The Wednesday Daughters

by Meg Waite Clayton

  —Beatrix Woolf, I say.

  I tell her that tomorrow we’ll take the launch across to Wray Castle, the first place Bea stayed in the Lake District, in July 1882, when she was sixteen and Annie Carter Moore was still her governess, not yet the mother of the children to whom Bea wrote picture-letters she would turn into books.

  —We’ll take our journals along, Bea says. Perhaps sketch pads. You can start painting where I started, and I’ll encourage you as Mr. Rawnsley encouraged me. Wouldn’t that be fine?

  —It would be chilly, painting outside in February, and I don’t sketch any better than I paint, which I don’t, I told her. Then I asked if Rawnsley was the model for Mr. McGregor. People seem to think he probably was.

  —Mr. Rawnsley always was digging around in the dirt, although not so much garden dirt as anywhere-else dirt. But you write fiction, Allison. What do you think?

  —I’ve only ever written geese and alligators and penguins, I say.

  —As have I, she says. It’s so much easier to tuck a bit of oneself into a puddle duck, isn’t it? Nobody thinks to look for you there. Often you don’t think to look yourself.

  “Who in the world is this?” inquired Johnny Town-mouse. But after the first exclamation of surprise he instantly recovered his manners.

  —FROM The Tale of Johnny Town-Mouse BY BEATRIX POTTER

  JULIE WOKE TO SUNLIGHT EDGING THE WINDOW SHADES AND AN INSIStent knocking at the cottage door. She bolted up from her bed on the love seat and fumbled with the key. The lock was an old-fashioned fire hazard requiring the key to get out as well as to get in, but she’d locked it again when she and Anna Page returned from stargazing with Robbie. “The danger of a wife-murdering ghost who can’t get past a lock,” Anna Page had joked, “is far worse than that of being trapped inside trying to work the dang key as the cottage burns down?” But Julie hadn’t relented.

  She cracked the door open and peeked out at the neighbor with the frightening dog. Fresh clothes but with dark circles under his eyes, behind his glasses. He had three shoe boxes in his arms. In the van, the dog looked up and kept looking.

  Anna Page, in the bed, said grumpily, “It’s freezing in here! Close the dang door!”

  I heard them from the cottage kitchen, where I sat with my coat on against the cold, looking through Mom’s three moleskine journals, the pages and pages of letters that made no words.

  “Haven’t you a fire?” the man asked Julie. “Good God, let me set one in the grate for you.”

  Julie stepped aside to let him in—never mind that Anna Page wore only an oversize man’s oxford-cloth shirt she’d kept when she’d abandoned its original owner. The neighbor muttered something about ashes, and before I realized it he was clomping down the stairs, looking startled to find me sitting at Mom’s kitchen table. I closed the journal before he could see it and said good morning, and he retrieved a big metal drawer from the space under the stairs. I headed back up with him, and in no time he had a fire blazing in the main room, with the ashes falling neatly into the added ash drawer. No smoke pouring everywhere. Not so much as a spot of coal on his khaki trousers or his fleece.

  Julie pulled the lid off one of the shoe boxes he’d set on the love seat. Gray hiking boots.

  “I thought those … I meant to …” The neighbor turned to me. “I made such a dog’s breakfast of things last night. I only … it was such a shock about your mum.”

  “These are my size,” Julie said, although they were an eight, and Julie wore the same 7½ she and Jamie had worn in high school. Size 8 was Jamie’s size, their feet having ceased being identical when Jamie was pregnant with Oliver. Oliver, who’d tossed a single tulip on his mother’s coffin—yellow, her favorite, and Julie’s, too—the poor little guy saying, “Bye-bye, Mommy,” and waving his empty fingers that were his mother’s and hers as well.

  “Your size, brilliant,” the neighbor said. “I have other colors, but I prefer the gray.”

  He disappeared into the van, calling back that he hadn’t brought quite as many sizes of hiking clothes; he was a fair guess at clothing sizes, but feet didn’t always match the rest. He emerged with several plastic store bags as big and full as the bags we’d loaded with Jamie’s sheer nightgowns and slippers and moisturizer, crystal perfume bottles, unused tampons, blue eye shadow none of us had worn since junior high—Jamie’s things that, when faced with the jumbled Goodwill bins and the blank white donation forms requiring us to itemize every size-8 shoe, every B-cup bra, we’d loaded back into Anna Page’s pickup and taken to a self-storage place across 101, where they still are.

  Mom’s neighbor set the bags on the love seat and began extracting microfiber tops and wool socks and jackets, as sure of his choices for us as Kevin might have been. The man owned a chain of hiking stores all over Britain, he explained. “I thought I might take you on a hike to one of your mum’s favorite places, Asha. All of you, of course.”

  Your mum. Your mum. Your mum. Each utterance of the word a blow. Your mum who was off her rocker, wasn’t she? The journals full of non-words Exhibit A for the case.

  Anna Page, not at all self-conscious of the fact that she was wearing only the oversize shirt, got the neighbor out the door, and Julie turned the key again, muttering that the guy might seem more presumptuous than creepy if it weren’t for that awful dog.

  “Mom would have loved the dog,” I said.

  We can’t help how we look on the outside, she liked to say.

  Anna Page was already stripping off her shirt and pulling clothes from the love seat, holding a yellow and gray jacket to my face, then putting it in my hands. “Do we go on this hike, Hope?” she asked. “Or do we beg off?” She extracted a microfiber shirt and examined the tag. “Hmm … which one of us do you suppose he thinks is extra large?”

  Another knock sounded, and Anna Page, naked, ducked into the tiny bathroom as Julie opened the door.

  “I hate to be a bother, but there are mackintoshes in the bags.”

  Julie and I gazed upward: perhaps the clearest blue sky we’d ever seen.

  “Things are very changeable here,” the neighbor said.

  “I’m sorry,” Julie said, “but I don’t believe we even know who you are.”

  He seemed a bit affronted. “I live up the hill. My family have been here since … well, practically since the Romans left the Lakes.”

  “And you have a name, presumably?”

  “Of course. Yes, I’m Graham. And this is Napoleon. He doesn’t make you nervy, does he? I can leave him back if he makes you nervy. I’ll come for you in an hour, then. Or you can give us a bell from the pier when you’re ready.”

  “A bell?”

  “I’m afraid the only mobile reception in this part of the woods is at the pier’s tip end.”

  Julie was in the bathroom and Anna Page down at the pier calling the hospital to check on her patients when I retrieved my mother’s puzzle box. Intricate and seamless, the inlaid wood in the top panel forms a woman in a sky-blue kimono, her lips pressed to the forehead of a dark-haired baby above whose head is looped the palest halo of gold. I sat on Mom’s bed with the slipper tub between me and the fireplace, and I touched a finger to the halo of this box that, from the outside, appears to have no way in, no hinges or doors, no openings, no way to access whatever treasure it might enclose.

  Some of the puzzle boxes Mom collected in the years after her mother died were as small as matchboxes, some big enough to hold loaves of bread. One took 324 steps to open, its outside simplicity masking a complicated mechanism inside that left room for only the smallest of treasures. But this Madonna and child was her first. Her grandfather had brought it from England when she was a girl, and her sister had found it in the attic of their childhood home after their mother died, after the funeral my mother didn’t attend.

  What kinds of treasures belonged in a puzzle box? “Anything you like, anything of infinite value, any secret you want to keep just for yourself,” Mom told me with an air of delighted secre
cy the night her sister returned the box to her. I was not yet school-aged, and it was dark and late, and the smell of wood fire and hot chocolate, together with the fact that Mom was letting me stay up way past my bedtime, was treasure enough. After my aunt left, Mom put the box in my hands and set my index finger on the baby’s halo. “To open it,” she said, “you trace your finger from here around the edge to the third flower, see? Then you slide the flower down.”

  When I asked how she knew, she looked at me with her big brown eyes, and she blinked and blinked. “Some things in life, Hope, you just have to know,” she said. “Someone tells you and you remember it, and you tell it to someone else. Sometimes you tell it directly, and sometimes you tell it through stories. It’s one of the ways we show our love.”

  After Mom had walked me through all the steps to open the box that night, she let me slide aside the top panel with the mother and baby to reveal the secret inside.

  “It’s empty, Mommy!” I said. “Where is the treasure?”

  She took it from me and touched a fingertip to the smooth, empty wood, and she sniffed the way I wasn’t supposed to sniff; I was supposed to get a tissue. She pulled me to her, tucked my head under her chin. It frightened me a little, the silence with only the burning wood and the chocolate and the vanilla smell of my mother, the shuddering of her chest against my ear, the kisses she placed atop my head once, and again.

  “I don’t know where the treasure is, Hope,” she said finally. “I’m sorry. I don’t know.”

  Sitting in her cottage, my fingers worked the puzzlebox by memory. I moved one piece, adjusted another to engage a third, slid the first piece back in the other direction before adjusting a piece on the adjacent side, all the while trying not to think of the non-word gibberish in her journals.

  When I finally slid the Madonna and child aside, I dipped my fingers into my mother’s ashes. Not ashes, really. Only the dry bone fragments left after the rest of Mom was vaporized, dry bone crushed by machine into a fine sand. (“Lordy, dying isn’t as glamorous as they make it sound in Sunday school,” Aunt Kath had said about that.) I tucked a bit of Mom into my coat pocket before Julie came out of the bathroom or Anna Page returned, or I lost my nerve. Move slip slide engage, through the steps to close the box again. I worked the delicate wood quickly, to keep my treasure safe.

  The lake was lapping clear and fresh as we hiked along the colored-leaf path to a signpost: Public Bridleway, Hawkshead 3m. Graham led us around a gate of sorts—a single wooden beam stretched between two posts, with a latch at one end and a hinge at the other to allow vehicles to pass. The steep uphill path beyond the gate was paved with slates so poorly set they made the going more difficult. He’d left Napoleon at home, which was a bit of a relief.

  “Mind your steps,” he advised, catching Anna Page’s arm as she slipped a bit on the stones. “Public works, these paths are.”

  Mind your steps. Is that how my father would have said it? He hadn’t been gone six months, and already it was so hard to recall his voice. But he’d have said “Careful here” or “Watch it, it’s slick.” Unlike so many Indians of his generation, he must have learned English from an American.

  “A snake!” Julie called out, stopping dead in her tracks. “Was that a snake?”

  Graham pointed to a red squirrel, which shot off in a jagged path and bolted up a tree. “Only the adders are poisonous, in any event,” he said, “and their venom won’t likely kill an adult. Some say if you come upon one coiled on the bridleway, you might step across him without any bother; they’re rather timid and will play quite dead and let you carry on.”

  “You recommend this?” Anna Page said. To which Graham conceded that he did suggest giving them wide berth.

  He went on at length about the forest wildlife: golden eagles, although you didn’t see them often, and red and roe deer, and rabbits. “There used to be boar and wildcats, but the biggest danger now is the weather, do let me impress that upon you. It changes precipitously.”

  We were high enough to have a view of the lake and the clouds over the far hills, the bracken on the nearer fells heading toward brown, although the ferns in the forest were still a firm green. When Julie said she’d left her lungs at the bottom of the hill, we paused to catch our breath, Graham taking no break from his lecture on hiking partners, maps and weather gear, and emergency kits. I slipped a bit of Mom surreptitiously into my palm, to let her have one last look at the lace veil of trees, the fall colors, the stone walls marching up the fells to their peaks, fencing in nothing at all. Who in the world had gone to the trouble to build them?

  “Look,” Anna Page said.

  A broad rainbow arced fatly over the bracken-brown hills to the north.

  “Each color is as wide as a whole rainbow,” I said.

  “It’s a snowbow,” Graham said. “It’s snowing over the border, in Scotland. It’s not yet November, but it’s been snowing there since the sixth.”

  “There isn’t such a thing as a snowbow,” Julie said. “Rainbows come from sunlight refracting in the smooth surface of raindrops, which snowflakes don’t have.” Something she learned from a children’s book. When library patrons need answers, she often directs them to children’s books, with their simple explanations, their easy diagrams.

  I tucked my mother’s ashes back into my pocket, remembering the snow falling in Kevin’s tiny hometown in Minnesota the day we married, in April, Kevin uncomfortable in a stiff Ken-doll tuxedo, me dragging the weight of my train behind me like the expectations of marriage to come. “It’s a sign,” Ama had said when the fat white flakes began to fall. She never said what it was a sign of, though, or I wasn’t listening when she did.

  The four of us continued up the path, through a stretch of ugly cleared forest, a minefield of stumps that looked like the end of the world. Anna Page slipped again on the stones, and Graham caught her arm, saying, “Do mind!” He called back to Julie and me, “Mind, there’s a step-down,” pointing to a funny slanted step where a break in the stone wall would allow rainwater to funnel off the path.

  “Careful here,” my father would have said—about the step and about Graham as well.

  A fair hike later, we looked from a sheep field down into a valley and pond backstopped by a woods and a mountain range. The fields were more of what we’d been hiking through—the same tufty grass, inelegant and wild and muddy, with the occasional cow paddy (“Mind your steps!”), the occasional bright red farmer’s marking on an otherwise lovely white sheep. It was the colors and shapes that made the view so striking, I decided as I surreptitiously held a bit of Mom out toward it all: the gentle gray of the clouds stacked behind the mountaintops echoed in the maze of stone walls; the arc of the pond’s shore feathered with reeds; the leafless Abbott and Costello trees in the foreground, one round and branchy, the other tall and sparse.

  Anna Page pointed out a waning moon showing as a filmy white crescent in the daylight, where it didn’t belong. I wouldn’t have said I was annoyed at her for pointing it out, and yet I felt so irritated all of a sudden, at Anna Page and at Julie and at this man who was all “mind your steps,” and always so politely when what he was saying was mind the cow dung on the path, the goose poop on the rocks. The crescent moon—which would grow slimmer the next day and the next, and would disappear entirely on no-moon day at the beginning of Diwali the following week—wasn’t there in the painting in my mother’s cottage, but this was the place that was depicted, the home of Gabby Goose. Why did that feel so like a betrayal, that Mom chose to give the goose I always thought belonged to me a home here, in this place I didn’t know?

  “This is Moss Eccles Tarn,” Graham said. “It’s part of Beatrix Potter’s estate. That lane across the water leads down to Near Sawrey and Hill Top Farm.”

  “Summer evenings, she and her husband rowed here in a flat-bottomed boat,” I said, remembering my mother talking about Potter sketching and her husband fishing while I, already weary of her obsession, half listened. Then sh
e’d died and I was left with only a few fuzzy memories of what she’d told me and the nonsense in her journals. It was spooky every time I opened them: Mom’s handwriting, ehqrs mhfgs zs sgd bnsszfd. Three journals written over several years. 1997. 1998. 1999.

  “This was your mum’s favorite place, Asha,” Graham said, looking away.

  “Her favorite place was Point Lobos,” I said. “And that dramatic stone arch at Pfeiffer Beach.” Knowing as I said it that those were my favorite places, seawater filling the air with sound and splash and turmoil. Mom would have loved this quiet path through these quiet woods to this quiet valley with its smooth pond, its quiet calm.

  It was that calm of hers that so frustrated me, the sense that all the world’s problems could be solved if everyone just took a few deep breaths. Even in the last conversation I had with her, when I was working up the nerve to tell her my marriage was ending, her response had been “Asha, Asha. Do take a deep breath.” As if a deep breath would bridge all the gap between Kevin and me, the arguments over so many stupid things: when to replace the garbage disposal or stop for gas, where the spare key was supposed to be and who hadn’t put it back, how to do so many tasks the doing of which didn’t even matter, loading the dishwasher or parking the car, cutting the roses, covering the grill. Arguments that always boiled down to who was being selfish and who wasn’t—the who being me and the selfish being yes because I wasn’t getting any younger. Layers of bickering painted over the ground of our childlessness.

  “Mom talked about a waterfall here,” I said.

  “A waterfall?” Graham asked. “Perhaps you mean the small dam there?”

  “Her favorite place here had a waterfall, a big one,” I insisted, although I couldn’t actually say she’d talked about one place more than any other. So much about her world here surprised me: the blue door and the coal fire, the slipper tub, the tiny bathroom and the towel warmer your knees bumped against when you used the toilet. “There was a flood here,” I said, grabbing at a memory. “One of the first times she came here, before Thanksgiving a couple years ago.” I just about lost one of my shoes among the cabbages, Hope, she’d said, the quote we called on from Peter Rabbit to convey fright, because Peter was “most dreadfully frightened” when Mr. McGregor spotted him and sent him fleeing through the garden, losing his shoes. “And the waterfall usually ran several paths,” I said, “but there was so much rain that it all joined together in a big rush.”