Gossip of the Starlings

by Nina de Gramont

  All I could really think about was Pippin. When I imagined officers combing the woods from Sesuit to Provincetown, and prowling the jetty caves and dragging Maushop Lake, I didn’t hope for the girl’s recovery but the horse’s. I pictured Pippin—galloping through a darkened forest, foam dripping from his bit. I imagined him shot by a poacher’s stray bullet. I saw his delicate flexor tendons crushed in a steel-jawed leghold trap. I pictured his heart, giving out with fear and confusion, and the running that Skye wouldn’t understand was too much for him. And even if the accompanying image were Skye, a mile or so behind, head cracked on a small but jagged rock: I didn’t care, as long as Pippin was found unharmed.

  But what drove me crazy, that first night and in the weeks that followed, was not being able to decide if Skye’s decision to disappear with Pippin had been born of necessity or revenge. I didn’t know if she wanted to hurt me or if it was simply the only way she knew: to bring me along with her.

  “THE PROBLEM WITH CATHERINE,” my father said, as they drove me home from school, “is that she’s never had to work a day in her life.”

  From the backseat, my eyes stuck to the road, hoping for a glimpse of Pippin behind the passing trees. But I could see my mother swivel her head toward him, a reflexive instinct to defend me. Then she turned without speaking, facing the window. A sigh to say she’d already done everything she could, and notwithstanding disappointing results, her job was finished.

  And despite her defection, and the guilt-ridden panic over my horse, I felt relieved. My father had only returned to the same conclusion—a personal cliché that no amount of sweat would ever knock out of his head. Even this most grave incident would be a conflagrated version of ones that had come before. When we arrived home, he got out of the car and slammed the door, heading into the house without a word. My mother waited for me, then looped her elbow through mine as we followed him.

  He waited for us at the bottom of the stairs. I remember a vague sense of alarm at the veins in his forehead—the only moment of my life I’d feared for his health instead of his retribution. I thought of his drowned son—my unmet brother—and for the first time in years wondered about Marc’s funeral.

  My father looked so old, and so angry.

  “Catherine,” he said, raising a finger at me. “This is not going to be a vacation for you. Until you are back in school, you will be working in this house. You will be ironing and doing laundry and dusting and vacuuming. You will be performing menial and meaningful tasks from the time you wake up until the time you fall into your bed asleep.”

  I didn’t say anything. He dropped his hand and turned to go upstairs.

  “Dad?”

  He stopped for a moment, didn’t turn around. His back looked comfortingly broad—his same self, unchanged by my actions.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  He laughed. A short, harsh, and unhappy sound that cut me off at the knees. My mother put her arm around my shoulder. He went upstairs and slammed the door to their bedroom.

  “Chérie,” my mother said, pulling me into a hug. “We’re just so glad you’re safe.” I wondered at this pathology, the use of the plural pronoun, as if no parent could stand as a single entity.

  TWO MORNINGS LATER, I awoke to my father standing over my bed. He wore his usual gear: suit coat, tie, disapproving scowl.

  “Pippin’s all right,” my mother called from the doorway. Clearly she’d been forbidden to cross the threshold but wanted to soften the blow of whatever news my father was about to deliver.

  He told me, in the flattest of tones, that my horse had returned to the stables at Esther Percy in the early hours of dawn. My father did not have a flair for narrative and knew very little about horses—despite having lived in such close proximity all these years. So he didn’t tell me what must have been true. The way Pippin’s coat would have been soaked through with sweat. I imagined Skye had saddled him inexpertly, without a blanket. He would have shown up with his back chafed, the saddle askew, stumbling with exhaustion and hunger.

  “Don’t expect to see him again,” my father said. “I sold him to Captain Zarghami.”

  I stared at him. The groggy remnants of my troubled dreams hadn’t quite lifted. My relief was already mitigated by imagining what Pippin had suffered; now its tide rolled back like an unnatural disaster.

  “I don’t believe you,” I said. “Captain Zarghami wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t buy my horse.”

  “I made him an offer he couldn’t refuse,” my father said.

  I felt my brow knit together in confusion. It seemed so odd that my father would reference any kind of popular culture. I couldn’t remember ever seeing him at a movie.

  He reached into his inside pocket, and because of that allusion, and my own wasted exhaustion, I thought for the longest, strangest, and most emotionless moment that he was reaching for some sort of revolver. That he was going to shoot me in my bed while my mother watched. So that when he actually floated two fifty-dollar bills, they seemed to fall in slow motion—landing on my chest in payment for a horse worth thousands upon thousands and, beyond that, more than I could ever say.

  My father left on business that day, with no estimated date of return. And I felt the most swirling combination of reprieve and anguish at his departure. After all: girding myself to face the truth, I knew it was I who’d put Pippin in danger. The fact that the horse had survived, unharmed, seemed a boon I didn’t nearly deserve. Contradictions warred: the relief that Pippin was all right, the grief that I’d never see him again. I felt rage and hatred toward my father, and at the same time a strange sort of gratitude, that someone had finally managed to mete out an appropriate punishment. When my father walked out the door, leaving his disappointment and anger in a swirling cloud around my head, I felt glad I wouldn’t have to face him for a while, and sorry that I couldn’t be finished with him for good.

  And then in the illogical way of children, I would expect him to appear at the dinner table and be inexplicably sorry to see his place empty.

  “SUSANNAH’S HOME,” my mother told me at dinner, two days later. I glanced up from my untouched food. I must have looked too hopeful. The letter Susannah had written from Venezuela—forwarded to me from Esther Percy—had seemed almost like a message from someone who’d died.

  “Bail,” my mother explained. She patted my hand and smiled sadly. Since my father left, she had been treating me like an invalid—alluding to my situation but never saying anything directly. She had already deemed my father’s long list of chores impossible to perform because of my broken arm. We read the newspaper together in the morning, trading articles about the scandal.

  That night we watched the evening news—segments showing both the Waverly campus and Senator Butterfield, ducking past reporters into a Cape Cod police station.

  At ten o’clock she came into my room to kiss me good night. I lay awake for a full hour before creeping downstairs. When I opened the burglar alarm’s control panel, I saw that she had forgotten to turn it on, and I wondered if the omission were intentional.

  I walked past the garage and back toward the barn. I’d spent the past four years at boarding school and every summer immersed in horses. Nobody had ever gotten around to teaching me how to drive.

  Pippin’s stall stood empty, a painful and gaping hollow. I couldn’t manage saddling and bridling Bloom one-handed. So I just slipped a halter and lead over her ears and rode bareback. A dense and misty night, the air smelled of damp blossom and newly regenerated leaves. I rode out through the woods in back, across Potter’s field and into a neighboring meadow to circumvent the squad car at the end of our driveway, watching out for Skye.

  On the road Bloom snorted peacefully, plodding the familiar back streets to Susannah’s. I held the lead with my good hand, my cast resting heavily on one knee. Susannah’s driveway was lined by linden trees, their silver leaves shedding sprays of dampness as we passed.

  The house was dark except for her window. I knew exac
tly what she’d be doing: sitting at her desk writing a letter, to me or Drew. I rode Bloom into the narrow shaft of light cast by her deskside lamp and waited for her to look out the window in search of her next thought. I had only sat there a moment when I noticed the red ember of a cigarette under the oak tree. I peered into the darkness, expecting Charlie’s form to present itself once my eyes adjusted. But the man who dropped the cigarette and stubbed it out with his toe was too tall and fair to be Charlie. I would have been frightened as he walked toward me, if his gait hadn’t looked so easy and so familiar.

  “Hi, Catherine,” he said through the darkness, and I recognized Susannah’s father. His faced weathered and peeling as she’d described him but also strangely young in his T-shirt and jeans. Exposed and jittery.

  “Hi, Mr. Twining.” I tried to keep the surprise out of my voice. As if I didn’t want him to know I had any reason to find his presence unusual. As if I didn’t want him to realize I’d ever known he left. “I thought you were Charlie,” I said.

  “No, he’s still at school,” he said. “I’m staying here in the guest room, during this whole big mess.”

  I nodded, not sure what to say. In the old days, he would have sent me away by now with a stern warning or perhaps even a phone call to my parents.

  “Do you want me to go get Susannah for you?” he said.

  “Yes please.” I watched him walk, stoop-shouldered, into the house. Not fatherly at all, but cowed and dejected.

  Through Susannah’s window I could see him startle her with a hand on her shoulder. I lifted my heavy left arm and waved. She waved back and pushed passed her father. In a moment she appeared alone at the back door, wearing a long sleeveless nightgown. Her father still stood in the window, mournfully looking down at us. I felt a strong surge of relief—as if his guilt, his sense of responsibility, somehow exonerated me.

  “Catherine,” Susannah whispered. “It’s wet out here.”

  I rode to the doorstep, and she pulled the rosebud material around her waist and climbed up behind me.

  “Don’t go down the driveway,” she said. “The police keep driving by. As if she’d come here.”

  I rode around to the playground of the Lutheran church that bordered her backyard. We climbed off Bloom and onto the swings. I felt dampness gather at the bottom of my jeans when I sat. Bloom, untied, lowered her head to munch on clover and dandelions.

  “I was just writing to you,” she said. “So I feel like I’ve already told you everything.”

  “Actually,” I said, “I want to tell you something first.”

  She turned toward me, expectant. But I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t get it out. She stepped back her legs and began to swing. High and higher into the air, her nightgown winnowing through the air like a ship’s sail. I watched her for a moment, then pushed myself up, too, taking care to match her rhythm so we swung side by side. Moving back, our heels touched the leaves of the oak tree. Moving forward, they sliced through the air and up through the damp stardust that swirled all around us. The corner post rose and fell from the ground in noisy and precarious complaint, until finally we slowed down and came to rest, swaying beside each other.

  “You told them,” she said, after a while. “Didn’t you?”

  I wanted to speak. But I couldn’t admit what I’d done any more than I could deny it. Susannah watched me a minute, then turned her gaze away.

  “At first I thought it was Skye,” she said, looking straight ahead. “But that didn’t make sense, because Skye didn’t know anything. And I knew you wouldn’t tell her.”

  The mist picked up to a light rain. Bloom snorted, then continued her grazing under an elm tree. I tried to apply a number, to how many times Susannah and I had sat on these very swings. A sum far too infinite to compute.

  “They found Rico’s address with the coke,” Susannah said. Her tone was informative, but also accusatory, letting me know that she was not my only victim. “My lawyer said I had to turn him in. It was the only way to save Drew and me.”

  We sat for a moment, imagining Rico’s small home. The grim options available to him: betraying Colombian drug lords or surviving Venezuelan jail. Perhaps both. A world of consequences we couldn’t even begin to contemplate. While we sat in the cool New England night, the wind gently rustling the greening leaves. Even in the rain, the sky no longer looked ominous. With so much actual danger at hand, worrying about the end of the world had been relegated to luxury.

  We heard a low, lorn cooing in the tree behind us. “Gray owl,” Susannah said.

  “Susannah,” I said. “Are you? Saved, I mean.”

  “No,” Susannah said. “But I will be.”

  If she hadn’t been angry she might have admitted fear. Vulnerability. But instead she predicted what she couldn’t possibly have known. That she and Drew would spend hours in front of judges, and years in anxiety-laden limbo, but never see the inside of a jail cell. They would each repeat their senior year at public school and continue on to the very colleges whose acceptance letters lay unopened in the mail slots at Waverly.

  Something of the same—that grim confidence in continuing liberty—must have existed in me. Because I didn’t know that Captain Zarghami had begun campaigning on my behalf and that Middlebury would agree to admit me as a freshman without completing my sixth-form year. Still, I had the strangest lack of worry about anything other than Skye. In terms of my own future, that time had such a vacant and intermediary feel—like nothing before whatever happened next could possibly matter. Police officers and TV crews lurked around corners, and the sky hung terribly close above our heads. But these portents didn’t have nearly the strength of the blue hydrangea mingling with Bloom’s good, horsey musk. The stillness and certainty of midnight, only the wild and unauthorized among us.

  “It’s not like you chose John Paul over me,” Susannah said. “He would have ended up in jail for sure. His life would have been ruined.”

  A display of fireworks in my chest, crackling joy. I couldn’t have been happier if Pippin had appeared from behind the juniper bushes—saddled and unharmed, ready to be mine again. These past months of distance and anger disappeared in a single instant. Of course I chose Susannah to betray. Her disownment of me was no more likely than her incarceration.

  “It’s Skye’s fault,” she pronounced, unwilling—as I must have known she’d be—to break her firm rules of loyalty, despite my own grave and repeated violations.

  I reached out my good hand, cold metal chain nipping the inside of my bare arm. Susannah did likewise, and we clasped fingers and swung gently, kicking our feet into the wet ground.

  “Do you know where Skye is?” she asked—certain, for once, that I would answer.

  “No,” I said. “But I’m sure she’s all right.”

  “Of course she is,” Susannah said. “Her kind always is.”

  We both laughed—at the campiness of that phrase and how ridiculous it was to think of Skye as any particular kind. As if there were any tribe that could possibly claim her.

  “You know,” Susannah said, “I think my father is more upset that I went to Venezuela without telling him than he is about the drugs. Weird, right?”

  “Right,” I said.

  “The worst part of this whole thing is having him puppy dog around the house all day, looking guilty. I hate feeling sorry for him.”

  She got off the swing. Stood up and walked in her bare feet down the road. I collected Bloom’s lead rope and fell into step beside her—her white nightgown unnaturally bright in the darkness. We walked through the woods, the back route to her house. The rain came down, still light but fuller in volume. It flattened my hair to my scalp but barely dented Susannah’s heavy mane.

  At her house, she hugged me quickly, then ran inside. I mounted Bloom as she stole inside her kitchen door. Through the light in her bedroom window, I saw her fold my letter and put it into an envelope. She never hand-delivered letters, always mailed them, and I knew this one would find its way
to the corner mailbox by morning, traveling the scant mile by circuitous way of the Old Lenox Post Office. Like a thousand letters before it. And after it.

  The rain fell, Bloom twitching her ears in protest. Without being commanded the horse shifted around and began heading toward home. A lump in my throat swelled with sorrow and relief at my own undeservedness.

  I could never have predicted it could feel so painful. So grand and enormous. So unexpected and inevitable. To be forgiven.

  AND SO THAT TIME CONTINUED, Skye gone, the rest of us in limbo. Susannah’s father returned, for the time being, to Venezuela. Her mother went back to work, leaving her each morning with a list of chores that Susannah would perform in a perfunctory and half-done manner before climbing into her VW and driving over to see me. We would ride out to the woods together, always at a walk. Entirely forbidden to see one another but with nothing left to lose. To stop taking risks would have marked the true end of things, concessions to parental rules even more unthinkable in the face of such disaster. And anyway, the absence of Susannah’s mother and the insistence of mine on remaining a polite bystander made any risk seem minimal.

  Never did our eyes keep to one direction. We let our gaze rove slowly all around us, expecting at any moment to see Skye, hiding in the snag trees. Her intoxicating beauty, and her dazzling energy, her disregard for the havoc wreaked by her ineffable mission. I looked for her everywhere. A week went by. Then the rain came full force. On the local and national news, pretty reporters in hooded slickers stood in front of Waverly and Esther Percy and the Butterfield Cape house, talking solemnly into their soggy microphones.

  When I woke up in the middle of the night, I saw Skye standing over me. I saw her at the end of our driveway, and behind the saw-horses in the tack room. I saw her on the sides of highways, thumb poised. I imagined her sneaking aboard boats bound for Europe. Susannah’s forgiveness allowed me to envision Skye seeking refuge in the most unlikely places: Eleanor’s room at school or wherever Mr. November had been exiled. I had been so certain, for so long, of Skye’s impending doom. Now, faced with it, nothing in the world seemed more impossible. Somebody, somewhere, was harboring Skye. I knew it in my bones deeply as I knew myself.