Ugly, ugly, their cold glassy stares. They made my stomach turn. I fell to my knees before the display table and grasped the one that most resembled a family—a triple figure of a woman and a man dressed in finery, pushing a baby carriage—falsely colored, falsely poised. I held it in my hand and tried to scratch at it with my nails, but the material was too hard and slick for me to ruin it. Nothing mattered as much to me as damaging that figurine, so I stood and smashed the family to the polished wood floor, where it crashed apart in flaky white shards and floating powder.
I left my mother’s home while the fine chalky dust of that broken china still drifted in the air. I heard Clorinda say in my wake, “Lord God Almighty.”
Walking away, I could hear the other maids calling for me, calling for a carriage for me, but I would be long gone before the driver could be summoned. They had known me during all those years when my world revolved only around me, and still their concern for me was sincere. But I needed to share this sorrow with only one person.
I took long steps, heading in the direction of the Methodist church, where Ira slept at night. I knew this because it had been posted on the board outside our office for all the time we’d worked together, there so anyone could find him if in need. And there had never been a soul as much in need of him as I was at that moment.
I don’t remember my thoughts, only my feelings of such deep betrayal that tore me apart, and I needed to see the only person in the world who could calm me, the only person who could help me find a place for this new truth. My father alive. Not dead. But insane. Hidden because he no longer suited. The stars overhead pulled me, my footsteps pounding out his name.
On the church grounds, I found his quarters easily, and when he opened the door, an expression I can’t describe—fear, concern, gratitude, and love—shone back when he saw me. I touched him. I had been waiting, knowing it was inevitable, and then I was sinking into his chest, my face on his shoulder, my body encircled in his arms, the solid length of him against me, and that awful urge to cry that had always lived inside me broke free. I cried until every single cell inside was drained and all that was left was the horrible empty husk of humanity I was.
The next day, Ira accompanied me on the train to Houston and then onward to the address I had demanded from my mother. He sat next to me, his warmth comforting me on my quest to see the man I hadn’t seen since I was five, the man I barely remembered but whom I hoped I could still love.
“When we arrive, do you wish to go in by yourself?” Ira asked me in the kindest voice I’d ever heard.
I was putting off an inevitable decision. In some ways, coming to grips with what Ira and I had meant to each other was more frightening than seeing my father for the first time in fourteen years. I said, “Would you follow behind me?”
“Of course.”
“In case I can’t hold up.”
“But you will, Grace. I know it. You will hold up. Your fortitude is greater than you know.”
I couldn’t think of the future. Ira took my hand and lifted it toward his face, as if he intended to kiss it, and then suddenly he seemed not to know what to do, and he laid my hand back down on the seat between us. He smiled at me, I suppose apologizing. But had it not been for his caring, his sincerity, his presence, I believe I would not have been able to go on with my life.
What was to happen next? Where would I be had not Etta come, had I not been sent to work with Ira, had I never known the truth? One tiny word or event could mold our lives into very different shapes. Mine had assumed a complicated form, but it was larger, so much larger, as a result.
The journey passed heavily. The heat was alive and wavering and gave a deep dreamy quality to the air and sunshine. On the mainland, the train took us past cornfields, empty farm roads, and green cotton patches, scenes of pastoral tranquility so at odds with the turmoil that lived inside me.
And yet, sitting there beside Ira, I could hear each new moment coming to life, each breath and each heartbeat.
“Ira,” I said to him, “you are the finest man I’ve ever known.”
At the institution, they led us to my father, who was kept in a private room near the back of the huge old house, where people such as my mother were able to hide away their disgraces. As we walked down a center hallway, a woman cried out, and then a childlike voice called, “Help me, oh please, help me,” and I wondered if I could do this, but Ira seemed to believe I could, so I kept placing one foot down before the other.
The nurse opened his door, and I saw his back, curved and ridged with spiny protrusions. So much older than I had expected, but when he turned to face me, I saw a face I remembered, older now, but the same long, straight nose that my mother had once described as “aristocratic,” soft gray-blue eyes, narrow cheeks, and prominent chin. His face appeared peaceful and soft, ivory in color, and his eyes settled not exactly on mine. His hair was thin and pale and combed away, so light and wispy it looked like nothing, blonder than mine, like part of the sunlight streaming in from the window.
His room was made up like a regular bedroom, not as an infirmary room or ward, and the private nurse who attended him left us alone. My father gazed up and said, “Hello,” as if I could have been one of the nurses who worked there. Ira stood behind me as I sat beside my father and took his hand.
“I’m Grace, your daughter, Grace.”
“Oh yes,” he said, smiling, then laughed. “So nice to meet you.”
He didn’t know me.
And yet I stayed with him for much of the afternoon. Except for a few moments when his face changed expression, a kind of distant alertness momentarily taking over at the lilt of my voice, or when his eyes drifted to some unknown or perhaps remembered place as I spoke of myself, he showed no change in recognition or mental faculties.
Outside the most sorrowful rainfall began to patter the packed dirt, dropping large, glossy tears on the leaves of rosebushes. He was like a child, just as my mother had said. But my heart rushed to the surface. I would not abandon him, childlike as he was. He was still my father, and knowing that he was alive had already begun to fill that place left empty inside me all those years ago. Perhaps a God-given gift, my intuition had told me that there was no last chapter at the end of his tale, and I’d never recovered because of it.
As we returned to the island, Ira beside me, his hands next to mine, I felt the island’s pull and the slow rise and fall of the sea. It tugged at the soft spots between my ribs. What had transpired in my family was no stranger than the fact that people lived and thrived despite all the sad things that happened. And Ira and I were but a man and a woman in a carriage surrounded by a world filled with unexpected wonders and wounds.
The trajectory of my life had been forever altered, and there was only one person to credit. Etta had provided this devastating gift, this knowledge, both excruciating and enlightening. That morning I had learned that her infatuation and curiosity about Mother had driven her to uncover it. She had released the secret, and in many ways I was thankful she had, but I would never allow her or anyone else to again describe my father in such a way. I never wanted to hear that word madman ever again.
And what of my mother? Keeping the secret must have consumed her. I did believe she had thought she was protecting me. How hard she must have worked to keep me from knowing! I had an image of my mother staring down a distant storm, rumbling ever closer, her fists raised in silent defiance, insisting it not come, still standing there even as the sky cracked open and the first hard pings of rain hit her.
At least she had made sure that my father wasn’t locked up in a cage or tortured, as I’d heard was often done in other asylums. She had found probably the best and kindest care for the afflicted as was possible. My mother took care of everything so well, especially herself.
The floodwaters again poured down my face. Ira held me and whispered in my ear, “You’ll withstand this, Grace. You will.” I turned my face to say something, and then his lips were on mine and I was kissing
him back, our mouths salty from so many tears and sweet from so many words we had yet to say.
Chapter Thirty-Two
THE GIRL
The girl rubbed her eyes awake and thought of Harry. Not since he’d first taken bad sick had they been out on the bay again. Every day Harry had stayed huddled in his berth in the boat, the boat rocking lifelessly with the will of the waves, straining against the ropes. Harry stayed inside, coughing and choking and hacking up blood and mucus and suffering, suffering as the girl had never seen a person suffer before.
She visited every morning, took him breakfasts and suppers from Reena he barely touched, and often sat with him until he’d garnered the strength to shoo her away, saying, “Be gone with you now” in his broken voice.
She returned every morning, always holding on to the hope that she’d arrive to find him out in the sunlight, working on some little thing that needed fixing, back to his old self again, miraculously healed. But each day brought more weakness, and one day the girl got a glimpse of his leg. It was chicken-bone thin with pale, plucked flesh drawn tightly over it. If only he would go to the hospital.
One day he lifted himself up on one elbow, stretching out his side to get enough air into his lungs to form words. He pointed at her to make sure he had her attention. “Visitor I had. Told me that girl was in the newspaper again.”
He stopped for a minute, his labored breathing accompanied by a rattling sound. “No good, no good.”
She nodded.
“There’s people trying to find you. Like it’s some kind of a game. But once they gets a hold of you . . .” He stopped and shook his head. “No telling.”
The girl lowered her eyes. She should never have gotten up there again. People would be all over her like Grace was, maybe asking to help but really doing nothing of the sort, further complicating her already complicated existence.
Still, as she sat there on the edge of Harry’s bed, listening to him fight for every breath, she remembering the running, jumping off the wall, escaping, and she had a feeling of something else, too, something beyond memory. There was a fire in her gut like undigested food, voices rumbling down deep inside her, something incomplete, other dangers more threatening than this misunderstood running on the wall, and somewhere in her center the other danger lived and grew behind a closed door, the unspeakable thing that she couldn’t express even if she were able to express anything.
“What’s wrong?” he finally asked.
She lifted a hand and pointed a chapped finger in his direction.
“No,” he said, “what’s wrong with you?”
She shook her head.
The rain came down the next day in panels that looked like glass under a layer of dew. The girl had stayed indoors at Reena’s for all of the daylight hours until Reena sent Maurice for her. He shook her awake and then passed on the message that Reena wanted her company in the big house kitchen. The girl put on her blue dress for such an occasion as going into the big house, something she’d done only twice before.
Reena scolded her unfairly, telling her not to be “lazing around no more,” “moping around never did no one any good,” and that she needed help fixing supper. And then Reena fixed her gaze on the blue dress. She frowned in disapproval but handed over an apron and told the girl to slice onions and chop peppers for the evening supper, a jambalaya she often made for her white family. It was Reena’s favorite meal to cook on a Saturday, and as the girl watched her put it all together, she helped herself to stray pieces of boiled sausage and shrimp as Reena was cutting and tossing them into a pot.
“Someday you is gonna have to learn something else besides getting yourself into trouble.”
The girl tried to smile, but it came out as a grimace.
“You don’t need a whole lotta words in your mouth to be able to cook,” said Reena. “It’s just some knowing about seasoning, and what goes together with what, and how long to let things simmer.” She looked up. “I be teaching you shortly. That’s how I learnt—from a good cook, my own mama, God rest her soul.”
The girl leaned against the working table and watched the pot begin to fill. Cooking wasn’t such a bad idea, but she would’ve preferred to have become an artist.
“You best start watching me every day.” Reena waved a big arm at the nice white house they were standing in. “And then maybe I can get you a job someday in one of these here houses.”
The girl kept on watching. The jambalaya was finally put together and set to simmer, and then someone called out in the backyard for Reena. Reena wiped her hands on her apron front and strode to the back door, which swung open on its oiled hinges without a sound. The girl was right behind her.
A fisherman from the docks, and a friend of Harry’s, was standing there. The girl wondered why he was seeking Reena, and then in her gut she knew he wasn’t looking for Reena, that he was probably looking for her.
“I’m a-coming for that girl there,” said the man, gazing at them. “Harry has gotten real sick, and he’s a-asking for her.”
“Lord have mercy,” Reena said softly. She let out a heavy sigh. “Take that apron off yourself, and you best head on down there.”
The girl passed over the apron, then started down the steps, hitching up the silky blue skirt in both fists. She joined the man as Reena called out from behind them, “Don’t stay too long, you hear?”
The rain had stopped, but everywhere the leaves glistened and pools reflected the ceiling of dark clouds overhead. The girl wished she could run down to the docks. She could jump the low-water spots easily, but the man who’d come for her walked along at a regular pace, as if to say that rushing would serve no purpose.
She stayed with him as they walked all the way to Harry’s boat. On the planks at the back of the boat, the man left her.
As she stepped into the stern, a sour, musty smell that she remembered hit her nose, something not nearly as bad as the smell on the day she and Harry had returned after the storm, but there was still something familiar about it from that time.
He was stretched out in the berth, with heavy quilts pulled up to his neck, his face pale as linen and his lips bluish and chafed, a clammy dullness on his skin, his cheeks sunken, as if scraped out with a knife, his eyes weary and blurred, his breath and body foul. And there was a feeling of slipping, of bone-white finality and cold.
He motioned her over. “Now listen,” he said with effort.
After drawing breath, he held it and then said in a raspy wheeze, “This’ll be the last time we talk, and I want you to know I’m leaving this boat to you. It ain’t much. But it’s all I have. Your pa and your brother would have wanted me to take care of you. And I done the best I could. Work the boat or sell it. Don’t matter to me either way.” He lifted his head from the pillow and hacked for a minute, then laid his head back down resignedly. “That’s all. You can go on now. Leave me be.”
She shook her head. She didn’t want the boat. She wanted him.
“This ain’t nothing. For a young girl. To see. Go on.”
But she stayed.
The girl sat until long past nightfall, until the docks grew silent; until she could hear the splash of jumping fish in the quiet waters of the wharves; until she could hear gull wings in the warm night breezes over the port; until she could hear waves colliding with sandy shelves on the other side of the island; until she heard him draw one long, last wheezing breath, and then nothing at all.
Reena would have said that he’d passed on, but passed on to where, the girl didn’t know. She could only hope for Heaven. The girl lifted the quilts to cover his face and head, as that was what she’d seen her mother do to her grandmother’s body years before, and then she left the boat where it sat in the brackish port water. She walked down the docks, surprised that there could still be stars overhead, that there could still be this cool night breeze.
Why did the best people die? Why did they leave her?
She wasn’t aware of them until they’d crept up on he
r again, silent and stealthy.
“You’re back,” one of them said.
“Back for more?” another one said and laughed.
She spun around and stared. Then the lock on the door in her head labeled “Don’t Ever Look in Here Again” flew open, releasing a rogue wave that slammed her down. She remembered. That which she had been able to hide away now stood right before her eyes. The same beginning, the same men, the same raucous comments, the same laughter and smells. It was as in the dream, in the nightmare, but it hadn’t been a dream after all. Instead, it was real, all too real. Yes, it had happened. She had been taken. She had been used. She had been wronged in the worst way one could be wronged.
But it would never happen again.
Her body became fluid. She moved like water, flowed like water—silky, smooth. She poured away, her feet striking the planks soundlessly, her heart beating in her chest silently, her feet crossing the boardwalk on The Strand and then over sand and gravel and oyster-shell alleys noiselessly, running for so long she thought she’d lost them, but no. When she turned, they were still there, chasing her like a pack of hungry animals, teeth bared, hair stiff like razorbacks, and she kept floating over the earth, running for her soul, for her very life, because she would not let this thing happen to her again. If only she could scream for help.
She ran from memory. No moon tonight because of the cloud cover. Utter darkness except for an occasional flickering candle or lantern behind gently waving curtains meant that she had to move by instinct. She could no longer hear them behind her, only the cooing of mourning doves, the hoots of owls, and mice scratching in the trash piles.
She had outrun them for now and turned right once, then again, changing course and heading back toward the docks on different alleys and streets. They would always track her. She could still feel their nearness reaching out for her with long, tentacle-like arms. While she was running, it came to her—an image, a sketch she had to compose—and it twisted her and wrenched her out. But it was the idea she needed. Otherwise, she would end up like those minnows she and Harry had seen on the dock, those tiny fish dropped on solid land and left to die. Staying would spell her death. By the time her feet hit the planks on Dock 19 again, the wind was wild in her hair and she was already tearing herself out of the blue dress, out of these things that didn’t belong to her.
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