“Of course. I wanted you to see everything. If she doesn’t stop this, I’ll take her to see Father Steinhouse. He’ll likely want to meet with you, and he may well decide she’s not suited for Our Lady of Supplication. As it is, I’m taking her out of the May procession.”
Willow slid off her chair and ran to stand beside Julian. “Mémé bought me a dress, and you’re coming to the procession too, aren’t you Papa? You’re coming to church.”
“Adults are talking,” Sister Dominic Agnes said.
Willow’s eyes met Sister Beatrice’s eyes, which looked kind and sorry. Sister Beatrice couldn’t help though, and Willow turned for her room and Doll. Julian caught her arm, pulling her up short. As she tugged, stretching for her room, though he didn’t seem to notice her struggle, he raised the pictures. “You’re taking her out of the procession because of these?”
“She draws when she shouldn’t. She did all those this week. I cannot tolerate such misbehavior. We take time for coloring the last hour on Fridays, and it’s not the devil we color at Our Lady of Supplication.”
The pictures hung at Papa’s side, the corners fluttering as he tapped them against his leg, his thoughts loud in Willow’s head. She can’t be getting in trouble over her drawings again, can’t be drawing when the rest are getting ahead. Jeannie attended that school; she wanted her kids to go there. I don’t want Willow in rough public schools…not where they’ll pick on her.
She stopped fighting his grip. Why had his mind said getting in trouble again? She’d never been in trouble for drawing.
He let her go and re-rolled the pictures into a tight scroll. “I’ll see this stops.”
“Very well,” Sister Dominic Agnes sighed with satisfaction. “However, as punishment, I’m still removing her from the procession.”
A squeak from Sister Beatrice. “Perhaps, if she—”
“I must maintain discipline,” Sister Dominic Agnes cut in, “or risk having none at all.” She motioned to the pictures in Julian’s hand, “I’ll take those back with me.”
To both nuns, he gave a slow, gracious smile. “Why don’t I keep them? We’d hate to see them land in a file somewhere. Especially if someone might think they’re inappropriate.”
Willow saw red wash up from Sister Dominic Agnes’s neck and onto her cheeks. “They are school property. They were drawn at school and, therefore, belong in her school records. Father Steinhouse may wish to see them.”
“Well, then, I’m sincerely indebted to you for bringing them all to me. That was a real act of kindness.” He stepped around the women and held open the screen door with an outstretched arm. “I’ll talk to Willow. She won’t give you any more trouble.”
Sister Beatrice leaned down, and her kind eyes met Willow’s again. “Angels are coming tonight.”
The elder nun gasped, “Sister! Wait outside.” She glared at the pictures and then again at Julian. “I insist you return those to me.”
He feigned a smile, “I’ll keep them.”
The nun reached, and Willow’s mouth opened when she saw Papa swing the pictures behind his back. Sister Dominic Agnes would have to touch his arm to reach again. Wasn’t Papa committing a mortal sin?
He stood still, waiting until Sister Dominic Agnes stepped out onto the porch beside Sister Beatrice. He stood still until they descended the steps and reached the sidewalk. He crossed the room, picked up his cigarette, inhaled smoke, and blew it toward the ceiling.
“Only half a cigarette, Papa. You did good.”
“Why are you drawing while others are being taught? If all you do is draw, how do you expect to learn how to take care of yourself?”
There it was, more of the rejection and loneliness she’d felt all week. This time not from Mary or Sister Dominic Agnes but from Papa. He was even telling her she needed to know how to take care of herself because he wouldn’t always be with her. She hurried down the hall to her room. With Doll in her arms, she curled into a ball on the bed, making herself as small as she could. Doll was crying, too.
She didn’t hear his footsteps enter her room, but she heard his thoughts as he stood over her. So small. Still only bird bones. How’s she going to make it if I don’t keep pushing her? Some punishment, but nothing Jeannie would think too harsh.
Willow screamed and rolled over on top of Doll, hugging her. A tug and Doll was gone. Willow’s arms were empty, as though she hugged herself. But that was hugging nothing.
10
Willow cried many nights for Doll. I knew she cried in part for what she supposed losing Doll represented, that she deserved to be alone. She pulled off her pillowcase, stuffed a shirt in the bottom, and hugged it.
Julian was sorry. For her birthday, he bought her a plastic doll with yellow hair. It came in a colorful box with a cellophane front. Willow thought the object an intruder, too hard to lie on, smelling like bad oatmeal, and nothing like Doll. It reminded her of Mary Wolfe and things she wanted to forget: having her hand struck with a paddle, Derrick making the class laugh, missing the May Procession, and Sister Dominic Agnes’s proclamation.
At first, Willow stuffed it under her bed, but at night, sleeping on the floor, the hard blue eyes stared at her. She pushed the doll to the back of her closet floor and threw a towel over it. Julian asked only once, wondering if she’d packed her new doll for the weekend with Mémé. She shook her head. He looked at her for a long moment. “That’s all right,” he said. When she rushed to him, throwing her arms around his waist, he held her.
January of her ninth year, a far deeper loss loomed unseen on the horizon. At Farthest House, dark clouds were gathering, proving my worst fears true. I could only watch and wait.
It was a Friday afternoon. Snow had been falling for an hour. Julian considered not taking Willow out on the roads, but he was scheduled for work later in the evening. With his weekends free, he picked up extra hours, and given the weather predictions, the precinct was going to need every hand. His mother also expected Willow, and Willow loved going and came home happy. While he wished he could be her whole world, he understood she needed her Farthest House family, too. And if some day he took a bullet to the chest?
Sitting beside him in the car, Willow tried to look innocent as she kept one hand pressed to the front of her coat, hoping the week’s worth of drawings hidden beneath weren’t getting wrinkled. Not since that bad day had she let anyone other than Mémé see her pictures.
The windshield wipers whipped back and forth, and she watched Papa light a cigarette, turning his head with each exhale to send the smoke through his half inch of rolled-down window. She suspected he knew she still drew pictures, though never at school. He sometimes passed by her room when she was drawing, and she closed her tablet and put both hands on top. Sometimes, when he came home from work before she and the babysitter expected, he’d catch her drawing in front of the television, and she’d jump and quickly stuff her pad of paper under the sofa. Though she felt he wanted her to share with him, he never asked. In return, she studied hard and gave him the “A’s” he wanted on her report cards.
As they left the city limits and hit the highway, the snowflakes grew heavier and thicker and the wind buffeted the side of the car. Usually, she enjoyed the drive, but as the minutes passed, her restlessness increased. “We’re driving so slow.”
“Everyone is. We’ve likely got three inches already.”
Something was wrong. The wrong thing seemed more than the storm, the noisy wipers, or the slow going. She wanted to tell Papa about the unquiet thing, but she didn’t know what it was, and telling him stuff he didn’t know, and didn’t think she should know, worried him. He wanted her to be like other children: not getting in trouble at school, not drawing odd pictures, and never saying things that made people’s eyebrows go up. Or down.
Julian fiddled with the radio, trying to find a station without static and with an updated weather report. “Twelve inches,” he repeated the announcer. “We won’t be dug out until spring.”
&n
bsp; She heard someone call her name. She sat up straighter, looking to Julian, but he only clutched the steering wheel, which meant he hadn’t heard. If she told him, his brows would go up, then down.
“A couple of Ginn stations were robbed last weekend,” he said. “Two more robberies this week.”
She rarely went into his thoughts now. To hear them, she had to leave her own and go into his, which were boring and usually about things like Ginn stations. She was in fourth grade with Sister Beatrice, and she had a friend. They called themselves “The Two-Girls Club,” and they had a rule: To be a member you had to hate Derrick Crat and Mary Wolfe.
“Thirty inches last month,” Julian said. “A new record. You suppose this month’ll be worse?”
He didn’t usually talk so much, which meant he did feel the thing without a name. She tried to distract herself. She’d think about pretty things like the blue coat over her pictures with its rabbit-fur collar, dyed-to-match blue mittens, and the dresses Mémé bought her, dresses as pretty as Mary Wolfe’s.
Julian kept his hands on the steering wheel until they’d started up the drive of Farthest House. He reached across the seat and brushed back a lock of Willow’s hair from the side of her face. “Tell Ma, I’ll see her on Sunday. If I waste time on coffee, I won’t make it back.” The car wheels began to spin, and the car veered sideways. He stepped on the brake and looked at the house still ten yards up and Willow’s short rubber boots leaving her legs bare to her knees. The car slid backwards a few inches and caught. “If I carry you, I’m going to lose the car.”
“I can walk.”
“No, I got it.” He put the car in reverse and turning around threw one arm across the seat top. “I’ll park at the bottom and carry you up.”
“Papa. I can do it.” She grabbed her bag and opened the door. The dread in her stomach rolled, but she’d soon be with Mémé and could talk over her feelings. The cold wind lunged at her bare legs, stinging the flesh. For weeks, winter had felt like a cat clawing at her calves and knees, and now it tried to pull open her coat and get her pictures. Hurrying, slipping, she heard Papa’s car idling behind her. She thought to wave him off, but she knew he wouldn’t leave until she reached the porch. She trudged up, holding her bag with one hand, the other still pressed against her coat.
The third-floor attic door was closed, and the light behind it off. Across the house, the turret was also dark. The upset in her stomach increased. At the porch, she turned and waved to Julian and watched the car’s wobbly slide down.
“He ought to stay.” Jonah stepped from the shadows near the door and crossed to the top of the stairs. He wore a light jacket and his ears and hands were bare.
She started up. “What are you doing here?”
“Sweeping.”
He held a broom, but the majority of the snow fell on the porch roof. Of the snow that had blown in, she saw no signs of sweeping. He’d been waiting for her, something he didn’t usually do. Foreboding washed over her again. When she reached the top stair, he made an almost imperceptible motion, angling his elbow an inch in her direction. If she didn’t take it, they could pretend she hadn’t seen the gesture. Black men, Tory told her, couldn’t touch little white girls. There’d been the hot afternoon when Mable made a pitcher of lemonade for Jonah, and Willow asked to be the one to take it to him. She kicked at his door, her hands full, and his delight on opening it was everything she hoped for. He bent and took the pitcher, wet with condensation, and thanked her, but he didn’t ask her in to share a glass.
Back in the kitchen of Farthest House, Tory’s pinched face leaned in close. “Don’t you ever go in his cabin.”
Can’t he even touch little white girls, Willow wondered, that have a stupid hand and shoulder?
On the cold porch, she juggled her things, freed a hand and clutched Jonah’s arm. He pulled his arm in tight. “Miss Willow, you’re here now.”
His eyes looked as if snow melted in them. She knew all people had the same color of blood, and she wanted to tell him people all had the same color of tears, too. But saying so might be stupid, and then there was the reason for his coming. It wasn’t to sweep.
He walked her across the porch and turned the handle on the front door, pushing it just enough to clear the lock. “Hurry now. I was afraid the storm might keep your daddy from bringing you.” He left her there, and when he’d gone down the stairs and stepped into the snow, he looked back, surprised she still watched him. Snow fell on his white hair and disappeared. It clung to his shoulders. “Hurry, your grandma been calling for you.”
Now that she’d arrived and knew Mémé called for her, Willow didn’t want to hurry. “If I lie down in the snow, I could be a snow angel and disappear.”
“Yup.” He gave her a moment, the broom clutched in his hands. “Now, Willow, you got to go on in there.”
She leaned her weight against the door and stepped into the round foyer of polished walnut floors and walls, always like stepping inside a big tree. The foyer was a clock, and she could lift an arm and tick off all the rooms. On her left, seven o’clock to ten o’clock was the dining room. Tick, tick to eleven o’clock to the kitchen. All the lights were on there, and she could smell baking. Tick, tick to one o’clock up the wide staircase, then tick, tick to two o’clock to the library, and tick, tick again to the best room, the den full of Mémé’s things: the blue, tufted and buttoned chairs and sofa where Mémé read aloud to her—stories and poems—Mémé’s old phonograph and records, her silver candlesticks sitting on small tables alongside books and plants and framed pictures. Willow’s favorite place in the room was the wall holding a few of the watercolor flowers I painted and many of the rescued photos Thomas had taken of Native Americans, especially one of an Indian woman who, in her grief, severed two of her own fingers to the first knuckle.
Standing in the foyer, Willow thought to twirl twice, something she always did, but not this time. Mémé hadn’t met her at the door and wasn’t coming down the stairs, her cat-head cane tapping and Friar bounding ahead of her. The empty staircase looked too big. Even the crystal chandelier over her head, hanging from the second story on its long, long chain, normally a magical spray of light and color, hung solemn and dark.
She toed one rubber boot and then the other. With her wet boots off, she headed up the stairs. A mitten landed on one stair, the second mitten on another, and her coat at the top. She knew Mable “preferred” the coat be hung in the closet by the front door, “fitting for the poor rabbit skinned just for a child’s coat collar.” But Mable never really got angry.
The upstairs didn’t make a clock. Two large bedrooms ran straight along the right side of the hall, then a large walk-in closet for linens and storage of every sort, followed by Tory’s room at the far end. The left side of the hall had only two bedrooms, Mémé’s, and then a long railing Willow loved to look over, spying on people in the foyer below. There she could also get a closer look at the chandelier and the colors when light struck the prisms. The last bedroom on the left was directly across from Tory’s. Willow slept on Mémé’s end of the long hall, their rooms directly across. Tossing her Jeannie bag at the door of her room, she kept hold of her pictures and hurried to Mémé’s door.
Her grandmother lay in bed across the dim room, the blankets drawn to her chin, her cheeks and lips chalk colored. Her eyes looked ringed in purple, but they were open. “I was worried,” her words a whisper.
“How come you’re in bed?”
Friar lay stretched out alongside Luessy. He rolled his eyes in Willow’s direction when she approached, but he didn’t lift his head or wag his tail. “Why is Friar sad?” When her grandmother didn’t answer, Willow looked away and around the room for reassurance. On the bedside table, though they added little illumination to the room made gray by the December late-afternoon light and the storm, a dozen tapers and pillars burned in various sizes and shapes on silver candlesticks. Each shiny stick reflected a hundred tiny flames, so that they seemed to burn, too. Wil
low’s older drawings still hung on the oak-paneled wall, and the small door to the attic, which even Mémé had to duck to enter, was just ajar, the way Mémé liked, as if someone might come down, or she, dreaming, might want to float up. The crocheted bedspread named “Mother Moses” lay over the back of the rose-colored bedside chair. Except for Friar not jumping up to lick Willow’s face and Mémé being in bed, everything looked the same. She felt the difference then, and her eyes ran over the room again. Others were there. Mémé had company neither of them could see. Willow could almost count them, five, no six. She didn’t question how they’d come from their world to hers. They simply had.
I felt Thomas’s presence and Sabine’s. I ached to be at the reunion of Sabine and Luessy, but I couldn’t be. Though we all inhabited the same space, they were as distanced from me as they were from Willow. I’d entered a labyrinth and shut down my focus to the pinpoint of Willow’s life. They were there for Luessy, to walk her across. I prayed Sabine felt my desire to undo my mistakes and that Thomas watched me and smiled at my journey.
Luessy’s lips moved so slowly into a smile that they seemed to drift back from her teeth. “I knew it was time for you.”
The heavy clouds, the snow, and the winter hour meant there were no shadows moving on the walls or on the floor. Willow marveled; Mémé never wore a watch or checked a clock. Shadows and their motion told her the time, and she could read their minute hands.
Wanting to keep her drawings a secret until later, because secrets were a full thing she liked to hold in her belly, Willow carried them to Luessy’s desk. She stopped at seeing the top cleared of everything but a few loose pages of poems: Mémé’s favorites, which the two of them had read so many times they’d fallen free of their book binding. “Where are your stories?”
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