Homecoming (20 page)

“I don’t think so,” Cousin Eunice said. She was stirring the noodles with a long-handled
fork. “I was talking with my girls and they said someone your age could only get babysitting
jobs. I don’t know anybody who has small children. We might advertise in the paper
I suppose, but who would take care of the
housework then? The girls said—you know how silly some people are—that I was a saint
to take you in, that anybody else would turn you over to social services. But I said,
I can’t do that, they’re my own flesh and blood. Which in a way you are, you know.”

“Yes,” Dicey said. Then she added, because she knew it was true even though she didn’t
feel that it was true, “You are being awfully kind to us.”

Cousin Eunice nodded and smiled her foolish smile.

“James is excited about school,” Dicey told her. “Maybeth and Sammy are enrolled in
day camp.”

“That’s nice. And you dusted?”

“Yes. Everything.” Dicey was glad to be able to answer yes to one of the cleaning
chores. “Are those your photograph albums in the bookcase?”

Cousin Eunice nodded as she put a colander in the sink.

“May I look through them?” Dicey asked.

“I guess so,” Cousin Eunice said. “I didn’t keep the albums. They’re Mother’s work.
Some of the pictures are very, very old. You’ll be careful, won’t you?”

“Yes,” Dicey said. “Will you be late coming home tonight?”

“After ten. There’s no need for you to wait up. Mother never did. I expect you’ll
all be in bed by the time I return. There’s a television in my bedroom you can watch.
As long as you don’t play in there. Children like watching television, don’t they?”

Dicey answered with more enthusiasm than she felt.

“And tomorrow we’ll have to remember to have a key made for you.” Cousin Eunice sighed
and drained the noodles.

S
omething about Aunt Cilla’s house (even though she knew it belonged to Cousin Eunice,
Dicey still thought of it as Aunt Cilla’s house, and still regretted her lost dream
of it) made Dicey’s brain slow down. Maybe it was trying so hard to please Cousin
Eunice that had that effect on her. Maybe it was the routine of every day, with meals,
cleaning, times to drop off the little children and pick them up, shopping, mending
and ironing, having the cup of tea ready for Cousin Eunice at precisely twenty of
six. Maybe it was just fatigue after her long journey there. Or maybe it was that
nothing seemed to happen, except the same thing happening over and over again.

Even that was not precisely true. Sergeant Gordo called up one morning when Dicey
was alone in the house. He asked her to come down to the police station, and gave
her careful instructions for getting there on the bus. She took just enough change
for her fare from shopping money and rode the bus down to the old stone building,
with bars on the windows of the second and third stories. There she sat in the midst
of a large, busy room to look at some pictures of women who might be Momma. None of
them were. All of them, Sergeant Gordo told her, were dead and unidentified. They
had found the Tillermans’ car, he told her, and the Peewauket police could sell it
and send the money to Dicey. He didn’t expect she would get very much for it, he said.

“Does that mean Momma’s not dead?” Dicey asked.

“I think we can assume that,” Sergeant Gordo said. “Now, I’ll start checking hospitals.
Part of the problem is that we don’t know where to look. If you’d reported her missing
right away, we’d have a better chance.”

“I’m sorry,” Dicey said.

“Fat lot of good that does now,” he answered. His phone rang then, and he waved her
away. “I’ll be in touch if anything turns up.”

Dicey didn’t have much time for thinking about her family. James, she knew, was perfectly
happy. He studied at night and went through the heavy wooden doors into the school
at a run, every morning. Now and then he would report some amazing fact to Dicey.
One time he told her about Alaric’s treasure, that disappeared long ago when Rome
ruled the world and America wasn’t even discovered. Nobody had ever found the treasure
because Alaric hid it so well. He diverted a river, then buried the treasure in the
river bed, then rerouted the river back to its old path. The treasure was somewhere
there, in Italy. Only Alaric had known where. He even killed all the men who had worked
to hide it, so they couldn’t tell. James pored over the maps in his history book,
trying to think out where the treasure might be. James was always willing to tell
Dicey what he was learning, even though he seemed to have no interest in discussing
other things with her.

Sammy, on the other hand, demanded more and more of her attention. He ran up to her
every afternoon, grabbed her hand and pulled her away from the gate where she waited
with Maybeth silent beside her. “Let’s go,” he said. “Let’s play ball. Will you play
catch with me? Can we race on the sidewalk?” He wanted to wrestle with her after dinner
and needed her to tuck him in every night.

Maybeth was Maybeth. Silent and peaceful, she went off to church with Cousin Eunice
on Sundays dressed in a frilly pink dress Cousin Eunice had bought her, wearing a
little straw hat with flowers on the brim and white gloves. She even had a little
white purse. Cousin Eunice had taken a great liking to Maybeth.

Dicey wondered if she was losing touch with her family.

Dicey had looked through Aunt Cilla’s photograph albums. She didn’t know what it was
she was looking for, just something. There were only two pictures of Aunt Cilla’s
childhood, before she met and married Mr. Logan and lived in Bridgeport.

The first picture was a posed photographer’s picture, badly yellowed, of a man with
a long beard and a woman with long hair piled on top of her head. The woman held a
baby on her lap. Beside her stood a girl with curling blonde hair and a silly smile.
Underneath this picture Aunt Cilla had written in her lacy handwriting:
Mother, Father, Abigail, and myself.
Dicey thought Abigail must be the baby, since Cousin Eunice said Aunt Cilla was twelve
years older than her sister.

The other picture must have been taken at a birthday party, because there was a cake
with candles at the center of the picture. A pretty young woman in a white summer
dress held a knife to cut the cake. Beside her, on one side, stood her parents, the
man’s beard turning white and the woman grown fat. On the other side stood a girl
with wildly curly dark hair and a sour expression. The three adults were looking at
the photographer and smiling. The little girl scowled down at the cake. Her hands
were behind her back. Dicey would have bet that her fists were clenched.

Dicey recognized the older daughter as Aunt Cilla. The younger girl was Abigail. The
sour one. Her grandmother.

One afternoon Dicey went early to meet James. She went early on purpose and entered
the school building rather than
going around to the playground to where James usually waited for her. She found Father
Joseph in a small office, sitting behind a wooden desk correcting papers.

“We’re very pleased with James,” he said to her. “Sit down.” He pulled out a chair.
“How is everything going for you? You’ve been with your cousin for about two weeks
now, haven’t you?”

“Yes,” Dicey said.

“Is something wrong?” he asked her. Then he seemed to recall something that had slipped
his mind. “I’ve been wanting to talk with you anyway and haven’t gotten around to
it. I’m glad you came in. Shall we deal with your business first, and then get on
to mine?”

“But you said you were pleased with James,” Dicey said. She was alarmed. “He’s happy
here. Awfully happy.”

“James is fine, fine,” Father Joseph said. He closed up his grade book, folded his
hands and looked at her. “What brought you to see me?”

“I wondered if you had heard from your church in Crisfield,” Dicey said. Her mind
was working furiously. Was something wrong about Maybeth? Or Sammy? Or both of them?
She knew something was wrong with Sammy at camp, she’d known that all along.

“What do you know about your mother’s family?” Father Joseph asked.

“Nothing. Momma never talked about them, never at all. Except Aunt Cilla. And that
wasn’t the truth—but Momma didn’t know that. I found a picture of my grandmother in
Aunt Cilla’s albums, but she was only a girl, Maybeth’s age. Cousin Eunice doesn’t
know anything. Did you find out something?”

“A little. The family is not Catholic, you know.”

Dicey nodded. He kept bringing that up.

“So they aren’t parishioners. If they were parishioners, then
we would know a great deal about them. But—your grandmother. Her name is Abigail Tillerman.”

“I knew that. There were names under one of the pictures.”

“She lives alone on a small farm, outside of Crisfield. She lives absolutely alone
there. Her husband died some years ago.”

So Dicey didn’t have a grandfather.

“They weren’t Catholics, but Crisfield is a small town, where everybody knows everybody
else. So—the priest asked some questions of his older parishioners. They had known
the Tillermans. None of them had been friends—the Tillermans didn’t seem to have friends—but
they knew about them. He told me there were three children in the family. A boy, John,
named after his father. People say he is in California. Nobody has heard from him
for years, not his mother, nobody—twenty years or more. A second son died in Vietnam.
Do you know about the war in Vietnam?”

Dicey nodded. Well, she had heard of it, and James would be able to tell her about
it.

“Then the daughter, your mother. She ran off when she was twenty-one, they say, to
join a merchant mariner she had somehow met, a man named Francis Verricker.”

“My father?” The man who had swung her to his shoulder and named her his little only.

Father Joseph rubbed his hand over his eyes. “Yes. At least, that is the name on the
birth certificates from Provincetown. I have no reason to think he was not everyone’s
father. The police are trying to trace him for me. They had searched for him some
years ago. He seems to have disappeared.”

“I don’t mind,” Dicey said.

“I do.” Father Joseph’s voice was sharp and angry. That surprised Dicey, and, sensing
his concern, she was grateful to him, for the first time in all the time in Bridgeport,
truly grateful.

“Do you mind hearing unpleasant truths, Dicey?”

“Yes. But I’d rather know the truth than not, if that’s what you mean.”

“I thought so. The Tillerman home—it must have been unhappy. Do you know what that
can mean?”

“I think so,” Dicey said. “I mean, we were happy. We were—whether you believe it or
not . . . ”

“Oddly enough, I do believe it.”

Dicey smiled at him. “You see, there were kids at school—they hated their parents
or they hated other people so much that you knew—it wasn’t just being angry, it was
hating. I can’t explain what I mean, but I could feel the unhappiness.”

“I see that James doesn’t have all the brains in the family,” Father Joseph said.

Dicey was flattered. “He’s the smart one. I’m just—practical.”

“Well, the Tillermans seem to have had that kind of unhappiness. The priest—or his
informants—seem to blame her parents, especially the father. Remember, this is conjecture,
not fact. It may just be gossip, you know. This is just what someone told him and
he told me. Your grandfather seems to have been a stern man. An unbending man. Over-righteous
perhaps. Perhaps cruel. Nobody knows anything certain. Your grandmother always let
him have his way. Nobody can say what she thought. She never spoke of it. He had his
boys do a man’s work, from the time they were eight. He used a whip for disobedience,
a real whip. He did not tolerate disobedience of any sort. He quarreled with his neighbors.
He was angry—probably hate-filled too. She—your grandmother—was apparently the kind
of woman who sticks faithfully to her husband’s rule. She may have thought he was
right. Or something else.”

“It doesn’t really matter which, does it?”

“In effect, no. You are practical.”

“I haven’t had much choice.”

“Speaking practically then, your other uncle is dead, your mother has disappeared,
and I don’t think your uncle John wants to be found. Which leaves your cousin Eunice.”

What was wrong with her grandmother? Dicey didn’t ask aloud. She sat silent for a
while. “What a family,” she finally said.

“You shouldn’t judge unless you’ve been there and known what actually went on,” Father
Joseph said.

“Come on,” Dicey protested. “And Momma’s—but she gave us a good home in Provincetown.
She took good care of us, as good as she could.”

“Yes, I think so, in some ways. One wonders,” he said carefully, his light brown eyes
resting on Dicey’s face, “if there isn’t a strain of—mental weakness.”

Was he reading her mind?

“Your grandmother’s isolation—she has no phone, so the priest drove out from Crisfield
to talk with her. She wouldn’t let him into the house. She apparently screamed aloud
so that she wouldn’t hear what he was saying.”

Dicey remembered Momma’s strangeness and James’s idea that craziness was inherited.

“I mention this to you because I want to tell you that, if it can be inherited, you
have probably
not
inherited it. In my opinion,” Father Joseph said.

“Are you sure?”

“No, of course not. But remember, you’ve already been through more trials than most
people endure in a lifetime. You and James, you two at least, seem to have the strength
and resilience to go on. Isn’t that what sanity is?”

“I don’t know,” Dicey said. She rose to go, her mind filled with what he had said.

“But we
are
concerned about your sister. She is—so far behind
her age group. She doesn’t speak. She can’t read or work with numbers.”

This again.

“She can,” Dicey sat down again. “She can do all that. She isn’t—she doesn’t in front
of strangers. Her teachers always said she couldn’t do things, but at home, with me
or James, she could. You don’t believe me.”