Child of My Heart (22 page)

“I can shorten that for you,” my father said as she tried it on. He leaned toward her, counting with one finger the pale brown stones, and then suggested he remove three of them for a perfect fit.

“And I’ll tell you what,” he said to her over his bifocals.

“We’ll save the three of them for you so they don’t get lost, and as you get bigger, you just come over here and one by one we’ll put them back. That way, you can wear the bracelet now and the whole time you’re growing up.”

Janey sniffled and nodded and further streaked her dirty face with the back of her hand.

“Okay,” she said softly. My mother returned to the kitchen, and we all watched my father as he bent over the bracelet like a watchmaker. (Later he would declare that the thing was hardly worth five bucks, which no doubt is why Sondra threw it to her children.) I put my arm around Daisy to pull her closer and whisper “Thank you” in her ear. She seemed to be shivering, and I reached up and moved the towel over her head to dry her hair.

I suggested that the bracelet should probably stay here until I had a chance to talk to Petey about it and Janey happily agreed, and happily agreed to stay for dinner as well, tasting creamed spinach for the first time (first by a tentative touch of a forkful to the tip of her pink tongue) and declaring it really good.

That night in bed as I curled around her, Moe and Larry two warm weights at our feet, I told Daisy again how nice she had been to poor Janey. And once again I felt that shiver in her spine.

“Janey’s lucky,” Daisy whispered.

“She can come to your house anytime she wants, for years, all the way until she’s grown up.”

Faintly, I could hear my parents’ voices on the other side of the wall, their quiet and unending exchange.

“Well, you can, too, Daisy Mae,” I told her, whispering into her hair.

“Just hop on the train.”

I felt her shake her head against the pillow. For a second, when she didn’t speak, I thought she might have been crying, homesick again. But then she whispered, “I don’t think I’ll ever be back here.”

I laughed, just a puff of air against her scalp.

“Why?” I asked her.

“I don’t know,” she whispered.

“I just have that feeling.”

I tightened my arm around her.

“Of course you will,” I said.

“Every summer. You could come at Easter, too, if you want, even Christmas. You can come back anytime, all the way until you’re grown up.” I said it fondly, assuredly, with all the authority I knew she gave me, all the authority I knew I had, here in my own kingdom, but I also said it against a flash of black anger that suddenly made me want to kick those damn cats off the bed and banish every parable, every song, every story ever told, even by me, about children who never returned.

The newborn children named for Irish patriots. The children who said, I want to show it to the angels. Children who kissed their toys at night and said, Wait for me, who dreamt lollipop trees, who bid farewell to their parents from the evening star, children who crawled ghostly into their grieving father’s lap, who took to heart an old man’s advice that they never grow old, and never did. All my pretty ones? All? I wanted them banished, the stories, the songs, the foolish tales of children’s tragic premonitions. I wanted them scribbled over, torn up. Start over again. Draw a world where it simply doesn’t happen, a world of only color, no form. Out of my head and more to my liking: a kingdom by the sea, eternal summer, a brush of fairy wings and all dark things banished, age, cruelty, pain, poor dogs, dead cats, harried parents, lonely children, all the coming
griefs
, all the sentimental, maudlin tales fashioned out of the death of children.

“And when you grow up,” I said, “you can move out here, with me. And we’ll bring our babies to the beach together and teach them to swim in the ocean and we’ll have a hundred puppies in the yard and we’ll hire Petey to come over every day and clean up the poop.”

She laughed.

“And Mrs. Richardson will have us over for tea, and Mrs. Clarke will give you her house because you were almost her older sister’s best friend’s boyfriend’s niece.”

“I didn’t get that,” Daisy murmured, and I murmured back, “Me neither.

But I think it makes you her closest relative.

And I’ll tell you a secret about that house,” I said.

“If you promise not to tell anybody. This is absolutely true: Nobody ever saw that house get built. One day there was just grass and trees and that little pond with the dragonflies, and then one night there was a house, lit up like a lightning bug. And although nobody saw anyone go in, in the morning the front door opened and out came a man, kind of short and bald, with a round, happy-looking face and a round stomach and wearing a beautiful gold shirt and brown pants and a black jacket so he kind of looked like a lightning bug himself. And that was Mr.

Clarke’s uncle, and that’s how Mr. Clarke came to own the house. And when it’s time to leave it to someone, since they haven’t got any children of their own, Mr. and Mrs. Clarke will have to leave it to you, so when you grow up, you’ll live in a house built by fairies.”

She was quiet again, thinking this over, I could tell. Then she asked, “Why will they have to leave it to someone?”

I said, only because they miss the city so much—didn’t you notice, it’s all they talk about? Sooner or later they’re going to want to go back to the city and leave the house to someone else.

“To you,” I said. Everyone who misses a place so much, I said, eventually goes back to it.

“Which is why I know you’ll always come back here, to me.”

Now she nodded, ready to leave behind, it seemed, whatever notion she’d had, just moments ago, about never returning.

“Will you live there, too?” she whispered.

“With me?”

I considered this for a minute.

“I’ll be living here,” I said.

“But I could visit.”

“Will you sleep over?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Sometimes.”

“I wouldn’t want to sleep there alone,” she said.

“What a coininkydink,” I said in my best Three Stooges voice.

“Neither does Mrs. Swanson.” I moved my head to a cooler part of the pillow.

“I don’t know what there is to be afraid of. Fairies? I’d love to see some fairies dancing around my room.”

But Daisy shook her head again.

“Ghosts,” she said.

“Like the book said, if you sleep alone.”

I laughed, and tightened my grip around her.

“I don’t think seeing ghosts would be such a bad thing, either. You might see someone you used to know.”

“Like Curly,” she said, sleepy at last, and I said, “There you go.”

I held her, listening to her breath until I matched it with my own, and then woke briefly to hear Petey’s breath as well, and to see his shadowed form against our window.

While Dr. Kaufman approached our blanket at the beach that afternoon, Flora was still napping in the shade of my father’s umbrella and Daisy and I were sitting on the edge of the quilt, drawing finger pictures in the sand. As I saw him approach, I quickly erased my picture, throwing the sand over Daisy’s feet, pretending I was unhappy with what I had drawn.

He’d just come out on the train. The city was unbearable, he said, 108 in the shade. (My parents had listened to the weather on the radio that morning, had smiled smugly at each other when they’d heard.) He had his beach chair and his newspaper and he dropped both in the sand to sit at my feet.

He wore the same black polo shirt and red trunks. The insides of his thighs were still pale.

“I have something to show you,” he said, opening the paper and pulling out two long envelopes.

“And a favor to ask.”

They were letters from the twins, camp letters decorated with stick figures sitting in canoes and dancing around bright orange fires. On wide-lined paper and in their shaky, oversized hands, Patricia had written that she loved swimming, got stung by a bee, and sang Doe, a Deer at the talent show. Colby, less prolific, went fishing and won a prize—although he didn’t say, as Dr. Kaufman pointed out, delighted, leaning over my knees as I read, if one was the result of the other.

I folded my legs under me as I handed the letters back.

“Tell them I said hi.” And he said, buoyantly, “Oh, I already have.”

He looked the letters over again and then folded them up and returned them to their envelopes.

“They’ll be out here August 10,” he said.

“And here’s the thing. I’ve met this woman, her name is Jill, she’ll be here this weekend. I’ll introduce you.

Anyway, she’s going to be out here that week, too. For the whole week.

She really wants to spend some time with the kids, get to know them.

Which is great and all, but I don’t want to overwhelm her.” He smiled.

The bright sun shone through his thinning brown hair and lit his scalp. It seemed to light his brown eyes as well, and I realized he had, since last week, been relieved of the burden of his loneliness.

“So,” he said, “can I book you, the week of the tenth?”

I saw Daisy turn her head over her shoulder, listening.

“I’ve got Flora,” I said, but he held up his hand.

“I know, I know.”

He lightly touched his fist to my knee. I saw his eyes slip from my face to my chest to my lap, a happy little tour.

“This is just for the nights,” he said.

“We’ll do things with the kids during the day, but I’d really like to give her, give Jill, her nights off.”

He smiled again. It occurred to me that Ana, too, had her nights off.

He suddenly reached out and moved away a strand of hair the wind had blown across my mouth.

“It’d be a big help to me,” he said.

“And the kids would love it. I really want it to be a great week.”

I recalled the summer afternoon that I had held his children in my lap while he and his wife—their mother—were inside, the rising tenor of her voice: Oh, what happened; oh, where is it? I wondered if I could anticipate something of the same, the week of the tenth, now with a different woman’s voice crying out. The sand had slipped from Daisy’s instep, I could see through it to the bruise, but I knew, too, that Dr. Kaufman’s attention was elsewhere—on himself, to be exact.

I thought there was something Red Roverish, something panting and a little dumb about his new enthusiasm, for this woman, for his kids, for his sudden reprieve from his bachelor summer. I knew Daisy, her bruises and her pale skin, would be lost in it all.

I said I’d do it, and he said, “Great,” a little too loudly.

Flora stirred beneath the umbrella and he hunched his shoulders and put his fingers to his lips.

“Sorry,” he said, mouthing the word. He leaned closer; for a minute I thought he was going to kiss me again, but he merely whispered, “We’ll look for you on the beach this weekend. You’ll get to meet Jill.” He stood. He waved to Daisy and she waved back. He pointed to his own cheek.

“She’s getting some nice color,” he said, as if that was that. He picked up his newspaper and his chair and headed down the beach, his calves muscular, slightly bowed, his shoulders thrown back, and his head turning, unabashedly it seemed, toward every young woman he passed. With his every step, a happy spurt of sand was thrown up by his heels.

I packed us up as soon as Flora woke. Even this far out on the
Island
, it was a hot, hot day, and by the time we got back to Flora’s house, we were all cranky. There was a strange car in the driveway and as we walked past the studio I heard another man’s voice, and some laughter. Ana was in the kitchen, in her blue uniform. She was putting tiny sandwiches on a tray that already held crackers topped with caviar and bits of hard boiled egg. There was a table fan spinning in front of the window.

She said something in French that I gathered meant “Don’t bother me,” so I took both girls back to Flora’s bathroom and put them in the shower. I got them dressed and combed out their hair and put some of Flora’s baby dolls on the floor for them to play with and then went in to take a shower myself. It was not something I’d ever done before. I had been warned early on by my mother, who had learned it from her own parents, that the last thing I should do in the homes of my employers was to act as if it were my home as well. No matter how warm and friendly and welcoming my employers might be, a bit of distance and decorum, my mother and her mother before her had said, is always appreciated.

Helping myself to their shower and to Flora’s mother’s skin cream (a lovely lily-of-the-valley scent that really put Noxzema to shame) was hardly distant or decorous, but I was hot and salty and tired, and more and more I was coming to realize that Flora’s house was the only place I really wanted to be. I put on my shorts and, because of the heat, dispensed with a T-shirt and just slipped into another one of my father’s crisp button-downs, one that I had taken from his closet that morning and placed in the bottom of the beach bag. I wrapped my hair in a towel and, barefoot, carried the skin cream back to the bedroom to share it with the girls. I was just smoothing some on Flora’s arms when he came to the doorway. He asked if I would bring her out to the living room, someone wanted to meet her. I took the towel from my head and shook my hair like a dog, wetting us all, getting the girls laughing and running.