When it was gone, I got up and slipped back into my clothes, standing for just one moment under the opaque light with my shirt in my hands. He was still stretched out on the bed, the damask draped over his shoulder and his thigh. He turned to me, the back of his hand on his forehead, and watched, and I watched back. Finally, he said, “Although I can hardly see you, from here, without my glasses, I suspect you’re beautiful, standing there.”
I pulled on my shirt, lifted my hair up over my collar, and slowly closed each button. “Back to my work,” I said.
Daisy and Flora were still sleeping. Only twenty minutes had elapsed since I’d left the room. I put the back of my hand to Daisy’s cheek, she seemed cooler, and drew the blanket up over Flora’s shoulder. I glanced at the three sketches in their gold frames and considered what their worth might be, when they had been claimed by the future and all that was pretty and charming about them was transformed by all that had intervened—the infant grown into a troubled woman, the mother never returned, the father and all his efforts turned to dust. But then, I supposed, with more time, all that would be forgotten as well, and they would once again be charming and pretty portraits of a mother and a child—not a biography, as Macduff might have said, but a novel.
I found I preferred modern art, pictures of nothing, after all.
I went out to the porch with my book. I moved one of the canvas chairs under Flora’s window. I realized that every bit of my body, every inch of my skin, felt windblown, weatherworn, pleasantly weary, except for some pain at my center, a dark, sharp jewel of it. I turned the book over, thought I heard Ana’s voice coming from the studio, perhaps crying again, or crying out. Then it was silent, only the distant breeze, the distant ocean, the birds on the lawn and in the high hedge. And then, softly, I heard Flora and Daisy. They were talking to each other, something about the tree, and the licorice, and Mommy in New York City, something sweet and calm in the rhythm of their voices, in the gentle exchange of their words, that reminded me of my parents’ muted conversations, the perpetual sound of their voices coming through our bedroom wall as I woke or drifted to sleep. I felt a sweet, deep, sorrowful nostalgia for them, and for the days I had been in their care.
Then I heard Flora say my name, and Daisy repeat it. I called over my shoulder, toward the window, “I’m out here, girls,” and got up and went to them.
We had a snack in the kitchen, glasses of Hawaiian Punch (telling Flora, “Doesn’t it taste better in a glass?”) and some crackers, and then I went to the broom closet and found some of the old pillowcases Ana used to clean with. We carried them out to the quilt under the trees, and after we had each picked a lollipop and a licorice string, I used the scissors to cut them into long strips that the girls knotted together to make a tail for our kite. We put the kite together on the porch, to be out of the wind, and then Flora got into the stroller and we headed for the beach, Daisy carrying the gaudy kite on her back to keep the wind from bending it. A modern-art version, it seemed to me, of angel wings.
We had used a good deal more kite string on the lollipops than I had figured, and so while the kite took off immediately, it seemed to end its ascent rather abruptly, and while with plenty of tugging and running I was able to keep it aloft pretty well, it never lost the impression, as kites sometimes will, of being tethered to the earth. This bothered me more than it bothered the girls, who chased after the kite and tried to grab its tail each time it dove toward the sand. The waves were high, coming close upon one another’s backs and crashing with that hollow, angry sound that I usually associate with bad weather. But the sky remained bright. The clouds had grown higher but they were still pure white and lit by the sun. As we stood at the edge of the water, letting the foam spill around Daisy’s feet, we spotted a ship out on the horizon, just the grayish silhouette of what seemed like a tanker heading east. We watched it moving, imperceptibly, it seemed, and then Daisy said, “I think it will be safe out there. I think the water’s pretty calm. It’s just dangerous here, where we swim.”
I looked down at her, Flora on my hip. “You think?” I asked.
She nodded. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure,” she said. And then did a gentle little two-step, just as I had instructed her, moving her feet out of the wet sand that covered them to a new spot where they could be covered again. She looked up once more. “Yeah,” she said, as if to reassure us, “those sailors will be fine.”
Up in the parking lot, as was our routine, I had them both lean against the railing while I bent to wipe the sand off their feet. I slipped Flora’s white sandals on, then brushed off Daisy’s feet. With her clean, bruised foot resting on my thigh, I held up one of the shoes, and it caught the sun, iridescent and, I insisted, still pale blue, the very color of the sky. I held it out to Flora. “Haven’t these turned blue?” I asked, and Flora shook her head solemnly and then told us, “The babies were crying.”
Daisy and I looked at each other and frowned. Then Daisy smiled her “Let’s indulge Flora” smile and said, “What babies, Flora Dora?”
“The babies,” Flora said, and reached out and put her fingernail to one of the little fake jewels. In an instant it was off and fallen into the sand. I leaned over to pick it up and then held it out to Daisy in the palm of my hand. It was turquoise and diamond-shaped, and the glue that had held it had left its shape on the shoe. “We can just glue this back on, Daisy Mae,” I said. “I’m sure we can.”
She seemed stricken, and if she had been another child—Bernadette, for instance, or one of the Morans—she might have slapped Flora’s hand. But she only shrugged, used to this kind of disappointment. “I know,” she said.
I slipped the jewel into the pocket of my shirt, slipped the sock and the shoe over Daisy’s foot. Gently ran my hand over the bruise on the back of her calf. We walked home quietly, the sky becoming a pale orange in the west, although above us it was still bright blue. On one of the great lawns, just our side of a long split-rail fence entwined with roses, we came upon a tiny rabbit, close enough to the road that we could see its mouth moving, the reflected light in its round black eye. With a finger to my lips, I told the girls to be quiet as we crouched down to watch him, getting as close as any wild rabbit will let you get, a very young rabbit, it seemed to me, not wise enough yet to be startled.
When he’d finally hopped away, we began walking again, and I said to Daisy, “You must have told Petey you liked rabbits.”
She said, “Yeah. Remember my first day. That morning when we saw all the rabbits, when Red Rover ate my muffin?”
I said I did remember. It wasn’t so very long ago.
“We were sitting with the Scotties,” Daisy said. “Petey told me he wasn’t allowed to have a dog and I said we weren’t either. But I was thinking of asking my father if I could have a rabbit. Because you could keep them in your room and they wouldn’t run away. And they’re so cute. I said I’d just like to pet one.”
I laughed. “You may have started something,” I said.
At Flora’s house the car was gone and the painting was still propped up against the studio wall. There was green in it now, the color of grass, flecked here and there into the black and the gray. The cook was in the kitchen, shaking a torrent of tenderizer onto a thick steak, picking it up with her bare fingers and slapping it down again, her forearms jiggling. The overhead light was on although it was only six o’clock and the light outside was still bright. There was a pot of water boiling on the stove and some dough rolled out on a cutting board on the table. Something lovely and ordinary about the scene, and about her solid presence in her hairnet and calico apron, the beads of perspiration above her lip. What had happened this afternoon, in that pale, enchanted light of the studio where he painted, suddenly struck me as imaginary, a place and time and series of events that were only conjured, recited, wished for, dreamt about, a fanciful antidote to what was real and solid and inevitable—this kitchen, this food, this woman, the preparation of yet another meal at the closing of yet another day. For
a moment I found myself trying to recall that little bit of pain, somewhere at my center, fearful, for a moment, that I had lost it.
“Hello, my dears,” the cook said over her shoulder. Daisy and Flora went to the table, looking at the rolled-out dough as if it would form itself into biscuits or cookies or pie right before their eyes. “Frenchy’s gone,” she said to me. “He took her to the station.” She rolled her eyes, breathing heavily with her efforts in the kitchen. “All of a sudden she remembers she hasn’t seen her husband in three weeks.” She chuckled, flipped the steak over. “Thank God I’m a Christian,” she said.
Daisy and I got Flora into her pajamas and then delivered her to the cook, who had already set out a dinner of applesauce and warm biscuits and carrots and peas. She told us we might as well go on home. She’d get Flora to sleep. She’d brought her overnight bag, she said. Not that she didn’t think it would do him good to take care of his daughter by himself, but at his age, and with the way he liked his drink, it probably wasn’t the safest thing to leave the two of them alone.
She chuckled again to herself, and whispered to me, “I don’t suppose I’ll have to bar the door.”
Flora cried when we said goodbye, and as Daisy leaned over to kiss her good night, I noticed the brightness had returned to her cheek. “One minute,” I said to Daisy at the door, and then went back to Flora’s room to retrieve the aspirin I’d left there this afternoon. I shook a dozen of them into my palm and then slipped them into my shirt pocket. Flora’s mother’s scarves had been taken out of the kitchen and placed neatly on Flora’s dresser. I lifted one, and saw beneath it a folded piece of heavy beige cloth, the painter’s backdrop damask that covered the studio bed. It was no more than a twelve-inch square, roughedged, cut rather quickly and unevenly by a dull scissors. In the center there was a stain, a smear of dark color.
I folded the cloth carefully, and returned it to the pile of scarves.
We walked home together in the fading summer light, holding hands, mostly quiet. At one point Daisy said suddenly, “I know what Flora meant—about the babies.” I looked down at her. The windburn, the fever had painted her cheeks, and her eyes were bright against them. “That was the story you told, about the babies at Lourdes who drink the water in their bottles and then their tears turn to jewels. Remember? You told Flora. And their mothers put them on their shoes. That’s what she was thinking about when she picked the jewel off my shoe. The babies crying.”
I stood still for a moment, then dropped my head back and closed my eyes. “You’re right,” I said. “You’re absolutely right.”
Daisy nodded, proud of herself.
“Gosh,” I said. “I can’t tell you kids anything. You remember everything.”
We began walking again, and softly Daisy said, “I remember Andrew Thomas.”
I put my hand to the back of her neck, lifted her thick red hair. Another gust of wind picked up the rest of it and Daisy squinted, walking into it. “Margaret Mary Daisy, Daisy, tell me your answer true,” I said. “I have no doubt that you do.”
We had just turned the corner onto our road when we heard the commotion: Rags barking and Petey and Tony shouting, and maybe Janey’s voice and the old man’s mixed in there, too, mixed and carried by the wind. We had not reached the Moran place yet when out of their driveway came Tony, and then Petey, with one of the wooden rabbit traps held aloft, high above his head, and Rags leaping and jumping and barking beneath it, and Janey and Judy following, trying to bat the dog away. Tony was the first to see us and he pointed, and then Petey saw us and came running, knees high, triumphantly holding up the rabbit trap, Rags snapping at his heels, the girls following, screaming and yelling, all joyous, all oblivious to the old man’s voice, which was still coming from behind their hedge, shouting and swearing. Baby June following up behind.
They descended on us, Petey yelling, “We got one, we got one,” his face flushed and perspiring, his eyes crazy and bright. He thrust the rabbit trap into Daisy’s hands as Rags followed along under it, barking and spinning, the wind blowing his fur. “For you,” Petey shouted. And Tony, like an echo, leaning over her, repeated, “For you, for you.” And then the girls were upon her, Janey crying, “Let me see, let me see,” Judy trying to swat the dog away.
They engulfed Daisy, with their brown limbs and their blond heads, their voices and their quick breaths, their hands on the cage, on her arms, all of them pressing together, Rags barking and leaping. I saw Daisy’s foot go up behind her, either to regain her balance or to move the dog away, and then I saw Rags with his teeth sunk into her ankle. She cried out and Rags was jumping toward Janey and Petey, who were suddenly holding the cage, suddenly stepping away from Daisy as she bent, screaming, both hands to her leg. I saw the blood blossom into her thin white anklet.
I scooped her up and ran to the house. She was crying, holding her leg, screaming in breathless bursts. “You’re all right,” I told her. “You’re all right, Daisy Mae. You’re all right.” I was aware only of the sound of the Morans running behind me. Then of Petey shouting in his adult voice, “I’ll get the cop.” I pulled open the back door and ran through the silent kitchen, through the living room, where the cats bounded from the couch to welcome our arrival.
“You’re all right, you’re all right,” I kept repeating, through her panting tears. “You’re all right, Daisy Mae.”
I carried her into the bathroom and sat her on the edge of the tub. I pulled off her shoe and the white socks. The bite was precise, two deep toothmarks already beginning to swell and then a smaller set of punctures between them. I turned on the water in the tub. She had her arm around me, she was gripping my hair, burying her face in it. I told her to move her leg under the water, to rinse off the blood, while I pulled a towel down from the rack and wrapped it around her calf. Moe and Larry padded gently around my knees.
“It hurts it hurts it hurts,” she said. I said, “I know, I know. It’ll be all right.”
I leaned back and found the bottle of hydrogen peroxide my mother kept under the sink and poured it over her ankle as well, making the blood foam. She screamed and tightened her grip on my hair. “I know,” I said, holding her. “I know.”
I was hardly aware of the Moran kids, piled like a logjam in the bathroom door, until I heard Mrs. Richardson’s voice saying, “Move away, you children, move away.” And then, “Scat, scat,” to Moe and Larry.
And then—with a dream’s inappropriate and nonchalant merging of people and place—Mrs. Richardson, in her tweed skirt and sensible shoes and her wide, capable body, was behind me in our narrow bathroom, her hand on my shoulder as she leaned to see Daisy’s leg. “Oh, that’s bad,” she said, drawing in her breath. “Terribly discolored.” She patted Daisy’s shoulder as well. “We’re going to get you to a doctor, my dear,” she said, shouting a bit to be heard over the running water. And to me, “She should go straight to the emergency room.”
I felt Daisy’s arm tighten around my neck, her fingers gripping my hair. I leaned to scoop the water over her foot, over the blood, handful after handful. “It’ll be all right, Daisy Mae,” I told her, trying to keep my voice sure. “It’ll be okay.”
“The man next door has gotten hold of the dog,” Mrs. Richardson was saying. She seemed to be bustling about, as much as she could in such a narrow space, opening and closing the vanity doors. “That’s the important thing, in case of rabies. I gather it’s a stray.”
Daisy was crying so hard by then, I doubt if she heard. I hardly heard myself, with the water running and Daisy leaning over my back, her mouth against my shoulder. One of the Moran kids said, “It was Rags,” and I think there was a sound that I associated with the wind—I had the image of a tree limb breaking, the clap of a black wave—and a few minutes later Tony was shouting, “Here he comes.”
Then I recognized the cop’s voice saying, patiently, “Get out of the way, guys.” Now the cop, Mrs. Moran’s boyfriend, was in the bathroom as well, leaning past Mrs. Richardson’s s
olid front. “I’ll drive you to the hospital,” he said. I continued scooping the water over Daisy’s leg.
He moved closer. Mrs. Richardson pressed up against the sink. “Let me carry her,” he said.
But I blocked him with my elbow and my shoulder.
“The sooner the better,” Mrs. Richardson said.
I looked at Daisy, her little chin raised and her eyes shut tightly against the pain. “I’ll carry her,” I said.
Slowly, I turned off the water and asked someone to hand me another towel. Mrs. Richardson already had one in her hands. I turned Daisy around and had her place the bitten leg on the towel, and then I wrapped it carefully, bending over her, my hair against her bare legs.
“Apply pressure, dear,” Mrs. Richardson said.
And the cop said, “Let me get my car.”
He squeezed out through the door, herding the Moran kids in front of him, saying, “Come on, guys, give her space. She’ll be okay.”
I carried her through the living room, where the light had begun to take on its peachy, golden hue, through the kitchen, and out into the yard, where the Moran kids were all standing, Janey and Tony dumbfounded, their mouths open, Judy crying into her hands, Petey with his fists balled up tight, his face both furious and full of tears. Mr. Richardson was out there, too, with Angus and Rupert held short-leashed, close to his side. Even old Mr. Moran. He was unshaven, wearing a gray-looking undershirt and baggy pants, leaning wearily on our back fence, above my father’s dahlias. He was holding baby June in his arms. The cop pulled his car out of the Morans’ driveway and then swung up to our gate.
Child of My Heart Page 21