Girl in Landscape Read Free Page B

the fence. David was halfway back, running toward them, and as Pella looked up he tripped over his cone and tumbled forward. He landed on his knees in the sand, his cone flattening up around him.
    Caitlin rose and started out to meet him. Pella followed. They ran, cones wobbling around their ankles, to the place where David knelt.
    He struggled up, his face flushed. “Raymond found something,” he gasped.
    “Let’s go see,” said Caitlin. She reached under his cone, exposing her own arms, and brushed the grit from his knees. “Come on.”
    “I’m scared,” he said.
    “That’s okay,” said Caitlin. “Let’s go have a look.” She nudged him along.
    Pella got ahead. She could see something black, high on the rock barrier; Raymond was climbing toward it, on all fours, hampered by his cone.
    Pella rushed closer, and the black thing grew clearer: It had an arm, which hung brokenly in the joint of two boulders. Three steps more, and it gained a head with blistered, purple cheeks. Pella stopped running, just short of the fence, then stepped forward, hypnotized, and put her hands on the mesh.
    Caitlin and David came up behind her. Raymond was still climbing. Caitlin yelled his name, but the sound was almost swallowed in the surf’s crash.
    Again: “Raymond!”
    He stopped there, a few feet below the body on the rocks, turned, and looked at them. Caitlin motioned with her hands. She couldn’t wave, under the cone, but she pointed, first at him, then back, to the ground at her feet.
    Raymond paused, then reversed, and picked his way back down the rocks, as slowly as he’d climbed. The waves smacked again and again just short of his path.
    Pella gripped the fence and stared at the twisted black body on the rocks. So did Caitlin and David, now that Raymond was safely headed back. The man was purple and black and ruptured in places, and it was impossible to think of how he’d looked, alive. The sun and the ocean had each taken their blows.
    As Raymond came off the rocks and started toward the fence David began weeping.
    “I’m scared,” said David again.
    Raymond came up, the fence still between them. “What?” he said, to David. “Nothing happened.”
    “Come back under the fence,” said Caitlin.
    “The guy’s dead,” said Raymond. “He can’t hurt anybody.” But Pella saw that Raymond was trembling, actually.
    “It’s okay to be scared,” said Caitlin. “It’s scary, what you saw.”
    “He did the lemming thing, I guess,” said Raymond. “The fence didn’t stop him.” He kicked more sand away from the place he’d scooted under, and squatted, crablike, holding the edges of his cone.
    “It’s not the lemming thing when it’s only one person,” said Pella. “It’s just suicide.”
    “I want to go home,” said David.
    “We’ll go home,” said Caitlin. “But Raymond’s right, nothing’s going to hurt you.” She turned David in his cone away from the fence. “It’s just upsetting to see that, but nothing is going to happen. Be brave.”
    “Like an arm,” said Raymond, laughing, nudging his brother’s cone.
    “Shut up,” said David, sniffling.
    “Anyway, Pella, he could have been part of some big lemming thing somewhere else and only his body washed up here,” said Raymond. “The others floated—”
    “Enough about that,” said Caitlin.
    “Shouldn’t we report it?” said Raymond. They trudged together in a line, leaving the body on the rocks, and the adamant surf, behind them.
    “We
will
report it,” said Caitlin.
    “Well that’s all I was doing,” said Raymond brightly. “I was checking for I.D.”
    “Okay, but I didn’t want you to touch it, or get in the water. Come on.”
    Pella could hear that Caitlin was upset. They were all upset. But Pella felt only she knew it was a warning: dare to go out under the sky, dare to enter the sky, and trouble will touch you. Your tunnels will collapse. A body will fall.

Two
    Pella showered first, rinsing away the grit that