Your hair is winter fire,
January embers.
My heart bums there, too.
She had hidden that in her bottom drawer, beneath her underwear. Her mother might have seen it, but that was all right. The important thing was, that was one drawer her father never looked in. If he had seen it, he might have looked at her with that bright, almost friendly, and utterly paralyzing stare of his and asked in his almost friendly way: 'You been doing something you shouldn't be doing, Bev? You been doing something with some boy?' And if she said yes or if she said no, there would be a quick wham-bam, so quick and so hard it didn't even hurt at first - it took a few seconds for the vacuum to dissipate and the pain to fill the place were the vacuum had been. Then his voice again, almost friendly: 'I worry a lot about you, Beverly. I worry an awful lot. You got to grow up, isn't that so?'
Her father might still be living here in Derry. He had been living here the last time she had heard from him, but that had been . . . how long ago? Ten years? Long before she had married Tom, anyway. She had gotten a postcard from him, not a plain postcard like the one the poem had been written on but one showing the hideous plastic statue of Paul Bunyan which stood in front of City Center. The statue had been erected sometime in the fifties, and it had been one of the landmarks of her childhood, but her father's card had called up no nostalgia or memories for her; it might as well have been a card showing Gateway Arch in Saint Louis or the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.
'Hope you are doing well and being good,' the card read. 'Hope you will send me something if you can, as I don't have much. I love you Bevvie. Dad.'
He had loved her, and in some ways she supposed that had everything to do with why she had fallen so desperately in love with Bill Denbrough that long summer of 1958 - because of all the boys, Bill was the one who projected the sense of authority she associated with her father . . . but it was a different sort of authority, somehow - it was authority that listened. She saw no assumption in either his eyes or his actions that he believed her father's kind of worrying to be the only reason authority needed to exist . . . as if people were pets, to be both cosseted and disciplined.
Whatever the reasons, by the end of their first meeting as a complete group in July of that year, that meeting of which Bill had taken such complete and effortless charge, she had been madly, head-over-heels in love with him. Calling it a simple schoolgirl crush was like saying a Rolls-Royce was a vehicle with four wheels, something like a hay-wagon. She did not giggle wildly and blush when she saw him, nor did she chalk his name on trees or write it on the walls of the Kissing Bridge. She simply lived with his face in her heart all the time, a kind of sweet, hurtful ache. She would have died for him.
It was natural enough, she supposed, for her to want to believe it had been Bill who sent her the love-poem . . . although she had never gotten so far gone as to actually convince herself it was so. No, she had known who wrote the poem. And later on - at some point - hadn't its author admitted this to her? Yes, Ben had told her so (although she could not now remember, not for the life of her, just when or under what circumstances he had actually said it out loud), and although his love for her had been almost as well hidden as the love she had felt for Bill
(but you told him Bevvie you did you told him you loved)
it was obvious to anyone who really looked (and who was kind) - it was in the way he was always careful to keep some space between them, in the draw of his breath when she touched his arm or his hand, in the way he dressed when he knew he was going to see her. Dear, sweet, fat Ben.
It had ended somehow, that difficult pre-adolescent triangle, but just how it had ended was one of the things she still couldn't remember. She thought that Ben had confessed authoring and sending the little love-poem. She thought she had told Bill she loved him, that she would love him forever. And somehow, those two tellings had helped save all of their lives . . . or had they? She couldn't remember. These memories (or memories of memories: that was really closer to what they were) were hike islands that were not really islands at all but only knobs of a single coral spine which happened to poke up above the waterline, not separate at all but one piece. Yet whenever she tried to dive deep and see the rest, a maddening image intervened: the grackles which came back each spring to New England, crowding the telephone lines, trees and rooftops, jostling for places and filling the thawing late-March air with their raucous gossip. This image came to her again and again, foreign and disturbing, like a heavy radio beam that blankets the signal you really want to pick up.
She realized with sudden shock that she was standing outside of the Kleen-Kloze Washateria, where she and Stan Uris and Ben and Eddie had taken the rags that day in late June - rags stained with blood which only they could see. The windows were now soaped opaque and there was a hand-lettered FOR SALE BY OWNER sign taped to the door. Peering between the swashes of soap, she could see an empty room with lighter squares on the dirty yellow walls where the washers had stood.
I'm going home, she thought dismally, but walked on anyway.
This neighborhood hadn't changed much. A few more of the trees were gone, probably elms felled by disease. The houses looked a little tackier; broken windows seemed slightly more common than they had been when she was a girl. Some of the broken panes had been replaced with cardboard. Some hadn't.
And here she stood in front of the apartment house, 127 Lower Main Street. Still here. The peeling white she remembered had become a peeling chocolate brown at some point during the years between, but it was still unmistakable. There was the window which looked in on what had been their kitchen; there was the window of her bedroom.
(Jim Doyon, you come out of that road! Come out right now, you want to get run over and killed?)
She shivered, hugging her arms across her breasts in an X, cupping her elbows in her palms.
Daddy could still be living here; oh yes he could. He wouldn't move unless he had to. Just walk on up there, Beverly. Look at the mailboxes. Three boxes for three apartments, just like in the old days. And if there's one which says MARSH, you can ring the bell and pretty soon there'll be the shuffle of slippers down the hall and the door will open and you can look at him, the man whose sperm made you redheaded and lefthanded and gave you the ability to draw . . . remember how he used to draw? He could draw anything he wanted. If he felt like it, that is. He didn't feel like it often. I guess he had too many things to worry about. But when he did, you used to sit for hours and watch while he drew cats and dogs and horses and cows with MOO coming out of their mouths in balloons. You'd laugh and he'd laugh and then he'd say Now you, Bevvie, and when you held the pen he'd guide your hand and you'd see the cow or the cat or the smiling man unspooling beneath your own fingers while you smelled his Mennen Skin Bracer and the warmth of his skin. Go on up, Beverly. Ring the bell. He'll come and he'll be old, the lines will be drawn deep in his face and his teeth - those that are left - will be yellow, and he'll look at you, and he'll say Why it's Bevvie, Bevvie's come home to see her old dad, come on in Bevvie, I'm so glad to see you, I'm glad because I worry about you Bevvie, I worry a LOT.
She walked slowly up the path, and the weeds growing up between the cracked concrete sections brushed at the legs of her jeans. She looked closely at the first-floor windows, but they were curtained off. She looked at the mailboxes. Third floor, STARK-WEATHER. Second floor, BURKE. First floor - her breath caught - MARSH.
But I won't ring. I don't want to see him. I won't ring the bell.