Flora (27 page)

Had they discovered the damage back at the house yet? (Flora: “Oh! What happened here?” “Well, I think some milk was spilled,” Finn would say matter-of-factly, noting the empty glass. “But—oh dear, the sketch pads! Both of them ruined. Maybe we can save them. Not my portraits, what do
those
matter, but maybe the pads aren’t completely soaked through. What do you think happened?” “I think someone was angry.” “But why would she—? Oh, no! You don’t think she
saw
—Oh dear, look at the
sofa! Her father is going to kill me.” “Leave it, love. Why don’t you go and check on her?”)

How long would it take for them to figure out what to do? (“She’s not in her room, and the door is wide open.” “Where would she most likely go?” “Well, maybe the garage. She often sits in the Oldsmobile when she’s moping.”)

Not in the garage. Not in the Oldsmobile, “moping.” What next? Search the rooms of the house? (“Would she have run away?” “She never has before. Oh, dear, I’m sure she must have seen us in the kitchen, but how? She had gone to her
room
, she had said
good night
.”

“People,” Finn would reason patiently, “have been known to come out of their rooms after they have said good night and gone into them.”)

If she wasn’t in the car and wasn’t in the house, where would she have gone? The gift of tears would surely have kicked in by now, and Finn would have to perform some manly comforting while organizing what to do next. “I want you to stay here at the house, in case she shows up. I’ll do a bit of reconnaissance work outside.” “Will you take the motorcycle? Or since it’s an emergency I’m sure her father wouldn’t mind if you took the car—” “No, reconnaissance is best done on foot. Now, I want you to stay here, is that agreed?”)

I slouched down at the base of the sassafras tree and rested my feet on the bumpy root below. If someone were to come after me soon, they wouldn’t have to descend all the way into the crater. Or, if I thought it best, I could always scramble down at the last minute, though it wouldn’t be so easy in the dark and with no one to catch me. But for now I would wait here and count how many nature noises I could identify. Cicadas, tree frogs, rustlings of larger bodies on the ground that I didn’t want
to think about right now. Mrs. Jones said when you heard your first cicadas it was just six weeks till the first frost, and they had been going strong for days now. Starling Peake had kept a tree frog in his room for a whole winter; it lived in a fern pot and liked to come out in the daytime and cling to the top of an upholstered chair with its little sucker feet. (“There was something adorably boyish about Starling, even though he let us down badly.”) I had been planning to tell this anecdote to the next inhabitant of Starling’s room, after I had finished with the more important stories of the house.

Distant gunfire exploded from below. Then I realized they were shooting off fireworks in town. To celebrate the bomb, of course. Would my father be a local hero? “There goes Harry Anstruther, he helped make the secret bomb that finally ended the war.” I wasn’t clear whether Oak Ridge would be someplace people would keep working at, now that its purpose had been accomplished. Just as well if it closed down. I loved my father, but he had sounded tempted by the prospect of staying on there, and I knew without ever seeing it that I would hate living there in a little house and going to school like a child on a reservation. Maybe they would send him home with a bonus: big enough so we could fix up Old One Thousand. If he came tomorrow for my birthday he would be surprised by the repaired gutters and our reopening of the circular driveway around the house. If only things hadn’t turned out the way they had tonight. But whose fault was that? I was the one who had been ambushed by the unimaginable. How could people be so double-dealing?

Officially, my birthday wasn’t until late tomorrow. I had “finally decided to make my entrance” at six fifteen in the evening, according to Nonie. The time was recorded by her in blue ink in my baby book.

“Was she very tired when I finally came out?” I always wanted to know.

“You are always tired when you finish having a baby,” Nonie said, “but I would say she was more relieved than anything else.”

“Why?”

“She had been working hard to make you come out for eighteen hours. That’s a long time. But between her contractions she could be quite droll. ‘Honora, I’ve just had an awful thought,’ she said. ‘What if he decides he’d rather not come out?’ ‘Then,’ I said, ‘we’ll have to think of something really special to bribe him with.’ This made her laugh.”

“But where was my father?”

“He was waiting at a proper distance to be informed. I was the one who saw her through. Early on, the nurse came in and said, ‘Mrs. Anstruther, what, pray tell, are you doing in the bed with Mrs. Anstruther?’ ‘Isn’t it obvious?’ I said. ‘I am lying beside her, sharing her labor pains.’”

I liked this story except for one thing. “Why did she have to call me a he?”

“Oh, darling, that’s nothing. It’s just gender shorthand for babies who haven’t been born yet. It’s the same as when people refer to ‘the history of man,’ or ‘mankind.’ She knew you were
you
, all along.”

The fireworks had stopped. Had they run out or gone to get some more? I thought of Mrs. Jones waiting for the pretty fireworks Rosemary liked best and then saying “Stella Reeve, you are not forgotten,” even though people looked at her funny.

What if nobody came after me? Would I have to stay here until my father started searching tomorrow? And if nobody was going to come, what was the point in spending the night with my bottom getting damp from the ground and goose bumps on
my arms and tree bark digging into my shoulders? Maybe I should drag myself back through the undergrowth and walk down Sunset Drive to the village. I would be just as hard to find if I spent the night in the church, which Father McFall was leaving open for people who wanted to thank God or be sorry about the bomb.

Something horrible with a huge wingspan passed directly over my head and I was back in the nightmare where Nonie flew through the air and shrieked before breaking apart at the bottom of the crater, one dismembered leg twisted sideways in its old-lady shoe. Only this time I was the one who shrieked. Why was life so treacherous and unfair? It was enough to make you want to stop being in it.

A circle of light jittered back and forth across the treetops. “Helen? Is that you?”

Don’t answer. Give the false-hearted more time to imagine the world without you in it.

Louder:
“Helen!”

The tree frogs abruptly ceased their night chorus. The bouncing circles of light grew larger. “Are ye in there? I’m sure I heard you.”

Now my own mind was double-dealing me: Had I known all along he was going to come, like the soldier who finally wins the princess out of the coffin before she can destroy any more men? Or had he come too late for it to count?

The light played back and forth over the floor of the crater. “Will I find you down there?” he called. “Or are you wanting me to jump so you’ll have time to hide somewhere else?”

“I’m not hiding, stupid,” I said in my normal voice. “I hurt my leg climbing down.”

“Ah, the Sphinx speaks. Is it bad, the leg?”

“It’s stopped bleeding, but I’m resting it awhile.”

“Good idea.
Where
are you resting?”

“At that sassafras tree.”

The light skittered about until it found my face. “Ah.” The voice could not conceal its relief. “Will I come down?”

“Suit yourself.”

The light shut off. There were no footsteps, just the rustling dark, and then he swung down and was sitting beside me.

“How did you do that?” I said. “I didn’t hear you coming.”

“Didn’t I spend two years training to outsmart my enemy in the dark?”

“Am I your enemy now?”

“Let’s have a look at the injury.” He played the flashlight, which I recognized from our hardware drawer, on my legs. “Which one is it?”

“The one with the blood on it.” I stopped myself from adding “silly.”

“Hmm. Can you walk on it, or will I have to carry you home?” I caught something less than playful in his tone.

“It’s more of a
cut
than anything else. I’d prefer to walk.”

“Up you go, then. And no, you’re not my enemy, but just imagine yourself handcuffed to me as my prisoner of war till I get you home.”

He lugged me up the side of the crater and then towed me ungallantly along behind him. What a disaster this place was after dark. It was hardly possible to imagine my father and Willow Fanning running away at night, even though it hadn’t been such an obstacle course back then. How naïve of Flora to have thought we could “repair” such a jungle as a “surprise” for my father at the end of the summer.

“Do you have to go so fast?” I cried. “You’re hurting my wrist.”

“Sorry,” he said, stopping to let me catch my breath but not letting go of my wrist. “It’s only that I want to get you home. The poor girl is beside herself with worry. She takes it mortally seriously, you know, being left in charge of you, and now she’s terrified she’s let your father down. I had a feeling you might come here, but she thought you could have gone back to that place you walked to. That land on top of the hill that old Mr. Quarles wants to buy.”

“Why on earth would I want to go back there? The loggers have ruined it. That’s why he wants to buy it, he loves making a profit on other people’s losses.”

“Well, you weren’t there to tell us that, were you? She said you seemed to have enjoyed the walk, so we tried that first.”

“Enjoyed! How stupid can you get?”

“A pity, isn’t it, how stupid we all are.”

“I didn’t mean you. But Flora’s simpleminded, you must have realized that by now.”

“I must be simpleminded myself because no, I hadn’t. I think you are confusing simpleminded with simple-hearted.”

“I’m not sure I know what ‘simple-hearted’ means,” I said haughtily.

“When there’s no deceit or malice in your heart. Most of us have some; it protects us. People without it are rare. My friend Barney came close, but he’d built up a layer of sludge to protect his heart against his mother. That’s why Flora is so rare, it’s just her heart she offers, with none of the sludge to wade through.”

“You sound like you love her,” I remarked scornfully, but his answer, if he gave one, was drowned out by a shriek of braking
tires, headlamps dancing crazily toward us, as though someone thought it might be fun to drive into the woods and run us down, then veering off wildly at the last minute to hit something else up ahead with a crack and crush of metal.

“God in Heaven,” said Finn, letting go of my hand.

“It’s because they shot out the streetlight again,” I said, feeling a surge of excitement accompanied by shameful relief. An accident would surely wipe my misconduct from Finn’s memory of this night. “Will we go and help out?” I was starting to talk like him.

“From the sound of things, we need to get an ambulance. You’re going to run up that hill as fast as you can and tell Flora to phone. She’s waiting at the house in case you come back. Tell them exactly where, on Sunset Drive.”

“But I want to help you.”

“Who’ll go and call for the ambulance, then? Who is being simpleminded now?”

“But shouldn’t we go and look first? We don’t even know how badly—”

“Christ almighty, Helen, is it your morbid curiosity we must satisfy before we get help?”

“I need to see!” I screamed. “It might be my father. He’s coming for my birthday! What if he decided to come tonight? You can’t keep me from my father.”

I was already running ahead of him toward the trees broken by the crash. Finn had hurt and insulted me, and I had screamed what I did in order to punish him and win my point, but when I got closer to the wreck it seemed that I had wreaked a hideous magic. The crumpled, steaming car, whose innocent headlights still beamed reliably ahead into the woods, was my father’s Chevy coupe and the numbers on the license plate were the ones I knew by heart.

XXVIII.

Annie Rickets’s claim that her parents were privy to secret information because they worked for the telephone company was not a total fabrication.

My grandfather had installed one of the earliest phone lines in town for Anstruther’s Lodge, and our three-digit number had remained the same, though most people had five-digit numbers by this time. In 1945, you still took the receiver off the hook and an operator, often one whose voice you’d heard before, said, “Number, please.” You said the number—Annie’s was 34598—and the operator said, “Thank you” or “I’ll connect you” (and sometimes both) and she would plug you into the right hole on her switchboard and the number you wanted would ring. If someone didn’t pick up after a certain number of rings, the operator would say, “I’m sorry, but your party doesn’t answer, will you try again later?” Annie’s family was on a party line, and sometimes when we were talking a petulant woman’s voice would break in with “Are you little chatterboxes
ever
going to get off?” “Oh, dry up, you old bag,” Annie once shot back, and the party complained to the operator, who told Annie’s parents. They made her phone the old bag and apologize. Until the dial
system came in, the voice of the operator was an integral part of all telephone intercourse. Talking to callers, the operator could learn about things that were happening and make further calls on her own and thus contribute to the outcome of events.

In an emergency, it was enough to tell the operator what it was and she would plug you into the proper service, or you could just tell her what was the matter and she would contact the service and relay your message.

I had been preparing my message as I ran uphill, a stitch in my side: Operator, you’ve got to help me, my father’s had a bad wreck on Sunset Drive and we need an ambulance quick. She connected me and stayed on the line while the hospital took down the information. Hairpin curve, near the top. Thrown through the windshield. The person with him said a severed artery in the neck.

The ambulance was on its way, but the operator kept talking to me until I told her I really had to go. How old was I? Was there anyone with me? I told her I was eleven and that my father had been one of the people at Oak Ridge helping make the bomb, only we hadn’t known what he was doing, he himself hadn’t known, it was so secret. He had been driving home to be with me on my birthday tomorrow.