She got into her car, and I watched her drive away, the sound of the pebbles crunching under the wheels.
We were swimming when David Pinney arrived. He dove in off the board, and then surfaced and came up to me. I felt as if I’d taken one of Jane’s mother’s pills—flushed and dizzy.
“Where’s your sister?” he said.
The water ran down his shoulders, and his eyes were bright against his tan face. I stared at him, defiant.
“Well?” he said, annoyed.
“She’s not here,” I said. “And you can just stay away from her.”
He laughed, and I watched him swim back to the deep end, a streak beneath the water. He pulled himself up to dangle under the diving board and grinned at me. “Jealous?” he mouthed.
Jane sat on the pool steps, talking to Katy and Paul Grant. Every so often she gave Paul a playful shove. Paul had his cooler of beer, and I swam over to him and he handed me one. David stayed in the pool in his spot, and eventually others arrived, and we got out of the water and started a game of croquet. The wind had picked up, and the sun kept disappearing behind clouds. Over the ninth hole the sky was gray, threatening a storm. I had it in the back of my mind that David was still under the diving board, and I wanted him to watch me, to want me, even, so that I could be vindicated by refusing him again. I drank more beer, and we played the game, the wickets set along the wide lawn. At one point I looked for David, and he was gone. I should have been relieved, but for some reason I was not. I was drunk and wanted the last word. I left my mallet leaning against a tree and went to look for him, stumbling a bit over the hillocky grass.
I approached the barn. The big doors were closed, as they usually were since my grandfather had died. I went in through the side door—a wooden door that stuck in its swollen jamb. I felt the familiar coolness, the smells of the stalls nearby still emanating cow and sheep. The dim light seemed to amplify sound for me and something high and lilting—a girl’s laugh cut off—came through the barn. I guessed it was someone at the pool, the sound traveling between the barn’s slats. The sun kept flickering in and out. I heard thunder, not too far off, and then another sound, rustling—hay being disturbed—and jagged breathing. Once I stepped around to my grandfather’s workbench, I saw David. His bathing suit was lowered, and he worked, panting, furious, between two spread legs. I watched him and the girl, her knobby knees, oddly numb. David held her arms over her head with one hand and I knew the weight of him would have kept her from fleeing. There was no way to tell who the girl was, until I noticed her bathing suit bottom ringing one ankle, Sarah’s orange bikini, the one I’d worn my own day in the barn with David Pinney. It was Del held pinned beneath him.
At what point she’d arrived home I couldn’t say. Later, no one would have a clear memory of where we were, if we were in the pool or inside the house. No one would place David Pinney swimming that day at the pool at all. One moment David Pinney was hovering over Del, his suit down around his knees, and the next he had collapsed on top of her. She rolled him off, her eyes wide with shock. She lay there, unclothed, the pale places ordinarily covered by the bathing suit revealed in the flickering light, her hair tangled in the hay. I had taken a sharp breath in, and I felt the air in my chest, held, waiting for release. I had my grandfather’s hammer in my shaking hand. My arm throbbed from the impact of the blow. David Pinney’s eyes looked up from the barn floor, dark and empty. Around his head a blackish puddle had begun to form.
Outside, the leaves shuddered in the tall trees. The petals of my grandfather’s hydrangea scattered into the grass. Clouds covered the sun, and the light went out. Thunder sounded again, and I smelled the ozone in the air, the scent of hay and copper wire and chlorine. The rain hit the barn roof in a torrent. The sparrows cried out in the eaves, churee, churee. Once, near the spot where David Pinney and Del had lain, Sister Martha Mary had sat, cool and implacable, her hands clasped in the black folds of her lap. I didn’t know how long I stood there, looking down at David Pinney. Del had scrambled to pull up her suit, to fasten her top.
“What did you do? What did you do?” She was next to me, breathing in a high, panicked way.
I’d seen them together, and something had filled me—but what that was I couldn’t explain. I’d taken the hammer from the workbench. I’d been too late to protect her from him. I didn’t want him to ever look at me again with that mocking expression.