Wildwood

by Drusilla Campbell

Genres: Family Life; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

From the acclaimed author of Blood Orange comes this unforgettable, mesmerizing tale of the power of friendships-and the secrets that can destroy them. . . It has been over thirty years since the words "Bluegang Creek" passed their lips. Because something that happened near that shady stream has shaped their lives-and haunted their darkest hours. Now, Liz can no longer bear the silence. What she is about to bring out into the light will test the very limits of friendship-and take all three women back to that fateful summer day when their innocence was shattered forever. . . A novel of friendship and forgiveness, Wildwood brings to life the lengths to which women will go to protect themselves-and each other-in the name of loyalty. . .and in the name of love. "The pull of family and career, the limits of friendship and the demands of love all come to vivid life in Wildwood." -Susan Vreeland, author of Girl in Hyacinth Blue "Resist the urge to turn the page to find out what happens next. Linger, instead, to savor the skillfully crafted writing." -Judy Reeves, author of The Writer's Book of Days

Release date: January 28, 2011

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 369

Sample

That week no new polio cases were reported in Rinconada so most kids swam at the town pool. For practically the first time all summer, Bluegang Creek belonged to the birds and the squirrels and the crawdad—and a twelve-year-old girl sunbathing on a flat rock with her old Brownie shirt tied at her midriff like Debra Paget, painting her toenails with Tangee Strawberry Sundae polish, waiting for her two best friends.

Hannah Whittaker twisted the top off the polish and took a deep breath. Strawberry Sundae smelled forbidden, grown-up and cheap—like ankle bracelets and pierced ears and the music she listened to on that Oakland radio station. The show was called Sepia Serenade and she didn’t know what sepia meant until she looked it up. Brown. Hannah Whittaker, the Episcopal minister’s daughter, closed her bedroom door and listened to Negro music down low so her parents wouldn’t hear.

She steadied her right foot, lifted the brush from the polish, let it drip, then brought it gingerly over to her big toenail and painted a perfect stripe of pink. Toes were easier than fingernails. Of course it didn’t matter if she did a good job or not since she had to pick it all off before she went home. If her mother saw her painted toes, she’d catch it.

Hannah had always understood that she and her mother were not alike. This made her feel bad because if a girl wasn’t like her mother, who was she like? She wanted her mother to love and admire her but there seemed no way this could happen unless she made herself into someone she was not, a carbon copy of her mother.

Hannah had explained this to her friends, Liz and Jeanne, and they knew exactly what she meant. Sometimes she felt like they lived right inside her head and if they were captured by Communists and tortured and their tongues cut out they would still be able to communicate. That was what it meant to be best friends.

Hannah’s mom thought they all spent too much time together. She didn’t approve of the way Liz was being brought up, half neglected. She said intellectuals had “no business” having children. She wouldn’t even say what she thought of Jeanne’s parents. Just rolled her eyes. Hannah’s mother divided her world into two columns, those people who met her standards and those who did not. Women and girls were always either ladies or not. Ladies did not paint their toenails except with clear polish and where was the fun in that?

Fortunately, Hannah’s mother was easy to fool.

Hannah had headed down to Bluegang right after breakfast when Liz called and said she had the new copy of Secrets, snitched from Green’s Drugstore. It wasn’t like they wanted to steal; they had to. In a town like Rinconada they couldn’t even pay a quarter for a confession magazine without word getting back to someone’s mother.

Hannah hummed a few bars of a song she liked, “Bebop Wino.” She loved the beat and the smoky sound of the music on Sepia Serenade, but most of all the words which, even when they didn’t say anything, implied so much. “Shake, Rattle and Roll.” “Money Honey.” “Sixty-Minute Man.”

Dirty songs, songs about sex, the dark side of the moon.

If nail polish was cheap, confession magazines were unadulterated trash. Hannah wasn’t sure what her mother meant when she said unadulterated; it was one of her favorite words and bad for sure. I Married My Brother. Forced to Love—Forced to Pay. My Secret Shame. The stories were never as good as the titles, which sent little ripples of expectant heat through Hannah’s stomach.

Liz always kept the magazines because her mother never investigated her bedroom the way Hannah’s did. Hannah stole nail polish and lipstick from Woolworth’s and hid them in her bookcase behind boring old Nancy Drew, and she had to remember to carry them to school with her on Tuesdays because that was the day her mother dragged out the Hoover and all its attachments, the furniture polish, the vinegar and ammonia and the basket of rags and cleaned house like she expected a visit from an angel. Jeanne mixed cocktails when they slept over at her house. Last weekend they’d tried out Manhattans, which tasted the way Tangee nail polish smelled.

Hannah heard the crunch and rustle of deep oak leaves, the snap of a branch and looked up, expecting her friends. Instead she saw Billy Phillips on the hillside above her, standing on a saddle of roots from the big oak that had been undercut by high water some winters before.

“Hubba-hubba,” he said.

Billy and his mother lived next door to Hannah and went to her father’s church. Hannah’s father said Mrs. Phillips wanted Billy to be an acolyte but the ritual was too challenging for him. He was a tall, heavyset boy who should have been in high school but had been held back. He wore his hair slicked with grease like a pachuco, but he was white and Episcopalian like Hannah. With his chewed-down fingernails he picked at the clusters of white-capped pimples on his chin and forehead.

“Your girlfriends ain’t comin’,” he said. “I seen ’em up by the flume.”

“You lie.”

Billy grinned. Without a shirt on, his pale torso looked soft and feminine. She tried not to stare at his pointy pink nipples. He looked more like a girl than she did.

“Pool’s open,” he said. “How come you didn’t go? I seen you there another time. You swim good.”

She shrugged.

“That friend of yours, the one with the braces? She’s a good diver.”

“She took lessons.”

“I could dive from here.” Billy teetered on the edge of the root saddle, giggling.

“You better be careful.”

He made a face.

She caught the Tangee bottle in her fist and slipped it into the World War II khaki pack that held lunch.

“Whatcha got?”

Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, oatmeal cookies and bananas, but it wasn’t Billy Phillips’s business.

“How long ago did you see ’em?” she asked.

“Couple hours.”

“Now I know you’re lying, Billy. We were just talking on the phone then.”

Billy patted the pocket of his blue jeans. “I got something.”

She rolled her eyes.

“Betcha can’t guess what.”

“Betcha I don’t care,” she said. “Whatever it is, you probably stole it.”

“Takes one to know one.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Mrs. Watson at Green’s Drug told my ma you and your girlfriends’ll probably end up in San Quentin the way you snitch stuff.”

“She never.”

He laughed.

“Shut up, Billy. You don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t you want to know what I got?”

Hannah said, sarcastically, “I could not care less.”

“What if I said it was something of yours.”

“You’d be lying.”

“What if I said it was outa your bedroom.”

“You’ve never even been upstairs at my house.”

His laugh sounded like he was gagging for air.

She stood up. “You can just show me what it is or you can leave, Billy Phillips. You’re not even supposed to be down here.”

“It’s a free country. Who says I ain’t supposed to be down here?”

Hannah had heard her mother say if Mrs. Phillips was smart she’d never let Billy out of her sight. “Are you sure they were going to the flume?”

“That fat one—”

“She is not fat!”

“The one with hair like Nancy in the comics. She had smokes in her pocket.”

“You make me sick the way you lie.”

Billy looked up into the branches of the oak. “I bet if I was to climb up there, I could jump clear out to where the water’s deep.”

Hannah buckled her brown leather sandals and gathered up the army pack, slinging it over her shoulder. “You do that and then write me a letter. I’ll try to remember to read it.” She leaped across the space between her rock and the shore and scrambled up the path.

“Where you going?”

“Crazy,” Hannah said. “Wanna come along?”

He grabbed her arm.

“Get your cooties off me!”

He squeezed her wrist so her bones hurt.

“I’m gonna tell.”

“Yeah? Well, I could tell your ma some things about you and your girlfriends.”

“You better let me go, Billy.” Hannah wanted to ask him what he knew but more than that, she wanted to get away from him. Their raised voices had attracted the attention of the crows. A pair scolded them from the branch of a sycamore across the creek.

“I seen you down here actin’ like movie stars with your shirts tied up around your chi-chis.”

He grabbed at the Debra Paget front of her shirt and yanked it undone. With her free hand, she tried to hold it together. In her ears, a ringing began like the song of the cicadas.

“You’re in big trouble now,” Hannah said, tugging away from him. “I’ll tell my father.”

He grabbed for her again; and she kicked his shin and told herself not to be frightened—it was only dumb old Billy Phillips—but panic nipped at her anyway. She kicked again, but he was ready for her and stepped back so she lost her balance and would have fallen if he hadn’t caught her wrist again.

“I seen you plenty of times down here when you didn’t know I was lookin’.”

“You can go to jail for that. That’s spying.” She snarled the worst thing she could think of. “Commie.”

“Look in my pocket. Go ahead. I dare you.”

Her fingers were numb and tingled.

“You’re hurting me.”

“Put your hand in there,” he said.

“I don’t want to.” She began to cry.

Billy snorted. He shook her hard by the arm and she hiccupped. “Put your hand in.”

Her fingers touched the frayed edge of his denim pants pocket.

“What you think you’re gonna feel? Mr. Pinky?”

“Shut your nasty mouth, Billy.”

“You want me to let you go, you gotta . . .” Hannah squeezed her eyes shut and put her fingers into his pants pocket up to the middle knuckle. She felt something silky.

“Go on.”

“My underpants!”

It was one of her Seven Days of the Week panties. Her mother had printed her name on the elastic band with a laundry marker when she went on the day camp overnight. She thought of her mother, hanging out the wash and talking to Mrs. Phillips over the fence, thought of Billy’s hands on her shirts and shorts and underpants. She didn’t think, she just shoved the panties back at him.

“You stole these off the line, you dirty creep. I’ll tell your mother. You’re gonna get in so much trouble—”

His hand clamped over her mouth. “Wanna see Mr. Pinky spit up?”

She bit his palm. Surprised, he jerked his hand back. Her first scream rang through the woods.

Up in the field by the old chicken coop, Jeanne and Liz stopped walking. Liz was plump with her dark hair cut in a Dutch-boy style. Jeanne, a full head taller, chewed on a pigtail and talked through a mouthful of braces.

“That was a scream.” Jeanne’s S’s whistled.

Another scream, like diesel brakes on the long, snaky grade down from the summit; and a murder of crows burst from the canopy, cawing.

“That was Hannah,” Liz said.

“Come on,” Jeanne cried and ran into the trees at the edge of the ravine; and after a moment, Liz followed, slipping and sliding sideways down a steep trail through scrub oak and manzanita and thickets of pungent bay and eucalyptus trees.

A third scream ripped through the wildwood and then another, deeper.

Jeanne yelled, “We’re coming, we’re coming!”

At the bottom of the hill they found Hannah in tears, her shirt half open and filthy, leaning against the trunk of an oak tree. She looked at them accusingly.

“He said you guys went to the flume.”

“Who?”

“What’s the matter with you? Why were you screaming?” Jeanne tossed her braids back. “We were just this minute up by the chicken coop.”

“Are you okay?” Liz asked. “Do you need to go to the hospital?”

“He said you had cigarettes.” Snot ran out of Hannah’s nose and along the line of her lip. She licked it away. “Billy Phillips.”

“What about him?”

Hannah pointed down over the root saddle, down the path and onto the Bluegang rocks.

Liz inched her way to the edge of the overhanging roots. “Wow!”

Billy Phillips lay sprawled on his back on a boulder, his head at an odd angle, his arms and legs splayed.

“His mom’s our cook,” Jeanne said.

“What happened?” Liz asked.

“I . . . pushed him.” When Hannah cried, her whole body moved, up and down, pumping up the tears.

Jeanne grabbed her by the shoulders and shook hard.

“Stop being a bully,” Liz said. “She’s scared and you’re makin’ it worse.” She reached around Hannah and hugged her. “You want us to go home with you so you can tell your mom?”

“Are you stupid? You know her mother, how she gets. And what about the nail polish? That’s gotta come off before we—”

Hannah looked down at her toes.

“But he’s hurt—” Liz said.

“He isn’t hurt, you stupe, he’s dead,” Jeanne said. “This isn’t like a story, in a book, it’s real and she’s in big trouble.”

Hannah sank to the ground and huddled against the trunk of the oak.

“Are you sure?” Liz peered down at the body on the rocks. “There’s lots of blood on the rock. We should go down and look, huh?” The way his head was turned, they couldn’t see his eyes. “He might be in a coma.” Liz had read of such things.

“He had my underpants. They were in his pocket.”

“Yuck.”

“How’d he get them?” Jeanne asked.

“He stole them, I guess. Off the clothesline.”

“Is that why you killed him?”

“I didn’t kill him!”

Jeanne peered over the bank another time. “Looks suspicious.”

“I didn’t mean for him to fall. He was touching me and saying nasty stuff.”

“Boy, if this ever gets out, your family, your entire family, is going to be completely ruined. You’ll have to leave town.”

The three girls looked at each other.

“She didn’t mean to do anything. It was an accident, like self-defense.”

Jeanne snorted. “It’s not like he was trying to kill her.” She crouched on the edge of the hillside and picked at a scab on her knee. “This would destroy your parents. Probably ruin your father, you know that, don’t you?”

Hannah didn’t know anything except that she wanted to be away from Bluegang.

“Him being a minister means his family’s got to be perfect or the congregation fires him.”

The way Jeanne said it left no room for doubt.

“I just wanted him to stop touching me.”

“Your mom’ll have a heart attack.”

“I’m sure it’ll be okay.” Liz’s round, serious face in its squared-off haircut looked almost adult. “I read in a book where this woman—”

“I told you before, this is real life.” Jeanne thought a moment. “When the police find out she was down here alone painting her toes with stolen polish, in public, they’ll say it’s no wonder Billy Phillips acted funny. Haven’t you ever heard of girls asking for it?”

“Asking for what?”

“You know.”

They looked at each other again. Below them Bluegang sang over rocks and gravel and sand on its way down to the Santa Clara Valley and the San Francisco Bay; and in the deep pools the trout and crawdads dozed in the shadows of boulders and above it all crows perched in the oaks and sycamores and alders and bays, translating everything the girls said into squawks and caws.

Liz said, “I still think we should tell a grown-up.”

Jeanne crouched before Hannah. “If you tell someone, it’ll be just like on Gangbusters. The police’ll want to know everything Billy said and what he did and there’ll probably be photographers from the paper and no one’s gonna care if you’re crying or embarrassed or anything like that. I bet you have to stand up and tell everything in court. With a jury and all.”

“He said bad things.”

“And the judge’ll want you to say ’em out loud for the jury.”

“But I didn’t do anything.”

“You expect a jury to believe you? You’re a girl.”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“The church’ll have a big meeting and they’ll vote and you’ll have to move out of Rinconada. Maybe go someplace like Georgia or Alabama.”

Hannah blinked and wiped her tears. A smudge of dirt and snot and tears spread from one cheek, under her nose to the other. “All I want is for it to be like it never happened.”

Jeanne thought a moment. “Maybe it can be.” She stared down at Billy Phillips. “We could just go away and leave him.”

“You don’t mean it. You know that’s wrong, you know it.” Liz’s plump cheeks colored. “Besides, dogs might get him. There’s coyotes around here . . .”

“Someone’ll find him. They’ll just think he fell over.”

“What about his mother?” Liz said. “She’s only got one son.”

“What’re you talking about her for?” Hannah sprang up in outrage. “What about me? He said he was going to make me do something . . . nasty. I don’t care what happens to him. I wish coyotes would get him. I wish I could forget about this forever. I wish I could hit my head on the rocks and get amnesia.”

“Like Young Widder Brown.” Liz nodded as if she now understood perfectly.

“Yeah, well, if wishes were fishes our nets would be full. My dad says in real life people don’t get amnesia.” Jeanne tossed back her braids. “Actions have consequences and he says we have to take what we get and make the best of it.” She glanced down at her Mickey Mouse Club watch. “If we’re gonna leave we better do it before anyone comes along.

“We’ll say you fell. We’ll say we went up to the flume and you fell off at that place where the boards are rotten. You could say you saw a snake, a big one and it really scared you and that’s how come you were crying. And you could walk through the poison oak on the way home. You’ll swell up like I do and no one’ll blame you for being miserable.”

Half way up the hill Liz stopped and pointed at Hannah’s feet. “What about her toenails? Her mom’ll see—”

“I don’t care!”

Painted toenails and confession magazines and cigarettes were not important anymore. All that mattered was getting away from Bluegang and never coming back. Maybe then Hannah could forget Billy Phillips. Maybe if she lay down in the poison oak and rolled over and over, the poison on the outside would drive out the poison she felt on the inside.

At the top of the hill, Liz and Jeanne put their arms around her in an awkward hug. She wanted to believe Liz when she said, “It’ll be okay. It’ll be like it never happened.”

When Hannah got home her mother was in the kitchen fixing dinner, a pork roast with applesauce and summer squash and bowls of Jell-O chocolate pudding with sprinkles of coconut on the top.

“I’m not hungry,” Hannah said on her way across the kitchen.

“You will be by dinnertime. Have you done your chores?”

Clean the upstairs bathroom bowl, scour the sink with Bon Ami, fold the towels in the special way her mother said was the only way to fold towels.

“I will.”

“Come back here, Hannah.” Mrs. Whittaker laid her palm across Hannah’s forehead. She was a tall almost-pretty woman with soft curly hair and wary eyes. “You look flushed. Do you feel all right?”

Her mother worried about polio, all the parents did. If a kid got a fever or felt stiff or had a bad headache, the doctor made a house call that very night. Mostly it was too much sun or sugar, but sometimes it really was polio. The summer before two boys in Hannah’s class had been attacked—this was the way grown-ups always spoke of the disease, like it was an enemy soldier. One of the boys would have to live in an iron lung the rest of his life. The other was half-crippled and could never lead a normal life. That was the worst thing about polio, and another thing grown-ups always said: once you got it, you could never lead a normal life.

Hannah hardly thought about polio, or about anything going on in the world. There had been a war in Korea and when grown-ups weren’t talking about being “attacked” by polio they worried about the The Bomb and Communism; and it seemed to Hannah that being an adult meant being scared all the time. Hannah mostly thought about school and her friends and how she couldn’t wait to be a teenager. That was about as far ahead as her imagination carried her—though occasionally she wondered if anyone would ever want to marry her and what kind of a house she’d live in and what would it be like to “do it.” There were so many things more urgent to Hannah than polio and bombs and Communists.

“I want you to take a couple of aspirin and nap a while,” Mrs. Whittaker said. She looked Hannah up and down.

Hannah tried to curl her toes under.

“You’ve been painting your toenails.”

Hannah stared at her feet and the ten pink dots.

“Oh, Hannah.” Her mother sighed and sat down at the kitchen table. “What am I going to do about you?”

“It’s only polish, Mommy. I can take it off.”

“I know you can take it off and you will, believe me, you will. That’s not the point.”

The point, Hannah knew without listening, was that there would be a time and occasions in the future for painting her toes. When she was grown she could paint them green if she wanted to. But she was too young now. She needed to try to understand how it looked to people to see a little girl with painted toes; she should be aware of the kinds of assumptions people made just on appearances.

“You never want anyone to think you’re not a lady, Hannah. A young lady now. A grown lady soon enough.”

Hannah wondered if her mother would ever understand that she did not care about being a lady any more than she cared about polio and Communism. She wanted to yell out how much she hated gloves and girdles and those hats with dinky veils. But the way her mother bent her head and passed a hand over her face, the dejected slope of her shoulders, stopped her and filled her with shame. She thought about Billy Phillips lying dead on the rocks at Bluegang and about the terrible things he had said to her, and she had to believe that what her mother had said was true. She had painted her toenails and tied up her Brownie blouse and Billy Phillips . . . assumed. It was her fault. The police would say so, the judge too.

“I’m sorry, Mommy,” she said and meant it.

Upstairs as she lay on the bed with a washcloth across her forehead and a glass of cold water—her mother was a loving nurse—Hannah could not stop her mind from going over and over what had happened. And then she remembered her Saturday panties.

Jeanne sat in the kitchen eating the slice of peach cobbler the school cook, Mrs. Phillips, had left for her. It felt very peculiar eating the cobbler and thinking about Mrs. Phillips making the crust and all and her son lying dead, probably. She was glad Mrs. Phillips had gone home for the day and Jeanne didn’t have to look at her face and answer her questions about what kind of a day she was having.

She couldn’t stop thinking about the way Billy looked lying on the rocks, but instead of trying to put the image out of her mind, she went over every detail. She saw the way his legs were sprawled and the zipper down on his pants. Maybe someone would find him and think he fell when he was peeing. She had watched the boys from her parents’ school having pissing contests and could just imagine Billy Phillips arcing his pee out over the oak root saddle like a fountain. When she watched the boys, she never saw their you-knows but she’d once seen her father’s when she walked in on him in the bathroom, and he was so stewed he barely saw her. The next day she went to the library after school and looked up penis in a medical book. There were about a dozen pictures of men who had venereal disease and one had the elephant’s disease and the underneath part of his thing had swollen up so it looked like he was sitting on a basketball. Jeanne had decided the penis was the ugliest of any body part and she was really glad she didn’t have one and that she hadn’t seen Billy Phillips’s. She finished her cobbler, washed her dish and left the dining hall. Bells rang every hour at Hilltop so she knew it was after three. Too soon to go home.

Jeanne’s mother had fallen off the water wagon again so she had a pretty good idea what awaited her at home. Mrs. Hendrickson would be sitting in the little den with a book open on her lap and a tall glass of water beside her. It wasn’t really water; it was vodka, only Jeanne wasn’t supposed to know that except one time she had sneaked a taste.

Instead of going home she walked around the far side of the rose cloister, across Casabella Road and scrambled up the hill to the flume that had until recently carried water from the reservoir in the Santa Cruz mountains to the town below. She hoisted herself up and walked along until she had a clear view of the Santa Clara Valley. The calendar in the school kitchen had a view of the valley at blossom time: from Rinconada to the San Jose foothills, nothing but prune plums and apricots in bloom. Under the picture it said, “The Valley of Heart’s Delight.” In August all Jeanne could see were trees and green and a few streets and houses. In the distance—exactly eleven miles from Rinconada according to the sign at the town limits—she made out a half dozen medium-tall buildings in San Jose and beyond the little city the rolling eastern foothills the color of late summer gold.

The hills looked like breasts. Jeanne didn’t have any yet. She hadn’t started her period even. But she knew it would be soon. She had looked up puberty at the library and found out that the few hairs sprouting under her arms, which she carefully kept cut back with scissors, meant she was on the edge of, just beginning, puberty and pretty soon she would have to buy Kotex and a belt and remember to bring an extra one to school or she’d bleed all over everything like what happened to one of the girls in her class last year.

She would be glad to start her period even if it did mean she couldn’t swim or go on hikes or ride her bike for five days out of every month. The sooner she grew up the sooner she could go to Cal and get away from her parents. Her brother Michael had gone to Stanford and Jeanne didn’t think she could stand to walk where he had, maybe sit in the exact same classrooms as he.

No one ever said so, but Jeanne knew Michael and his buddies had been drinking when their car hit the abutment on the Bayshore Freeway. Three years had passed since he died and she still felt angry with him because he had broken his word to her. She remembered a time when she was small—only six or seven and he was in high school—and she told him he shouldn’t drink beer or he’d end up being like their father. Michael had laughed and promised her he would never do that. The lie was bitter in her memory. Jeanne had vowed she would never be more than a light social drinker. She would never be like her parents.

She lay down on warm boards over the flume and folded her hands behind her head. There were a few clouds, harmless white puffy things in funny shapes. An elephant, a face with a big nose, one looked like a penis. She started thinking ab. . .