Wonder Show (7 page)

It was a Tuesday.

It was raining.

Portia was dusting the downstairs hallway when Mister opened the study door. But he did not walk through it. He simply looked at Portia, unsurprised, as if he’d expected to see her exactly where she was, and then he crooked his finger like a fishhook and reeled her in.

“Portia,” he said, “may I see you for a moment?”

It was a rhetorical question. She was already walking to him.

He sat down behind his desk and gestured to the chair opposite him. “Close the door,” he said, “and have a seat.”

Mister’s speech, always, was clipped as neat as whiskers, and his voice did not waver. Never in anger, certainly never in grief. Portia thought of the Tin Man and how he rusted himself with tears. Mister’s metal was far tougher than that.

She sat perfectly still. She did not want to disturb anything, did not want to leave her impression in this place. It had bothered her, before, to think that she could simply disappear. Now it seemed necessary, the perfect first step of her escape.

“Portia.”

She hated to hear him say her name, but still, she didn’t move.

“I know you must be terribly”—he folded his hands on his desk, leaned forward—“sad. About Caroline.”

Was that all he expected? Sadness? What about guilt? The heart-wrenching weight of responsibility? She had brought Caroline here, had led her straight to the lion’s mouth and watched the horrible jaws close around Caroline’s hopeful face. Perhaps he did not know it had been Portia’s idea to move out of the bunkhouse. Perhaps Caroline had never told him.

“Yes, sir,” Portia said, primly as she could. She would not let her voice waver, either, even if it meant actually gripping her throat with her hand.

“It is difficult, isn’t it, to imagine that she’s gone,” he went on. “Poor girl. Taken from us so suddenly. I think she scarcely recognized me, at the end. Calling for her mother until the very last breath she took.”

As if Portia did not know. As if she had not been there, listening to that last breath.

As if she could not hear it still.

“Yes, it’s very sad.” Mister sighed. “But we must move on, mustn’t we?”

Oh, his voice was smooth, oily as warm butter.

“I don’t mind telling you, Portia, that I have achieved some measure of success with my . . . enterprises. The orchards are thriving, and now that our army seems to be mobilizing for action in Europe, I expect the need for uniforms will be greater than ever.”

Portia imagined an army of carefully hemmed trousers, marching across the nations of the world, and had to swallow a laugh.

“I want to speak with you, Portia, about
your
future.”

He stood up then and walked halfway around the desk, sat on the corner, and crossed his legs so one knee was dangerously close to Portia’s. And went on talking as if he had not moved.

“You get on very well with the other girls, don’t you? Telling them stories and jokes and such? Keeping their morale up?”

So Caroline had told him a few things.

“You are an intelligent girl, Portia. One might even say an
unusual
girl.”

She watched the space between them, saw its borders shrink a bit more.

“You are not the kind of girl to let an opportunity pass you by. Am I correct?”

“That depends, sir,” she replied, “on the conditions of the prospect.”

Mister smiled, curling his lips carefully, as if he were imitating something he’d seen in a picture.

“Fair enough,” he said, and leaned a little closer. “I would like for you to be my assistant.”

“Like Caroline was?” She did not mean to sound snide. It was, mostly, a question of fact.

“Not precisely,” he said. “I have no interest, for instance, in marrying you. I don’t believe I’ll make that mistake again.”

Portia fought the ripple of revulsion that crawled up her spine.

“I will employ you to manage my work force and organize my accounts, for which I will provide you a salary.”

What sort of buffoon considers a bunch of rejected girls a work force?
Portia thought.

“Furthermore,” Mister purred, “you will report to me on the . . . shall we say, conduct of the young ladies, and bring any insolence, rebellion, or idleness to my attention immediately.”

“You want me to be a rat,” Portia said. “Pardon my language.”

“Does that offend you?” Mister asked.

“Not necessarily,” she said. “But I might require some further compensation.”

“Such as?”

“I want my file.”

He drew back. “Portia,” he said, voice low and wary, “I’m not sure what you mean.”

“My file,” she said, matching his tone. “I want it.”

It was not a request she expected he would grant. She was not asking for a favor. She felt she could afford to reveal that she knew a secret and was not afraid to speak of it. It was a gambit, a tip of her hand. After she was gone, he would know that he had not controlled her.

Mister stood up then and returned to the other side of his desk, sinking into his chair with an almost imperceptible smile.

“I understand the importance of one’s family history.” He waved one hand stiffly toward the wall of books next to him, without breaking Portia’s gaze. “This entire house, after all, is my family legacy. Where would I be without it? Where would any of us be?”

A whole lot happier,
Portia was tempted to say.

“But understand,” Mister said, “that it is at my discretion to tell you what you need to know about your family. You must trust me, Portia. Haven’t I treated you well?”

“Better than you treated Caroline, maybe.”

Mister shrugged. “Caroline was a troubled girl,” he said, “and I do feel badly about the way things . . . turned out. But that proves my point, don’t you see? She wrote to her mother about our marriage without telling me, and she suffered because of it. Had she only asked, I would have told her to wait. I would have found the right time, and we could have avoided the entire mess.”

Portia remembered trying to straighten Caroline’s twisted, bloated fingers and nearly gagged.

“I’m not Caroline,” she said. “And I deserve to know where my father is.”

“Don’t you mean, where your
parents
are?”

“I mean what I mean,” Portia replied. She had long since absolved herself of any guilt she felt whenever she thought only of Max. Her mother had simply melted into the landscape like the ghost she had always been.

“Regardless of semantics,” Mister said, sneering, “what is the point of this pursuit? They don’t care to know anything about who you are or what you want. They left you here, my girl, and they are not coming back for you. Surely you know that by now.”

“You’re wrong.” Portia forced the words past the tremendous weight she felt in her chest, her throat, everywhere. “My family is looking for me.”

“But Portia,” Mister replied, his voice false and sweet, “
I
am your family now.”

It was then Portia knew that she was right to leave, because if Mister found a way to claim her, she would never get away. She would spend the rest of her life in this limbo state, floating invisibly through Mister’s haunted hallways. And worse than becoming one of Mister’s possessions, worse than spending the rest of her days as a wayward girl, Portia knew that if she stayed, eventually Mister’s words would tunnel through her skin and enter her veins like a virus. She would come to believe him.

She would give up.

Portia stood—carefully, as if she might shatter by moving too quickly—and made her way to the door. Mister did not stop her. There was nothing more to say, after all. He had led Portia to a grim realization that, he expected, would tamp out the last flicker of hope she carried. As he had done for Caroline. For so many girls.

Hope, Mister believed, was a waste of time. And it made girls so terribly willful.

He felt he could almost see through Portia now, see the hope draining out of her like water through a sieve. It thrilled him from top to toes. He could barely keep himself from clapping.

Escape

It had been drizzling all day, and there was still all that water in the air that couldn’t quite make itself into rain. It caught on Portia’s coat and her hair as she moved through it. It stowed away.

Caroline’s blue suitcase was strapped on the back of the bicycle. Portia had kidnapped Caroline’s belongings, knowing that they would likely never be retrieved by her neglectful mother but would instead be relegated to the collection of discarded items left by other girls over the years. She could not stand to think of Caroline’s things in that trunk, gathering dust and the hazy scent of mildew. From underneath the blanket of torn letters, she had carefully extracted the good-girl books (repellent things) and pushed them underneath the dresser in her room. Her own clothes remained in its drawers. This was her exodus, her new beginning, and it seemed fitting for her to take whatever she could of Caroline along.

Perhaps, Portia thought, it might count as a kind of penance. She hoped it would not be considered grand larceny instead.

She had her little cloth bag in the bicycle’s basket, with some stolen food, her stolen ledger, and Caroline’s letter scraps. She wasn’t going to leave them with Mister. He didn’t deserve to keep them. Even if he didn’t know he had them.

She had a trowel from the garden shed.

She had a stop to make before she left town.

She was leaving later than she had wanted to because Mister, usually a creature of habit, had changed his evening routine and demanded coffee in the parlor before he went upstairs to bed. Portia stood in the hall and waited, watched the minutes shudder past while he sipped from his mother’s best china cup and set it into its matching saucer.
Sip. Clink. Sip. Clink.

It was maddening.

Finally, he set cup and saucer on the tray next to his chair and waved his hand once, signaling Portia to retrieve everything and take it to the kitchen. She left the dishes in the sink. By the time Delilah got up in the morning, Portia thought, she’d be miles away and out of earshot. Delilah could yell all she wanted about having to do Portia’s work.

When she walked back down the hallway and peeked into the parlor, Mister was gone. She hadn’t heard his feet on the stairs, but that wasn’t unusual. The house had a way of swallowing sound, turning its inhabitants into silent apparitions. Portia looked around at the dark wood walls, at the worn floors, at the stairs that sagged in the middle. She knew every squeaky spot, every knot in the wood, every dull patch where the finish had worn off under years of thoughtless assault by feet and hands. She was surprised to find herself feeling a twinge of something—regret? longing?—as she readied herself to leave.

But there was no time for that.

She ducked down the hall to the kitchen, where she had hidden her belongings under the sink earlier that morning. She made her way to the back door, opened it carefully so it wouldn’t cry out and betray her, and slipped into darkness. Down the steps. Around the corner of the house. The bicycle was waiting.

It was all so simple.

Except for this:

As Portia pushed off and began to pedal, as the gravel crunched under her wheels and she felt the first rush of motion toward her freedom, one lone shaft of moonlight touched her path and revealed her, just for a moment. And Delilah, watching from the upstairs window, saw her go.

Something about a place where no one has ever been happy makes you pedal extra hard to get away.

Because of the fog and because the shadows were deep, Portia had to feel her way into the cemetery, along the stone wall, to find the gate, down the gate to find the latch. It lifted easily. This gate, unlike others in town, was never locked. Maybe because it was like an extension of the church and God’s door was always supposed to be open. Not a door Portia had ever knocked on before, but for Caroline, she made an exception.

She could see just well enough to find the outline of Mister’s family mausoleum, where generations of ill will were buried. Caroline’s grave was behind it, under a plain slab with a plain engraving Portia traced with her index finger.

CAROLINE ELIZABETH SALES

JANUARY 10, 1922 – MAY 22, 1939

RESIDENT OF THE MCGREAVEY HOME

It had always been easy for Portia to forget that Caroline was three years older—she had been so fragile, so quick to shatter. But seeing the numbers etched in stone, Portia could not help but think how quickly she would surpass Caroline’s final age.

The last line, in smaller type than the rest, was the evidence of Mister’s concession to bury Caroline among his family members. He had, of course, refused her admission into the mausoleum itself but agreed to house her on the McGreavey plot. Caroline’s family had requested this, for they did not want their own land sullied by suicide.

Portia wished for a sharper tool, something that could scratch Mister’s wretched name off Caroline’s grave so she wouldn’t have to spend eternity pinned underneath it. But there was only the trowel.

And she could not afford to spend the time, precious currency that it was.

Portia began to dig. The dirt was still loose at the base of Caroline’s headstone, and it was quick work to fashion a pocket in the ground just large enough to hold the collection of letters that Caroline had torn so thoroughly apart. Portia couldn’t have said why, exactly, she felt that this was the correct place for them. It was entirely possible that Caroline would be angered by this and come back from the Great Beyond to nag Portia unceasingly.

Portia almost hoped that she would.

Perhaps she was simply tempting fate.

Her task completed, she patted the soil back into place, tucking in a few errant strands of paper that peeked out of the dirt like curious insects. She decided against taking the trowel with her and looked around for a good spot in which to leave it. It was only then that she noticed the other headstones.