Chapter Two

For a long time after Lydia's minded quieted, all that lived in her conscious thoughts were gleaming eyes. Her name, her self image, her parents, the Maitlands, everything that had culminated in the Lydia Deetz of the now had been swept away in the current. She stared, unaware of self and yet still afraid, at a clean blackboard, and through that slate, blemishing smooth unsullied blackness, were those two pinpoints of light, sharp, tiny, and burning.

As the world tiptoed closer, the impassioned light faded until she could squeeze them between her thumb and forefinger. Her body had returned. The light snuffed, her fingers traced the board. Her flesh ran and smeared. Her arms swooped in big halos around her head. A smile that was not hers tickled her cheeks. A smile that did not reach her eyes. And as Lydia Deetz returned to the world of the living, she took with her a message from the dead. In giant block letters that message was:

HOLLOW MAN

Lydia could smell church. That's the only way she knew how to describe the warm sweetness that flared her nostrils. Delia's liberal use of it had been one of Lydia's pet peeves in the beginning when Mis'ess 'chase every eastern fad that hit New York' joined the Family Deetz, as it made her feel queasy and high, but now it made her sore bones unclench. She felt safe. From what she couldn't remember anymore. She felt home.

She listened to her own labored breathing for a long time, still confined to the dark. Her slight wheeze was almost indistinguishable from the soft crackle of the incense stick nearby.

She started suddenly then, unsure if she had dozed. Her eyes shot open. Her lids screamed in protest, and she imagined what they might sound like. A rickety sailboat at rough seas. The only thing that wasn't blurry was the tiny pinpoint of light at the end of the scented flame, which danced shadows along the clay sculpture Lydia's stepmother had made. Lydia would never cop to using the bowl as an ashtray. That was a bridge (why did the mention send a chill up her spine) she and her parents had yet to cross. She regretted it now, looking at the work Delia had done.

The flat base of the bowl where the ashes fell tendriled up on the sides into long swirling viridian turns. One of those coils had won dominance in what Lydia imagined was a protoplasmic war of Darwinian proportions and loomed higher than the others. It had formed a kind of dented, rocky head (Delia didn't do a lot of likenesses) and maw with which to snatch any incense sticks that wandered into its dominion. It was very hard for Lydia to manage a smile, but she did.

She drifted from atop her dresser down the templed colored light play to where even brighter flames lit the gloom, smoldering in a tightly wound bundle of chemically altered hair.

The artist responsible for the sometimes ashtray lay halfway across Lydia's midsection. Despite being buried under at least four cacoon layers of blankets, Delia's head seemed surprisingly light. Lydia struggled against her exhaustion and freed a hand from its linen confinement. Her palm lethargically ran along her stepmother's silk kimono, and she nearly cried.

"Delia." Lydia's voice was badly distorted. The air passing through her windpipe made a wavering gurgle. It was like having the worst case of strep throat ever. Even swallowing required several tense seconds of negotiation. At least she was taking air. Death had not taken her, despite rushing to rendezvous. "Delia," she struggled again. Mom was not the word that Lydia ever used, and it had never been asked for. An agreement, silent but mutual, had been settled on that.

Mrs. Deetz stirred and turned her half-asleep face toward her stepdaughter. Her mercilessly plucked brow ridges were furrowed stupidly like the wax cavemen you might see stalking food in the wiles of a museum. She looked angry when she slept. Lydia believed she was still very much the viper she had always been even at rest. A viper who, from the moment Charles had formally declared their union, had sized Lydia up as a possible meal. Yes, still a viper, with poison dripping fangs. God, how Lydia had hated her. But, enemies at war had found peace. Dare the word love ever pass across the lines of the former battlefield? Snakes abandon their young. This one had coiled around another's and had laid claim. Death (or proximity thereof) brought people closer together.

The repressed rage drained from Delia's rounded features. Her smile nearly squinted her slanted eyes shut. She raised her head and, quite demurely mind you, wiped not venom but drool from her bottom lip.

"How are you feeling?" The older woman's tone was patronizing, not by choice, but by lack of experience. It wasn't every day, after all, that a reptile gained the ability to feel for someone else.

"Okay." The gravel she was chewing didn't exactly vouch for her, so Delia's clammy chin pressed against her forehead.

"You feel a little warm." A kiss was snuck on the sly, executed so quickly and abruptly that it was like trying to hide a slap in the face in the middle of a conversation, only somehow more shock-inducing. This punctuated by an oh so loud smack that reigned in a hush of some magnitude. And then they both laughed. Lydia's chest burned with each hiccup of laughter, and a corresponding groan answered each one.

"What happened?" A dark fog loomed over the teenager's memory. There seemed to be a great concrete wall between home and the Winter River Bridge. And when she tried to peek around its edges

two angry pinpoints of radiant fire race to the barrier like a sentry rottweiler, no voice to bark with and no maw to clench around your throat, but there are screams.

Delia sensed Lydia's body tighten and so she wrapped her hand in hers. "You fell into the river. The current almost swept you away."

Sensations permeated from behind the block in her mind. The lack of oxygen stabbing her, the murky wetness stinging the inside of her nose. And somewhere an image, somehow as much feeling as a picture, swirled into view.

heaving into a soggy white lapel with a red question mark on it (?)

"Your dad went into town to fetch a doctor," Delia continued. "I wanted him to have someone flown in from Yale-New Haven, but he insisted on a local-" overdone cringe "sawbones. My God, what were you doing out there?" No pause long enough to answer. "I swear, you'll be the death of your father. You know he has stress issues. I don't know what I do if you died."

"You could visit me in the attic." Lydia was quite proud of that little retort. With it came a shadow of the relationship that had been.

"Young lady, that isn't funny." There was as much hurt as there was tetchiness in her tone. Delia had not used it since the formal introductions to Adam and Barbara had gone so so awry. Not since-Him. "The last thing I need is your father having an infarction over you."

"Did you learn that word on Donahue?"

That's how it always started. A flash of anger quicker than the censor checking the print before it hit the airwaves.

But, instead of Delia's favorite disdainful denouncement-how dare you(!)-she sighed, like a dragon slowly allowing the flames to turn to smoke and puff harmlessly out of its snout. "Mayberry only has one doctor. If he has to, your father will drag him kicking and screaming up this hill to see you."

Lydia suddenly wanted to talk to Barbara. "Doctor Andrews," Lydia gargled, recalling another profile in valor in the school paper. "He's a nice man." She appreciated the fuss Delia was making. It was her way, and to see it used in her defense was awe inspiring. It was an incredible power. The power to kvetch, no, to nag, no, to bitch like Delia Deetz née Monroe. This was just a small display of it, presented as a sign of affection and as a clue in into the psyche of a viper. Belittlement of small-town life? Please turn to the corresponding page in your guide. And the handbook says: the Medusa Viper is very worried for the infant black cat she has adopted. The rabbit she married had better retrieve one hell of a good veterinarian, and he better be good, like freaking Doctor Dolittle or rabbit stew was on the menu tonight. God help the one who got the fangs.

"Well, hopefully, he's more helpful than the kook who dragged you out of the lake."

"It wasn't dad?"

"You wouldn't believe it even if I took a picture."

Picture. Camera! "My camera!" Lydia's voice crackled while Delia kept talking, who was just sort of talking to the room now.

"He looked like something off of the Bozo Show. He woke us up out of a dead sleep. It sounded like cannonball fire. I thought that preevert who tried to marry you was back. Charles cursed like an old sailor the whole way down, and he would have punched him out and given him a fat nose to go with that stupid coat of his if he hadn't had you in his arms. Maybe he's here ahead of the three hundredth Anniversary Carnival, I just don't know why anyone would want to celebrate three hundred years of staring at the same track houses day after day. I don't why a grown man would wear orange spats. Anyway, so he steps up onto the porch with you in his arms, soaking wet, the both of you, and he says 'I'm fairly certain that this belongs to you.' 'This' he says, like you're a bag of potatoes."

"Did he say anything about my camera? I need it for school."

"He certainly dumped you like one, right on top of Charles. I had to grab you before his back went out. There we are sprawled on the floor with you, and Bozo just stands there looking down at us."

"Delia-"

"He looks me right in the eye and says, 'she had a spill at the Bridge, she'll be fine.' And he walks away! By the time I was up and out the door he was gone!"

"Mom."

A mixture of pride and panic doughed Delia's already creamy complexion. "Yes-dear."

"My camera."

"You didn't have it on you."

Lydia sighed heavily, hitching several times. There went doing something nice for the Maitlands in time for the festival.

"What were you doing down there?"

"Just taking pictures for school."

"Please be more careful. The last thing you want to do is die in this rinky-dink town."

"I love you, too."