Animal, the Vegetable, and John D Jones Read online

  She was clutching the float so tightly that it came out of the water with her. When the men lifted her over the side, it flopped back into the water and bobbed away on the choppy sea.

  Clara grabbed at the air, but the man said, “You don’t need that anymore. You’re all right. You’re with us.”

  She was on her knees, staring around, blank-eyed.

  “You’re all right,” he said in a softer voice. “Get a blanket,” he told someone.

  Clara began to shiver. Her teeth clattered. She wrapped her arms around herself.

  “Here, here.”

  Still on her knees, still shaking violently, Clara was wrapped in a blanket and helped to her feet. When her trembling legs would not support her, she was lifted and carried below and put on a bunk.

  There she realized for the first time that she had been saved. She began to cry, sobbing into the blanket, shivering harder than ever.

  “It’s all right,” the man said. He was rubbing her arms now, trying to get some heat into her body. “You’re on our boat. We’re taking you to the island.”

  He spoke in the soothing tone people use to calm frightened animals. “We aren’t a half hour from the bay. You’ll be home soon.”

  Clara nodded, then lifted her head. “Thank you,” she said through her salt-parched lips.

  “I bet your parents are worried sick. We’d call ahead, but our radio’s out.”

  “It’s just my father and sister.”

  “Well, I know they’re worried sick. How did it happen?”

  “I don’t know. One minute I was floating by the beach and I closed my eyes and when I woke up—well, I was out where you found me.”

  Suddenly Clara sat up. “I want to go up on deck,” she said.

  “Well, now, I don’t know whether you ought to be doing that or not,” the man said. “You just—”

  “I want to see the ocean. I have to.”

  “Well, wrap up.” The man tightened the blanket around her, threw a towel over her head, and helped her up the narrow steps.

  As they came onto the deck the man said, “There’s a helicopter. It was probably searching for you.”

  “If they know I’m gone.”

  “They know.”

  Clara sat in one of the chairs and pulled her legs up under the blanket. There was the island—the lighthouse, the long curving shore. Then she let her eyes look back at the sea.

  “Sea’s getting higher,” the man said.

  Clara nodded, her eyes on the waves.

  From the boat the waves looked high and rolling, with an occasional crest of foam, but not a dangerous sea. Then the boat dipped between waves, wavered, and Clara clutched the arms of her chair. As the boat lunged forward she shuddered.

  “Cold?”

  “No.” She licked her upper lip and tasted salt. She looked at the man. “I’m just—” She paused to find the right word, realized there wasn’t one, and substituted “glad.” She smiled.

  “This has been quite a day for us, young lady. I was thinking, before we spotted you, that I had something to brag about—we caught more than a hundred blues today. Now I really got something to brag about. It’s been quite a day.”

  “For me too,” Clara said.

  The boat moved over the waves, and Clara leaned forward in her seat. She watched the water with a new kind of intensity. They rounded the end of the island, and Clara rose from her seat as they came into the bay.

  JOHN D WAS STANDING at the window alone, watching the boats coming into the bay, their masts sharp against the darkening sky. He had no right to feel sad, he told himself. Deanie had made that clear in the car with her fierce “She’s my sister!” It was as if you weren’t allowed to feel grief unless you met certain family conditions.

  Actually, he thought, I probably don’t qualify. I only knew Clara one week. She was scared of me. I looked down on her. The Animal. Only I still feel bad, terrible actually.

  He could see in the window the reflection of the room behind him. Clara’s father was at the desk, still trying to put through a call to Clara’s mother.

  In the past half hour Sam had changed from a neat, controlled man into the picture of despair. His thin hair stood up like wire; his clothes had come untucked; his eyes were red and swollen.

  Delores sat on the sofa with one arm around Deanie, patting her shoulder. From time to time Deanie said things that needed no response.

  “One time,” she said, “when we were real little, Clara and I got dolls alike for Christmas and I broke mine and I dressed it up in Clara’s doll’s clothes, and she thought her doll was broken. I never did tell anybody and I still have the doll. It’s perfect.”

  “There, there,” Delores said. Deanie’s tears ran unnoticed onto Delores’s blouse, turning it a darker color.

  “And one time we were going to play piano pieces for our grandmother, and Clara only knew one piece. It was ‘The Spinning Song,’ and I begged to go first and then I played her piece and she didn’t have anything to play! I don’t know why I did that.”

  Deanie’s father was dialing. “Hilton? Has Frances Malcolm come back yet?”

  On the sofa Deanie looked at her father and said, “I want to talk to her too.”

  He nodded without glancing around. “Well, would you have her call this number when she gets in?”

  There was a silence after he hung up the telephone, and then Deanie’s voice, saying, “And one time—this was when we were real little—I …”

  John D let the picture of the room, and the words, fade away. He concentrated on the harbor. The boats were being tied up. Fishermen were clomping up the walkway with their catch. Shipowners were readying their ships for a possible storm.

  Overhead the sky was empty of birds. Gulls and an occasional pelican sat on the pilings, still as statues, facing into the wind.

  “… I don’t know why I did things like that.” Deanie’s voice rose. “Clara was just so easy to trick. I mean, she believed in people and she—”

  John D watched a boat pull up to the dock. It was an old boat, and the bare wood showed through the peeling paint. John D could barely make out the name Seaswept on its side.

  But there was something about the group on the deck that held John D’s attention. They weren’t just fishermen coming in after a long day. There was an urgency about their movements. Someone’s hurt, John D thought.

  He watched as two men helped a girl onto the dock. She was wrapped in a blanket. Her legs were bare. There was a towel over her head. She was clutching it under her chin like a kerchief.

  With the help of the men, the girl began to walk. She was unsteady, as if she had been at sea a long time.

  John D pressed his face closer to the window. His nose touched the glass. He took off his thick eyeglasses and peered through the salt-sprayed window. He could see from a distance better that way.

  He watched the girl’s slow difficult steps with increasing interest. He felt as if he had stopped breathing.

  And then he felt his lungs fill with enough air to burst them. His hands pressed against the glass. The girl lifted her head, the wind caught the towel and blew it down to her shoulders.

  Tears filled John D’s eyes and goose bumps rose on his thin arms.

  “Here’s Clara!” he cried.

  EVERYONE WAS SILENT AS they drove home. They were worn out, drained of emotion. Clara felt she had used her last bit of strength talking to her mother on the telephone.

  “Mom, hi, it’s me, Clara.”

  “Hi, I just got in from a meeting and I have two seconds to dress for a banquet. What’s wrong?”

  Clara could imagine her mother zipping up her new beige dress as she handled the phone, slipping her coral and seashell necklace over her head, checking the result in the mirror.

  “Nothing, I’m all right.”

  “Something must have happened or you wouldn’t be calling. Is Deanie all right?”

  “We’re all fine. I just wanted to let you know—Oh, ne
ver mind. Here’s Dad.”

  Her father’s voice, deep and calm again, told the story of Clara’s being swept out to sea as if he were recapping a game. “Oh, I guess we should have waited, but we wanted to call—Hey, remember that time you let Deanie phone me in the middle of the Steeler game to tell me she almost went through the windshield?” He laughed. “Well, now we’re even.” He laughed again, then said, “Your mom wants to speak to you again.”

  Clara had taken the phone. “No, I’m all right. Really, Mom, I’m fine.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “My back’s sunburned and my eyes sting and I’ve got water in my ears, but other than that, I’m fine.”

  She had felt foolish listing the little complaints, but they were like proofs that she was still alive. She could almost feel the sympathy coming through the telephone wire from her mother.

  “You take care of yourself.”

  “I will.”

  “I miss you.”

  “I miss you too.”

  Clara closed her eyes. “You all right?” her father asked, patting her leg. She nodded.

  She was, for the first time that she could remember, sitting in the front seat of the car with her father. But she didn’t want any more attention. She had had enough—Deanie sobbing, saying, “I’m never going to be mean to you again”; her father picking her up and swinging her around as if she were a child; Delores, tears in her eyes, patting her and saying, “I should never have let you go.” Only John D, standing apart and watching with his cool pale eyes, seemed normal.

  “I cannot wait to get out of this bathing suit,” Deanie said in the backseat. “I feel like I have been living in it for a hundred years.”

  Clara answered, “Same here,” without opening her eyes.

  It was true. She felt as if she had been away long enough to travel around the world. She felt as if she had returned from one of those seven-year voyages old sailors used to make. She imagined the homecoming. “It’s so good to see you. It’s grand to have you home at last.” And then the silence, as everyone realized that in seven years the old sailor had become an absolute stranger.

  “What are you thinking about?” her father asked.

  It was the first time anyone had ever been interested in her thoughts. Perhaps a sea voyage made a person more fascinating. She smiled to herself.

  “Old sailors.”

  “What about old sailors?”

  “Oh, just that they used to go off on those long, long voyages, and then they would come home and everybody would meet them at the dock and say, ‘It’s so good to have you home’ and everything, and the kids would climb all over them and then everybody would suddenly stop. Because they would realize, you know, that this person was an absolute total stranger.”

  “Is that how you feel, Clara, like an absolute total stranger?”

  “No, I just feel kind of different.”

  “Better different or worse?”

  “Oh, better. I don’t know how to explain it, but when you think you’re going to die—and when I fell off the float, that’s exactly what I thought—‘I am going to die.’”

  She paused. “Well, when you think you’re going to die and you don’t! You feel like everything is perfect. The little things don’t matter. Tomorrow I’ll probably wish I didn’t snort like a horse, but tonight I’m just so glad to be here. Everybody ought to almost die at least once.”

  “I hope I’ve already had my time. When I was seven Arnie Dalton’s little brother hit me over the head with a two-by-four.”

  Clara laughed.

  “What are you two laughing about up there?” Deanie asked, leaning forward. “I cannot hear one single word stuck back here in the backseat.”

  Clara smiled over her shoulder. “I know,” she said.

  CLARA LAY IN BED, staring up at the ceiling. The bed still rocked occasionally with the slow, up-and-down movements of the waves. She found herself holding onto the sides.

  “How about some soup?” Delores asked from the doorway. Clara shook her head and Delores smiled. “I know you are worn out with being offered food, but we’re so glad to have you back that we want to do something for you. You hardly ate any shrimp.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “Even John D, who never does anything for anybody, volunteered to make you a milk shake.”

  Clara shook her head.

  “Well, call if you want anything.”

  “I will.”

  Delores went back into the living room. Clara watched the shadows on the ceiling, the faint light from the lighthouse. She listened to the distant pounding of the surf. The threat of a storm had passed, but the surf was still high and boomed against the shore.

  She closed her eyes. When Clara was little, she had had wonderful dreams about disasters. When a tornado was in the news, she dreamed of being whisked away to a land of little people. When a volcano erupted, she dreamed of going to the center of the earth. It was the way everyone wanted to get away, she imagined, off to something different and interesting and exciting. In reality—

  “Are you all right? Tell me the truth,” Deanie asked.

  Clara opened her eyes. “Yes.”

  Deanie came into the room and sat on the bed. “Weren’t you terrified?” she asked, crossing her legs yoga-style.

  “Yes.”

  “I would have died. I really don’t believe I could have held on all that time. I would have been so scared.”

  “You would have held on.”

  “I don’t know. I’m not like you. I panic. I remember I was in the pool one time with Marcia’s brother—he thinks he’s so funny—and he was pulling us under by our legs, and I was just desperate. I was like our cat. Remember when Moonie fell in the pool? I was like Moonie.” She made a cat face and some hand movements under her chin. Then she sat up straighter and said, “Didn’t you worry about sharks?”

  “No.”

  “That’s all I would have thought about.”

  “After a while you don’t even think.”

  “Anyway, when you go back to school this fall and Yogurt McCalley asks you to write a theme about something that happened on your vacation, you’ll have something to write.”

  “Teachers don’t do that anymore.”

  “‘My Sea Adventure,’ by Clara.”

  Clara shook her head. “It wasn’t like that.”

  “What?”

  “An adventure. You make it sound like getting on the wrong bus or something.”

  “No, that’s what an adventure is—being in danger and getting saved.”

  Clara sighed. “It wasn’t like that.”

  “Anyway, you would not believe how sickening John D was after you got swept out to sea. He said to me, ‘You should have kept an eye on her,’ like you were a baby! And then he said, ‘Your sister was in a very miserable state of mind.’”

  “He said that?”

  “Yes, he made it sound like you let yourself be swept away. I wanted to throw sand in his eyes. He brings out the two-year-old in me.”

  “I didn’t let it happen.”

  “Of course not.”

  Still, it seemed to Clara that everything was somehow tied together. She closed her eyes. Life wasn’t a series of unrelated things, one event after another, like television. It joined together. It overlapped. And what happened in one hour, one day, affected what happened the next.

  “Don’t go to sleep,” Deanie said, “because I have something important to tell you. This is why I came in. It is up to you whether we go home or not.”

  “What?”

  “It’s up to you whether we go home or finish out the two weeks.”

  “Who says?”

  “Dad and Delores. They don’t want you to be permanently scarred. So when they ask you, say you want to go home. Look, I have already started to peel. I want people to see me before I look like a pinto bean.”

  “I don’t know whether I want to go right home,” Clara said slowly.

  “Clara,
that’s stupid!” Deanie struck her fists on the bed.

  “It isn’t.”

  “It’s like going on the Space Cyclone and making yourself sick. It’s stupid, stupid, stupid!” Grains of sand flew up from the bedspread as Deanie struck it three more times.

  “It isn’t the same at all.”

  “Well, would you explain it to me? I thought you would be delighted to go home. I thought you would leap up and start packing.”

  “I can’t explain it,” Clara said. “It’s just that if I go home now, well, it’s like I’m running away.”

  “But, Clara, you always run away! It wouldn’t be you if you didn’t run away.”

  “But this time I’m not. I don’t want to go home with this as The Terrible Thing That Broke Up the Vacation.”

  “It was terrible—”

  “But it won’t be as terrible if I stay.”

  “That makes no sense to me at all.” Deanie stood up. “If you want to go home, you should go home. That’s what I’d do.”

  She paused in the lamplight, watching to see if Clara was going to change her mind. “You know what we’re going to do if we stay, don’t you? Tomorrow we’re going crabbing. And tomorrow night we’re going on some sort of patrol to watch sea turtles laying eggs on the beach.” She waited, then sighed. “Well, I’ll go tell the others the wonderful news.”

  Deanie went into the living room. “I bring you Clara’s decision,” she announced. “She wants to stay.”

  “Good,” someone answered.

  It sounded to Clara like John D’s voice, but she did not think that was possible. She was mixed up in a lot of ways about John D. She could not imagine him being the one to discover her missing. She could not imagine him saying, “Clara was in a very miserable state of mind.” And what was the other thing he had said to Deanie? “You should have kept an eye on her.” She smiled. She felt as strange as if the President or the Pope had noticed her.

  “Now, Deanie, you didn’t pressure her to stay, did you?” her father asked in the living room.

  “I pressured her to go! Look at these arms! I want to get home before I’m a complete eyesore.”

  “You’ve got time to get another tan,” Delores said.