The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls

by Anton Disclafani

  He pointed a thumb to the door, and Martha Ladue, who was sitting a table away from me, gasped, a flush spreading over her white skin.

  Follow me, he’d said that afternoon, but that was just a formality, a thing he said. I would have followed him anywhere. He took me upstairs, to a room I’d never entered. All done up in pink, with a narrow white bed. Sarabeth’s room. I didn’t understand why he had brought me here. He retrieved something from her dresser, a pretty marble-topped piece, while I was hungrily taking in the room, and put it in my hands. Look, he’d said, and he’d seemed suddenly shy, his hair falling over his eyes.

  But now, in the dining room, I knew it was no longer true. I would not follow him anywhere. I would have, for a moment, and that’s how it had been with Georgie, too. I would have followed him anywhere for a moment, and then the moment ended.

  I shook my head, and Mr. Holmes watched me in that fierce way of his, as if he were inventorying my soul, and then he left. I looked to the head table; his children weren’t here. He would have taken them away had they been. He would go to them now. This was where he would always be. I would leave, but he never could.

  “Girls,” Mrs. Holmes said, and stepped up to Mr. Holmes’s lectern, where he usually led morning prayer, “your attention for a moment. An announcement.” She was flustered, her voice unsteady, her hands fluttering in front of her. That I had undone her brought me no pleasure.

  But the view, always the view: she stood in front of the window, the same window I had touched nearly a year ago, when Father had dismissed me from Mr. Holmes’s office. She was framed by the mountains; despite everything, I could still sight a marvel. Both then and now.

  “Theodora Atwell is leaving us. Tomorrow morning. It is all very sudden, of course.” Girls started to whisper again, as I’d known they would, as I’d known what Mrs. Holmes would do as soon as I’d seen her enter the dining hall. It was an odd sort of comfort, to know all this and not be frightened.

  “For an infraction. Involving a young man.” The din grew louder, and Mrs. Holmes raised her voice. “I expect that there will be no more talk concerning this matter. You are ladies, and ladies do not gossip.” She looked at me then, across the room.

  In Sarabeth’s room, I’d looked at what he’d handed me. A photograph of a much younger Henry Holmes in a silver frame that needed to be polished, Mrs. Holmes’s absence wrought in little ways like this. Me, he’d said. Me when I was your age. He stood in front of a lake, holding a paddle. He looked directly at the camera, as men always did. He looked the same, except his face was fuller, not chiseled into handsomeness by time. I touched the glass. So handsome, I’d said. But what I’d meant was this: So new.

  “And let this be a lesson, girls, to act your age. To obey the rules.”

  Sissy looked at me from across the room, along with everyone else, a slow dawning illuminating her delicate features. She knew. She looked away, out the window, touching the diamond horseshoe that rested in the hollow of her neck, and for an instant I thought that what Mrs. Holmes had predicted might be the case: Sissy would believe I had betrayed her. She backed out of the door, everyone watching.

  Mrs. Holmes watched me. Then I felt Docey’s hand on my shoulder. I took it, and held it, and though Docey’s hand was tense at first, she didn’t take it away. I could tell by feel that we had matching calluses—mine from riding, hers from the constant work of putting things in order. Our hands felt the same.

  —

  I found Sissy in the woods, where she and Boone went. She sat on a fallen log, crying into her hands.

  I told her what I had done, and gradually, her crying stopped. I sat so close to her I could smell her. That’s what sleeping in her bed a dozen times had earned me—recognizing the scent, surprisingly pungent, she left on her pillow.

  “You’ll sleep in the infirmary tonight. That’s where they’ll put you, before they send you away for good.” Still she wouldn’t look at me. I tapped her shoulder, and she turned to me, her wide-set eyes swollen.

  “Thank you,” she said, her voice even more jagged, from the crying. “It was a brave thing to do.”

  “There’s proof. Eva noticed that I was gone that night. I told Mrs. Holmes to ask her.”

  “Eva wouldn’t tell.”

  Of course Eva would tell, if it was me versus Sissy. “It doesn’t matter. She won’t ask.”

  “No,” Sissy said, “she believes you, along with everyone else.” Her voice broke.

  “Mrs. Holmes doesn’t believe me. She saw right through it. Through me.” I took Sissy’s hand. “I’m sorry.”

  “I know.” She flung her hand in the air, as if to say, We’re done with all that. That gesture never left me. In my darkest hours I would recall it, extract it from the recesses of my mind. “But who will I talk to, now that you’re leaving?”

  I thought then that it was always a matter of exchanging one thing for another, losing one kind of love for a new kind.

  “And why do you want to go home, Thea? I don’t understand.”

  I smiled. She was right to ask that question: Why did I want to go home? My family didn’t want me. “I want to help you. And my brother. I need to see my brother.”

  She nodded. “But your reputation. What will your parents think?”

  I looked away. That was what I feared most, but I couldn’t tell Sissy. I would be leaving this place in shame, which was exactly the opposite of how I wanted to leave it. I wanted my parents to love me; no, they had always loved me, I was their child—I wanted them to like me again. And leaving this way, in the midst of a scandal—I had made sure they would not. But better me than Sissy, who still had a chance; in my heart, I knew I was ruined in Mother’s eyes; one scandal or twenty, it didn’t truly matter. The Thea I had been had disappeared, a puff of smoke.

  “I think I am a lost cause, to my parents.”

  Sissy looked like she might start to cry again. She grabbed my hand. “That is awful, Thea. The most awful thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “It’s not the most awful thing I’ve ever heard,” I said. “There’s worse. I need to do what’s good, Sissy. I need to help my brother. I need to be a right girl.”

  —

  I wandered the Castle the afternoon before I left Yonahlossee, sneaking out of the infirmary, which wasn’t at all hard to do. No one watched me. I knew by the bells that it was rest hour. Sam would know I was coming home, by now. Mother would have told him. Surely he would be glad to see me, in his heart if not in his head.

  I’d left a book in one of my classrooms. But the book didn’t matter so much. I had become attached to this place, and I wanted to see where I’d gone first when I’d arrived almost a year ago, once more before I returned to Florida.

  I knew what to expect, now, the rapid process by which Yonahlossee would turn alien.

  The dining room was clear of the chaos of this morning. I tried to memorize each detail as it lay: the table where I had eaten hundreds of meals; the space where Mr. Holmes had stood and talked to us of God.

  I climbed the stairs to the third floor, to see it for the last time, but perhaps I knew, somehow, that Mrs. Holmes would be in her classroom.

  She leaned against the window in an odd posture, her forehead on glass, her open hand pressed against the wall, as if she were trying to push her way through. I knew the view very well: she was in the mountains, only a window between her and them. I thought she might be crying.

  And then she turned and I drew back, certain she had seen me. But she went to a desk, where Decca sat, drawing. Mrs. Holmes smiled, and pointed to something on the paper. Decca nodded. I watched them for too long, Decca engrossed in her drawing—she kept looking at the window, and I realized she was drawing the mountains—and Mrs. Holmes watching, her face constantly moving—her lips, her forehead—in response to Decca’s work. She looked pleased. They both did.

  Whe
n I left, I wound my way behind the cabins—I was meeting Sissy—so that in case Mrs. Holmes returned to the window she would not see me.

  —

  A kitchen girl I didn’t know by name brought my dinner to the infirmary. I tossed and turned against the hard mattress all night. I was going to see my parents soon. My brother. What had they been told? I was doubly bad, returned to them for the same sin for which I had been cast out.

  The door opened. There was no lock, and for an instant I thought Mr. Holmes had come to see me, and I was so happy.

  But the silhouette belonged to a girl. I sat up and turned on the lamp. Mary Abbott.

  “Why are you leaving?” she asked in a normal tone of voice.

  “Shh. Because I was bad.” I sighed. “You shouldn’t be here.”

  “But you weren’t bad!” She knelt down next to my bed. “I know who was bad.”

  My stomach dropped. I remembered the night I’d lain in Sissy’s bed and Mary Abbott had called out.

  “She shouldn’t have done that. She shouldn’t have sneaked away all the time.” She paused. “But don’t be mad at me.”

  “I won’t,” I said, “I promise. Just tell me everything.”

  “I didn’t tell Mrs. Holmes.”

  “Who did you tell?” I whispered slowly, as if I were coaxing a small child.

  “Henny,” she whispered, her eyes wide. “Henny.”

  “Oh,” I said, and lay back against the iron headboard. “Oh.”

  “She asked!” Mary Abbott said defensively. “She heard rumors, it was something all the girls have been talking about for such a long time, and then I saw Sissy.”

  “The night of the dance,” I said.

  She shrugged. “Lots of nights. I know where they go. I’ve known for a long time. Sometimes I follow them.” She seemed proud.

  “You watch them?” I asked incredulously.

  She shook her head quickly. “Just for a second, two seconds. Just to see Sissy’s safe. I love her, too,” she said. “Like you.”

  I nodded, assembling all this new information, which was, after all, unsurprising. Unsurprising that Mary Abbott should have followed Sissy and Boone into the woods, unsurprising that she had been an instrument of Sissy’s demise without the malice that such action usually called for. She was lonely. That was all.

  “You were bad at home, weren’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said, without thinking. “Very bad.” I felt my eyes warm.

  “Oh, Thea,” Mary Abbott said, and then she hugged me, fiercely, and whispered into my ear, “it’s all right,” and whatever spell she had cast was broken. I pushed her away, hard.

  “Ow,” she cried, and rubbed her shoulder, drew her arms to her chest as if to protect herself—she did need to protect herself. I recognized something in her, a certain deviancy, a certain need. A yearning she knew she needed to hide without knowing how. She hadn’t the slimmest idea. She was too much like me; I could not be kind to her. The only difference between us was that I did not seem as strange, on the surface of things.

  “It’s better,” I said, “not to be strange. Not to be noticed.”

  Mary Abbott looked pained, but she nodded. She reached for my hand, and this time I let her take it. She was always reaching for my hand, but this time would be the last time.

  “Take care,” I said, “take care of yourself.”

  —

  I found Sam that night after I had confessed everything to my mother, almost everything: I would never tell her that my cousin and I had slept together. I thought I was being merciful; I never imagined that she did not believe me, that she had her own ideas about what had happened. But she was right, in the end; she was correct not to trust me.

  I believed, as I searched the house for her, finally finding her out back pruning roses, that telling might relieve me. I believed foolishly.

  Sam was in our old nursery, reading a magazine, sitting Indian-style on the bare floor. He shook his head when I walked in; his eyes were glassy, and the room was very dim.

  “Do you want more light?” I asked, my hand on the switch.

  “Leave it.”

  Sam turned a page, and I saw an advertisement for roller skates, which neither of us had ever used.

  “What are you reading?” I asked.

  “I’m reading an article about people with unnatural desires.”

  “I’m sorry.” My face was swollen from crying, it felt as if there was sand trapped underneath my eyelids.

  “I should have stopped you.” He looked miserable, his eyes swollen and red, veins I’d never seen before at their surface. His left eye was black from a bruise.

  “You couldn’t have,” I said quietly. “It wasn’t yours to stop.”

  “They’re going to send you away.”

  I was stunned. “Who?”

  “Who do you think? Mother and Father.”

  “Where?” I thought of my mother’s brother, in south Florida; that was the only place they had to send me.

  “To a place I’ve never heard of. It has an Indian name.”

  “I won’t go, Sam,” I said, my voice rising. I didn’t stop to think how he knew this. He must have overheard something. “Don’t let them take me.”

  “Why, Thea?” he asked. “Why did you do it?” He began to sob. “They’ll send you away, and I’ll be alone. Did you think of that? Did you? Did you think that you would go away and I would be all alone?”

  I threw myself on him. I felt my twin relent, and this relenting made the next two weeks, before I was sent away to Yonahlossee—the utter awkwardness, the turned heads of my family, the acknowledgment of my deep betrayal—my brother yielding against me in that moment made all of this bearable.

  “I should have known,” he murmured into my hair. I could barely understand him.

  I held his face in my hands. His cheeks were hot and sweaty.

  “You did know,” I said.

  —

  My father had been in his study. I knocked and his voice sounded the same as always, giving me permission to enter: quiet, firm.

  “Thea.”

  “Father.” He was in the middle of writing a letter. Now he tapped his chin with his pen and waited. “How is Georgie?” I blurted, because either I said it now, and quickly, or not at all.

  “Georgie is in the hospital. Did you know that?”

  I shook my head. “He was breathing when I saw him last.”

  “Yes. Unfortunately one can breathe and still be badly damaged. It seems his brain is injured.” He paused. “When your mother told me what you had confessed I was sure she was wrong.” His voice was even. “Was she wrong?”

  I shook my head.

  “I wish with all my heart that she was.” It was strange, for my father to use a sentimental phrase like that. All my heart. “But your brother is involved in this, too. Georgie’s wound”—and here he laid his pen down and put his hands before him as if he were cradling a melon—“is consistent with violent injury. Do you understand, Thea?”

  I nodded, not understanding.

  “Georgie was either hit, by your brother, or he fell. Either way the result is the same. But there is a great distinction between the two, as you must know.”

  I said nothing.

  “It is plausible that Georgie fell on a large, blunt object. I told the hospital the rock. They relayed this information to the police. That your cousin had fallen and hit his head on the rock.”

  “All right,” I said, because he seemed to require a response. “All right.”

  “Your brother did not know who I was when I found him later. He had been sitting under a tree for hours. He had wet himself. His recounting of what happened is faulty, at best.” Father looked at me like he was surprised to find me there.

  “I just wanted to find out about Georgie,”
I whispered. His name was dirty in my mouth.

  “Well, now you know. He is not well.”

  “But he will be well again?”

  I should not have asked, clearly.

  My father shrugged faintly. “God willing.” I made to leave, but my father spoke again. “Did you see, Thea? Can you tell me what happened? Can you be honest?” He looked so pained, my father, so lost. The top button on his shirt was undone; it was never undone.

  “It was the rock,” I said. “The rock, not Sam.”

  It seemed an easy thing, to let my father believe what he wanted so badly to believe. The least I could do.

  —

  My mother found me in the barn later, untangling the knots in Sasi’s tail. It was something to do.

  “Thea.”

  “Mother.” I held the tail loosely; I did not want to let go of it completely.

  “I was out for a walk.” She gestured toward the wide expanse. My mother never took walks. She was either in the garden or in the house. She had spoken to me three times in the past week. Once she had asked me to sweep the front porch, which I had done, twice, even though it hadn’t needed it.

  She rested her forehead against the stall door; she looked tired, vulnerable. Perhaps she would have news of my cousin.

  “We’ve decided to send you away from all this.”

  “I won’t go.” I looked my mother in the eye, and though she was surprised, all the rules of how we behaved with each other had disintegrated, as if into thin air.

  She closed her eyes. “You have no choice. It will be better for you, to go.”

  “No. I’m fine here. I’ll stay out of everyone’s way. You’ll see. I’ll sleep out here. I won’t be a bother. Please, it won’t be better for me.”

  She laughed. “You’ll sleep in a stall? You’re not an animal, Thea. Are you?” She shook her head. “You will go.”

  “Oh.” I wound Sasi’s tail around my wrist. “I see.”