On Little Wings (16 page)

“That ain’t nothing you haven’t seen!” she said with no trace of embarrassment. “Ain’t nothing a lot o’ people haven’t seen.” The color boiled up in my face and my throat constricted tightly. Was I going to cry? Here in this tiny, sunshiny room with a disturbed old woman who might as well be naked?

“But I got something that not everyone has seen. I know you can keep a secret. There’s no one in your family who wouldn’t be born knowing how to keep a secret. Hazel had a hundred and your aunt… she takes the prize.” I couldn’t begin to decipher what she meant when she began unbuttoning her housedress. I skidded back in my chair, making a jarring, scraping sound as I stood. Storm or not, there was only so much I could take. Before I could form my excuse for goodbye her deep voice boomed out in command. “Settle yourself!” I froze, my teeth chattering wildly. I could not disobey a direct order from an old woman. She stood on tottering legs and turned her back to me, letting the dress slip over her shoulders, halfway down her back. “Eh?” she asked in a tone of pride. I took in the wrinkles first; Her entire body falling into itself. But just in the middle of her shoulder blades a strange black stain. She tugged her shoulders forward under her chin, pulling her loose skin tighter.

I gasped. “Wings!”

“That’s right.” She crooned as she replaced her housedress and wrapped herself back in the towel. “Wings. Been there for more than sixty years. Jus’ in case I need a little extra lift gettin’ to heaven.” Now you have your own secret. Nathan don’t know. Your aunt don’t know. Your mother don’t know. Jus’ you and me know. Makes you a bit special don’t it? I guess I decided you’re special so you must be.” Her wispy white hair was drying slowly, making a fine cloud above her pink scalp, and hanging in a thin tail down her neck. “Back then not many girls got tattoos. I was different. I was different like your mama. But I didn’t stay gone.”

“How is my mother different?” I asked. Of anyone in the world, anyone at all, that I could have chosen to have an air of mystery about them, my mother would have been solidly, dead last. Other than not getting along with my Aunt there was not one thing about her that seemed out of the ordinary.

“She left. Nobody leaves. Well, everybody leaves, but she stayed gone. Burned her bridges flat! She was one of the toughest little girls I ever saw. Had her own mind. Different than your aunt. You’ll figure that out, though” Little held me with her blue eyes, gripping tightly, but stroking at the same time. Her eyes were caressing some part of the inside of me as if she knew I would need the comfort. “But tougher don’t mean better. It just means tougher. I could see it because I am the only person I know who’s tougher. So I can see it.”

“Is your name really Little?” My tongue slowly unglued and the question popped out.

“If it’s what you let people call you, it’s your name.”

“But what is your real name?” I persisted.

Thunder cracked violently outside and I moaned when the house shook and the lights wavered. Little’s mouth opened into half-crazed smile of glee and she clapped her hands together. “Now that’s more like it!” She cried. “I hate a half-hearted storm. Show us what you’ve got!” She called up as if she could see through the roof to the churning sky. She caught sight of me in her pink robe and her thoughts came back inside the kitchen, which was fine with me because I, unlike she, did not want the house to blow down on top of us. “What are you doing here?” she asked me. “Your mama coming back?” At first I thought she had dementia and couldn’t remember why I was in her kitchen. Then I realized she meant Smithport, not her house.

“I found out about Sarah last month. I came to meet her. My Mother’s not coming. Just me.”

Little looked at me long and hard and then said, “My brother named me Little. My Mother named me Lillian. She called me Lil. When Joe was three he thought she was saying Little and that was that.”

“Did that bother you? You never changed it back?”

“No. No.” Recollections ran through her smoky blue grey eyes. “Little fit me fine. It seemed right somehow. Mostly because there was nothing little about me,” she slid her eyes slyly back to her breasts and raised her eyebrows at me. “So,” she said loudly, changing the subject, “do you have a love story?”

“Me?” I wasn’t sure what she was talking about, but I knew I was growing increasingly scared and intrigued by every word she said. “What do you mean?”

She gave me a pitying, disgusted look as if she were dealing with a very simple person. “A love story. No matter what anyone says the best loves belong to the young. By the time I was your age I had the start of a love story that could rival anyone. But I tell no one. No one except those that can give me a love story first. It’s a trade. But mine is always better.”

“I…I… don’t have one,” and for the first time I felt ashamed of my boring, routine life. I wished I could have gone toe to toe with that old woman, put her love story to shame, whatever it might be, but all I had was a lifelong determination not to get stuck in a sappy love story.

Little dismissed me with a glance, and I flinched. “Then come back when you have one and I’ll tell you mine.” She nursed a cup of water in her hand, peering into it like it would show her the past in its depths. “I’ll get dressed before the boy comes back,” she mumbled and shuffled into her bedroom.

A shiver racked my shoulders and shot down my spine but it wasn’t the temperature, it was the desolation. She denied me her story, which left an ice cold curiosity sliding down my stomach. I had no story, nothing interesting to set me apart.

The front door opened, and every loose object in the kitchen rattled as the wind made a frantic dash through the room. Nathan shut it firmly behind him and wiped the water from his dripping hair as I stood up gratefully. “It’s letting up. My house lost power, but that doesn’t take much. It’s still standing, at least. I’ll take you home now.” He called out, “Little, I’m taking Jennifer home. I hope you didn’t scare her.” He smiled conspiratorially at me and gestured to the door.

“Hah!” Little called from the other room, “She’s tougher than she looks. She’s a Dyer.” She appeared in the doorway in a fresh housedress. “How’s your mama, Nathan? Are the girls all right?”

“Grumbling about the storm like all good New England women. Except Claude. She’s ranting and raving. She lost her internet.” Little waved her hand as if the mention of the internet offended her and wasn’t worth a reply. I slipped off her robe, thankful that my t-shirt was thick and dark blue and headed for the door.

“I’m all here, Jennifer.” Little’s low voice stopped me as I reached for the handle. I started and turned back to her at the sound of my name. “Some people think that all old people start going soft in the head but I’m not old. Only my skin got old and I can’t help that. Ugly, I know, but you should have seen… Boy, tell her that she should have seen me seventy years ago.” She continued without pause so she didn’t really expect him to say anything, which seemed fitting, considering. “I’ve got stories for you and when you’re ready I’ll be here. You’ll want to talk sometime. I’ll be here. I’m not really old.” She sat back down at the kitchen table, staring me down for a moment and then turned back to her water. “Take her home, Nathan. I’ll be fine.”

“No more walks tonight. I mean it,” Nathan ordered and started to open an umbrella.

“What’s the point,” I asked, looking from the umbrella to my wet clothes. “Let’s just go. Bye, Little.”

She gave me a slow and steady nod, her liquid blue eyes watering between folds of loose skin, but still lit with some unrelenting flame. The door opened and I sprinted out after Nathan, trying to navigate the slick, rocky ground with my eyes squinted against the rain. The small porch light beside Little’s front door threw strange shadows across the yard. We made it to the more consistent glow of the streetlights and jogged the long stretch to Sarah’s house without speaking. Nathan beat me to the front porch and Sarah opened the door looking relieved. “All accounted for?” she asked us as we stepped in.

“All’s well,” Nathan said. “Little was just taking a stroll.”

Sarah handed us towels and smiled. “So you met Little?”

I toweled my hair a moment longer before answering slowly, “Yes.”

“Well,” she said with high arched eyebrows, “I’ve been wondering how I should introduce you. I knew she’d want to meet you. How
much
did you meet her?”

“Oh, pretty much all of her,” I answered under my breath. “She seemed to know me already.”

“She knows your place in an old family, that’s all,” Sarah said.

“Were she and Grandma friends?”

“No, she’s as old as your great-grandmother. But everyone here knows her. Little is a town legend. In fact…” she paused and looked to Nathan, “should we show her?”

“I’d love to but I better go help with Darcy and Hester. You go ahead.” He handed her the towel and waved good-bye to me before stepping outside into the stormy night.

I looked back to Sarah to find her studying my dripping clothes. “Go clean up,” she instructed. “I’ve got something really good to show you.”

I grabbed the flashlight and followed its wobbly glow up the creaking stairs and narrow hallway to my bathroom. With full authority I can declare that showering by flashlight is a unique experience. I set the light on the counter, the beam focused in a wide circle on the ceiling that barely lit my body as I shampooed the cold rain out of my hair. I watched the foamy white bubbles slide down my stomach, catching tiny pieces of light in their iridescent domes. Even the noise of the running water could not compete with the torrential rain hitting the roof above my head or the thunder that shook the walls. I finished in less than five minutes, threw on warm sweats and hurried downstairs.

Sarah looked up from the couch where she sat with her laptop cradled on her legs.

“I thought internet was out,” I said.

“I’m not on the internet. I can’t show you on the television because the power is still out, but I have some battery life in the laptop.” I sat down next to her and she hit the play button.

A black and white movie came on to the screen in the middle of a scene with a man and woman deep in conversation. “Little comes in right here,” Sarah said pointing as a young lady with elaborately curled hair burst into the room with a telegram.

“That’s Little? The Little I met tonight?”

“Oh, trust me, Dear, there is only one.”

I watched in wonder as Little spoke her lines. I could not tell the color of her hair, except that it was light. Her lips were beautifully shaped, full, but not wide, and her eyes glimmered beneath thick black lashes.

“Pretty, don’t you think?” Sarah asked.

“Very, but … Little was a movie star?” I remembered the sagging tattoo.

“What else
could
she be with a name like Lillian Fairborn? But star is stretching it too far. She was an actress. A pretty good one. This was her first movie. 1942. Just a few years after she ran away.”

“She ran away from Smithport?”

“When she was only 17. Just like your mom. Legend is that she went to Coney Island first. Lied about her age and entered a bathing suit pageant. Someone found her there and told her she should go to L.A. She wrote home to say that she was in a commercial a few months later. The pride of Smithport for the next ten years. Everyone in town went and saw every show she was in. “

“Then what?”

“She came back one day. Never went back to Hollywood. Never said why. She spent years in the drama department at the University of Maine. Her brother Joe died when I was a teenager and she came back to Pilgrim’s Point. That’s her house.”

“So what has she been doing all that time?”

Sarah laughed. “Stomping around town and telling us all off, is what. And we’ve loved every minute of it. We still get together every August and show one of her movies in the theater. We call it Little Day.” We watched the movie until the battery died and then went to bed late, a misshapen, canned candle lighting the way to my room. At three o’clock, right as I was dreaming of the movie, the power came back on and the television clicked to life in the middle of an infomercial, along with most of the lights in the house. Sarah met me downstairs where we grinned groggily at each other and hurried to turn everything back off. By the time I pulled myself out of a fitful sleep the next day the rain had stopped, leaving a wet, gray sky filtering the weak rays of late morning sunlight.

I hopped downstairs, grateful to find the dreaded black shutters open and the view of the washed world unobstructed once more. The only evidence of the storm was the branches scattered across the ground.

“Quite the night?” Sarah asked as she handed me a bagel. “It has a bit of a dream-like quality for me today.”

“Agreed,” I said trying to talk around my bite. “I dreamt about the movie, by the way. I was in the house and everything was black and white and it was raining outside.”

Sarah stared at me too long and a small smile crawled across her face. “You cannot possibly know how nice it is to wake up and have someone sitting at this table and telling me about a dream. I haven’t had morning company in … I don’t know if I’ve ever had it.” She paused while I gave her a shy grin. “I get my students at school and the Beckers visiting and Nathan in the evenings, but no one ever shares my mornings.” To assuage my embarrassment Sarah pointed to Charlie who was flopped by the back door. “Except that fool dog.” He cocked his ear and rolled his eyes happily in her direction.

At that moment the doorbell rang and Charlie’s limp body popped up like a marionette with its strings pulled tight and bolted for the door.

“You expecting anyone?” Sarah asked as I followed her out of the kitchen.

“Not a soul.”

Sarah opened the door and there stood Little, enveloped in a housedress and wearing clunky walking shoes with white socks poking out the top. Her hair was neatly arranged in a tiny bun at the back of her head and held along the sides by at least forty bobby pins.

“Little!” Sarah exclaimed in surprise.

Little curled her lip in displeasure and asked in a lifeless voice, “Can Jennifer play?”