“I feel funny about her, ever since you told me,” I admitted. “As if I could have been Paula, really.”
“You?”
I held Natalie tighter. “At least she had that father doing his best to find her.”
“You would never be like her,” Shirley said, in that same flat tone I’d heard before, when she denied knowing the girl.
“What was she like?” I asked carefully.
Shirley turned left, onto a wide, uneven road, so few tire tracks that each was visible in the plowed-down layer of snow. “I wouldn’t know, Rose. How often must I remind you? I did not know the girl.”
“Did Stanley?”
“In those days, I knew all of Stanley’s students,” she said evenly. Caught on some errant splash of icy muck, the windshield wipers screeched against the glass before settling back into a more easygoing swish, swish.
“I don’t know why the story makes me feel so scared,” I whispered, as if Natalie in my lap might understand my weakness. “Even though she was the one who chose, you say it was her choice to go there. Disappearing, there is nothing worse than the idea of it.”
“Yes,” Shirley said, agreeing. “But you have Fred. He would make sure that you were found.”
“That’s why you had to write her, to make her last.” And in that moment of understanding, despite what I was wondering—what was I wondering? What did I suspect? Certain that she was lying, although I did not know why—we were safer together than we might either ever hope to be, apart.
And then she said, “You can’t let anything go to waste.”
“What story was it, the one you wrote?”
“‘The Missing Girl.’ Have you gotten to it yet?” I was systematically reading through all the stories in Shirley’s files, published and unpublished. On Shirley’s dark days, and she still had them with relative frequency, I would look in on her mid-afternoon to discover she’d retreated to their bedroom, where she would hide under the covers until she could convince herself to emerge. With the vestige of tears visible still on her cheeks and along the bosom of one of the velvet dresses she favored, she’d not meet my gaze when she entered the kitchen to join me in the chopping of vegetables for the evening stew. We’d been trying to cook with more consideration for Stanley’s heart condition, cutting butter and potatoes, and she would ask a question about what I’d done to brown the mushrooms or I’d ask whether baked squash would please that particular evening’s company. She’d open the cupboard door and pull down plates, and we’d continue on as if the day had been a usual one. I’d not tell her my day had been spent reading her old stories and thumbing through witchcraft textbooks, imagining I’d find a spell to cheer her up. But of course she knew.
“It’s in the recent files,” she said. “An amusing trifle, as Stanley would say.”
The narrow highway wound treacherously, so that an oncoming truck threatened to take ownership of our lane. Off Route 9, we turned onto an icy side road; I think it was called Woodford. The car skidded to the right, and I placed my hand firmly on Natalie’s sleeping thigh. Shirley steadied the car with a similar maternal insistence. I hadn’t realized I’d been holding my breath until I let it out with a long huff. She glanced at me, one brow lifted.
“We witches generally don’t perish in snowdrifts,” she said.
“Houses drop on you.”
“We float proudly above the jeering mob before we plunge and perish in flames.”
I pulled Natalie onto my lap, where she gurgled peaceably and turned her head to nuzzle my waist. The blanket was too close to her mouth. I tucked it under and wiped a little bubble of saliva from her lips. Cold as the car was, it smelled of damp books and cigarette smoke, just like the rest of the rooms in the Hyman universe. It occurred to me that Natalie would always recognize this smell and call it home. Lucky girl.
“Ah, here’s the entrance to the trail,” Shirley said, pulling around the ice-mudded parking circle. It was surrounded by a berm and a ring of skeletal bushes, and beyond that a stand of snow-hooded beeches. At the edge, brook water trickled over sharded boulders of ice, and in the distance I could hear the louder thundering of water in the river. I shivered, thinking about the forest where Hawthorne’s Goodman Brown spies his neighbors (and perhaps his own new bride) en route to their coven meeting, and loses his love of life. Did I want to cross into such a dark, forbidding forest? What might become of me if I did?
“I meet my shadow in the deepening shade; I hear my echo in the echoing wood,” Shirley said, her voice harsh. I should have known she would love Roethke as much as I. I’d studied him back at Temple University, and thought he spoke to me and for me like no one else I’d yet read. Anyone whose parents have failed them loves Roethke more than any other poet, I suppose. She reached for Natalie, and took my daughter to the breast of her fur coat. “Poor Paula Welden,” Shirley said, opening her car door, ancient metal creaking in the sub-freezing air. “Deserved or not, she met her shadow here.”
“It’s too cold for Natalie. She isn’t dressed properly.” She wasn’t, I’d not taken time to put on the sweater Shirley’d handed me, just grabbed the blanket from the crib and wrapped it around the baby, thinking there was no way in the world we’d be getting out of the car.
“It’s fine. Cold air is good for babies!” Shirley tucked my blanketed infant inside the flaps of her open coat and tilted her head. “Come on.”
“Give her back, it’s way too cold,” I said. “Give me the baby.”
“Don’t be a silly girl, get out of the car.”
“No.”
“We can go to where Paula was last seen, one of the shelters. Just a short distance up the path. It’s for hunters and summer hikers, and someone saw her there that afternoon. Come on, I want to see it.” The trail had been recently used, I could tell. Boot prints hardened to ice prints, several sets of them, as well as the wide swath of ice crumbs churned by snowshoes. But the icicles hanging from tree branches looked as fragile as cheap jewelry. It wasn’t safe to take the baby up there.
“She’ll catch a chill. Give her to me.” I could hear how tight and high my voice was; it hurt my own ears to speak so firmly. All I wanted was to have Natalie back, and yet I didn’t open the car door and go around to get her. Instead, I leaned across the seat and held out my hands. “Give me Natalie,” I said.
“Case in point. Here you’re given choice and you select the only direction that means staying still.”
“Give me my baby.”
Shirley seemed amused. “Our Rose has thorns.” But she bent down to hand me my daughter.
She left the door open, however, so that no matter how tightly I snuggled Natalie, she would be exposed to the same freezing temperatures in or out. Shirley pointed up the trail, and asked me if I could see the beginnings of the ridge. I shook my head no.
“Someone saw her up there, she went up the path and to the right, she made the right turn, Rose, and she argued with a man. That’s what the newspapers said. She was seen up there.”
“We should go home.”
“But someone else saw her at the bus station in Bennington, buying a ticket to Canada, if I remember correctly, and somebody else saw her on a train heading south. Her parents broadcast a radio message asking her to return, no matter what.” She paused. “Come to think of it, I wrote a story about that, too.”
“It’s too cold.”
“‘Louisa, Please Come Home,’ I called it. It’s a good one.”
I’d already read that one. She was right. It was my favorite of her stories. “Get in the car. It’s too cold.”
For such a large woman, she drifted with delicacy, seeming to undulate over a snowdrift, undeterred by the frozen tire tracks that dimpled the unplowed lot. An imaginary creature has that freedom to move without regard to bulk or height; she was real, but sometimes I wondered. She called loudly, “You get used to t
he cold once you’re out in it. See those berries? I’m going to get a branch.” A trio of trees, just off the parking area but ten feet or more from the path, so that she had to step deep into a crusted bank of snow. Her slight Chinese slippers went dark; her stockings gleamed with damp; she seemed not to care at all. Turning to smile at me as she wrestled a branch heavy with red berries, her glasses glinting opaquely. Coat wide open, the pale skin of her plump cheeks barely flushed, I thought the whole heavy bulk of her might fall into the snowbank, and I held my breath. At the ready, even if it meant leaving Natalie on the seat and digging into the snow with cold hands to lift her. My treasured navy winter coat ruined in the effort, my shoes permanently stained and gritty. I opened the car door, clutching Natalie inside my coat—she would have been far more cozy had I let Shirley swathe her in the folds of her fur—and picked my way across the snow wash, furious at having compromised. Unwilling to do otherwise.
“Rowanberries, look! Ah, Rose, a rowan tree’s a rosebush with a noble heart. It saves the red foxes in winter, welcomes the birds back for spring. First sign that winter’s over is robins snacking on them. I like to have a branch on my desk, it’s good protection, or so we witches say.” She twisted the thin branch left to right and back again, forcing the fibers to tear until the laden bough came off with a snap.
“Protection from what?”
“Lovers find one another, evil’s vanquished. Rowanberries attract love and repel wrongdoing. Roses, Rose! I’ll bite into one. Give me rowanberry lips, although my eyes aren’t blue enough for Robert Graves.” She popped a berry in her mouth, winced at the flavor. “Bitter berries, but small price to pay.”
“Stanley will hate it if you catch cold,” I said.
She considered this with a certain detachment, but it was just for show. Already, she was returning to the car obediently. I followed, huddling over Natalie. We sat quietly for a minute or so, trying to warm up. I watched the icicles dance at the ends of the tree branches and imagined I could hear the tinkling sound they made, such delicate wind chimes capping the brutish beech tree limbs.
“Whatever happened to her, really, isn’t as important as what we remember,” she said. That idea was so large and complicated I could hardly imagine all its permutations, and so sat silent as our breath fogged the inside of the windshield.
“The worst part is how people forget,” she said eventually. Natalie gurgled something plaintive in her sleep. I stroked a chilled baby cheek with the pads of my cold fingers. “They just forget, that’s what I wanted to say in the story I wrote. That it’s easier to forget than to endure the pain of remembering.”
“Yes.”
“And feeling what you lost, and imagining what could be the truth. I hate the notion of what-if. And yet I believe it better to be missed than to be forgotten.”
“Yes,” I said again. I hugged Natalie even tighter, until her eyes opened in surprise and she gave a wail. I would be a mother worthy of missing. I would.
Shirley sniffed suddenly, and then again, with the intensity of a hunting dog.
“What is it?”
“Fire.”
No, I thought. He’ll never leave me alone. But I kept my face still and calm, hoping that for once Shirley would not guess the images in my mind. Wherever in the world he’d landed and whether he was alive or dead, it seemed my father wanted to be caught, and caught by her.
“Where?” I asked.
“A long, long time ago,” she said. She closed her eyes, breathed in deeply. “But coming again.”
I was silent. My damned father. His scent clung to my soul.
A fire coming could mean only that he would whisk me off, the only times I knew him cheerful and full of stories of the old country, of his mother’s cooking or the way light lingered in the mornings in the rocky hills behind the village—hills that had protected them all when they were forced to run. And I’d be adoring him, and proud to be descended from this infinite and never-ending line of sturdy survivors. Loving and admiring, and then the car he’d borrowed would pull up behind a row of buildings in some random town and he’d say, “Sit here,” if I was lucky. Because sometimes he wanted me to pour the kerosene with him; it went faster that way, and I’d be dizzy with the smell and with the honor—he never took my sister with him—and I’d be proud when he praised the splashing pattern I created in the narrow hallway at the back, where the stock of toys or insurance files or ladies’ undergarments were stored away from customers’ view. Fire. He always made me leave before he set it, but there was the sound of lost oxygen in the darkness nonetheless. A siren in the distance, and he would pound the wheel, push the car a little harder. “Sleep, Rose,” he’d order. I’d lie down on the seat, close my eyes. A heart pounding so hard takes a long time to slow. I sniffed my fingers; no kerosene touched them, and yet the scent clung. Smelled it for days, no matter the soapy diligence with which I washed my hands. Remembering, I smell it now.
“Who is Graves with the rowanberry lips?” I smoothed the blankets around Natalie; her lips were dark red, even more beautiful than the succulent berries clumped limply on the branch on the seat next to me, droplets of snowmelt glistening. I wanted to read whatever Shirley read. I wanted to know enough to keep up with her, with all of them. If I took a book from the Hyman library each time I finished one, I’d not make a dent in what they had. But I wanted to, desperately. Already, I had read Horace’s odes and Emerson’s essays, Poe’s stories and Hawthorne’s, anything to keep up with them at table. To laugh along with the way they spoke to each other, catching reference after reference without effort. Ah, me, I hoped to master being one of them. Or at a minimum, to have their respect.
“Don’t worry. We won’t be around to see the fires,” Shirley said. She smoothed her skirt, straightened her blouse, gave a halfhearted swipe to a damp spot on her skirt.
“We won’t?”
“Some might call it fortunate.”
“How do you know, how do you do it?”
To her credit, she did not pretend to misunderstand. “I’ve always been able to.” She laughed. “I know what cats think.”
“I can only guess what that is.”
“They’re more interesting than you’d suppose.”
I nodded, inexplicably charmed at the notion of all Shirley’s cats competing for her attention, even slyer and more insistent than the children.
“There was a camp here, a little cottage. Years ago, when Paula disappeared. It burned down, though. I remember when it burned.”
She pointed behind us, and I turned in the seat and for the first time saw the low white ranch house perched in the snow at the very far end of the parking circle, the barbed wire and wood paddock that held four horses, the two dingy windows. Inside, a small child peered at us, as if perched backward on a couch. “Do you know them?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Probably. They bought the place after the fire here.”
I said, “How did the fire start?”
She studied me. “You’re made of good, aren’t you, Rose? You aren’t like other girls your age.” I sat taller, hugging the baby inside my coat.
Potency surged through me: I was a mother now, with a perfect husband and such an extraordinary friend, I thought that anything was possible. “I want to be important” burst out of my mouth, stark truth. The words hung in the frosty air as if they might etch letters into the ice sheen on the inside of the windshield.
“No, you don’t.” How dry her tone.
“I do. Maybe I could write. I love books. Perhaps you’ll teach me, to hear what cats think and imagine that dead people are still alive. And parents miss you when you disappear. I want to believe what you believe.” Slipping so quickly from eager to desperate: I would take the fatness, and the cheating husband, and the messy house and the cats and the depression and all the rest. I really would. If I could know the world the way she did, render it amusin
g and sardonic and ever so smart, well, then, anything would be worth it. Any suffering, any past, any difficulty. “You’ll always matter, you’ll never be forgotten.” I was breathless with the thought of it. “You’ll live forever,” I told her. “You’ll live in books.”
She turned the key to the engine with an angry slip of the wrist. It sputtered reluctantly, and its struggles made Natalie cry. I’d said something wrong. It seemed so unfair, when I’d been trying to tell her that I loved her. She was my hero, and she hated the idea that I admired her. Did worship look so much like its envious twin?
“It takes more than wanting,” she said cruelly. “You don’t have the language. You don’t want to share. You hoard your past. You clean it up. Withhold the details that make you what you don’t want to be.”
“That’s mean.”
“You lack courage, Rose. You aren’t brave.”
“All I am is brave,” I said hotly. “You have no idea, you have no idea what I lived through, what my life was like. And you change your stories all the time—you do, you’ve told me so yourself!”
“I clean them up to make them read better. I don’t care what the hell I look like, or anybody else.” I found that hard to believe. Her chin trembled—anger or self-pity made manifest—and I told myself it was a kindness not to respond. But honestly, I couldn’t speak. I felt that sick, sad nausea that comes when you’ve told your truest truth and gotten no more notice than if you’d asked to borrow a stamp or whether a hemline was even. Mostly, I did not want to cry.
“I regret nothing,” she said then, quietly. I pretended not to know what she imagined my accusation to be.
We returned to the house in silence. As we headed toward town I wished I were Shirley or any other woman in the world. Not Paula Welden, of course. But with Natalie’s gaze steadfastly fixed on mine, I wanted more. I wanted to be worthy.
• • •
BACK AT THE HOUSE, Sally was reading in the parlor, sprawled across the long, shabby sofa as if she’d been there all week. For me, it was the first indication that Friday afternoon had arrived. Sally’s presence always signaled the end of the workweek. Natalie another week older and Sally installed back at the dining room table, where her banter with the writers and artists and critics who lounged there put my feeble efforts to shame. Yes, I admit it; my heart did the proverbial sink into the pit of the stomach. As usual, she did no more than lift her eyebrows at the sight of me. We were at war, unspoken, but war all the same.
Shirley Page 10
