From the audience there was a muffled whinny, and a patter of smothered laughter. Peyton’s hands and lips numbed. She did not look up. She read on. Nora was not there. Peyton would have felt her if she had been.
“We were happy here,” she finished up. “Our farmer was kind to us. We were fed and groomed with love, and nobody ever beat us in our lives.”
“You can’t beat a dead horse,” a voice in the audience said. This time the laughter was not muffled.
Sickened and dizzy, Peyton started into the segment about the young girl. She knew she was whispering. She did not care. Just get through it.…
Nora did not come.
“My name is Elizabeth,” Peyton quavered. “I was sixteen years old when I died, and I loved my life. I think of it often now, up on my hill. I look down at Lytton and I see not Lytton today, but the town that was my town all those years ago. There were no streetlights then, but there were gas lamps, and I used to walk in their soft light in the spring nights, smelling the honeysuckle and mimosa, laughing with my friend, all dressed up. We did not always know where we were going, but it did not matter. Sometimes we just went to the little meadow behind the bandstand and lay in the cool grass.…”
“Must have been a real good friend,” someone called.
“Yeah,” another voice, a boy’s, yelled. Peyton could tell by its roughness that it belonged to one of the bus kids, a farm boy. “I’ve had a lay behind that bandstand, too. I never knew you could die of it, though.”
There was an airless hush, as of the held breath of a crowd, and then the auditorium exploded into laughter. Peyton saw her father stand up and turn and glare at the audience, saw him hold up his hands for quiet, heard the principal sternly exhorting silence. The laughter spiraled up.
Peyton turned and walked off the stage. She left the pages of her speech behind. She did not turn her head right or left as she went through the wings. The handful of people there stared. The drama coach put out her hand.
“Peyton, honey,” she said. “It wasn’t you. It was those idiot boys.”
In the schoolyard Peyton broke into a trot. By the time she was a block from home she had taken off her new pumps and tossed them into the grass beside the sidewalk and was running flat out. Her stockings were shredded, and the cement of the sidewalk abraded her feet. She did not feel it. The wet band of her new brassiere bit into her chest. She did not feel it. She felt nothing but a simple, one-celled need to be in the tree house. In the dark.
Where Nora was not.
Without hesitation she went up her tree and huddled on the floor of the tree house. She felt the slimy mold of a recent rain under her cheek and knew it was staining the candlelight dress beyond repair. The tree house felt cramped, too small, a toy. She knew she would not come to it again.
She laid her head on her crossed arms and sank down into the leafy darkness of the tree branches. She waited. She knew that they would come soon.
In what seemed like an eyeblink she heard her father’s voice under her tree.
“Come on down, honey,” he said, and his voice was thick with what sounded like sorrow. “Come on down and let’s go in and have some hot chocolate. It’s not the end of the world, and it’s not your fault. Those boys will be punished. The principal promised me. It was a kind of nervous laughing. It wasn’t your speech. Your speech was just beautiful.…”
Peyton burrowed her head deeper into her arms.
“Peyton, come down from there,” Aunt Augusta’s voice shrilled. “You’re way too old to be up that tree now, and in that pretty dress, too…come on down and just hold your head high and smile and everybody will have forgotten about it before you know it.”
She did not reply. I wish I could be dead, too, she thought. In a quiet cemetery somewhere, looking down on a little town. But not Lytton.
“Peyton, I can’t just leave you up there,” her father said pleadingly. “Please don’t make me come up and get you.”
She did not reply. She had waited him out before, until the morning. She could do it again. It was the morning when Nora first came, she remembered. Something that was not tears nor anger, exactly, formed in her chest and pushed at her eyes. She kept them closed.
“Let me get her,” Nora’s voice said. “I did it once before. She’ll come down for me, and we can talk this business out.”
Peyton lifted her head and looked down. Nora stood at the foot of the tree, hands on hips, looking up. She had on the yellow dress, and she shone in the darkness like foxfire. The lights from the house touched the clownish planes of her face. She was smiling. Beyond her, at the curb, stood the little pink car; she and Sonny must have come home and Peyton had not heard. Sonny stood beside Nora, looking serious and concerned.
“I apologize, kiddo,” Nora said. “We just got hung up and couldn’t get back. Listen, you don’t care about those goddamned cretins. They think the backs of cigarette packs are literature. I’m just going to come up now. That’s how we met, remember?”
She put her hands on the lower limbs of the tree to swing herself up. The yellow skirt belled out around her. The other faces stared up like water things in an aquarium.
Peyton was on her feet before she even knew she was rising. She leaned far out over the railing of the tree house.
“Don’t you come up here!” she screamed. The force of it scalded her throat. “Don’t you dare come up here! What makes you think you can just come up here and take care of me like a baby, like nothing even happened? YOU TOLD ME YOU’D BE THERE AND YOU WEREN’T! You can’t take care of anybody! You can’t even take care of your own baby!”
The silence was absolute. In it Peyton could hear the katydids start up, and her own blood thundering in her ears.
“Did you all know that Nora has a little boy?” she called down, in a voice of such ugly gaiety that it hurt even her ears. “He’s five years old and his name is Roberto and he lives in Cuba with his grandmother because Nora went off and left him. He’s black, and his father is black, and he was never Nora’s husband.…”
A blindness was roaring down on her, but through it she thought she saw her father’s face go still and blank, and saw Sonny Burk-holter’s slight recoiling, and heard Aunt Augusta’s gasp. Nora said nothing; her face did not change. Then she turned and walked away toward the house. She did not look back. The others did not move.
“Go tell the Devil!” Peyton screamed after her, leaning further out still. “Go tell the Devil!”
The sodden railing gave, and Peyton followed her rage and anguish down into darkness.
16
There was a song they used to sing in the car, Peyton and her father and Buddy. “There’s a hole in the bottom of the sea,” it started. Peyton knew now that it was true. There was a hole in the bottom of the sea, and that was where she was.
It was as if she lived and moved and slept in deep green water. There was sunlight dappling the surface of it, far above her, and just under the surface people and things swam in and out of the sunlight, sometimes reaching down to her, sometimes simply looking. She did not reach up to them. She was happy to be where she was.
There was a time when she was in real darkness. It seemed like an eternity after she broke free of it, but her father said that it had been only three days.
“You have a doozy of a thing called a cranial hematoma,” he said. “It knocked you out for three days. But you’re fine now, and there won’t be any aftereffects as long as you behave and stay quiet. You’ve got a broken collarbone, too. And a couple of cracked ribs. Boy, when you take a dive you really take a dive.”
His voice was light and warm, but Peyton could see, through her clear water, that his face was slack and his gray eyes were ringed with deep circles. She remembered thinking that he must have been worried about her, and was sorry for that, but it did not seem to touch her. She remembered, too, dimly, about the night of the graduation and the tree, but she did not let her memory take her any further.
The fat, perennially un
shaven young doctor who attended her told her and her father that there might be lapses in her memory for some time.
“That was quite a thump,” he said. “You’re a lucky girl.”
“Yes,” Peyton said tranquilly, and she went to sleep again.
When she came home from the hospital she asked to be in the upstairs bedroom. Nora’s room.
“You sure?” her father said.
“Yes. The other one’s too small. And Trailways won’t stay in any room but this one.”
So Chloe aired the room and turned it out, and it became Peyton’s room, with nothing left in it of her Cousin Nora Findlay. Peyton lay in it, floating on pain medication, and slept and waked and watched the little television her father had brought her, and ate the tray meals Chloe brought, and stroked Trailways, and never thought of the room’s last occupant except once or twice, on close, still nights when she had not turned the air conditioner on. Then she thought, in that place between sleep and waking, that she smelled the bitter green smell of Nora’s perfume.
It did not bother her, either.
Later she dressed and tottered about the house and yard, feeling too tall and not quite connected to the earth, blinking in the light. Her collarbone no longer hurt, but her ribs still did when she took a deep breath, and sometimes her head throbbed under the bandage. It had been a large bandage, covering her head turbanlike, when she first awoke, but now it was only a small patch in the stubbly field of her scalp where they had shaved her head. She thought once or twice that she must look pretty awful with one side of her head shaved and her hair an untended tangle. And her clothes were too tight across her chest now, and her old shorts too short. She did not care. She had not looked into a mirror since she came home. She brushed her teeth and washed her face and combed her hair without raising her head from the washbasin. She saw in her father’s eyes, and in Chloe’s, that she looked beautiful to them, and that was enough.
June seeped away, and July came, hot and stopped and still, as underwater as the hole in the ocean she lived in. Peyton felt as peaceful as a fish hanging still in sunlit water. She did not ask about Nora. She did not ask about Sonny. She did not ask about graduation. She did not care. She read and slept and watched TV and slept again.
“There’s nothing organically wrong with her,” she heard Dr. Sams say to her father one evening, after he had brought his bag to the house and checked her over. He had been her physician since birth. “It’s not unusual after a severe head injury. She seems comfortable, and she smiles and talks, and isn’t confused or irrational. I’d say she’s just resting. Let her do it, as long as she doesn’t complain of headaches, or start sleeping all the time.”
“Good,” her father said. “I’ve been awfully worried. She hasn’t seemed like herself.”
I’m not, Peyton thought. Why did you think I would be?
The succoring sea held her almost until the end of July. On a still, hot day in the third week of that month Peyton raised her head from her toothbrushing and looked into the mirror. A bleached, yellowed stoat’s skull looked back, with shapeless, lank hair on one side of its head and stubble like a wheat field over white scalp on the other. There was a long, welted red scar in the stubble. Peyton put her hand up and touched the scar.
“I need a haircut,” she said, and then she realized that there would be no haircut because Nora was gone.
She began to cry, and she cried, on and off, through the afternoon and most of the night. Her father lay on her bed beside her, holding her face to his shoulder. Gray light was just showing under her venetian blinds when she stopped.
“You better now?” her father said.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Daddy, do you pray?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Does it always feel to you like God is listening?”
“I don’t always feel Him, but I think He does listen. Most of the time, anyway.”
“What good does it do if He’s not listening all the time?”
“I think He wants us to handle what we can on our own. Why do you want to know?”
“Because I prayed for Nora to stay, and she might have, but then I ran her away myself. I thought maybe I’d done it wrong.”
And she began to cry again.
“Once I told Nora that sometimes when I prayed it felt like I was praying to God, but sometimes it felt like I was praying to my own need. And she said as far as she could see it was the same thing,” her father said. His voice was peaceful.
The pain lanced at her again. She longed desperately for the green sea, but she knew that she would not be allowed to go back there.
“I hate her,” she sobbed. “She ruined my life!”
“Well, you didn’t do such a bad job of ruining hers,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean old Sonny was out of there and gone before you hit the ground. And Augusta was on the phone before then, too.”
“When did Nora go?”
“I’m not sure. She was gone when I came home from the hospital the next morning.”
“She didn’t even care whether I was badly hurt or not.”
“She did. She called from Alabama late that day to see about you. We knew then that you’d be all right. Chloe told her.”
“Have you talked to her?”
“No.”
“When you said…that Sonny was gone, you mean gone back to Hollywood, without her?”
“Precisely. I think he hit the road before daylight.”
“I don’t understand.”
“How would it look if the new Rhett Butler was keeping company with a lady who had a black baby out of wedlock?” her father said. Incredibly, there was laughter in his voice. Peyton smiled tentatively, and then she began to laugh, too. Her mouth was stiff, as if she had forgotten how.
“Rat Butler,” she said, and collapsed against him in weak laughter.
Presently she stopped.
“So you know where she is?” she asked.
“Texas,” he said. “I had a letter the day before yesterday. She’s working in a library there. She says it’s a funny little town but it doesn’t hold a candle to Lytton.”
Peyton felt fresh pain flooding her. She closed her eyes against it. Nora, in a dusty little town in Texas, working in a library.…
“What about the car?”
“She sold the car. She said she didn’t like it anymore. She has a Plymouth now.”
Peyton shook her head back and forth, grinding her face into her father’s shoulder.
“I loved that car,” she said.
“There was a message for you in the letter,” he said. “I’ve been carrying it around for days, waiting for you to want to hear it. I think now’s the time.”
He pulled a much-folded sheet of stationery from his shirt pocket. Peyton closed her eyes and waited.
“Here’s your part,” her father said. “‘Tell Peyton it wasn’t her fault. If I know her, she’ll carry around a wagonload of guilt for the rest of her life if somebody doesn’t take it away from her. But it was all me. Tell her it’s what I do best, run. I’ve been doing it all my life. I preach freedom and spontaneity; I know better than anybody in the world how to draw people out and get them to trust me. It’s one of the only talents that were given to me. And when I have them hanging on to me, naked as jaybirds, I run. I leave them twisting in the wind. The truth is that I’m dying for safety, and a place to be, but I can’t stand it when somebody offers it to me. I can’t handle the responsibility of that. I punish the people who open themselves to me. Tell her that she was born with the gift of a constant heart, and that’s worth a hundred of me. Tell her to stop feeling guilty and start writing, and that she did me a favor. Ol’ Sonny is nothing but a redneck with money, and he’ll be a real hog when he’s forty. I knew that even when I was following him around like a puppy dog. He was my ticket away from the love and trust you both offered me. I deserved him, but I’m mighty glad to be rid of him.
“�
��Tell Peyton I love her, just as I do you.’”
It was signed, simply, “Nora.”
“What does that mean?” Peyton said.
“I think it means that you grew up and Nora didn’t.”
Peyton’s heart cracked. Nora stood before her whole and living and vivid, laughing. Peyton could count every copper freckle. Loss drowned her.
“I hate her,” she said, weeping, but she said it doubtfully. Surely hate did not hurt like this.
“Well,” her father said, “you’d just as soon hate a butterfly. We didn’t give one single thought to what she might need. We just climbed up on her wings. We loved it there; it was a wonderful ride. And she tried to hold us up, but we were too heavy. Finally she had to drop us and go. All the time she wanted an anchor, a place to light, and we were too busy riding her wings to see that.”
“She said I’d always be safe with her. She said that!”
Her father put his chin down on her head and began to rock her like a child.
“Nobody’s safe, Peyton, and nobody’s free,” he said. “There’s only somewhere between safe and free, and what people are. The only thing we can ever be is just human, and that ends up breaking our hearts. We all try so hard to be strong, or free, or safe, or whatever it is we think we need most…and in the end all we can ever be is just us. And it’s enough because it has to be. There’s not anything else.”
“I don’t think I know how to do that. I’m not even sure who me is.”
“Well, this is what we do,” he said. “We try to give what little we have to somebody who hasn’t got it, and maybe they try to give us back some of what they have that we haven’t got. That’s what love is. That’s all it is. You can do that. You already do it.”
Between the slats of the blinds the sun burned rose red. “Look,” he said. “It’s one of Nora’s suns. Remember? ‘Red as sin over that green roof. I think the sun comes up redder there than anywhere else on earth.’”
“I remember,” she said.
They were silent awhile longer.
Then he said, “We both still need her, I guess.”
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