Happy flinched away from me and continued to shriek.
She literally danced up and down in front of me in her pain and fury, but she would not let me touch her. The old sinking feeling of rejection and impotence that Happy’s vast, un-quenchable hungriness always engendered in me welled up again, and I dropped my arms to my side and sank down in the old twig rocker. The abrupt absence in my heart and house—yes, my house now—of the two people who had so filled them for more than thirty years was like an abyss into which I had tumbled; I could not seem to drag myself out to minister to this suffering child. Oh, my children! Why had they both been born so furiously unfillable? Why could I not find food within for this last ravenous one? Why couldn’t Peter at least see what his distance from her was doing, even if he was unable to alter it?
I sat still, hoping the tantrum would abate enough so she could at least hear me and be reasoned with. I knew Peter had not promised her his presence this summer or a boat; those were phantom mushrooms sprung from the soil of her need. I knew she was more upset and frightened than she would acknowledge by the sudden death of her omnipresent grandmother. And I knew her need to hurt Peter, to punish him, had been displaced, as it so often was, onto me. She did the same when she was angry and jealous of Petie, whom she perceived as my favorite. Still; I would be still and quiet until she quieted. I closed my eyes.
Presently the crying slowed and lost some of its urgency, and there was a silence, which seemed to stretch on and on.
I meant to open my eyes; a moment and I would do so. A moment…I was so very tired….
“And you can’t even stay awake when I’m talking to you!”
Happy screamed, and ran out of the
house and slammed the door behind her. By the time I got to the front walk she was out of sight, and I heard her sneakers scuffling down the cliff path to the beach below Braebonnie. I started after her and the telephone rang. I paused, torn, and then went inside to answer it.
I should have let it ring.
She was beyond my control for a long time after that. She did not act out so much as she simply vanished for long periods of time and would not tell me where she was. After two or three incidents in which she came home on her bicycle long after dark, when I had been out and around the colony in the car, and had called virtually everyone I thought might have seen her, and was on the verge of calling the sheriff, I locked the bicycle up in the garage and hid the key. After a truly heroic tantrum and three days of black sulking, she seemed to accept her punishment with a modicum of the grace I had prayed for and asked me if I minded if she spent some time with Francie Duschesne, Christina Willis’s niece.
Francie was, she said, learning to quilt that summer and had offered to teach her.
“It looks like it would be fun,” she said. “And there’s nobody in the colony I’d waste a minute on. Besides, that awful Freddie and Julia said anybody up here without a boat was a drip, and I guess that means me.”
She cut her eyes toward me, but I refused to be drawn into the boat debate.
“I think you’d enjoy that,” I said, reaching out to smooth the fair hair off her face. I smiled. She was filling out quickly that summer, sliding rapidly from child into woman. Peter’s high cheekbones were beginning to emerge from the round pudding of her face, and my own full breasts were budding, as early on her as they had on me. I wondered if she minded, as I had. Surely some equanimity would come with maturity; perhaps this was the beginning of it.
“I thought, if you’d let me, I’d take my bicycle over there,”
she said. “The quilting frame’s in the barn behind the Willises’
boathouse, and it’s awful hot out there. I won’t be late, I promise.”
I hesitated. I liked Francie Duschesne; she was the child of Tina’s younger brother, Clovis, a stern and old-fashioned parent who kept his daughter close by. At fourteen, Francie reminded me of Micah’s niece Polly at that age, though of course there was no relation. She was pretty and capable and bright, though very shy, and I thought she might benefit from Happy’s spirit as much as Happy from her decorum. But I did not like her older brother, Jackie. He was sly and sloe-eyed, far too old for his age, and had been in no small amount of trouble around the village: petty vandalism and wildness, mostly. And he worked in the boatyard with Micah and Caleb. Tina had told me at the beginning of the summer that Micah had taken him on as a favor to Clovis and she was afraid nothing good would come of it.
“He’s sly and troublesome,” she said. “Clovis won’t see it and Micah won’t have it. I’m some worried about it.”
I did not like the possibility of his proximity to Happy. But surely, quilting—and in a barn practically under Micah Willis’s eye—was harmless enough. And I knew she was lonely in the colony, and missing her father and grandmother.
“All right,” I said. “But please, sweetie, be home before dark. And don’t get in the way of the men at the boathouse.”
“I’m not interested in the stupid boathouse,” she said.
And so she rode off each morning on her bicycle and came home each evening full of talk of stitches
and patterns, and I gradually relaxed and let myself sink into the silence of the old cottage as into cool water. I did the things I had done for all those long summers, either at Mother Hannah’s bidding or, later, under her stern eyes: I gathered food and washed and polished silver and china; I wrote notes and gardened and visited about the colony and drove old ladies on their errands and excursions; I played a little bad bridge and spent afternoons on the beach below Braebonnie with Amy; and read, and listened to music, and went for cocktails in fast-falling twilights and had people in turn, and once in a while I played some earnest morning tennis with the Mary’s Garden girls. I cooked small suppers for Happy and me and sometimes Micah and Tina, and they came in the evenings as they always had, and we laughed together, and listened and nibbled and drank.
Only now I did those things for myself. In my house. And if Mother Hannah was still as immutably with us as she had been when she lay in her bed only two walls away, well, that spectral presence would fade. I might and did miss the woman I had come to know only this summer, but I hardly missed the one who had loomed so large over all the others.
In August, I had Micah Willis cut the lilacs far back, and after that the cottage was flooded with a light that was both literal and figurative.
“Yes,” I said to Peter when he called, as he did once or twice a week, “we’re doing fine. The weather’s lovely, and I’m making a routine for myself that I think I’m going to enjoy. And Happy’s made a new friend of Tina’s niece, and she’s learning to quilt; can you beat it?…Well, don’t laugh; it may save you the price of a boat…. I miss you, too. We both do. We’ll be more than ready to see you for Labor Day weekend.”
I had not told him of my troubles with Happy. He had called the day after his mother’s funeral full of apologies for his behavior, and I had been so grateful to have him fully back with me, and so miserable at the grayness of the un-healed pain I heard under his words, that I simply could not add to it. And in my heart I knew I would do anything to avoid hearing in his voice the cold detachment that Happy’s behavior so often called up. I could handle Happy. I had already done so.
On the first Sunday in August, at a little past four, the sheriff’s dusty blue sedan pulled up in the driveway of Liberty and a still-faced John Gray got heavily out and reached in the back seat and pulled Happy out and marched her up the path to the door. I had been reading on the sun porch, half drowned in Retreat’s Sunday stillness and the thick peace that precedes a storm. I met them at the door, my heart pounding in slow, sick, profound thuds. Happy’s face was blanched absolutely white, and her nose and eyes were puffed and scarlet with crying.
“What is it?” I could hardly get the words out. “Is she hurt?
Has there been an accident?”
“She’s not hurt, no,” John Gray said. “And no, I don’t reckon you could say there’s been an accident.”
His voice was as neutral as his face, but I could see that he was having difficulty with his breathing, and something that seemed, incredibly, to be rage looked out of his eyes. I had known him for years, ever since he took office from Sheriff Perkins; he was a gruff, jolly man whose voice boomed out often, in greeting to his neighbors and in the choir at the chapel on Sunday mornings. But it did not boom now. I had trouble understanding him. I looked at Happy, who began to wail and covered her face with her hands.
“What?” I said, wanting more than anything in the world not to hear his answer.
“Caught her and Francie and Jackie Duschesne
over to Osprey Head,” John Gray said. “Got a call on the radio from a boat passing out in the bay. By the time I got there they’d knocked the nest down and torn it to shreds.
Rocks, had ’em a right pile stacked up. Must have finished it with their hands. Birds were gone, except one they got with a rock. Looked like near to grown, but wouldn’t have been flying too good yet. I shot that one. Had to. You know, I shinnied up and measured that nest once, when the birds were gone for the winter. Close to five feet, it was, with a circumference at the base of twenty-one feet. Two and a half feet high. Been added on to every year since it was first built, and that’s before anybody alive now can remember. I don’t know yet what they could be charged with, not the girls, anyway. Probably could have held the boy. Have before. But if somebody around here wants to bring charges, I’m not going to stop them. I took the other two on over to Clovis.
If I was you I’d keep this one out of sight. Them birds meant a lot to folks around here.”
He turned and strode back down the path, leaving me standing in sickness and horror, looking at my child.
“Why?” I whispered. My ears rang, and the still air buzzed around me.
“They made me,” Happy howled. “Jackie and Francie made me. They said they wouldn’t be my friends any more if I didn’t. It wasn’t my fault!”
Rage so freezing and terrible that I thought I would vomit filled me like water. I could have shaken her until she lost her senses at that moment; I could have done anything at all to stop her voice. All that grace and fidelity, all that fierceness and pride and beauty and value….
“Go upstairs to your room and don’t come back down,” I said, literally having to force the words between my teeth.
My mouth shook. “Stay there until
I tell you you can come out. I’ll bring your dinner to you, but I don’t want to see you for the rest of the day. I don’t care who told you what. There is no power on earth that could make a humane person do what you did to those birds.
It’s the most monstrous thing I have ever heard. I know that we will get past this, but right now I don’t see how.”
“Oh, I hate you!” Happy screamed. “You made me do it, just as much as they did. I want my daddy; my daddy wouldn’t let you talk to me this way!”
“Well, you shall soon have your wish, because I’m calling him right now,” I said, and turned away from her.
“No! Don’t call Daddy! Don’t call Daddy!”
Her voice slid up and up and into hysteria. I could hear the desperation in it, and the terror, and the abject self-loathing that would haunt her all her life. I had said dreadful things to her, things that drew her blood. In that moment I did not care.
“You know what your father told me the day before he left the first time?” I said. “We went over to see the ospreys, and he said, ‘I’ve always heard it was terribly bad luck to kill an osprey, but to me it’s purely a sin.’ I think he’s going to be very sorry he has to come back to this, Happy. Now go.”
“Well, he’ll come anyway, won’t he?” she shrilled as she thumped up the stairs. “Whether or not he wants to, he’ll have to come now!”
I went and made the call and then went out onto the sun porch and simply sat there until darkness fell. I shut the terrible sunlit images out of my head and let a swarming whiteness fill it; I heard the telephone ring several times and did not move to answer it. Sometime during the evening Amy Potter came onto the sun porch and stood beside me, and took my hand in hers, and said, “I just heard. I’m so sorry, Maude. I’ve always thought that Jackie was a little horror…. It will pass. The summer’s nearly over. Take her home early, and when we all get back next year it will be in the past, and no one will mention it. You know they won’t.
You know no one thinks it’s in any way your fault.”
“Everyone knows by now,” I said lifelessly. It was not a question.
She was silent for a moment, and then she said, “Yes. I expect they do. Is Peter coming? Do you want me to stay with you?”
“No, thanks anyway,” I said, and squeezed her hand. “He’ll be here in an hour or so. I…need the quiet. Oh, Amy. Our children.”
“Yes,” she said. “Our poor children.”
Peter came in just before midnight. His face looked as if the flesh had been boiled off the bone; I had a sense of how he would look when he was very old or dying. I don’t know if he was angry with me as well as Happy or not; if he was, it vanished when he saw my face. It must have been as terrible as his. He made a small sound and came to me and put his arms around me and buried his face in my hair, and we rocked back and forth in our anguish. Finally I lifted my head.
“You’d think somebody had died,” I said hoarsely. “Surely it’s not that bad.”
“I feel as if somebody had,” he said. “I almost wish—”
“Peter!”
“Is she in her room?”
I nodded. “Peter, maybe it would be better if you waited until tomorrow. I was awfully hard on her, and she’s just terrified of what you’ll say. I think, really—she says Jackie Duschesne made her do it.”
He simply looked at me.
“Okay,” I said. “I don’t imagine she’s asleep.”
I never will know precisely what he said to her. I heard her scream, once, and had the wild thought that perhaps he had struck her, but of course he had not, would not.
I half rose to go to her, then sat back down. It was obvious that nothing I had said, could say, had reached Happy. At least she would
hear
Peter. I listened as hard as I could, but I heard nothing else from the top of the house. I thought of the burbling, trilling, pattering little towhead she had been, trailing endlessly in Peter’s wake like a small sturdy dinghy wallowing after a sail yacht. Oh, my baby, I said silently, around the cold salt knot in my throat. What was it I could not give you, and he could not? What would it have taken?