Child of My Heart (21 page)

In the growing shadow of the porch, I could see him watching me. Maybe it was the glasses, or that white flame of hair above his head, or the way he held his fingers to his cheek, but it was this watching that disturbed me most of all. He put out his hand as Daisy stood.

“Stay a minute longer,” he said to her.

And to me, “Sit down for a minute.” I hesitated, holding the quilt against my chest, until he said, in a whisper, “It will drive Ana crazy.” Inside, I could hear Flora whining, crying a little, maybe saying my name. I placed the quilt over the porch railing and I went to the third canvas chair beside him and sat down. Now he was really smiling, as if we were once more in collusion.

We sat in silence for a minute, stubborn silence on my part, casual, amused silence for him. It was this watching that disturbed me, because in it I saw his belief that he could penetrate with his amused eyes the person I thought I was and find something more to his liking at the core. Erase me and start over again, out of his own design. His own head. It made me feel buffeted, somehow, as if, from moment to moment, I had to catch my breath, plant myself more firmly, as you do between waves. I had years left, I had beauty, I had the capacity to make uncertainty cross his face. And yet I had also entered into some agreement with him. There was some complicity between us, in the way we had left his studio together and headed for the house. In here first, he had said, as we went into the kitchen, as if we both understood what was to follow.

Some unspoken complicity in the way I had drawn him into Daisy’s care, in what I was doing now, driving Ana crazy. An uneasy alliance, as Sister Irene would have said in World History class.

I raised my eyes and looked back at him. I wondered for a moment why he didn’t have a drink, if his toothache had been cured, and then I saw there was an empty glass on the floor beside his chair.

“So what made you choose Macbeth?” he said finally.

“Out of all the fairy tales you might recite for my daughter?”

I shrugged.

“We did it in school freshman year,” I said.

His glasses seemed to flash with the setting light.

“I thought it might have had something to do with her mother,” he said. He leaned forward a bit.

“Don’t tell me you were one of the witches.”

I shook my head.

“I was Macduff. It’s an all-girl school.”

He gave his true laugh.

“Of course,” he said. He reached down for the empty glass and turned to Daisy.

“Would you run inside, Daisy Mae, and ask the lady of the house to fill this for me?”

Daisy took the glass and slipped off her chair.

“Okay,” she said. I might have resented him for appropriating my nickname, except that it so clearly pleased her. We both watched her go through the door, the pink shoes clicking on the floorboards.

He turned back to me.

“Lots of room for histrionics,” he said.

“Playing Macduff. Great sorrow, bloody revenge. Are you that kind of actress?”

I let the silence come back for a second and then I said, “I didn’t play it that way. That was how the nun who directed wanted me to do it. She kept yelling at me to wring my hands.

She wanted me to get all pop-eyed when he hears about his family. But I didn’t.” His head was to one side, against his artist’s hand. I was aware of him watching me, his own world whirling inside his head.

“Well, I did in rehearsals,” I said, planting myself more firmly, “but not when we put it on, when she couldn’t do anything about it. I just said it beside me, his long legs spread out before him, crossed at the bare ankles.

Something regal in his slouch, his white shirt rolled at the sleeves and open at the collar, the white flame of his hair.

“Always knew his children would be slaughtered?” he said softly.

I straightened my spine, aiming for something regal myself.

“In a way,” to look both besieged and neglected. He said a shy “Hi” to Daisy and then pulled me to the lawn. There was the sound of Flora’s voice from inside, Ana’s musical if terse replies. The drill of summer locusts in the trees. I felt him studying me, fingers along his cheek, although I still kept my head turned toward the lawn and the weeping cherries.

“I didn’t have him scream at Macbeth at the end, either,” I said finally.

“I didn’t make it a triumph. I made it look like he was crying. Like he was sick of all this blood.” I had a momentary recollection of that wet and tinny smell.

“I had him drop Macbeth’s head, at the end. This papier-mâché thing. I had him look like he was sick of the whole thing. Everybody dying.”

I turned to him and he lifted his chin out of his palm. I couldn’t tell if he was bored.

“How’d that go over?” he asked.

“She didn’t like it,” I said.

“She gave me a C.”

He chuckled.

“Understatement is a hard sell,” he said.

I took my arms from the armrest and folded them across my lap.

“Some of the other girls said I made Macduff seem like a fairy.” I recalled the slow dawning; Mr. Clarke’s house suddenly sunk back onto solid, sordid earth. I looked at him to see if he knew what I meant.

He wasn’t smiling.

“Nice girls,” he whispered.

Daisy, just beside him, was gently swinging her feet, utterly patient.

“We should go,” I said, although I didn’t want to, somehow. I stood, and she stood. He raised his glass to us both, still slouched in his chair.

“Bonsoir,” he said, and nothing more, although I knew he watched us as we walked across the lawn to the drive.

Petey was on the back steps when we got home, the light in the kitchen behind him already on and my mother inside making dinner, our folded beach umbrella leaning up against the house.

Petey stood as soon as we approached, something behind his back. I looked quickly to see if his rabbit trap was still there. It was gone.

He said to Daisy, “This isn’t what I told you about. The thing I really want to get you, but”—and he thrust out his hand. It was a bracelet made of caramel-colored stones, looped in rings of something that even in the dim light I could tell was not real gold. Daisy seemed to have no idea what to do, and so he shoved the bracelet toward her and said, “It’s for you.”

Hesitantly, she took it from him. I wouldn’t ask him, in front of her, where it had come from, but I suspected the worst. And then Petey said, looking up at me, as if he well understood an explanation was needed.

“The cop gave it to my mom, but she didn’t like it at all.

She said I could have it.” He scratched at an already-broken mosquito bite on his arm.

“I don’t know if you like it,” he said to Daisy.

Daisy looked at it and then looked at me.

“It’s pretty,” she said.

I asked, “Are you sure it’s okay with your mom?”

“Oh yeah.” He was absentmindedly picking at the scab, a string of blood running down his arm.

“She was going to throw it away. Honest.”

If this was true, it could not bode well for the policeman.

I reached out and gently moved his hand from his arm.

“Well, that’s nice of you, Petey,” I said. And Daisy said, “Thank you,” and Petey explained once again that it was not the thing he intended to give her, the thing he was still working on.

I asked him if he wanted to come into the house and put a Band-Aid on that and he looked at the place he had been scratching as if no part of it were his own.

“No,” he said.

“It’s all right.” And wiped off the blood with his shirt. He motioned toward the bracelet again.

“Put it on,” he said.

I put the beach bag on the ground and took the bracelet from Daisy.

“Hold out your hand,” I said, and then turned her wrist over to fasten it. We were in shadow from the porch light and the kitchen light but I knew what I saw along the inside of her arm was another spreading bruise. I fastened the bracelet and turned her arm over, and the thing immediately slipped over her hand and onto the grass. We all bent to pick it up, Petey beating us to it.

He held it, looking pained and disappointed.

“It’s too big,” he said. And I said, no, it could be fixed. I slipped it back over Daisy’s tiny hand and then pinched it to show how it could be made tighter.

“I can have my dad take out a few links,” I said.

Petey seemed skeptical, and his shoulders sank into that disintegrating slouch. But Daisy held her wrist up so that the bracelet slipped nearly to her elbow and shyly said, “Thank you very much,” once more, and Petey walked off with his hands deep in his pockets but his step light, somehow, as if not quite convinced of the success of his offering but neither resigned to its failure. He was barefoot and his shorts came nearly to his knees and his white T-shirt might well have been left behind by one of the fathers.

“Sometimes,” I told Daisy as we walked into the house, “I think Petey’s the loneliest kid on earth.”

I thought she would object, given his brother and his sisters and all the various temporary residents, animal and human, of his house, but she only nodded and said, “I know what you mean.”

Larry and Moe followed us into my room, where I took off the bracelet, and I held her arm under the lamplight. The bruise was there, but it had been exaggerated by the shadows and might only have been something caused by Red Rover’s pulling when I let her walk him. Daisy watched me quietly as I examined her, said, “Both,” solemnly when I asked her which hand she used to take the leash, and then, when I assured her it was nothing, she grinned her goofy grin.

“Out, damned spot,” she said. And I put my finger to her lips.

“Darn,” I said.

“Out darn spot.”

While she was in the shower I sat with my father at the dining-room table, the cats about our feet, counting the links on the bracelet and trying to figure out the best way to remove them. There was another rattle at the screen door, and then Janey came in through the kitchen, a small paper bag in her hand and her chiseled face dirty and streaked with tears. Her blond hair was still braided, probably the braid I put in it last week, although the ribbon was gone. Moe and Larry came out from under the table to greet her, but she had nothing for them today.

“Rags tore up your hat,” she said simply, and handed me the paper bag. Inside were the remnants of Flora’s mother’s hat, only a bit of the crown, and the chewed-up leather hatband, the remains of a bright red ribbon. Janey glanced at my father as if he were somehow inanimate. He had his miniature leather-bound tool set on the table in front of him, his glasses well down on his nose.

“I don’t know if you can fix it,” she said, her eyes on the air between us, as if she were uncertain of just whom she was appealing to. And then her eyes fell on the bracelet. Her pale brows narrowed. She raised her hand, pointing.

“I wanted that bracelet,” she said, and as she did I saw—I had glanced at the paler inside of her arm, making a comparison with Daisy’s—a cuff of red skin around her wrist. I took the finger she was pointing and turned her arm over.

“What happened here?” I said.

“Petey did it,” she said, raising her chin and her bottom lip, a look that promised, simultaneously, defiance and tears.

“Mommy threw the bracelet on the floor and I got it first,” she said.

And to my father, “I got it.” Back to me, “But Petey took it away.”

She held out her wrist.

“He gave me an Indian sunburn.”

To my father, “He twisted my skin.” To me, “Until I had to let it go. Then he pushed me.” Now her voice rose into another, tearful register.

“I came over to see if you were home yet but you weren’t, and that’s when I found the hat on the grass, all chewed up.” A tear welled and fell.

“Nothing’s gone right for me today.”

I held out my arms and she immediately came to me, and although she held her body a little stiffly, she put her forehead on my shoulder. My mother, a spatula in her hand, came to the kitchen door to see what the trouble was. A few minutes later Daisy, her hair still draped with a towel, came out of the bedroom.

I explained to them both what had happened, and then Daisy stepped forward and lifted the bracelet from the table and handed it to Janey.

“You can have it,” she said.

“It’s okay.”

Janey looked at her through her tears and shook her head.

“Petey will kill me if I take it.”

I assured her he wouldn’t.

“I’ll explain it to Petey,” I said.

“I’ll make it okay.”

Sympathetically, Daisy put her fingertips on Janey’s sore wrist. She said, “Petey has something else he wants to give me.

I’ll tell him I’d just rather wait for the other thing.”

I glanced at my father to see if he’d made the connection between this other thing and Petey’s futile rabbit trap. But he didn’t. My mother was saying, “That’s very nice of you, Daisy,” and Janey was tentatively reaching out to take the bracelet.