Follow Me (39 page)

Penelope lowered her feet back to the floor of the car. “Thank you so much,” she replied, trying to say it in a way that would
let Mrs. Peabody know that she really meant it.

And so she came home, returned to the place where she was wanted, where she’d been sorely missed, where she belonged. During
their brief visits together over the past three years, Sally had continued to think of her darling daughter as a hotheaded,
irresponsible child. But now it was impossible for her to ignore the fundamental changes: Penelope had transformed from a
willful little girl into a young lady eager to find a purpose in life. She was as pretty as ever, a natural beauty, though
not as eye-catching as she could have been since she refused to wear makeup or the kind of clothes that would have accented
her good looks. If anything, she seemed to prefer to mask herself in plainness. But there was something else that made her
stand out. She seemed to notice more and to appreciate experience with a great depth of feeling, as though she’d just been
released from a long incarceration.

Three long years. Was Sally still hot on that boss of hers? Penelope wanted to know. Well, if
hot
was the best word… all right,
hot
would do, sure, that described how Arnie made Sally feel, though really they were like an old married couple by now. He even
came by for a visit once in a while and was planning to come for lunch on Sunday, if Penelope didn’t mind.

Of course she didn’t mind that her mother was in love! She’d come home three years older and more capable of sympathy, and
with her return she offered her mother a satisfying sense of completion. Penelope was three years taller, smarter, curvier.
Three years wiser. Three years closer to being a full-fledged adult. Three years stronger and more desirous of a certain kind
of attention. Three years toughened by her father’s insults, and she was ready to take on the world.

She was still young enough to be uncertain about how to focus herself. She tried out different crushes on boys in the same
way that she tried out new foods. She worked to make up for her slack habits in Litchfield and took to studying late into
the night, long after her mother had gone to sleep. She started drinking coffee and reading the newspaper in the morning before
school. She became increasingly absorbed by political causes and helped fellow students draft speeches against the war. Soon
she was giving the speeches herself at rallies, standing on the platform in Crescent Park and listing the benefits of peace.

Why, look, that was Sally’s darling girl shouting into the megaphone, making sure that her appeals would be heard above the
sounds of wind and traffic. She spoke with passion and eloquence. Why, that was Sally’s daughter stealing the show! So what
if the show didn’t involve singing and dancing? It was a start, wasn’t it? You didn’t have to be a fortune-teller to predict
that this hometown girl would enjoy a life of renown. Sally, front and center, led the crowd in the applause.

Penelope Bliss. She was Sally’s daughter, yes, she belonged to Sally. She’d been away, but she was back again, and wow, just
look at her. What a beauty, what a sweetheart, the boys would go mad for her, she’d have her pick of the crop. First, though,
she wanted to go to college. What a good girl, a bookish, determined girl. Sure, she should go to college. She should learn
something useful as a fallback, Sally advised. Even though she wouldn’t need a fallback. When it came to the qualities that
would earn her the kind of prominence Sally dreamed of for her, Penelope had a surfeit. She was lovely, poised, and articulate,
and she had made up her mind to flourish. And though she hadn’t inherited the special quality of voice that distinguished
her mother’s singing, her confidence and determination more than compensated for her lack of musical skills. She was born
to be a star.

Except she didn’t want to be a star. It was no secret that Penelope didn’t share her mother’s aspirations for her. After all
the years of sullen moods and sudden rages, she’d become a girl empowered by her sense of her own moral conviction. She’d
grown independent under her father’s jurisdiction. It followed that she didn’t need him anymore. Soon she wouldn’t need her
mother. She already had all those boys to flirt with, a Will, then a Jessie, and then an Abe, all of them with stringy hair
down to their shoulders. Sally would have liked to recommend a good shampoo, but she kept her mouth shut. The joys she’d assembled
in her life were delicate, and she had learned the hard way that a harsh word could be enough to disrupt everything.

How pleased she was that her daughter had decided to come home. While Penelope figured out how to put her God-given talents
to good use, it was Sally’s task to make sure that Penelope understood how deeply she was loved.

Time passed too quickly, and before Sally could catch hold and yank it back, it was January 1974. How did that happen? Penelope
had been awarded a scholarship to attend a college downstate, Arnie and Sally were still having their affair, Arnie’s wife,
the poor woman, was stone-blind, and Mr. Botelia, Sally’s landlord, became ill with pneumonia and died at the end of the month.
When his wife sold the building to a real estate company, Sally was forced to move.

She bought a ranch house a few blocks away on a side street — a small house, just two bedrooms, no garage, and it needed a
new roof. Still, it was snug, with an efficient furnace. Sally appreciated her good fortune and never complained. She liked
the way the morning sun came into the bedroom and woke her up. She liked the way the cardinals hopped from one branch of the
forsythia to another, knocking off the wet clumps of snow from a late winter storm. She liked getting dressed and looked forward
to seeing Arnie at the office. She liked the soaking rains of spring and the thunder in the summer.

La-di-da… walk with me… It’s simple to wish… I got you good
. She would never stop taking pleasure in the action of singing, even if there was nobody listening.
Turn around, Lou, turn —

Hey, Sally, don’t you hear the doorbell? Someone has come calling. Yes, you have a visitor waiting on the stoop, a pale woman
standing at a slant, wearing a boxy plaid dress with a green shawl draped over her shoulders, her brown hair streaked with
silver and pulled back in a tight bun. Her lips were thin, unpainted, and they stretched like elastic as she blurted, “Sally
Werner!”

Sally didn’t mean to imply with her stunned silence that she didn’t recognize the woman standing there. She didn’t mean she
wasn’t glad to see her. She wanted to say… she didn’t know what she wanted to say and couldn’t utter a word, she was so perplexed,
as though somehow she were suddenly cognizant of an omen’s import even while she was still unaware of its message.

It was June 3, 1974, twenty-seven years to the day since Sally had run away from her childhood home, and Trudy was standing
on the doorstep asking her sister, “Don’t you know who I am?”

I
t turned sharply colder last night, and when I went back to the gorge this morning there were wet flurries blowing through
the channel. Steam from the brewery smokestacks hovered below the ceiling of gray clouds. The wind came in chilly gusts, and
I had to cover my ears with my hands to warm them so at first I didn’t hear the tapping, not until it was close behind me.
I turned to see an old man approaching, a little bald man dragging his plastic cane to the side, bouncing the tip against
the metal spokes of the rail. He nodded in greeting as he passed me and continued along the bridge. His tight-lipped smile
gave me the impression that he was holding back a guffaw, as though he were absorbed by some hilariously impolite thought.

I shifted my gaze back to the gorge. I had no loose change in my pocket, so I couldn’t toss a coin into it as I like to do.
But after a quick look around I found a gull feather beside one of the benches. I threw it into the air, but the wind blew
it right back onto the bridge. I tried again, dropping it from the far side of the bridge this time, and watched as the feather
flew skyward and spun in the wind. The barbs seemed to turn around the axis of the shaft that hovered magically, as though
submerged in water, like a sprig of seaweed turning with the force of the current.

After a moment a strong gust blew the feather farther away from me, tugging it in one direction and then another and eventually
dropping it onto the surface of the river.

The water level is low after a summer of drought, and the mossy sheen that’s usually visible toward the bottom of the gorge
walls has long since dried up, leaving its dusty imprint behind. Only a thin thread of water streams down the cliff face of
the falls. The gorge looks emptier than ever, too vast to fill up. It doesn’t seem possible that the river could have risen
high enough to reach the embankment wall at the Beebee parking lot. But I’ve been reminded that what is hardest to explain
can be easy to imagine — and this morning, even with the flurries blowing and the rocky borders of the riverbed peeking out
through the shallow water at the bottom of the gorge, I imagined my father spinning in the river like that feather spun in
the sky, propelled upward by the river’s back surge.

Until her death my grandmother maintained that a miracle caused the strange flood that saved my father’s life, and in her
last months she became increasingly absorbed by the superstitions that supported this belief. It was the river angels who
made the Tuskee flow backward that day, she said. God summoned them to do His will.

Psss, shhh, come here,
my grandmother would say, motioning to me even if I was already sitting close to her bed.
I want to tell you something,
she’d say.
The little angels in the river, they only pretend to be a legend. They are really very clever. Oh yes, sure, they know what’s
what. They know what would happen to them if word got out. The race to catch them would be on. They’d be caught, they’d be
sold, and yes, sure they’d disappear. They’d all disappear.
She told me that I should never let anyone know that there were tiny angels in the river. It would be all right for me to
write about them, she said, but I must give the impression that they don’t really exist.

In the last days of her life, I’d sit by my grandmother’s bed and listen to her speculate about the miracle that had saved
my father’s life. Sometimes she’d speak matter-of-factly, as if she assumed it wouldn’t have occurred to me to doubt her.
Other times she’d ramble, or speak with bemusement, as if she were recounting a dream. But she’d always end up acknowledging
that there was much she didn’t know about the legendary creatures the native people called Tuskawali, and she left it up to
me to find out what I could. She wanted me to trace their route from the source, to locate the spring that bubbled up from
the aquifer on a slope in the Endless Mountains and to follow the creek as it spread through the meadow flats. I was supposed
to look for the Tuskawali in the clear pools or basking on sun-warmed rocks. If I was persistent, I’d find them. Sure. I’d
find them if they let me find them. My grandmother wanted me to study them and figure out how they survived beneath the winter
ice. Maybe they hibernate in the mud, my grandmother suggested. Or maybe they swim out of the river, across the lake, east
through the seaway, and into the Atlantic Ocean, and there they head south, journeying to some secret coral paradise. How
long do they live? she wondered. Do they live for all eternity, like true angels? What do they do as the river picks up sewage
and chemical waste? How do they protect themselves against pollution? Maybe some of them grow extra hands and legs, maybe
they go blind as they make their journey down the Tuskee, or maybe they never even make it to the lake.
Those poor creatures,
my grandmother would say.
What did they do to deserve us?

The truth is, I’ve never found any Tuskawali, though not for lack of trying. I may not ever know for certain why the river
ran backward that day my father tried to drown himself. I really can’t verify that the river ran backward at all, since all
I have to go on is my grandmother’s questionable account. My father himself doesn’t remember the flood. He doesn’t even remember
falling from the bridge through the chasm of the gorge. From the moment when he slipped off the rail until less than a minute
later, when he awoke in a puddle across from the brewery, he has no recollection.

I do know what happened to him subsequently, though. Since I first heard from him, I’ve probably come to know more about him
than I would if he’d been there while I was growing up.

Now that I understand the reasons for his absence, I understand why it took him so long to get in touch. There was no question
in his mind that he was sparing my mother and me more turmoil by staying out of our lives. Thanks to my grandmother, he was
convinced that nothing would be gained by trying to repair the damage he’d done.

My grandmother hadn’t wanted to drive him away. She did her best to resist her initial suspicions about my father. Yet she
couldn’t keep herself from following the trail of clues that led to the truth. And of course once she had proof, she was obligated
to tell Abe who he really was.