I remembered Mother showing them all our rooms, even mine and Sam’s, and the woman, who was very tall and thin, like a bird, saying, over and over, “Exquisite.” I remembered her so clearly because we did not often have visitors. Aunt Carrie trailed behind; I closed my eyes against the image of her, trailing. I put my head in my hands; all these memories, of home before the mess, of Yonahlossee, swirling from my head like so much vapor.
“Exquisite,” the woman kept saying, “exquisite,” and I realized that our home was exquisite; I had never thought of it in any way before except to call it our home. By the end of the visit Mother seemed bored. And this woman
was
boring; she kept saying the same thing over and over, at each room. But Mother was bored because the woman was stating something so plain it did not need to be spoken. Like calling Mother beautiful. Like calling us lucky.
We stood on the front porch until their car had disappeared in a puff of dust and Mother took my hand.
“Well,” she said, “let’s get back to our exquisiteness, shall we?”
Now I watched her sit on the front steps, pretending to look at a yard that she would never love, in front of a house that would never be hers. Her house was her child, I realized; but no, that was wrong. Her house was her mother, her father; she took comfort in it, expected it to shelter her from life’s slings and arrows.
I slipped through the front door quietly. The heat was at me immediately. There was no color in the yard, only the palm trees, and shrubbery. Surely my mother would add color.
“A nice yard,” I said, from behind her, and she nodded but didn’t speak. I sat down next to her, and she patted my knee, lightly.
“Mother,” I said, “I want to leave again.”
She turned to face me, languidly; she seemed to be moving underwater, and it occurred to me that Father might have given her medicine, for her headaches.
“Why not, I suppose,” she said. “Why not?”
Her answer felt like a punch, a blow. I expected reluctance; no, I had
wanted
reluctance, some sign from her that she needed me. But I would have gone anyway, so wasn’t I being a foolish girl? I was getting what I wanted, more easily than expected.
Tears came to my eyes. But then she spoke again, and her voice was firmer, like I remembered it. “I thought you might want to go away again. Once you had a taste of what it was like.”
“You were right,” I said, and began to cry, and hated myself for crying.
“Oh, Thea,” my mother murmured, and pulled me close, and if I could have stopped time, stilled all the clocks, I would have. But I could not. I was just a girl. My mother was just a woman. “Beth mentioned something about a boy you were meeting.” She laughed. “I thought there were no boys there, but of course, there are boys everywhere. You’ll go somewhere else, and my advice to you, for whatever it’s worth, is to find a kind boy.” She stroked my hair. She sounded like her old self. “Find a kind boy, like Father. I was once in trouble with a boy.” I tried to lift my head, to look at her, but she pressed it back to her chest. “Long before your father. It is such a wonderful kind of trouble to be in. As long as you can get out of it. And you couldn’t quite.” She paused. “Get out of it, I mean. Could you?”
She let go of my head, and I sat up, tried to look at the blurry world through my tears.
“I didn’t leave because of a boy. You might not believe me, but I wanted to come back. I wanted to come back and see my brother.”
“So that you could leave again?”
“What is there for me here?” I asked. “There is not even a horse, here.”
Mother gazed at me for a moment. “It’s true,” she said, “it’s true. There is nothing for you here, not anymore. I wanted something else for you and Sam,” she said, her soft voice returned. “But that was my mistake, wasn’t it? To think I could fiddle with your natures.”
—
T
he week leading up to the Fourth of July had been our last together, mine and Sam’s, before what I had done was laid bare. There was something between us now, we both knew that, though of course neither of us had any idea, really.
It was pouring outside, in buckets. I flung myself from chair to chair, bored to death. I wandered into my brother’s room, opened the door without knocking. He looked afraid, but he turned back to what he was doing when he saw it was me, not Mother.
“A nest,” he explained, as I stood over him, “of baby squirrels.”
“Only two?” Sam had raised squirrels before, but usually there were more of them. They were so ugly, the size of mice, hairless and pink, their eyes sealed shut. Sam had nestled them in an old blanket. It seemed impossible they would grow to be squirrels.
“A raccoon got the rest.”
One of them shifted, and I reached my hand down to touch one—
“Thea!”
“Sorry,” I said. “I forgot.”
“Mother would kill you,” I said, after a moment. She didn’t allow Sam’s animals in the house.
Sam smiled. “No.” He shook his head. “If she saw, her eyes wouldn’t believe it.”
But chances were Mother wouldn’t come to Sam’s room again; she’d already made the beds and straightened the upstairs.
I watched Sam try to feed one of the squirrels with one of Father’s syringes, absent the needle.
“Is it milk?” I asked.
Sam shook his head. “Cow’s milk would kill them. It’s sugar water, warmed. They’re doing better now, I think.” The squirrel opened its mouth and began to suck, and even I was excited, in spite of myself. “There,” Sam said, “there.”
I watched him for a few moments. “There, there,” he said, over and over, a refrain for the nursing squirrel.
“Why do you love squirrels so much?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Why do you like horses so much?”
There were so many reasons, but when I tried to name one good one, I couldn’t.
“See?” Sam asked. “And besides, I don’t love squirrels. I just . . . I like being outside. I like the natural world.”
“The natural world,” I repeated.
“Yes,” Sam said. “The natural world.”
He began to murmur to the squirrel again, and I fell back onto the bed, and closed my eyes against the sound of his voice.
I lay there, close to sleep, hearing my brother’s pretty voice, still pretty even as it turned deeper and deeper, as it had over the past few months, changing to match his increasing height. My brother was a flower, unfolding, shooting toward the heavens.
—
T
hat night I went to his hotel room. It looked lived in, unlike mine. There was a jam jar filled with flowers on the bureau, and three snake skins, almost completely intact, with tiny holes where eyes used to reside. I touched one of them, very lightly.
“What happened to your terrariums?” I asked.
Sam perched on the edge of his bed, watching me.
“They’re gone.”
I nodded. “I’m leaving,” I said.
“I know.”
“You could leave, too. They would let you.”
My voice sounded too urgent. But he should leave, too. He should not let this swallow him whole.
When he finally spoke, his voice was a challenge.
“But I don’t want to leave, Thea. I don’t want—” And he paused, but no, it was more than a pause. He stopped himself from saying whatever terrible thing he was going to say. But I knew.
“To be like me?” I asked.
He looked away. I knew I was right. It was not fair, of course. I had been made to go away. I had not abandoned him on purpose. But in the end I got the better deal. There were so many accidents in the world, some happy, some not. I would take what I had gotten.
I went to my brother and sat down next to him on the bed. My twin would not leave because he was a better son than I was daughter; he could not leave because he could not imagine life without them. Sam wasn’t brave. He never had been. He was loyal and true and still belonged to my parents in a way I never would again. He wasn’t brave, but one person could only be so many things. He was still my parents’ child, and perhaps he always would be. Only time would tell.
“You’re a Florida boy,” I said. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the handkerchief I had taken with me to Yonahlossee. It looked no worse for the wear. I put it in his hand and closed his fingers around it.
He looked at it, and then at me. “Yes,” he said softly, with his new voice. “Yes, I am.”
—
T
hat night I lay in bed and tried to summon Sissy’s eyes, Mr. Holmes’s elegant hands, Naari’s dainty face. But I could not remember. Everything was slipping from my mind. I rose and dressed in my Yonahlossee uniform; it was the only thing that fit. The clothes still smelled of Augusta House, and I tried not to cry, I tried not to want something I could never again have.
Outside, the air was thick with moisture, the moon hung over us like a fat face. There were a few people, scattered on the sidewalks. A door swung open and I glimpsed a crowded, smoky room, a man in front of a piano.
“Excuse me, miss,” someone said, and I realized I was in someone’s way. I stepped to the side and a man walked in front of me, and I recognized him as the bellhop my mother had almost forgotten to tip. A woman was on his arm, but I could only see the back of her, her sheer dress, her black hair. He gave no sign that he recognized me. I watched him slip away into the night, off to another place, or perhaps his home, where he would touch his girl, she would touch him, and the night would open like a flower.
I walked and walked. An hour, two. I lost track of time. I thought, foolishly, that I might see Sam. I knew he wandered at night. I knew he roamed. But there was no sign of him. I walked away from the streetlights, in the darkness. Mother had not taught us to fear the world; she had taught us to scorn it.
I finally arrived at Church Street, visible from a block away. I knew it would be busy here, or if not busy, alive in some way. There were people going places, people returning, always, always.
The sky zippered open, as it did in Florida, suddenly and violently, and the lightning lit the sky in a way that was beautiful and fierce. I was unafraid. Nothing in the natural world scared me. This lightning was far away, and I was surrounded by things taller than me, where the lightning would strike first.
I sat down on a covered bench, next to an old woman who was clearly waiting for a train. She asked me for the time and I looked at the giant clock above us and told her. She did not thank me; she was agitated, and I understood why.
“I’m going to Miami,” she said. “And my train is so very, very late.”
I almost laughed. Miami. Sam had told me there were thousands of acres of land there, abandoned by their owners, our uncle just one piece of it.
I understood the woman’s agitation. She was waiting to be taken away from this place. She was dressed like someone from another century, long, long skirts, a blouse that hid even her wrists. And she was from another century, I realized. She had been born long before me, and I knew someday some impetuous girl would think the same of me: that I was old and foolish, dated, born too long ago to matter anymore.
I sat there and waited for the train with this woman. I tried not to fear the future. I hoped it would be kinder than the past.
On my way to Yonahlossee, all those months ago, I had watched my father’s profile as he drove, and felt ashamed. I hoped I would not always feel this intensely. But then I knew I always would. It was my nature.
I sat on the bench and felt the strong wind whip my ankles and tried to keep ahold of all my memories. I touched Sissy’s necklace. I saw myself in future trains and wondered who I would travel with. I wondered where we would go.
I would travel nowhere with Georgie, who died six days short of his twenty-fifth birthday. I never saw him again, I never saw Aunt Carrie or Uncle George or their former home in Gainesville. Georgie would never be himself again, a curse worse than death. If he had died right away, the circumstances surrounding his death would surely have been examined more closely; mercifully for us, Georgie lived. However briefly.
Mercy eluded my aunt and uncle, who tended to Georgie for the rest of his life. At Yonahlossee I only remembered Georgie and his family in the past tense, I tried never to think about what my family, especially my cousin, was doing in the present. It was perhaps a flaw in my character that I could forget so easily about my wounded cousin. That’s what I thought then. Now I’m glad I was able to put it out of my head, to survive. We did not speak of him often, but my father revealed to me, one night when he was very drunk and old, long after my mother had died, that Georgie often succumbed to terrible rages, that the part of his brain that controlled anger was damaged in the accident. The accident.
My mother became an invalid, locked herself in her room most days and tended to her migraines. I was sent to a proper boarding school, in the Northeast, a place of my choosing. There was a stable nearby, where I continued to ride. I exercised the horses of the rich, which was a good way, I learned, to put myself on a horse when I couldn’t own one. I thought of Leona in those days, wondered how exactly she had found her own way onto the back of a horse again. I was certain she had; how was the only question.
I left the South. My brother stayed put. He lived his life with my parents, who stayed in Florida but did indeed move to a foreign and strange south Florida, to a busy, bustling Miami, where my father continued to practice medicine.
My father never saw his brother again, but he continued to send him money. I saw the letter once, folded around a check: to George Atwell in Centralia, Missouri. Citrus continued to be good to my family; it kept us afloat in the thirties, and in the forties it made us wealthy again. It saved us, allowed me to go away to school, allowed us to live some semblance of the lives we had imagined for ourselves.
After Georgie died, Aunt Carrie sent us his obituary, cut from a newspaper. There was a note folded over the clipping, in Aunt Carrie’s hand: “He has left us.” She and Uncle George thought that there had been a fight between the male cousins; I’m fairly certain they never knew my part. I would have cut my tongue out of my mouth before telling them, and Georgie—well, if he even remembered what had happened, he was not quite right, they would not have, I am almost certain, believed him. I have lived my life and Georgie is a shadow, Georgie is a person who I once loved, whose death I had a hand in. He is a ghost. My ghost.