I hadn’t found the time to respond, not knowing what to say, how to tell her that there just wasn’t room for her here. And then that March, she’d just disappeared.

“Hmm.” She didn’t seem to care, just flattened her hands on the table. I noticed her nails, oddly perfect and polished. “I was wondering if I could crash here for a while.”

“Crash?”

“Stay for a while. You don’t know what it’s like, living with them.”

“It can’t be that bad.”

“It is. Aunt Hannah is crazy now, with Uncle Erik gone. Keeps staring out the window, waiting for him to come home. Sets his place at the dinner table, just in case. And Mother! She and Mr. Dillard are like lovebirds—it’s sickening. And I can’t do anything without going under their microscope.”

“They’re worried about you. Because of the drugs.” There were two overdoses. After the first, they found her on the sidewalk clawing at her face and screaming about spiders. The second almost killed her, left her in an alleyway behind a row of shops, her body curled between garbage bins.

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