A tight frown pulled Ellen’s face. “She cheated.”
“Jennifer?”
“She looked at my paper during the James and the Giant Peach test. That’s cheating. So I told Mrs. Davidson. You’re supposed to tell, aren’t you? Daintry says so.”
“And. . . ”
“And Mrs. Davidson called Jennifer’s name and told her to stop. She didn’t even get punished. And that’s okay, I didn’t care, but Mom, Mom, she got so mad at me and told everybody not to sit with me at lunch and not to play with me at recess and . . .” She stood, her features crumpled and her voice cracking. “And she went to my cubby and took my—”
“Ssh, Ellen.” I stooped again to kiss her, kissed the brimming eyes. “I know, I know.”
“Seems Jennifer changed her mind about Ellen coming to spend the night,” Daintry interjected.
Ellen nodded, recovering. “And I didn’t have any friends all day long.” She blew on her nails, satisfied with her version. “But I’d missed the carpool. And then you weren’t home for a long time.”
Daintry sat on a step, pulled the fabric over her knees. Waiting.
“Where were you? It was getting dark. I was afraid.”
“I was in the car. Running errands in case it snows. Then I had to wait, and—”
Daintry casually rested her chin in her palm. “You really should get a car phone, Hannah.” Telling me as she always had. “Take your mother’s coat,” she said to Ellen, rising. “Take her near our fire.” Our, as though Ellen lived there, belonged there, intimately familiar with her rooms and closets and rituals. I took off my coat with shaking hands that Daintry noticed. “Is it that cold out there?” she asked. “Has it started snowing?”
“Yeah,” Ellen said, “snow would make this whole night perfect.” She led me into the library, close with an embered fire. “Look, Mom, just the kind of fire you like. No big high flames. We haven’t had a fire in ages.”
There’d been no proper hearth at the O’Connors’ house. The chimney had been sealed by old Mrs. Payne. “You’re so lucky,” Daintry had said as we lazed before the flames, “I wish we could have a fire.” Backsides to the burning logs, we staged endurance tests, heated denim scorching our thighs with a cold-hot combination of pleasure and pain, bearing it until the last moment until. . . “I won,” Daintry had said. “I lasted the longest.”
Ellen held out a bowl of popcorn. “Daintry has Jiffy Pop, it’s so cool! A big shiny balloon on the stove. Better than ours. Better than microwave.” She lowered her voice, looked around. “And she let me have a Coke since it’s not a school night.”
Daintry poured wine from a bottle on a chest. “Wine? Red wine just seems to go with fires and snow.”
“We stopped at the video place to get a movie, too,” Ellen said.
“She was very upset at”—Daintry seemed to choose her words carefully—“not being able to get in touch with you.”
“Look,” Ellen said, holding up the video box. “It’s Ghost. But we haven’t watched it yet because we’ve had such a good time. Daintry’s going to be my immigrant.”
The glass was halfway to my lips. “What?”
“Didn’t you know Ellen had a project on immigrants?”
“Yeah, Mom. I told you that.”
Daintry smiled indulgently at my daughter. “Seems I’m the closest thing to an actual immigrant Ellen can find. All those old stories of living abroad you used to love.”
“And she’s going to take my wrapping paper form to her office and everyone who works there will buy some.”
I finally found my voice. “Yes,” I said. “She always took our Girl Scout cookies to her father’s office for his patients to buy.”
Daintry’s eyes sparkled. “But your mother wouldn’t let you send yours to the factory with your father.”
In the fireplace a log shifted and collapsed into fiery chunks. “My mother didn’t want the employees to feel pressured to buy. She thought it was an unfair advantage.”
Daintry laughed. “That’s all in the interpretation.”
“Can we play Clue now?” Ellen asked. She lifted a battered box and looked at me apologetically. “We were just getting ready to play before you came.”
“A closet upstairs is full of old board games,” Daintry explained. “Some priest with children, no doubt. I don’t know, though, Ellen. Your mother was always terrible at Clue.”
“She never wins any games with Daddy, either. What about cards? We could all play cards. I’ve learned how to knock.”
“Only two can play gin, El,” Daintry said, winking.
I rose and picked up my coat. “Let’s go home, Ellen.”
“Daintry invited me to spend the night. She’s going to do my hair again. I told her about when you rolled up my hair in those awful Velcro curlers and had to cut them out!”
“Because you—” I stopped. Why was I justifying some past accident to a ten-year-old? Because of Daintry. “No sleep-overs tonight.”
“I want to.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Yes, stay.” Daintry tilted her glass, staring at me through its ruby glow. “Peter should be here any minute.” I hadn’t let myself wonder and now forced my fingers to keep buttoning. “He—” she laughed. “I’m not sure where he is, to tell you the truth. The minister’s wife is always the last to know. He said something about preparing a couple for a reaffirmation service. I’d never heard of such. But you know Peter, always on to the new thing. The next thing.”
Ellen sat stubbornly on the floor, surrounded by video and popcorn and nail polish and Clue. “No,” I said.
“Yes,” she countered. “Yes yes yes yes yes.”
God help me. “Don’t you want to be at home when it snows?”
“If,” Daintry said. “Probably won’t.” She shook her head, a sage old owl.
“Tomorrow we can do snow angels, Ellen,” I said. “And make snow cream. We’ll save some in the freezer for summertime. And you have those new snow paint pens from Christmas.” The warring factions in Ellen’s head were nearly as visible as the warring factions standing on either side of her.
“Okay . . .” She sighed and began lacing her hiking boots over the thin ankles bound in zigzag leggings.
Daintry set down her glass, followed us to the door, and gazed mildly up into the black sky. “Still no snow. Too bad.” She pulled the limp belt of the robe more tightly about her waist and tweaked one of Ellen’s tiny braids. “I’ll give you a rain check, El.”
I turned up my collar and reached for the handrail, afraid of what I might say. Then my daughter did it for me.
“Only Mommy calls me El,” she told Daintry solemnly.
I listened as Ellen told Hal everything. He was attentive to the cheating issue, angry about the gym scene, less interested in Ellen’s tales of the wondrous Daintry. He was tired, had driven five hours since three that afternoon. “Attendance was low because of the forecast, some speakers had canceled. And it’s not even going to snow. A waste all around.”
Not a waste, no. Not in my version of the day.
“What’s your take on what happened to Ellen?” he asked me after she’d gone to bed.
“Someone was vicious to her.”
“Vicious?”
“Boys don’t do it. They don’t count their slights and advantages, their grades and their girlfriends and their talents. They don’t tally and compare. But girls have a god-awful history of it, right there alongside the history of nurturing and sacrifice and soldiering on. A history of doing each other in.”
Lacking siblings or sisters, Hal was perplexed. “How?”
“Bloodless battles.”
“But not you,” he said. “Not grown women.”
Oh, that certainty, that rock-solid sureness. “Me too, Hal. I’ve done it, too.” He showed no surprise, and I was grateful. “And Mark’s already in bed? I thought he was going out after they got back from the match.”
“Well, tha
t’s the damnedest thing. He just chose to come home. Found himself with a bunch of people drinking and driving. He told me that he had them drop him off here, said something about blaming it on you. You ought to leave him a note next time you’re going to be gone like that. Maybe you should get a cell phone if you’re going to spend so much time at the columbarium, or with Daintry, or whatever.”
“I don’t need a phone. It’s finished.”
He seemed not to have heard me. “You know, I’m not sure I much approve of your friend Daintry. Ellen told me they’d rented Ghost. Isn’t that rated R?”
And even then there was the instant impulse of defending her, no differently from the way I had with Mother. Protecting her, preserving something. “It’s not the movie. You don’t like her, do you?”
“There’s something. . . unpredictable about her.” He pulled back the blanket and climbed into bed. “I guess she just doesn’t seem like much of a girl’s girl.”
I tried to laugh. “Hal. What would you know about girl’s girls?”
Like always, he checked the blanket dial. “I know you,” he said, and like always, he kissed me good night.
But the day, and the night, what had been and what almost was, churned my consciousness, resisting rest.
My own robe was plain, flannel, blue. For once Hal had forgotten to draw the curtains. I never did close them and never would. In Cullen we even left our doors unlocked. “Old habits die hard,” Daintry had said that night at Ceel’s. So do old friends.
Not wanting to ever again hear Ellen’s recorded plaints for help, I pressed the playback button to erase the tape on the answering machine. There were three new messages, though, the library with a book on hold, a stockbroker cold-calling Harold Marsh. Then Wendy Howard. “Mark? Pick up . . . Mark? I thought you might like to . . .” Giggle. “You know, go out.” I quickly punched erase. I didn’t want to hear that again, either.
I switched on the outdoor flood, checking more from habit than hope. Then stopped, pulled a chair to the window, and tucked my feet beneath me. It looked like falling ash, so scant that I could count each tiny one before it drifted from the beam’s reach. Stars are said to twinkle, but so do snowflakes under a light at night.
There is always something unattainable that shines and glitters and beckons. Should you summon courage enough, grow reckless enough, it may be nothing but trickery at the bottom of the pool, an optical illusion. And even if it’s a piece of treasure—a coin or locket, a silver button—and even if you retrieve it, it still belongs to someone else. You can hold it, you can even keep it, but you’d always know it had first been someone else’s.
I barely exhaled, afraid my warm breaths might cloud the pane. When you least expect it, it finally comes. Snow at last. In no rush, the flakes floated gracefully, increasing in number. Miraculous.
When Daintry and I watched The Wonderful World of Disney, our favorite part was the time-lapse photography of blooming flowers, the tulip and daisy and crocus unfolding incredibly before our eyes. I knew about flowers. I knew about snow. So did Daintry, once. Fat, mothy flakes were prettier, but dangerous. Big flakes meant temperatures were rising, and the snow would surely stop. But these flakes had grown even smaller as I watched, become diamond dust in the light. It would snow all night, something I was finally sure of. The morning landscape would be white, blanketed, cleansed. I drew the curtains, for Hal.
In Mark’s room, by the faint lights from the cassette player, the illuminated face of the alarm clock, the lurid lava lamp, I could make out the stolen STOP sign, the posters on the walls of writhing rock stars. Their eyes were blank, staring, Children of the Damned eyes. We’d done that, too, Daintry and I, licked erasers and whitened out the pupils to blindness. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Wendy Howard would come again, and call again, and take him in again with her predatory and catlike slink. “The Howards are getting one of Daintry’s kittens,” Ellen had said. “Can we?” And maybe Mark would or maybe he wouldn’t do something he was too young to do with her. There’s no legal age or statute of limitations on sexual stupidity, not for a son, not for his mother.
And if not Wendy, it would be some other girl who loved him, and I’d feel again that uneasy combination of dread and gladness for my hurt and Mark’s delight. “It’s bound to happen, Hannah,” Hal had said. “It happened to us.” I leaned over my sleeping son and carefully removed the headphones from his ears.
Ellen clutched a sand-art pendant even in sleep, a homemade trinket she kept stashed in the velveteen case my pearls had come in, her makeshift jewelry box. I pried it loose from the gaudy fingernails, Daintry’s handiwork, and bent to kiss one of the baby plaits. Daintry, again. I kissed the forehead smoothed by carelessness, restored after a day of childhood’s anguish.
“Doesn’t it all boil down to diapering them and cooking for them and cleaning for them and driving for them and buying for them?” Daintry had said.
But those are temporary troubles. Temporary, like my move to Rural Ridge. Like my friendship with Daintry. She’d said so herself. “When your children are young,” my mother once said to me, “you wear them on your feet. When they’re grown, you wear them on your heart.”
“I could never have children,” Daintry had remarked. “They’re too needy.”
Just, I thought, and shut my children’s doors.
The sheets were chill with vacancy, and as I waited for the warmth to blossom and surround me, I cried, grieving for what I’d nearly done. Cried for Hal, the husband I loved. Cried for Ceel’s childlessness, for my children’s growing up with all its tender and terrible and unavoidable pain. Cried for my sickened, dying friendship with Daintry O’Connor.
As girls we’d collected Joan Walsh Anglund books, copied the chubby-cheeked, dot-eyed illustrations of moppet children in Love Is a Special Way of Feeling, A Friend Is Someone Who Likes You. I’d given Daintry another slim Anglund volume for graduation, this one a collection of short poems written for adults. Because we believed we were grown then, at eighteen. Before wrapping it, I’d copied a verse into my quote book. What matters? Very little. Only. . . the flicker of light within the darkness, the feeling of warmth within the cold, the knowledge of love within the void.
I hadn’t known that when you cry lying down, your ears fill up with water.
The bed grew warm. When Ellen was born, I couldn’t hold her for shaking under the epidural’s anesthesia aftereffect. I was freezing with teeth-chattering cold, my muscles rigidly contracted. The hospital bed vibrated with my shivering. Nothing helped, not layers of pre-warmed blankets, not the nurses’ suggestions to relax. My fingers curled and my jaws ached from trembling. Hal had climbed into the elevated bed, amid the sheets and blankets and pads, never mind the bloody gown and my clammy sweat, and held me close, and tight, and whispered that I was wonderful, that it would all be fine.
Tonight as it snowed, my husband was a dark hump in our warm bed. Tonight there was no restless twitching. Hal was still, and still beside me.
From Hannah’s quote book:
“And remember this,” he continued, “that if you have been hated, you have also been loved.”
—Henry James
Chapter 14
The snow went as quickly as it came, no more than a memory now of the bright glare those few hours before thermometers rose and tree branches dropped their melting weight and white blankets slid tiredly from sloping roofs. Peter had used that mid-South miracle, the swift transformation into an early spring, as text for his Easter Sunday sermon. “Listen to the words,” my mother had said as we waited to follow the choir down the aisle at my father’s funeral. I’d been teary, afraid I’d collapse with grief in that public procession. “Listen to the words and you will be all right.” Without looking at him or thinking of him, I listened to Peter’s words. Once, though, I glimpsed his eyes travel upward and wondered if it was inspiration he looked for or the organ loft and Daintry.
Hal and Ellen and M
ark went to Sunday school. So did Doesy and Bill Howard, so did Frances Mason and Maude Burleigh. So did Ben with Ceel, who tried to persuade me to come, too. We stood outside beside a five-foot cross spilling flowers. At churches everywhere children had brought spring blooms to adorn chicken-wire crosses. “It’s Speakout Sunday,” Ceel said. “The congregation has an open forum to discuss what they want in a new priest.”
“On Easter?”
“Schedule change. Ben’s hired the new chaplain for Asheville Academy, and she’s going to fill in at St. Martin’s luckily, since Peter’s leaving earlier than planned. You didn’t know?”
I tucked a sprig of redbud more securely into the wire and shook my head. We’d spoken only once since that day, by telephone. Hurriedly, sadly.
“It was a—”
“Reaffirmation service.”
He was silent a moment. “Yes, last minute. The couple was afraid the snow would cancel their plane, a second honeymoon. How did you—”
“Daintry.”
I envisioned his quick, rueful nod. “Should we . . . We could—”
“Peter.” There is and always will be that inescapable pull between the comfort of what is known and the lure of what isn’t. “No, it’s. . . ”
“The children. If they—” But my silence stopped him.
“It’s . . .” How could I put this?
“Tell me what you’re thinking.”
“I was thinking . . .” The afternoon was clear. I’d held a bedraggled forget-me-not; he’d held an abandoned bird’s nest. “I was thinking of the time I asked you if being good meant always letting someone in your lane of traffic when they were waiting. And you said, no, being good meant not thinking you were good for letting them in.”
“Hannah.”
“We can’t because . . . because I like the old light bulb.”
“I know,” he said finally, “I know you do. And English box in the churchyard.”
Even Now Page 20