When the Wind Blows (3 page)

“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.

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.

When Juan had been born, Theresa Whitefawn, the midwife from Shacktown, had told her to send Juan to live with the children in the cave, but Esperanza had refused. To her, Juan looked perfectly normal. His brown eyes had laughed at her, and his tiny arms had waved in the air. If he didn’t grab her finger right away when she put it in his fist, it meant nothing. Only when he hadn’t begun talking until he was four did she finally face the truth.

But still the doubts lingered. He was her son, and he had been alive when he was born, and she couldn’t send him away. To send him away would have been a mortal sin.

Besides, she loved Juan.

He was nearly thirty now, and if he didn’t talk very well and couldn’t think very clearly, that was all right with Esperanza. She could take care of him, and he enjoyed helping her, as best as he could. And he was
gentle, despite what other people said. It was just that he never realized that he was a grown man.

Esperanza, of course, never treated him like one. She understood, in her own way, that inside his head he was still seven or eight years old, and she saw no point in trying to make him be what he was not.

She bought him the comic books he loved and sat with him hour after hour as he turned the pages and tried to read the words. But Esperanza herself read only a little, and for her, English did not come easily. She preferred the Spanish of her childhood.

Living quietly together, Esperanza and her son earned a little money helping the Ambers. They were all that was left of the once-large staff of the ranch. Esperanza worked in the house two or three days a week, and Juan rode the land with Miss Diana, helping her mend the fence that kept the few head of cattle from wandering away. They lived in the old cabin by the mine, and Esperanza tried to keep an eye out for the children who loved to sneak up the mountain to play among the rusting mining machinery that, though long ago overgrown with weeds, was still strewn over the mountainside.