Romeo Blue (14 page)

They left the house in a flurry of kisses and good cheer. After all, Brie was Uncle Gideon’s niece. Aunt Miami loved her as well. And she was The Gram’s most beloved first granddaughter. So Brie moved about the Bathburn house as if it belonged to her. Perhaps it did, though I had grown to love the house and I felt it was partly mine. I had felt myself to be truly a Bathburn. Brie was wearing one of The Gram’s beautiful homemade dresses to the dance. The Gram of course had wanted to see it from all angles, and Brie’s mother and The Gram discussed the hem as if it were the solution to world peace. When I had done anything at all in the house, it always turned out that Brie had done it also, long before me. I loved sliding down the banister on the back stairs. “Oh, I started doing that when I was four years old,” Brie said once, “and there are tons of photographs of me sliding on it. It’s really mine but you can borrow it, if you don’t break it.”

It seemed as if Derek had always loved her. She marched in with her long blond braids and set the Bathburn house on end. If only she had liked me. But she didn’t. And so I sat there alone in my sadness, alone because I couldn’t really even mention it to Auntie.
Auntie’s very voice was comforting and kind and I needed to tell her about this, but she had a big framed photograph of Brie on her dressing table and underneath it on the margin she had written,
darling Brie
.

I watched the grandfather clock in the parlor tick. The great hand slowly clicked by, minute by minute. The air still smelled of Brie’s Blue Waltz perfume. I knew that perfume. You could buy it at the dime store. It came in a little blue bottle. It was very posh and made you feel sweetly sick if you opened the bottle and smelled it too closely. I had a bottle as well, though I had only doused my old bear Wink with it. I hadn’t used it on myself. But you could smell Wink a mile away for a long time after that.

I went round and shut all the curtains in the house. It seemed a very dark night. Someone downstairs put a record on the Victrola. It was that song “I Think of You” again.

When the clouds roll by

and the moon drifts through

When the haze is high

I think of you.

Suddenly, something in me just snapped and I kind of broke into millions of pieces, like a biscuit when it’s dropped on the floor. I was pieces and crumbs and particles and shards and nothing at all. I wanted my mum.
I needed her right now. Don’t say she was locked up in some horrible, dark hole. Don’t say she was hungry or cold or lost and lonely. Don’t say my mum wasn’t coming home to me. Don’t say it. She was my mum. She belonged to me. She didn’t even know Brie. She was mine. All mine. I was her Felicity and I wanted her back. Now.

I ran down the front stairs. I opened the door and it slammed behind me. I went out on the porch. I breathed in the dark, broken sky. I breathed in terrible, gray-black clouds that sailed over my head, the searchlights streaking the sky from a faraway harbor, searching for enemy planes. I ran down the many steps to the sea. The tide was out and the water rolled back, leaving the shore exposed and raw. I ran first along the great slabs of jutting rocks and then down into the sand and seaweed and mud and pebbles along the shore. The wind blew me to pieces too. My skirt battered and ripped against me. My hair blew back and then forward, flying into my eyes and mouth. The sea and sky raged round me. I had lost everything now. I had lost Derek to Brie. I had lost my mother to the wind. And Danny too. I had lost my beautiful England and soon I would lose America too. Everything would be washed away, battered and beaten and broken by the war that would soon come here to these shores. Derek’s father was the Gray Moth. We would all soon be dead.

I ran towards the ocean. The mud and sand squishy and wet, my skirt wet, my hair wet, the tide coming in.
I would meet it. I would be there so it could take me away. Suddenly, all the tears I hadn’t cried came up out of me in a terrible scream. I shouted and screamed at the wind. “I want my mother. I want my Winnie. Now.” I cried and cried and cried and I ran faster and faster. Soon the cold, cold water was splashing over my legs. I turned back to look behind me. I could not see the Bathburn house in the darkness. All its light was hidden. All the houses along the ridge were black shadows now and I was alone, the sea crashing up round my legs higher and higher.

And then I heard someone calling me. “Flissy? Flissy Bathburn, where are you? Flissy dear, Fliss, tell me where you are! Please, Fliss. Come back to me. Don’t leave me in this world without you. I love you and need you, Fliss. Please, please tell me where you are.” It was the voice of my father, Gideon. He was crying for me. “Fliss, don’t leave me. Please, little girl, come home to your father. Your father wants you now. Fliss, come back.”

I turned round again and I called out, “Daddy, I’m here.” And the wind wrapped me in its horrible arms and pulled me down into the cold water.

I don’t remember how long it took my father to get to me. I don’t remember how long or how much water I swallowed. I don’t remember or know how I ended up in
his arms, with my head on his shoulder, as he carried me along the shore. I know I was shaking and coughing and crying. And he held me tightly. “Flissy, my little girl. My little girl,” he said. “I’ve got you and I’m not going to let anything happen to you. Ever again.” He was crying too and as he carried me back to the house, I told him everything. I told him about Derek’s father and his visits to the house. I told him about my suspicions, the clear glasses, the hat, the song “Lily Marlene.” I told him about Mr. Fitzwilliam and the invisible-ink letter. I told my father everything. I told him too that I was in love with Derek. I kept back nothing. Nothing. And then I started sobbing again. Everything poured out of me … tears and words and all my sorrow all at once.

And when I was done with it and I had stopped crying and was sitting in front of the fire in the fireplace with a blanket round my shoulders and a cup of hot cocoa in my hands, I had a name for Uncle Gideon. I hadn’t planned on it. I hadn’t chosen it. It came out on its own and it was
Daddy
.

I was so exhausted that evening and the fire warmed and soothed me so much that I almost was dozing off later. I was in that strange, blurry, warm state in which voices tumble past and objects float without meaning in the dark space behind your eyelids. I was just looking through a vague cupboard door in my mind when I heard my father on the landing, almost shouting into the telephone. His voice had a dangerous, gruff edge that I’d never heard before. “Look, Fitzwilliam,” he was saying, “I want to talk to you in my study this evening. No excuses.”

I lay on the sofa then, with one of The Gram’s knitted afghans over me. I was counting the red squares and then the white squares, watching the fire leaping. I was trying to measure how high it leapt. I was planning on pretending to sleep. If they looked in on me, I would be snoring away, faking of course, though I wasn’t proud of it.

I thought of Derek, for a moment, at the dance with Brie. I wondered which song they were bebopping to. I wondered if he was holding Brie tight. Were his eyes closed? Was he feeling dazzled and warm and dreamy, like I used to feel when he and I danced? Now I had told
on Derek. I had ruined his dream of his father. Although he didn’t know it yet, I had taken from him the only father he ever had. Surely he would hate me forever. He would call me a tattletale. How could I love Derek so much and at the same time tell on him? Why was my father calling Fitzwilliam now?

Soon I fell into a lost sleep. Mixed-up dreams came at me in the veils of shadows, the glowing fire, the wind at the windows, the ocean crashing below, never pausing or resting or stopping. Then the old doorbell buzzed at the front door and the house shook and screeched into alert. My father came down the stairs, casting a long, dark form on the walls and floor round him. The front door was opened, letting the stirred-up sky and air and cold rain and wind rush into the hallway. With all of that came Mr. Fitzwilliam in a waterproof and scarf, shaking himself dry like a great, arching cat. The two of them climbed the stairs and went down the hall and into my father’s study, which surprised me. Why would my father allow a possible criminal into his private study, where even I was not allowed?

Once again I must confess that I climbed the stairs behind them.

I stood outside my father’s study door and listened. My father’s voice was still on edge, jagged, rough, almost shouting. “FBI or not,” he was saying. “How could you do this to me? How could you put my children at risk like this? Why?”

“Well, Mr. Bathburn, the FBI has been waiting. We became aware of a very important German agent in the area. Code name, the Gray Moth.
Die Graue Motte.
We didn’t know what he looked like, so we had no way of finding him. We had no way of identifying him. We have no tools without knowing who he is. I mean, what he looks like.”

“I see,” said Gideon. “I see. So you used my children.”

“Well, we put an ad in the classifieds in the Portland paper asking for the birth father of Derek Bathburn Blakely to write. We knew the Gray Moth would take the bait. He wanted access to the Bathburn house. Did he not?”

“Well, haven’t you identified him yet?” said Gideon, his voice gaining speed and strength.

“No,” said Fitzwilliam. “He has eluded us. Your boy has helped him. He hasn’t told anyone. He’s kept his meetings secret. We think he may have even visited the house here several times. We haven’t been able to see the man. Yet.”

“How could you do this to my children? How could you jeopardize their safety?” shouted Gideon. The sound of his voice roared and shook and shattered the air. “To say nothing of the fact that you have compromised my circuit.”

“Yes, the Butterfly Circuit. I have been admiring all the accomplishments that circuit has under its belt. I am a fan, really, in a way. I am rather thrilled to meet you.”

“Look here,” shouted Gideon. “You had no business jeopardizing my work and my children. What made you think you could bring my children into all of this?”

“Mr. Bathburn, you have forgotten. Has it slipped your mind? Mr. Bathburn, this is war.”