It was my tree figure, with her sea-grass hair cascading down her back, almost half the size of Josie. She looked older than I was, but as I touched her face, the small nose, the large eyes, the tiny scar on the forehead, the arms out, I could see it was me.
But not really me.
I looked closer, studying those eyes that were so sad it hurt to look at them, ran my fingers over those outstretched arms.
“Giving arms,” Josie said, nodding, bone thin, like one of the little birds that perched on the evergreen trees. I reached out to her, feeling those small shoulders, and hugged her to me. Tears burned my eyes. “She's beautiful,” I said.
“Do you think she looks like you?”
I held her out. “She's not as tough,” I said, trying for a smile. “She doesn't look like a mountain of trouble.”
Josie shook her head. “Maybe you're tough when you need to be tough. But trouble? What would I ever have done without you?”
Josie put her hand under my chin and tilted it so that I had to look at her. “I wish you could see yourself the way I see you.”
“But I'm not—” I began, but she broke in.
“Not good? Not kind? Not there when you're needed? Not anxious to be loved? You know that's not so.”
I did cry then, but just for a moment. If I had let myself go I would have had a hard time stopping. And then I saw that Josie was crying too.
“I know you want to go home,” I said, a jumble of thoughts in my mind. I wanted to say that we could be a family here, but she wanted to be in her own house, wanted to make Christmas cookies with Beatrice and spend Tuesdays and Thursdays at the movies making popcorn.
We sat on the couch, Henry on Josie's lap, watching the candles glow in the late-afternoon light. The fire in the fireplace sent warm shadows over the wood floor and the walls, and next to me Josie was closing her eyes. Her head went back to rest against the couch, and she was asleep.
I sat there too, half dozing, remembering that Steven's birthday was the next day. It hurt to think about it. I stood up slowly, quietly, and went into his room. I picked up the blurry picture from his dresser, half of the photo dark, the rest all blues and greens, with the faint figure in the center. It was the river, of course; I saw it then, with the holly bushes on the bank and just the faintest view of the Old Man's mountain reaching up in back. There was the rowboat, and I was in it.
How could I not have seen that the other day?
“Hey, stop rowing,” he said. “I'm going to take your picture.”
I looked up at him, feeling the sun on my face, feeling the happiness down to my toes, as he stood at the river's edge and snapped the picture.
“You've got a smiley face,” he said. “We could put you on a stamp and sell it all over Branches.”
“Too bad you didn't take your thumb off the lens,” I told him.
“Too bad you dropped the oar,” he said. “It's floating away.”
I put the picture back carefully, then went downstairs for sweaters and pulled my jacket off the hook. Something fell out as I did. It was the shell I had picked up the first time I had seen Josie's ocean. I held it up to my face before I put it back into my pocket.
I needed to be outside. I needed to be cold, so cold I couldn't think of anything but the ice and the snow.
Anyting, that's what the stucco woman would say.
For all I know this picture might still be in the agency conference room. It's a drawing of a small office with beige paneling on the walls. The paneling is fake wood. There's a table in the center, someone's initials, TR, gouged out of the wood. The picture isn't finished, but Emmy and the mustard woman didn't know that. They thought the girl sitting at the table was me. Of course it wasn't me. This girl was laughing. She was just make-believe.
I wasn't laughing when I sat there. I was sitting as straight as I could, but I could feel my knees shaking.
“Mr. Regan wants to talk to you,” Emmy said.
I shook my head, never looking at her, sketching on the paper.
She leaned forward. “He's come all the way down here, Holly.”
“Hollis.”
“Just see what he has to say.”
I shook my head again, but Emmy patted my hand and was out the door.
And then he was there, standing in front of me, and I still didn't look up. “I'm sorry,” I said in a voice so low I wasn't sure he heard me.
“It was Steven's fault,” he said.
“No,” I said.
“He took the truck—” I could see him wave his hand. “Hollis, it doesn't matter. We just want you home.”
I thought about standing up. I felt like putting my arms around him, then going out to the car with him. I thought of what it would be like to drive up to their front door.
“I didn't tell Izzy and Steven I was coming,” he said. “If I had, they would have come too. I had to make sure you wanted to be with us first.”
Izzy would be standing at the door, and Steven next to her. We'd be hugging each other, all of us. There'd be pancakes and hard candy.
But that was just for a moment.
“It wasn't Steven's fault,” I said. “I went up the mountain first.”
“It doesn't make any difference.”
He was blaming Steven. If I went home with him they'd always blame Steven. “He thinks you're perfect,” Steven had said. Before I could change my mind, I shook my head. “I think I'll stay down here.”
He tried to talk me out of it. I wasn't even hearing what he said. I stopped drawing; my hands were clenched under the table, and I never once looked up at him. After a while he left.
Emmy came back in with tears in her eyes.
“You want tough?” I asked. “I'll show you tough.”
Outside it was almost dark. A sliver of moon curved over the Old Man's mountain, and a single star was just visible. “A planet, Hollis,” Steven might say. “Get your astronomy in order.”
If I cried again, the tears would freeze fast to my cheeks.
The snow was so dry I could hear the creaking of my footsteps as I went past the holly bushes. No one could guess they were there, mounded up like soft white pillows, and the river in front of me had disappeared.
I stood still to look at it all. I wondered how I could draw that to show the world underneath: sharp, shiny leaves hidden in the snow, the river running fast and cold under the ice.
In my mind was a picture of Beatrice brushing her hair off her forehead. “Drawing is a language,” she had said. “You have to learn to speak it.”
In the distance was the faint sound of a saw: Someone must be cutting wood for a fire. I closed my eyes. Steven and the Old Man turning their heads. Roger's saw, they'd say. He must be in the apple orchard, or Hopper's finally gotten to that dead elm.
No, it wasn't a saw. It was the sound of a snow-mobile, probably on the other side of the mountain.
A clump of snow fell off the roof of the house. I looked back at it, at the house where I wanted to belong. Huge icicles hung from the eaves, and suddenly I was so cold I couldn't stay outside anymore. Upstairs in my bedroom I sat at the edge of the bed shivering, waiting until I was warm; then I went to my backpack and pulled out my pictures to spread across the bumpy white bedspread.
I saw how much blue I had used in those summer drawings: blue for the river, blue for the Old Man's rugs, blue for Izzy's locket; and green: a smudge of tree, a leaf, the edge of the mountain. Both colors I loved.
The pictures I had drawn of Josie lay in the middle of the bed. Josie on the pier, reaching for sea grass; Josie outside in her tree garden, shades of peach and lilac; Josie happy, Josie where she belonged.
Josie didn't belong here. She belonged in her house with Beatrice, and Henry, and the irritable pelican on her wall.
She belonged near the ocean.
I sat there for a long time, my head against the headboard, knowing what I had to do. I rubbed my hands, still icy cold. It was four miles to the telephone outside the grocery
store, a long walk, but I could do it. I'd call Beatrice … ask her, beg her.
We'd go home, Josie and I, Josie to Beatrice, me to another place. I looked at a half-finished picture of Izzy at the cemetery with a vase of daisies in her hand. What had she said that day? “I wanted children for every corner of the house.” And what else? There was something more she had said, something about Steven and the Old Man. “It's worse this summer.”
I'd have to stop thinking about Izzy, put all of them out of my mind. Before I left I'd get rid of all the pictures of them, burn the drawings in the fireplace. I'd forget about Izzy and the Old Man, forget about Steven.
I stared down at the drawing of Izzy backing out of the door with my WELCOME TO THE FAMILY cake and saw something I hadn't remembered: the Old Man's hand on Steven's shoulder.
Me, catching my first fish. Steven in front of me with the net, the Old Man smiling. But he is looking at Steven, not at me. Looking and smiling.
And another: Steven hanging into the engine of a car, just the back of him visible, with mismatched socks, and the Old Man with his hands on his hips, but his eyes are soft.
Beatrice was in my head again. What had she said to me one time? “Sometimes we learn from our own drawings; things are there that we thought we didn't know.”
My lips were suddenly dry.
I stood up, walked around to the other side of the bed. There they were in the boat. Steven laughing at something the Old Man had said.
How had I drawn all that and not seen it?
Of course the Old Man loved Steven. He was going to love him whether I was there or not. Had I given them up for nothing, the whole family?
What do you know about a family? Steven said in my mind. You've never had one.
I remembered what Izzy had said then: “They have to find their own way.”
I picked up another picture: me with candy in my mouth. Then there was something else floating just on the edge of my mind. Something to do with the radio? Why the radio?
Wait, I told myself. What had Josie said about wanting Santa to bring a radio?
And then I had it. The two of us joking. “Santa on a sleigh,” I had said.
“That was a hundred years ago. Now he comes ona …”
… a snowmobile? To bring the candy? Steven? The pancakes, and the applesauce?
I slid off the bed, the picture drifting out of my hand, my knuckles up to my mouth.
The sweater hanging on the shed doorknob.
Holly on the back step. “Peace, Hollis.”
I felt as if I could hardly breathe.
And then I was flying down the stairs, my feet barely touching the steps, skittering on the Old Man's shiny floor, coming to a stop in front of Josie asleep on the couch.
I sat down next to her, one hand on Henry's rough fur. “Wake up, Josie,” I said. “I want to ask you about Santa Claus.”
Josie slept through my questions, her head nestled on the couch cushions, and Henry with her, purring faintly with his eyes closed. She slept as I shook her, slept as I begged her, “Please, Josie, I can't wait to know,” slept as I offered her soup from a can, Izzy's candy, a cup of tea.
Then at last I gave up. I looked at the black square that was the window. The moon had disappeared behind the Old Man's mountain, and the star was gone.
I went into the kitchen to make something to eat: the rest of the tuna with canned pineapple thrown on top, and a few frosted flakes for crunch. I ate it at the kitchen counter, wolfing it down, made hot chocolate, and when it had cooled a little, put it under Josie's nose. “Smells good, doesn't it? Just open your eyes, take a sip, and talk to me.”
She smiled in her sleep as I kissed her forehead, and then I went upstairs to bed, lying awake for a long time, feeling the tick of my heart in my throat.
Maybe the holly had just blown onto the back step. Maybe Josie had found the candy in the house. Maybe. Maybe.
But then as I fell asleep, I could almost hear his voice in my head. Merry Christmas, Hollis Woods.
I was awake at the first light the next morning. It was a beautiful day, with sunshine melting the ice on the window. I went downstairs and Josie was still asleep on the couch, but Henry was awake, stretching his skinny legs. I let him out and stood in the doorway, hugging myself, squinting at that glittering world, listening for the sawing sound of a snowmobile.
And then Josie opened her eyes.
I began slowly. “Christmas was yesterday,” I said.
She smiled at me.
“Santa Claus is coming …,” I sang.
“… to town,” she finished.
“He came to us,” I said.
“In all this snow,” she said.
“But what did he look like?”
She ran her hand over her face, thinking. “He looked cold,” she said.
“And he gave you the candy.”
“One time,” she said, “when Beatrice and I were little, he brought mittens. Red for Beatrice, blue for me. We each swapped one. All winter, we wore one blue and one red.”
I went over to her and touched her hair. “I'm going to call Beatrice,” I said.
“Are we going home?” she asked.
“Maybe,” I said. “I think so. Can you wait here? It's a long walk to the phone. I'll be gone most of the morning.”
I heard a few fragments of song as she wandered into the kitchen. “If it takes forever, I will wait …”
I made breakfast for both of us, a heap of frosted flakes; then I layered on sweaters, three pairs of Steven's socks, my jacket, and turned to Josie for one last try. “Where did you get the candy?” I asked.
“It's in a tin box,” she said. “Orange and lemon. Makes your mouth wiggle.”
“I'll be back.” I opened the door, hearing the drip of melting icicles from the roof, and stepped back as Henry darted inside.
Outside I thought at first of taking the road. What difference would it make if I were caught?
But it would make a difference. I wanted to call Beatrice first. I wanted to hear that she'd come to live with Josie.
And suppose she doesn't? Steven asked.
I shook my head. She will. I think she will.
I brushed him away, trudging along through the trees, listening to the call of the crows, the screech of the blue jays. And all the time I was listening for that buzzing sound of the snowmobile, telling myself I had made the whole thing up, telling myself it wasn't Steven.
And what if it was Steven? I asked myself. What would I say to him?
It must have been almost twenty minutes later when I heard the faint sound of the motor. It could have been anyone, but still I ran toward the road, trying to pick up my feet in that deep snow.
I saw him, a helmet on his head, thick gloves on his hands, bent over the handles of the snowmobile, and I stepped out onto the road just in time for him to see me and glide to a stop.
I stood there, biting my lip, feeling that river of tears coming at last, waiting for that brief second as he pushed up the visor. “Hollis Woods,” he said. “Where are you going?”
“Steven Regan,” I said, my mouth trembling. “Happy birthday.”
And then we were laughing, both of us, laughing instead of crying.
“Thank you for the candy,” I said at last, looking at his face, thinner, bonier. Something about his eyes seemed older.
“Horrible stuff, that candy,” he said.
“And the holly branch.”
He tilted his head a little. “Hollis Woods,” he said again.
“How did you know I was here?”
He raised one shoulder. “There was a letter from the agency looking for you.”
I nodded, thinking about the mustard woman sending lost girl letters to every house I'd ever been in.
“I told Pop.” Steven swiped at his glasses. “ ‘Hollis loves that house,' I said. But did he listen? Of course not.”
I swallowed. “You and the Old Man are still arguing.” “
‘If sh
e loved that house so much she'd be with us right now,' Pop said. But I knew. I've been here every day except during the big storm.”
I was shivering in the cold, the wind blowing around us, my feet beginning to feel numb.
“We've been hoping you'd come home all these months,” he said. “Why not, Holly?”
And then I was crying, big sloppy tears. I leaned against the handlebars, making terrible sounds in my throat, and I just couldn't seem to stop.
Steven stood there, his hands dangling in those huge gloves, and then he reached out, put his arms around me, pulling me toward him.
“The Old Man went down to Long Island when he heard you were missing,” he said. “He's going crazy looking for you. He keeps going back and forth.”
“Why didn't you tell him?”
“I wanted to do that for you, at least that. Give you time.” He paused. “You're famous. Your picture's in the newspapers. A pretty awful-looking picture, if you ask me.”
As he rattled on, I kept sniffling and wiping my eyes, and then I'd start to cry again.
“I knew you'd be safe.” He took one arm off my shoulder to wave it around. “As long as I kept an eye on you and your friend.”
“You have a nerve,” I said.
“You'd have starved to death without the food I brought.” He frowned and began again. “I still don't know why …”
“I thought …,” I began, and bit my lip. I'd never tell him what I had thought about the Old Man not loving him. “You were always arguing, and I thought it had to do with …” I waved my hands.
“With you?” he said. “Oh, Holly. It doesn't have to do with anyone. I told you that. It's just the way we are.”
I stared down the road, not a car in sight, the trees heavy with snow, bent and leaning.
“I'm a slob and he's neat. I forget, he remembers. We drive each other crazy. But it's all right.”
I ran my hands over my cheeks, tried to dry them. As simple as that, just the way they were.
“I told you,” he said, his head tilted, his eyes smiling. “You don't know about families yet.” He leaned back against the snowmobile. “He knew the accident was my fault.”
Pictures of Hollis Woods Page 9
