Child of My Heart

by Alice McDermott

  I don’t know that I made any decision. I don’t know that I understood what the bruises might mean, or forebode, although I think Daisy and I both had a sense of something menacing about them, something making its way into her life, and mine. Something that had broken. Something you sort of expected to break. But still hope it won’t.

  “One day isn’t very long,” I said to her, eventually, when she was ready to hear me. “You never know. You haven’t really given those pink shoes much time.”

  She sat up, her arms still around my neck, our faces just inches apart. “You only put them on yesterday,” I said. “They only got out here yesterday. They were perfectly ordinary shoes until then.” I heard my parents’ car pull into the driveway, the crunch of their tires on the gravel. “We have to give them a chance, right? We have to wait and see.” I wiped my thumbs over her flushed cheeks, which were still wet with tears. There was the screech of the old car’s handbrake.

  Gently, I leaned across Daisy’s lap to pick up her socks. “You know what they say about magic, and ghosts, and good luck, too,” I told her. “They say first you have to believe, right?”

  I unrolled the socks. They were warm and damp, still sandy. I shook them out elaborately, first one, then the other. I slapped them against the inside of my wrist. Then I brushed off Daisy’s discolored feet, running my fingers between her toes, tickling her a bit. I heard the car doors slam, my parents talking to each other as they made their way across the path between the garage and the porch, their voices ordinary and gentle, the same conversation they had begun on first waking.

  “Point your toes like a ballerina, Daisy Mae,” I whispered. And I slipped the socks over her feet, and then held them both, concealed in my hands, as my parents came through the screen door.

  They might have been visitors from another, darker planet, my father in his rumpled navy suit, my mother in her skirt and stockings and heels, a newspaper, a briefcase, under their arms. The smoky smell of the office and the car in their clothes. “Well, here they are!” my father exclaimed, as if he was indeed surprised to see us. And my mother asked, “How did you girls get along today? Did you wear poor Daisy out? Are the potatoes on?”

  I gave Daisy’s two feet a single shake, as if to seal our agreement, and then pulled her off the couch. “Oh my gosh, the potatoes!” I said, pretending, just to welcome them home, that I didn’t always know what I was doing.

  After dinner, Daisy and I went out to catch fireflies. She had put the pink shoes on again, giving them time, and they did indeed make her seem brighter. We sat together on the tree swing, facing each other, Daisy’s legs around my waist, our hands together on the thick rope, and when I had pumped us too high and I began to feel her tremble with each upward swing, I scraped my bare feet along the grass to slow us down a bit. We were sitting like that, in the darkness, only our back-porch light and the light from the kitchen where my parents still sat, talking and smoking, reaching into the yard, when Petey and Tony came along, through the gate this time, although they were accustomed to merely hopping the fence.

  “Have you seen Rags?” Petey asked softly as he approached, barely raising his head to look at us.

  “Judy and Janey took him,” I said. “Just before I walked Flora home.”

  “Well, he’s gone again,” he said into the ground. “They haven’t seen him.”

  “I haven’t seen him, either,” I said. I continued to push the swing back and forth, slowly, the sound of the rope creaking against the high branch the only sound among us for a while. In the darkness, I could really make out only the boys’ bright eyes and the white stubble of their hair. Their bodies seemed to have vanished.

  Finally I said, “You need to tell Daisy you’re sorry, Petey,” and as if he’d only been waiting for my cue, he said, “I’m sorry, Daisy.”

  She glanced at me, and then turned to him to say, “It’s all right.”

  I moved the swing slowly, back and forth. “You might want to say it to me, too,” I added, and once again, without hesitation, Petey said, “I’m sorry.”

  Tony stepped forward, drawing the straw hat from behind his back. “Here,” he said, handing it to me with some formality. It was somewhat the worse for wear, and although I couldn’t examine it thoroughly in this light, I could tell it had been bent out of shape, perhaps even chewed on here and there.

  “I’m going to give Daisy something, too,” Petey said shyly. “I just don’t have it yet. But she’s really going to like it when I get it.”

  Daisy and I exchanged a glance at this news, and then Daisy said, somewhat regally, “That’s very nice of you.”

  Now added to our silence in the darkness was the hollow and faraway sound of old Mr. Moran yelling at someone inside their house, and then his daughter’s shouted answer. I let Daisy slide off my lap and we all caught fireflies for a while— Petey and Tony more often than not having to peel the broken, still-illuminated things from the heels of their palms, where they had caught them just a second too late and with just a touch too much violence and enthusiasm. Judy wandered over eventually. She was carrying Garbage, the stray cat, up under her chin, and she cursed softly when he struggled out of her arms and disappeared into the bushes. Then Janey followed, as the volume of the argument inside their house ebbed and flowed and doors slammed. I made popcorn for us all, and then let them come in to eat it at the kitchen table, since the mosquitoes were getting bad. I sent them all home at about ten o’clock, when my parents called in from the living room to say that Daisy really should get to bed.

  We slept in the attic that night, putting the old wing chair in front of the little window just as Uncle Tommy had done. I could tell by a certain texture in her voice, a certain terseness in her words, by the way she glanced now and then at the back of the chair as she pulled down the bedspread and arranged her pillows, that Daisy was beginning to worry a bit that the ghost would indeed appear, and so I showed her how it said in my novel that ghosts appear only to single people who sleep alone. This seemed to reassure her a bit, although still she asked me to lie down with her until she went to sleep. I did, whispering Hail Marys as my mother used to do for me, one after the other, monotonously. We said no more about the bruises, although as she dressed I had noticed a new one, on her shoulder, small and round, from Petey’s fist. I had showed her that I had a smaller, matching version on my forearm. In only a few minutes she was sound asleep. I got up, drew the blanket over her shoulder, and got into the other bed.

  I looked at the window, at the dark silhouette of the high-backed chair in front of it. Of course Uncle Tommy, lying alone, would have seen the ghost. Ghosts, as the story said, didn’t appear to married couples. I thought of Uncle Tommy lying alone in this very bed, Uncle Tommy, past fifty, unmarried, childless. A small boyish body, a large, handsome face, also boyish in its way, his thinning hair still fair, his cheeks baby-smooth until they met the web of deep lines around his smiling eyes. Uncle Tommy, always alone, always smiling. Always, even past fifty, going through jobs and girlfriends. He lived in an apartment I had never seen, on the Upper West Side, and my entire experience of him was merely a series of unexpected visits and unexpected departures. Here and then not here. I liked him because he called my mother Sis or Sissy, and whenever she begged him to be serious he said, winking at me, “Nothing’s serious.” He said, laughing, that he wanted no part of marriage “and, while you’re at it,” no part of the Church. He said he didn’t much like the sound of till death do us part—a shudder of his shoulders and a shake of his head. He didn’t like the notion of deferred joy in heaven, either. “I’d rather be joyful now.” He liked children and he liked dogs, he said (although he had neither of his own), because they were the only creatures who truly understood what now is. If I’d inherited my own talent from anyone, it must have been from him.

  “Being happy,” Uncle Tommy liked to say, “takes a great deal of work.” He said he had no time for anything else.

  But the ghost who appeared to him
here in our attic had been watching and waiting, wanting something, a ghost so choked with emotion, Uncle Tommy had said, that he could barely speak. A mournful ghost, until Uncle Tommy gave him a chair, and a little boy to hold in his arms. Finally returned.

  I stayed awake for as long as I could, lying in Uncle Tommy’s bed, listening to Daisy’s soft breath and being some–what afraid of it, afraid of her unconsciousness, I guess, until I heard her giggle in her sleep. The ghost and his boy never did appear, not that night anyway, although I learned in the morning that Petey was there, sleeping in the dirt beneath the window of my empty room.

  He was at the kitchen table with my parents the next morning. My mother had draped a crocheted blanket over his shoulders and there was a milky cup of the black tea and a plate of toast on the table in front of him. My parents were pretending they didn’t know he had slept out there, telling me when I came into the room that Petey was up extra early today because he had hoped to catch a rabbit in our yard. My father was showing him how to go about it, demonstrating with a matchbox and a toothpick the kind of trap he could build, and my mother was leaning into the refrigerator, getting some carrots for him to use as bait. Since Petey was in my seat, I stood against the counter, watching him. There must have been a hundred mosquito bites on his face and arms and his bare brown legs, I could even see a few of them on his pink scalp. His right shoulder and arm, the right side of his face and head were dirty, still caked with mulch from the way he had slept under the bushes. He didn’t touch the tea, but ate the whole plate of toast and then, with my mother’s carrots in hand, stood up and said thank you and headed out, like a rabbit himself, through the back door.

  My mother returned to her chair wearily, as if Petey were her own wayward child. She asked me if I’d heard the police car last night, at the Morans’ house again, and when I said no, she shook her head. “Your father didn’t hear it either,” she said. “Or all the shouting.”

  “I heard the shouting earlier,” my father said, but my mother shook her head. “No,” she said. “Late into the night.” And he shrugged, sheepishly acknowledging that he had slept while she hadn’t.

  When they were gone, I climbed up the attic stairs to wake Daisy, bringing with me as I did one of the new outfits her mother had sent along. My own gesture of reconciliation and regret toward Aunt Peg, whom Daisy loved. Who loved Daisy. It was the smallest of all the outfits she had brought—a pink-and-blue-plaid shorts set that went nicely with her pink shoes. I had already ironed out the creases, and planned to pin the elastic waist if it was too loose. But Daisy pouted a bit when she saw it. She already had her heart set on the red-and-blue-checked sundress from my own eight-year-old wardrobe. She liked the ribbon ties at the shoulders. Downstairs in my own room, I held her between my knees and brushed out her hair, tying it up on the top of her head with a rubber band and another thick red ribbon. Her face was suddenly narrower, with her hair pulled off it, and her ears stood out like the handles on a teacup. Her skin, the bones of her bare shoulders seemed teacup thin, pale blue and fragile.

  That morning, over my own shorts and T-shirt, I had put on an old white dress shirt of my father’s, and on an impulse I lifted the tail of it over my head and then swooped down on Daisy, pulling us both onto the bed. She laughed and squealed, and then, remembering, put her hand to her hair and said, “Don’t mess up my bun.” “Oh, it’s your bun, is it?” I asked, tickling her. “I thought it was my bun.” I loved her little crooked and missing teeth, and her tiny nose and the pale red arcs of her brows. Catching our breath, we lay together for a moment on my chenille spread, the tail of the worn shirt covering both our faces, blotting out everything but the morning light. And then she whispered, “You won’t tell?” I shook my head, almost imperceptibly, and only to reassure her. “Don’t think about it anymore,” I told her, and then pulled the shirttail off our faces. I told her we had work to do.

  Last night I’d placed Flora’s mother’s straw hat on the hook by the back door, and this morning I saw more clearly that it had been twisted and broken, definitely chewed on around the brim. I slapped it on the back of my head anyway. I had money enough to buy her a new one.

  Petey and Tony and Janey were in our yard with a cardboard box and Rags’s clothesline leash and the limp carrots. Petey stepped in front of the box as soon as we came out the back door, the carrots behind his back, and Tony gave me one of those scooting gestures that meant Daisy was not supposed to see. Janey’s eyes went from the red ribbon in Daisy’s hair to the checked sundress to the jeweled shoes. Like all the Moran kids that morning, she was dressed in the same clothes she’d had on yesterday, and perhaps the day before, the same blouse and pedal pushers she’d gone riding in with a father Petey and Tony didn’t share. She was a striking little girl, despite the dirty face and the stringy white-blond hair, one of those little girls whose adult beauty was apparent even at this age, and she was only about six, apparent in the sharpness of her features and the curve of her spine and the hard blue of her eyes. “Where you going?” she asked, and then followed with, before I had quite said where, “Can I come?”

  Tony shouted, “Janey, no,” his chest inflated with authority, and then told her in the same rough and loud voice a dog trainer—or perhaps his own father—would use, “Stay here. Mommy said.”

  “I guess you’re supposed to stay here,” I told her, and Tony added, “The police will pick her up if she leaves this street. My mother said.”

  Janey looked disappointed for just a moment, and then she turned to him, her blue eyes narrowed, and what she had hoped for was suddenly erased from her face by her scorn. I could see a shin kick coming on, so I took Flora’s mother’s battered hat from the back of my head and placed it on Janey. “You want this?” I asked. “It looks good on you.”

  She looked up into the shadow of the brim and her face changed once more. She was a six-year-old again. “You look like a movie star,” I said. “Sandra Dee.” I shot Tony a look that said, Don’t you dare contradict me. And Janey slowly smiled, touching the brim all around. “Can I have it?” she said. I said, “Sure,” as if it were mine to give. I told her to come by after dinner tonight and I’d find her some colored ribbons to decorate it with.

  Now Petey, still trying to block the overturned box, made the same scooting motion with his free hand, the carrots held behind his back. “Go,” he mouthed. “Will you guys go?”

  Although Dr. Kaufman was supposed to be home today, Daisy asked if we could stop by Red Rover’s pen just to say hello. It wasn’t much out of the way, so I agreed. The car was parked in front of the house when we got there, but the window shades were all pulled down, so I told her we’d just go quickly around the back, give Red Rover a pat and a biscuit, and then get going. But when we went around the house, Dr. Kaufman himself was on his patio, his back to us, looking out over his empty pool and pool house. He was barefoot and wore only boxer shorts and a polo shirt, and I would have turned around and disappeared if he hadn’t heard Daisy’s hard footstep on the concrete and turned around himself. His thinning, wiry hair was mussed from sleep and he needed a shave. Everything about him, as a matter of fact, arms, legs, even the backs of his hands, everything but the crown of his head, seemed muted by curly dark hair. He had a cup of coffee in his hand. “Well, hey,” he said slowly. “You coming to walk Red? Did I tell you today?”

  I shook my head and introduced Daisy and said we were just stopping by to say good morning to the dog.

  “Oh, hey,” he said again softly, as if he were searching for words. He might still have been half asleep. “Isn’t that nice?” He suddenly moved to pull out one of the patio chairs. His hairy legs were bowed and he was not as tan as he would be by August. “You want to sit down?” he said, gesturing with the coffee cup. “You want some juice?” He looked at me, trying to gauge something. “You don’t drink coffee, do you? I brought some rolls back from the city. You want a roll?” I said no, thank you and no, thank you. I told him I was just on my way to
my other jobs.

  “Oh sure,” he said, nodding, his voice soft and vague once again. Behind him, the water in the pool was beautifully blue and still, reflecting only the small clouds that had begun to move into the sky. The pool house was closed up. It seemed never to have been opened. I heard Red Rover whine once or twice, not much hope in it.

  Daisy took my hand, as if to say, Let’s go, but Dr. Kaufman seemed to want to keep us there. “You having a nice summer?” he said, leaning against the patio table, as if we would have a long chat. “Yes, thank you,” I told him. “Busy.” Although we had spoken on the phone a number of times to make our arrangement, this was the first time I’d seen him this year. He was broad-shouldered but about my height, a little stooped, maybe a little heavier than I’d remembered. He always had a kind, unhappy face. “You look good,” he said. “You’re taller,” and because he looked at me for what seemed just a second or two too long—his dark brown eyes sad and assessing at the same time—he turned to Daisy and asked, “Where in the city are you from, sweetheart?”

  Without missing a beat Daisy said, “Sutton Place.”

  I laughed out loud, I couldn’t help it, and Dr. Kaufman turned to me, smiling and puzzled—the first he had smiled since we arrived—and said, “What? What’s funny?” His eyes kept slipping from my face to my legs. Daisy was smiling, too.

  I grabbed the bun on Daisy’s head and shook it. “Well, Queens Village, actually,” I said, and she giggled and shrugged, and Dr. Kaufman, siding with her, said, “So she’s got a good imagination.” Now he looked her over, too. “And some nice shoes,” he said.