“That’s good.”
He hadn’t turned to her, and her cheeks pinked in determination. She stood still, taking in his every movement. The basket he rummaged through sat beside an empty and never-used clothes dresser with yellow-duckling handles. That piece of furniture, like the white curtains, the yellow rocker, and the wallpaper—hundreds of baby ducks, all with one foot in the air—was the work of Jeannie. A woman she’d never seen. A stranger Papa said was her mother. He didn’t use the dresser, Willow knew, because like the photographs of Jeannie hanging in his room, it made him close his eyes and take deep breaths.
He lifted her favorite pair of pants, the ones the color of a ripe apple. At least they were that red the summer before when they hung over her shoe-tops. They only touched her anklebones now, and matched the red-but-not-red color of her lips.
One of his discarded T-shirts served as her nightgown, and she lifted the cotton over her head and twisted out. Standing beside him in her Friday panties on a Saturday, she ached for him to turn, face her, and smile in a way that told her she was pretty, maybe even as pretty as her best friend in kindergarten, Mary Wolfe.
He looked over the front of one shirt and then another.
Waiting to be noticed was too hard, and Willow grabbed her stomach, pinching her skin to try and make an outside hurt bigger than her inside hurt. The outside hurt she could stop when she wanted.
If I could have pulled Julian aside and scolded him, just as I’d done when he was a boy, I’d have done so. He never let his eyes really see her shoulder when he helped her dress or when she sat naked in the bathtub. Did he suppose she didn’t sense his aversion? She knew he loved her, though. She knew because she’d ridden his shoulders and listened to his thoughts since before she could walk. At first, her arms had been so short she needed to stretch to wrap them around his forehead, his sweat filling her palms on hot days while he held her with one big hand low on her back, and with the other hand he folded laundry, washed dishes, and picked groceries from store shelves. She’d often napped sitting on his shoulders, one cheek and one ear on top of his head, his thoughts mixing with hers. Even awake, watching him walk across the room, or smoke a cigarette, the words in his head mostly said he loved her. Sometimes, they said things like she’ll suffer for her shoulder. Leaving her own thoughts and sliding into his, she first heard directly from him what he never wanted her to hear at all: She needed to be “fixed.”
Standing beside him now, she wouldn’t let herself think about sad things; she’d think about things that matched. Her favorite game was “Memory,” where small playing cards, each with a different, brightly-colored object, were turned over two at a time until matches were found. Those cards she got to keep. Bits of winning and order. Things fitting together and making sense. Even if her mother was dead.
She swayed, leaning her weight onto one foot and then the other. Her and Papa’s bodies matched and didn’t match. They had the same dark brown hair, though he had a few white hairs by his ears, and they had the same green-blue-brown eyes. Mostly though, their bodies didn’t match. She didn’t have the thing she once peeked into the shower and saw hanging off him from out of a mitten-sized patch of fur. (Mary Wolfe was right—boys did have ding-dongs.) But the main reason her body didn’t match his was because his back went straight across. Both his shoulder blades stayed inside him and as flat as the floor she slept on. Her right scapula—a word she knew from her trips to the doctors—pushed out with a knot of bone the size of her fist and not even sleeping on the hard floor made it go away. The bone huddled beneath her clothes and made her right arm slightly shorter than her left. Her right hand was stupid, too, because it was still five when she was six. Girls could have yellow hair and straight backs and be pretty like Mary Wolfe, and girls could have brown hair and crooked backs and stupid hands and be ugly.
Watching Willow, I ached for her. I thought myself ugly throughout my childhood, even believing my scapula, gnarled in the same way, made me deserving of my uncle: The Beast.
Julian continued picking through her things, and because he didn’t say it this time, she did. “I’m growing like a weed.”
“Uh, huh.”
“We can go to a store.” Her left hand pulled the fingers on her right. “You can buy me a dress.”
“You wear a dress to school every day.”
She put both hands on her hips, letting all the ducks on her walls watch. “Papa. My school uniform is not a dress!”
Now he did look at her, an almost smile she didn’t like. She wasn’t making a joke. She wanted a dress. If he bought her one, she’d wear it every day. Mary had a hundred dresses. Willow let her hands drop. Mary had a mother—that was the reason she had dresses. Jeannie, the mother Willow didn’t have, looked at her new baby and the thing on her new baby’s back, and died.
Five afternoons a week, as one of Willow’s many sitters napped or polished her nails, Willow sat rapt, her attention on a television show, I Dream of Jeannie. Then she practiced crossing her arms over her chest and giving a quick nod. When she got her powers—she believed absolutely it was a matter of nodding and winking just right—she’d make two things: first, she’d make herself pretty so Papa didn’t think she needed to be fixed, and then, she’d make a dress. But she wouldn’t make her mother come alive. She didn’t want that Jeannie; that Jeannie had left her.
She moved behind Julian and stretched over his back, wrapping her arms around his neck, as though he’d put a knee to the floor just to give her a piggyback ride. “How come your bones don’t poke?”
He rose slowly, so that she slid off without falling. He handed her the soft pants and shirt he’d chosen. Trailing a thumb down her cheek, he said, “Get yourself dressed now.” He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans and moved to the window where he could stare out and think.
The room faded around Willow as she watched him, found his thoughts, and slipped in behind a curtain of his mind. Damn doctors, his mind said, can’t fix Willow. Couldn’t save Jeannie.
He had never raised his hand or even his voice to Willow, but hearing again how he thought she needed to be fixed made her eyes burn like skinned knees. She sank to the floor to put on her pants. If he only wanted a little girl who could sing and dance, she’d practice until she won a hundred prizes. He wanted her to be a pretty girl though, and she was trying, but no matter how hard she prayed, her fingers going around and around the rosary the kindergarten nun passed out, touching each bead and saying “Hail Mary,” then moving on to the next bead, “Hail Mary,” or how many nights she slept on the hard floor trying to push the bone away, she couldn’t make herself pretty.
Don’t cry, her mind said. Tears blurred her vision, and she stuck both feet into the same pant leg, rolled to her knees, and tried to stand. The tangle pitched her forward, her weaker right arm folding and even the left arm lacking the strength to catch her. Her chin struck the floor. Hot pain rammed up through her jaw, and one cheek scraped over a thorn of the basket’s broken wicker. She grabbed the hurt and felt wetness and warmth. “Papa! Blood!”
Julian wheeled around at the sound of her fall, his hands jerking from his pockets, his eyes anxious as he took quick steps to her. He stopped, his will forcing hesitation into his bones. “It’s all right,” he said. “You’re hardly bleeding. Go wash your face.”
She heard what he said, and what he managed not to say: Today is the day. She’s gotta learn I can’t always be there.
She never lost a drop of blood without Papa making a fuss over her, and his rejection now, when bleeding proved she really was hurt, stung worse than her injuries. Running from the room and him, she wailed again, though not even her howling made him follow. In the bathroom, she grabbed the damp towel from the bar on the wall and pushed the cool wad against her chin. Still, Papa didn’t come. He wasn’t acting the way she wanted, and she’d cry until he felt sorry, came and held her. Or turned her upside down, ran her feet across the ceiling, and made her forget what she’d heard his mind say.
For extra powers, she dropped the towel, folded her arms over her chest, and gave a quick nod. Satisfied, she let her gaze creep down her reflection, over her chin, her neck, and her chest with its two button-sized and cinnamon-colored circles. Her front looked the same, but she promised herself that her back could still be changed. Turning inch by inch on the stool, afraid of looking too fast, she pivoted to see her shoulder.
Her heart sank. The stupid bone that made her different and Papa sad, still clung to her.
4
The bleeding stopped, but Willow needed longer to accept Papa wasn’t coming and she hadn’t been fixed. Finally, she stepped off the stool, shuffled back to her room, and dressed. When she returned to the main room with its sofa, television, and the desk where Papa wrote out checks and licked envelopes and stamps, he was waiting for her by the front door. He hadn’t made himself coffee or her a slice of melty peanut butter toast. The I Dream of Jeannie book bag she carried to school dangled from a strap in his hand. It looked puffy. Not book puffy, the school year had just ended. Clothes.
Now she knew why everything about the morning had been different. They were going someplace she wouldn’t like. To see another doctor? Was that why he packed clothes for her and wanted her dressed nice on a Saturday and thought she needed to learn to get along without him? She wanted to hear his thoughts again, but the thoughts in her own head shouted doctor, doctor, and hospital, hospital.
She ran for Doll.
Julian made the toy for Willow when she was two, balling together a couple of pairs of his socks and tying them into the center of one of her old baby blankets. The socks created a head, and with Willow beside him at the kitchen table, he’d drawn on eyes and red lips. The rest of the blanket hung soft and empty, and though Doll didn’t have shoulders, Willow could see arms and legs. She knew how to work a finger under the string around Doll’s neck so that they didn’t become separated at night. She also knew how Doll’s fading eyes cried real tears whenever Papa wanted them to see a new doctor.
With his longer strides, Julian followed, walking to her run, letting her reach her toy. He was thankful she remembered and would have the familiar object with her. He swung her and her doll into the air. “Come on, Little Bird. We’ll get through this.”
In his arms, she could almost quit worrying, except that he was worrying. “I need my sweater,” she cried.
He grabbed it, and because she loved to swing, he carried her slung under his arm like a bedroll, across the porch and down the steps. At the curb, he put her down and opened the passenger-side door of his black Ford. The odor of stale cigarette smoke rushed her nose, but she didn’t mind the stink; it meant him: a match. Still, she couldn’t relax. She remembered doctors and nurses in white clothes and smelling of soap and medicine pulling her out of his arms and carrying her down long hallways to cold rooms where machines, ceiling-high, whirled and hissed. Because she was afraid and kicked and screamed, they wrapped her in tight blankets and held her down. With her arms and legs bound, she screamed louder, her heart pounding in her chest. Both times, the doctors shook their heads at Julian. No brace would correct the shoulder, and shaving off the burl was impossible without weakening the bone too severely.
Climbing onto the seat of the car, Willow looked back at him. “You don’t have to take me to any more doctors. I’m starting to grow pretty.”
Lines etched between his brows, and he looked over the top of his car to the empty street. He sighed, “Willow.”
Her name sounded far away or spoken from inside a bottle holding too many other things. When he got into the car, she leaned her right shoulder forward, pressing both hands flat on the dashboard. “See, Papa, my arms are the same long. They match now. You don’t have to take me to any more doctors.”
“Quacks,” he said. “Every one of them.”
She believed she’d convinced him. She sank back against the seat, smiling. “They can’t make me pretty, can they?”
He reached, cupping her chin, touching his thumb to her cuts, and for the first time looking hard at them. Thankfully, she didn’t need a stitch or two. He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket. “My mother, your grandmother, wants to see you.” He tapped the bottom of the pack against the heel of his hand and pulled a cigarette free. “I promised her. She’s right, too. Every time I see you with that little friend of yours, I know you deserve more family than just your old man. If something were to happen to me…my line of work…,” he didn’t finish.
The thought of a stranger, even a grandmother, made Willow put on her sweater, just in case. She hadn’t known she had a grandmother. There was a voice on the phone, and sometimes Papa instructed her to say, “Hello.” And from time to time, there’d been an old woman standing in the living room, a woman who even tried to hug her. But Papa never made the woman coffee, never asked her to sit awhile. “How come she isn’t dead?”
The sudden set of Julian’s mouth made her regret asking. His scapula was flat; his mother didn’t have to die.
5
The drive back to Farthest House, to the place where my body lay buried, as did the body of my husband, and where Tory and Luessy still lived, filled me with heavy emotion. I struggled to keep my attention on the farms we passed with their flat acres of newly planted corn and hilly pastures with herds of cows and spindly-legged calves. Mile after mile, Julian’s cigarette smoke lifted and slipped out through the top inch of the car window he’d cracked. As the long white exhales trailed away, my memories drifted in.
I was seventeen when my savior arrived in the form of a tall, American photographer traveling through France. He, Thomas, helped me escape, stealing me out of the villa, across the Atlantic, and finally to Nebraska. He built us a small place with logs that he cut and the rocks he found strewn over miles. Both materials needed to be hoisted onto a wagon and drawn up the hill with a four-horse team. The big draft horses with their stomping and blowing air were powerful animals, but Thomas pushed them together with his shoulders, harnessed and commanded them. I thought him a god. I called our home Peu de Nid: Little Nest.
I loved him for who he was and the sacrifices he made for me, and I tried to be happy. I owed him that. Putting away the past, however, wasn’t as easy as just getting my body free. He never pressed me with questions about my childhood, or my night terrors, or how young I’d been the first time, or how often it happened. Did he pray that one day I would come to him, trusting him enough to speak my story? He asked no questions either, when only a year-and-a-half into our marriage, I asked him to help me return to France and kidnap, no rescue, my infant niece, Luessy.
He risked his life, certainly imprisonment, doing so. He understood this better than I; I was blinded by my need to have Luessy with me.
I never bore a child of my own. Thomas and I raised Luessy within those safe and solid walls of Little Nest. Luessy an infant, toddler, little girl, young woman, and still she kept her pure emerald eyes, the same emerald eyes of her mother, my sister, Sabine.
As Thomas’s wife and Luessy’s mother, my past was for years a shadow that squatted and cowered at night beside the ashy and cold hearth. With Thomas asleep at my side and Luessy sleeping across the room, I watched the dark and trembling silhouette and kept the blankets high under my chin lest it try to crawl into the bed and consume me. In the morning, I stood and put on a woman’s dress, tended my cooking and washing, wifed and mothered, and when I had the time, I painted flowers from our yard. As best I could, I kept the hearth swept of the shadow being’s tatters and loose hairs.
Thomas died years later, and Lue
ssy grew to become a mystery writer, something I never fathomed for her, though her whole life must have seemed mysterious. In her late twenties, when she’d sold a couple of books, the local banker let her sign a note to add to her monies. She wasn’t leaving me, though. On the same hill as Little Nest, she built Farthest House with three stories, more porches than folks to stand on them, five bedrooms, a library, and even a glass turret reaching out greedily for sunshine and starlight. Later, she hired Jonah, her gardener, and the wide Nebraska hilltop became even more of an Eden: cobble stone paths, flowerbeds, blooming shrubs, ornate trees, and roses. Everywhere, there were roses. How Luessy and I loved them. Damask mostly. The wood Thomas planted before he died matured: burr oaks, red maples, and walnut trees. Over the decades, his ten-acres of forest became a place of enchantment with cottonwoods seeding themselves amongst the other varieties and a host of wild and flowering plants taking root. And for those who knew the recipes, many of those native species made deadly poisons.
Julian, motioning for Willow, brought my attention back. She slid across the seat and pressed herself against him. Her legs stuck out over the edge of the seat, her scuffed Keds rubbed against his denim jeans. “Are we almost there?” she asked.
He swung an arm around her. Then, slowly, “Little Bird, you’re the prettiest girl in the world.”
She pulled her right hand, which she didn’t think was a right hand, but a wrong hand, up into her sleeve. Sometimes Papa lied. “Where does she live?”
“We just drove through Greenburr. Her house is up ahead.”
“Is it in Ebraska?”
“Yes, we’re still in Nebraska. With an ‘n’.”
“I know,” she gave him a stern look. “I like saying Ebraska.”
He glanced down at her, slowing the car and turning up the long drive of Farthest House. “Sure you do.”
The tires hummed on the brick. Huge oaks, grown even larger in our six years away, still lined the sides of the drive, the branches lacing overhead like giant threaded fingers.
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