When the Wind Blows

by John Saul

  “We’re here,” Bill said. Christie, seeming to come out of her daze, gazed up at him.

  “Where?” she asked.

  “At the Ambers’. They’re going to take care of you.”

  “You mean they’re going to adopt me?” Christie asked.

  “Well, I don’t know.” Bill wondered how to explain to the little girl that it was not at all certain how long she was going to be staying with the Ambers, and that almost surely she was not going to be adopted by them.

  Christie fidgeted, her fingers twisting at the hem of her dress. She could only vaguely remember her father introducing her to the Ambers. Then she thought of the statue in the square.

  “Isn’t Mr. Amber the man in the park?”

  “That’s right. But the ones you’re going to stay with are his wife and his daughter.”

  Christie tried to make sense out of it all, but too much had happened. All she knew was that her father was dead and that she was going to live with strangers. She began to cry.

  As Bill looked helplessly on, Esperanza gathered the child into her arms and cradled her against her ample bosom.

  “Pobrecita,” she murmured. “Is all right, baby.” She looked up at Bill Henry. “I tell them,” she said suddenly. “I tell them, but they don’t listen to me.”

  “Told them what?” Bill asked. He glanced at Esperanza, but the woman was staring into the distance, toward the mine.

  “The children,” Esperanza said. “I tell them not to bother the children, but they don’t listen. See what happened.”

  Dimly, Bill remembered a story he’d heard when he was a boy. He looked across Christie, then reached out to touch Esperanza. “What are you talking about?” he asked. “What children?”

  She jerked away from his fingers as if she’d been burned. “The lost children,” Esperanza replied, her voice low. “You can hear them when the wind blows. When the wind blows, they cry. And it was blowing today.”

  It didn’t make any sense to Bill. So what if the wind had been blowing? In this part of the country it wasn’t that unusual. On many days the wind came sweeping down out of the mountains, whispering among the aspens and caressing the tall grasses that grew on the floor of the valley.

  “I don’t understand, Esperanza,” he said. “What children are you talking about?”

  Esperanza looked at him pityingly. “The ones who are waiting,” she said. “The ones who are waiting to be born again.” Then she opened the car door and got out. Christie, who seemed not to have heard the conversation, slid reluctantly out after her.

  She looked up at the house and wished she could go somewhere else. It was too big, and too frightening. She slipped her hand into Esperanza’a. As though she had read her thoughts, Esperanza leaned down to whisper in Christie’s ear.

  “Is all right, little one. I will look out for you. You see? Up there?” She pointed off into the distance, where Christie could just make out the shape of a cabin crouching on the side of the mountain. “I live there. You need me, you come up there. Okay?”

  Christie nodded, then let go of Esperanza’s hand and followed Bill as he led her up the steps toward the front door of the Amber house.

  Diana Amber opened the door and, seeing who was there, immediately dropped to her knees. She took Christie in her arms and hugged her close.

  At fifty, Diana wore the remnants of her prettiness well. Her blue eyes were soft, and there was a sadness in them that touched nearly everyone who had ever met her. As she gazed at Christie Lyons she smiled gently. Looking on, Bill realized that, in a way, Diana reminded him of a rabbit—warm and soft, easily startled. She held Christie for a moment, then stood up and led the little girl into the house. Bill Henry and Esperanza Rodriguez followed.

  Diana took them to the parlor, where Edna Amber sat working on a piece of needlepoint. Unlike her daughter, Edna had bright hard eyes that sparkled with determination, and her body, though she was nearing eighty and getting stiff, was still strong. She didn’t stand to greet her visitors; she was one of those women who expects others to rise while she remains seated.

  Christie, unsure of what she was expected to do, stood quietly staring at the floor. Suddenly her nostrils filled with a strange odor and she sneezed.

  “God bless you,” Diana said. “Do you have a cold?”

  Christie shook her head. “I smelled something, and it made me sneeze.”

  Diana sniffed at the air, then smiled. “That’s lavender,” she said. “Don’t you like it?”

  “I don’t know,” Christie said. “What’s it for?”

  “It’s just to make things smell good.”

  Christie stared up at her. “Why?”

  “Why—why because—” Diana floundered, unable to find an answer for the little girl’s question.

  For the first time, Edna Amber spoke. “It’s to cover up sour smells,” she said. “Like houses that haven’t been properly cleaned, and old people, and children.” She got to her feet and, leaning stiffly on her cane, walked out of the room. There was a long silence until she was gone, and then Christie, comprehending only that the old woman didn’t like her, began to cry. Once again Diana gathered the little girl into her arms.

  “It’s all right,” she whispered. “Everything’s going to be fine. I’m going to be your mother now, and you’ll be my little girl.”

  The words struck a chord in Christie. Her crying abated, and she looked deep into Diana’s eyes.

  “My mama died a long time ago,” she said, her voice quivering.

  “I know,” Diana told her. “But now I’ll be your mama.”

  Christie’s expression was uncertain as she searched Diana’s face. “Promise?” she said at last, her voice shaking.

  “I promise,” Diana breathed.

  Suddenly the little girl dissolved into tears once more, but this time she slid her arms around Diana’s neck and clung to her. Lifting her up, Diana laid Christie gently on the sofa, then sat and cradled the child’s head in her lap. As Diana and Bill talked Christie’s sobbing eased until she lay still.

  “Is she all right?” Diana asked. Christie seemed to have fallen asleep.

  “She will be,” Bill assured her. “She’s still a little bit in shock, but I’d rather not give her anything—it seems as though every time something happens, we try to take something for it. But children are resilient.” He paused, then met Diana’s eyes. “Diana, are you sure this is wise?”

  “What?”

  “Taking her in. Obviously Miss Edna doesn’t approve.”

  “I’m a grown woman, Bill,” Diana said. “Mother doesn’t make all my decisions for me anymore.”

  But even as she spoke Bill saw Diana’s eyes flickering around the room as if she expected to see her mother somewhere, watching her, mocking her, contradicting her.

  Controlling her.

  He was well aware that Diana was all Edna Amber had left, and that she guarded her aging daughter like a tigress with a cub, prowling around her, ever wary of any danger. Even Bill, after all the years he had known Edna Amber, still felt a certain awe of her. She carried about her an aura of power that no one in Amberton was immune to, even while they sometimes wondered if Miss Edna used her power to protect her daughter or only herself.

  For Bill, Edna’s protectiveness had an extra edge: there had been a time when he had wanted to marry Diana. It was because of Diana that he had come back to Amberton at the age of twenty-nine, finished with school, finished with his internship, ready to begin his practice. He had come back because he had been in love with Diana since they were children together.

  But nothing had happened. Miss Edna, always polite to him, never raising her voice, had seen to that.

  As far as Miss Edna was concerned, Bill Henry was just a town boy, trying to better himself by marrying above his station. Eventually she had convinced Diana of it, and now, more than twenty years later, his love had mellowed to a mixture of sympathy and pity.

  “What’s Miss Edna doing?
” he asked now.

  “She’s upstairs, in her room,” Diana replied. “If she needs anything, she’ll let me know.” Diana’s even features were momentarily warped by a strange grin that seemed to Bill to be based more on fear than on amusement. “She pounds the floor with her cane.”

  Charming, Bill thought, knowing he wouldn’t be able to keep the sarcasm from his voice if he spoke the word aloud. Diana’s grin faded to a wan smile.

  “I’ve gotten used to it over the years.” A thought occurred to her: “I hope it won’t frighten Christie.”

  Bill lit his pipe and waved away the cloud of smoke that rose from the bowl. “She’s likely to be afraid of everything for a while, Diana. Losing both parents at her age can damage a child. You might be letting yourself in for more than you can handle. She’s probably going to have nightmares, and she’s likely to be demanding. She’s going to need a lot of attention.”

  “She’ll get it,” Diana said. She paused for a moment, and when she spoke again, her voice had a strength in it that Bill had never heard before.

  “I want to take care of her, Bill,” she said. “I’ve been taken care of long enough. It’s time I stopped being my mother’s dutiful daughter and had a child of my own. And maybe I can talk Mother into having Esperanza help out a little more.” She eased Christie’s head off her lap and stood up, and Bill, realizing that she wanted him to go, stood up, too.

  “If you need me, call me,” he said.

  Diana touched his arm and nodded. “I will. But I don’t think I’ll need anything. I think I’ll be just fine.”

  As she walked Bill to the door, Esperanza appeared from the kitchen, nodded briefly to them, and moved on into the living room. Diana stood at the front door until Bill had driven away, then she, too, returned to the living room. Esperanza was kneeling in front of the couch, stroking Christie’s forehead.

  “What are you doing?” Diana asked. Esperanza looked up at her, her brown eyes sad.

  “She is dying,” Esperanza said quietly.

  Diana felt a surge of panic. “Dying? What are you talking about?”

  The Mexican woman shook her head sadly. “Not now. But soon. The children will call her, and she will have to go.”

  “Stop it, Esperanza,” Diana told her. “Don’t say another word.”

  “But it is true, Miss Diana. You know it is true, no?”

  As their eyes met, and Diana saw the great sadness in Esperanza’s face, she felt a chill.

  The same chill she had felt that morning when the wind began to blow.

  2

  From her front room on the second floor of the house, Edna Amber watched Bill Henry drive away. Her body rigid, she leaned on her cane, held firmly in both her hands, but as the doctor’s old Rambler station wagon disappeared in a cloud of red dust, she let herself relax. Her ears, as sharp in old age as they had been when she was fifty years younger, listened to the sounds of the house. For the moment there was silence.

  She liked the silence, for it meant that the wind was not blowing. The thing Edna Amber hated most about Amberton was the wind.

  Amos Amber, twenty years older than she and used to the wind after his years in Amberton, had assured her that she would get used to it, that the only wind that was really bothersome was the chinook, the warm wind that came whistling out of the Rockies several times each winter, raising the temperature, melting the snow, and setting people’s nerves on edge. She had not gotten used to it, not gotten used to it at all.

  Instead, as the years had passed, she had learned to steel herself against the wind, learned to watch the sky and the mountains to the west, learned to watch for the signs that the wind was coming. Watchfulness had not been enough.

  The day Diana was born, the wind had blown.

  Ever since that day, she had hated the wind, always associating it with the death of her husband and the birth of her daughter.

  She had considered leaving Amberton and going back to Boston, but she had soon realized she could not. Despite the difference in their ages, she had loved Amos very much and had never wanted to leave him. Besides, there was the ranch to run, and she had an instinctive feeling that if she left, the ranch would soon prove to be “unprofitable,” and she would lose it. The prospect of being a young widow with no estate had not appealed to her.

  And so Edna had stayed on, doing her best to maintain the life to which she felt entitled. The people of Amberton didn’t blame her for the accident in the mine. She, after all, had lost as much as any of the rest of them. Over the years she had come to be called “Miss Edna,” living apart from the town in her too-large house, tending to her affairs with a much stronger sense of business than she had ever expected to possess, and being very careful never to become close to any of the people she knew.

  She had let herself become close to Amos Amber, and he had died. She had never made the same mistake again, nor had she let her daughter make it. Diana, she had decided on that day her husband died and her child was born, had only one purpose in life.

  Someday, when all else was gone, Diana would take care of her.

  All her life Edna had worked toward that plan.

  Now, once again, it seemed as if the wind was reaching out to destroy her. It had reached out to destroy another child’s father, and now that child was being thrust into her world.

  She turned away from the window and left her room, pausing in the wide hallway that ran the length of the house on the second floor, to listen once more. From downstairs there was no sound.

  Edna went to the back of the house and slowly climbed the narrow set of stairs. Once, this staircase had been used only by the servants, but in recent years it had barely been used at all. On the third floor a warren of tiny rooms were jammed beneath the rafters. Once they had been filled with the Mexican and Indian girls who had served the Ambers as maids in better days—Esperanza Rodriguez had lived there with her mother when she was a baby—but now they were nothing more than storerooms, filled with the castoffs of the years, a dusty breeding place for the rats that had slowly invaded the house.

  All of them were storerooms, except one.

  In the corner, facing the mountains, there was a small room. Edna hadn’t been inside it for thirty years, but this afternoon, as the sun began sinking behind the mountains, and the deep blue of the sky turned darker, she opened the door to the corner room and went in.

  It was a nursery.

  She and Amos had decorated it together, early in her pregnancy. She had known, somehow, that her baby was going to be a girl, so she had done the room in pink.

  There was pink candy-striped paper on the walls, and the wood trim had been painted white. Over the two dormer windows she had hung white lace curtains, which she had stitched herself. All the furniture was still where she had placed it.

  There was a rocking chair and an ornately carved cradle, which had been Diana’s first bed. When she had grown bigger, she had been moved into the crib that stood in the northern dormer, and finally, when she outgrew even the crib, she had moved to a daybed just inside the door.

  All the toys were still there—all the dolls and baby toys with which Amos had filled the room before Diana was born.

  And years later when Diana had finally abandoned the nursery in favor of a room on the second floor, the nursery had never been opened again.

  Not until today.

  Edna sank into the rocking chair and stared at the room.

  The wallpaper, once bright and pretty, had faded years ago. The pink and white stripes, barely visible now, were brittle and streaked with dust. The paper was peeling away from the walls, its seams curled back from the crumbling plaster behind it.

  The curtains hung in shreds from their rods, grayish-brown remnants of the fresh, clean ruffles they had been fifty years before.

  Cobwebs, heavy with dust, filled the corners of the room, and beneath the crib there was a pile of cotton batting moldering on the floor. A rat had apparently robbed the mattress for its nest.<
br />
  Edna sat in the nursery for a long time, letting her mind drift over her life. When finally she stood up, she had come to a decision.

  The nursery was a child’s room.

  Now, for the moment at least, there was a child in the house once more.

  Christie Lyons, she decided, would live in the nursery.

  And, as when Diana had lived there, the nursery would remain as she had furnished it.

  Her eyes, undimmed by age, saw what they wanted to see.

  To her, the nursery was as bright and pretty as it had ever been.

  Christie, she was sure, would love it as much as Diana had.

  The dust swirled around Esperanza Rodriguez’s sandals as she walked home that afternoon, leaving rusty stains on the hem of her long black skirt, but she didn’t notice it. Instead she looked at the mountains, admiring the bands of color that splashed across them as they rose from the floor of the valley. The aspens, bright green in their early summer foliage, glistened in the afternoon sun, garlanding the bases of the hills and shooting up the gulches that scarred the mountainsides, like guerrilla armies invading the dark green of the ancient firs that had conquered the Rockies centuries earlier. A few yards from the road Cleft Creek gurgled in its bed, its spring flood only recently abated, its water still icy cold. Soon she would take Juan fishing, and the two of them, she and her son, would be alone near the cave where los niños lived. They would spend a day by themselves, away from the prying eyes of the world, away from the knowing looks of the gringos who watched them whenever they went to town, and then whispered to each other. Esperanza knew what they said, and there were times when she wondered if they were right and she had done wrong.