“I love the summer,” she tells the bullfrog. “Of course, you do, too.”
Her parents are busy. Her father is taking care of his health by running around. He puts on his baggy shorts and a T-shirt, and he runs around in the basement. He doesn’t want to go outside yet, he says, because of his form. Suzanne looks at her father. He is formed like her father, long skinny legs coming out of the enormous leg holes of his shorts, long torso and his turtle head on top. He runs around until he gets tired, then he flops down on the old sofa with the sticking-out spring at the end. He lies there for a while before getting up and running around again.
“What are you doing?”
“Trying to stay alive,” he gasps.
And runs in the basement like the well pump.
It is sometimes strange to believe that it could really be true, that Little Sue could really be Fire Engine Sue, a girl with a gift. This child cannot even make her bed properly. She is a bright but indifferent student. How can she possess the abilities they claim?
For they do come to her. Mrs. Reidel sends for her, but they are old friends. Yet some still trek up the Cardinals’ driveway, on the flimsy excuse of borrowing flour, toting a small gift for Suzanne.
“I want to buy the coffee shop. Should I go ahead and do it?”
“Is Michael Cormack the right man for me?”
“Will I ever quit smoking?”
It doesn’t matter how many times Adele or Suzanne tell them, they return, sheepishly, to the front door, always embarrassed, always with questions.
If the child had any powers, wouldn’t she tell Adele? Couldn’t Adele benefit from knowing, just a little in advance, the many trials she must endure? In the newspapers, they are speaking about new consciousness, about opening up your mind. Could this be what they mean? Has Suzanne become like the hippies out on the city streets, running off to India and ingesting things that cause them to have visions? Taking LSD and trying to fly off the edges of buildings, only to fall . . .
Truth be told, Adele is afraid of the young people on the street. They unnerve her with their colourful long skirts, their wild peasant blouses and bouncing breasts, their hair that looks like birds have nested in it. They kiss in public, with tongues. They sing when they feel like it. And they seem to hate Adele, who dresses in pastel pantsuits that are neat, unwrinkled and clean.
Suzanne is but a child. She has no part in this “new consciousness”. And Adele aims to see that it stays that way.
“No more make-believe. No more pretend. No more talking to animals.”
“You talk to Fidel,” Suzanne says.
The dog out front of Cormier’s bakery.
“No waiting for them to talk back,” her mother says.
It is hard to imagine a world of such silence. Suzanne hears thunder in her ears as she walks the river path. No voices, no sounds addressing her. She is mute in a loud and undifferentiated world in which dolls are dolls and worms are wordless.
How can people live in such loneliness?
“I’m telling you, Suzanne, go out and find a friend. Make friends with Jeremy.”
The boy down the road. Jeremy is eight, but already he has mastered how to burn insects with his brother’s magnifying glass. Already he chops worms into bits with his penknife. He plays marbles to win. He cheats at checkers. She will not go there.
“You don’t want to become a hermit, do you?”
A hermit crab walking sideways across the carpet of the sea bottom, snapping his claws? Or a hermit like the one Father Jacques told her about once, who lived with the bugs and insects and talked to air.
“I’m worried about her,” Adele tells Robert as they sit at the kitchen table. Little Sue has padded downstairs and is listening by the door. She can peek through the doorjamb.
Robert shrugs and runs his fingers through his turtle hair. “I’ve tried to talk to you about having another one . . .”
But Adele will hear none of it. There is no way she will entrust another of her children to this family of careless people. It was carelessness that took Carla from her mother’s arms.
“My carelessness!” Suzanne hears her father’s anguished voice.
“Yes! You and that child, who was supposed to be a big sister, who goes about warning and saving other people but . . .”
She chokes off the rest. There it is, then. Fire Engine Sue. Fire Engine Sue and Adele’s useless husband, the reasons Carla died.
Adele and Robert have been to this place before and somehow always manage to pull themselves back, with half-hearted promises and grief. They even apologize once in a while and resolve not to let their daughter’s name enter into their problems. But tonight Suzanne hears none of the making up, for she has crept back to her room to lie beneath the rumpled bedspread. The moon is lighting part of her wall, on the side of the room where Carla would have slept.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers to the night, wet tears sliding down into her ears.
She is old enough to know that the girl who owns the nail polish is in charge. Joanne Albert has her sister’s leftover bottles of nail polish and scabbed tubes of lipstick. Once a week, the entrepreneur gathers the makeup into a basket and comes around looking for shoppers. She says she is the Avon lady, but she looks nothing like the heavily made-up woman with the wig who brings Suzanne’s mother samples. Joanne is supplier to kids like Suzanne who have developed a sudden interest in these pots and tubes. Often they will meet at the big tree in the park, three or four girls with cuts on their shins, stains on their knees. When Joanne has her juvenile coven primed, she opens, slowly, the first bottle of nail polish.
“Blushing Rose,” she intones, to the girls’ collective intake of breath. “It is fresh and dis-cree.”
Suzanne almost proffers a nail of her own then holds back, remembering the other bottles in the basket.
Joanne sweeps a bottle through the air. “Torrid Tango . . . for those hot, hot nights.”
Suzanne cannot possibly imagine how one red fingernail is going to provide relief from the sweaty summer evenings. The polish has obscured her cuticle and is only slightly covering the hangnail she’s been chewing.
“Beautiful,” she says quietly, but Joanne hears it.
“Forty cents for the rest of the bottle.”
Suzanne doesn’t have forty cents. She has only twenty-six cents: two dimes and six pennies, and one of those pennies is a flat railroad penny. Besides, Suzanne cannot trade away her entire holdings for one item, no matter how wonderful. So she shakes her head and gets up from under the tree. She can hear Joanne going on about a small and stinky bottle of perfume, but she is leaving. She has fended off the need and is happy with her red fingernail, the pointer of her left hand, pointing her home.
“I am entirely in love,” she murmurs, lying on her stomach on the big rock by the river, crossing her eyes and