Suddenly, Marion felt the child’s hand tighten in a spasm of excitement. Cathy’s face had turned so pink it looked ready to explode and with her free hand she was waving violently at two people in a small cream-colored sports car—a very pretty young woman with blonde hair in the driver’s seat, and beside her a young man wearing a wide friendly grin and a baseball cap. They both waved back at Cathy just before the lights changed and then the car roared through the intersection.
“The Smiths!” Cathy shouted, jumping up and down in a frenzy. “That was the Smiths.”
“Sssh, not so loud. People will—”
“But it was the Smiths !”
“Hurry up before the light changes.”
The child didn’t hear. She stood as if rooted to the curb, staring after the cream-colored car.
With a little grunt of impatience Marion picked her up, carried her across the road, and let her down quite roughly on the other side. “There. If you’re going to act like a baby, I’ll carry you like a baby.”
“I saw the Smiths!”
“All right. What are you so excited about? It’s not very unusual to meet someone in town whom you know.”
“It’s unusual to meet them.”
“Why?”
“Because it is.” The color was fading from Cathy’s cheeks, but her eyes still looked bedazzled, quite as if they’d seen a miracle.
“I’m sure they’re very unique people,” Marion said coldly. “Nevertheless, they must stop for groceries like everyone else.”
Cathy’s answer was a slight shake of her head and a whisper heard only by herself: “No, they don’t, never.”
When Paul came home from work, Cathy was sent to play in the front yard while Marion explained matters to him. He listened with increasing irritation—not so much at Cathy’s actions but at the manner in which Marion and Miss Park had handled things. There was too much talking, he said, and too little acting.
“The way you women beat around the bush instead of tackling the situation directly, meeting it head-on—fantasy life. Fantasy life, my foot! Now, we’re going over to the Smiths’ right this minute to talk to them and that will be that. End of fantasy. Period.”
“We’d better wait until after dinner. Cathy missed her lunch.”
Throughout the meal Cathy was pale and quiet. She ate nothing and spoke only when asked a direct question; but inside herself the conversation was very lively, the dinner a banquet with dancing, and afterward a wild, windy ride in the roofless car …
Although the footpath through the canyon provided a shorter route to the Smiths’ house, the Bortons decided to go more formally, by car, and to take Cathy with them. Cathy, told to comb her hair and wash her face, protested: “I don’t want to go over there.”
“Why not?” Paul said. “You were so anxious to spend time with them that you played hooky for two days. Why don’t you want to see them now?”
“Because they’re not there.”
“How do you know?”
“Mrs. Smith told me this morning that they wouldn’t be home tonight because she’s putting on a show.”
“Indeed?” Paul said grim-faced. “Just where does she put on these shows of hers?”
“And Mr. Smith has to play baseball. And after that they’re going to see a friend in the hospital who has leukemia.”
“Leukemia, eh?” He didn’t have to ask how Cathy had found out about such a thing; he’d watched a semidocumentary dealing with it a couple of nights ago. Cathy was supposed to have been sleeping.
“I wonder,” he said to Marion when Cathy went to comb her hair, “just how many ‘facts’ about the Smiths have been borrowed from television.”
“Well, I know for myself that they drive a sports car, and Mr. Smith was wearing a baseball cap. And they’re both young and good-looking. Young and good-looking enough,” she added wryly, “to make me feel—well, a little jealous.”
“Jealous?”
“Cathy would rather belong to them than to us. It makes me wonder if it’s something the Smiths have or something the Bortons don’t have.”
“Ask her.”
“I can’t very well—”
“Then I will, dammit,” Paul said. And he did.
Cathy merely looked at him innocently. “I don’t know. I don’t know what you mean.”
“Then listen again. Why did you pretend that you were the Smiths’ little girl?”
“They asked me to be. They asked me to go with them.”
“They actually said, Cathy, will you be our little girl?”
“Yes.”
“Well, by heaven, I’ll put an end to this nonsense,” Paul said, and strode out to the car.
It was twilight when they reached the Smiths’ house by way of the narrow, hilly road. The moon, just appearing above the horizon, was on the wane, a chunk bitten out of its side by some giant jaw. A warm dry wind, blowing down the mountain from the desert beyond, carried the sweet scent of pittosporum.
The Smiths’ house was dark, and both the front door and the garage were locked. Out of defiance or desperation, Paul pressed the door chime anyway, several times. All three of them could hear it ringing inside, and it seemed to Marion to echo very curiously—as if the carpets and drapes were too thin to muffle the sound vibrations. She would have liked to peer in through the windows and see for herself, but the Venetian blinds were closed.
“What’s their furniture like?” she asked Cathy.
“Like everybody’s.”
“I mean, is it new? Does Mrs. Smith tell you not to put your feet on it?”
“No, she never tells me that,” Cathy said truthfully. “I want to go home now. I’m tired.”
It was while she was putting Cathy to bed that Marion heard Paul call to her from the living room in an urgent voice, “Marion, come here a minute.”
She found him standing motionless in the middle of the room, staring across the canyon at the Smiths’ place. The rectangular light of the Smiths’ television set was shining in the picture window of the room that opened onto the patio at the back of the Smiths’ house.
“Either they’ve come home within the past few minutes,” he said, “or they were there all the time. My guess is that they were home when we went over, but they didn’t want to see us, so they just doused the lights and pretended to be out. Well, it won’t work! Come on, we’re going back.”
“I can’t leave Cathy alone. She’s already got her pajamas on.”
“Put a bathrobe on her and bring her along. This has gone beyond the point of observing such niceties as correct attire.”
“Don’t you think we should wait until tomorrow?”
“Hurry up and stop arguing with me.”
Cathy, protesting that she was tired and that the Smiths weren’t home anyway, was bundled into a bathrobe and carried to the car.
“They’re home all right,” Paul said. “And by heaven they’d better answer the door this time or I’ll break it down.”
“That’s an absurd way to talk in front of a child,” Marion said coldly. “She has enough ideas without hearing—”
“Absurd is it? Wait and see.”
Cathy, listening from the backseat, smiled sleepily. She knew how to get in without breaking anything: ever since the house had been built, the real estate man who’d been trying to sell it always hid the key on a nail underneath the window box.
The second trip seemed a nightmarish imitation of the first: the same moon hung in the sky but it looked smaller now, and paler. The scent of pittosporum was funereally sweet, and the hollow sound of the chimes from inside the house was like the echo in an empty tomb.
“They must be crazy to think they can get away with a trick like this twice in one night!” Paul shouted. “Come on, we’re going around to the back.”