On Little Wings (10 page)

“Why?”

“A few reasons. He didn’t talk much. Almost never. Nathan was born with a cleft lip and a cleft palate. The surgery to correct it went wrong and he needed two more surgeries before they got it all fixed. Then he had his tonsils out when he was three. So people kept thinking his speech delay was due to his medical conditions. But when they finished fixing his mouth and throat, he just stayed silent. He could talk, but he didn’t.”

That explained the odd scar. “So what was wrong?” I asked, watching her face soften as she spoke about him.

“We’ll never know. He wouldn’t interact with people. But I did a few tests on him and quickly saw that he was not delayed. I suspected something along the lines of Autism, but I couldn’t be sure because he wouldn’t speak to me. He didn’t fit the typical symptoms. At any rate, he got my attention. I kept going back to work with him. His mother was young, poor, living with a deckhand who was always gone on the boats. She didn’t know what to do with him.” Sarah stood up, clearing our plates as she talked. I followed suit, taking the leftovers to the counter. “And then one day I caught him. I brought some books to his house that had interesting pictures. I had an animal book, a book about space, some others. I laid them out on the floor and realized I left my notepad in the car so I ran out to get it. When I came back he was pouring over the book about space,” She smiled, just begging me to ask why that was significant. I took her bait.

“And he really likes space? Physics genius?”

“No,” she said triumphantly, “he was looking at a page … with no
pictures
. He was
reading
!” No mother could beam more proudly than she did. Sarah stacked the dishes in the sink and asked, “Do you want to eat dessert outside tonight?” I agreed quickly and she returned to her story while she cut two large pieces of chocolate cake and carried them out to the porch. Thank goodness they don’t put lobster in
that
.

“After a month he would whisper a few words to me. It is a very long story, but to make it short, he finally let me in. He started talking to me and his depth of understanding unsettled me, even after all my schooling for gifted children.”

Outside, the fresh sea breeze moved gently, caressing my face. I ate slowly, easily picturing the things Sarah said. “The strange thing is that Nathan wouldn’t use his own words. He quoted. Not exact quotes. He mingled them with his own thoughts until I could barely tell his own words from the words of others. He filled his conversations with snatches of things he read. He borrowed descriptions, metaphors, even dialogue.” Sarah stopped talking to take another bite and I filled in the quiet.

“How old was he? When he started quoting?”

“Not old. I didn’t pick up on it until he was almost five. But the more he read the more apparent it became. A preschooler talking about “life being a damned muddle” is hard to ignore. That was Fitzgerald, by the way,” she said as an aside. “Do you know how hard it was to figure out who he was quoting without the internet?” She asked. “Nowadays I just type the words into Google. Fifteen years ago I had to research. Half the things I suspected of being quotes I never even found.”

“Does he still do it?” I asked as I reluctantly reached my last bite.

“No. Not unconsciously. If he quotes now it is on purpose. It is my theory – and I am confident that I am correct,” she cocked her head as if challenging naysayers, “that he had to borrow words until his vocabulary and fluency caught up to his thoughts. He just didn’t have the skill to express himself the way he wanted to. Needed to. So he stood on the shoulders of giants.” Sarah set her plate on the wide porch rail and leaned back in her chair, closing her eyes to soak up the low, flat rays of the setting sun. I could see the remnants of her dancing days in her leisurely, rhythmic movements. When she brought her hands up to sweep her hair off her cheek, even that action was poised, just slow enough to make her fingers look like they floated effortlessly through the air. Sarah would never be a person to “flop” or “sprawl” or “hunch.” Some innate dignity, devoid of haughtiness, gave her an air of refinement.

“So the game,” she said brightly, remembering her original topic. “I wanted him to see the difference between what he read and what he thought so I gave him a daily assignment to find his favorite words and read them to me. It evolved into our nightly readings.”

Sarah explained their non-game as the motion lights over the garage blinked on, chasing back the falling darkness, and catching Charlie in the act of hunting down a frog. “There are no rules. We each pick a line or passage out of something we read that day – be it cereal box or Shakespeare – and recite it to each other. Nothing long. Sometimes three words. Sometimes a paragraph.”

I asked her if that was all – it didn’t seem like much of an activity – and she said the only other thing was a brief discussion. Sometimes about the words. Sometimes about life in general. “So, how do you choose? What sort of things do you read?” I asked.

“Anything. There’s no qualifiers. If it stands out for any reason, if you find it worth a second thought, you can read it. Funny, serious, nonsensical. Doesn’t matter.” She leaned forward, her face open in invitation, “Would you like to join us? Tomorrow? We’re skipping tonight because I wanted to spend it just with you.”

I smiled, snuggling into the fresh, salty night. The memory of sputtering in the sea on my bottom interrupted my peaceful mood and constricted my chest. Could I really look at him again? If he came every night, could I avoid it? “Why night?” I asked, my errant thoughts stalling. Sarah tilted her head in confusion and I clarified. “Why do you only meet at night?”

She closed her eyes and inhaled. “All the reasons. Work is over, school is over, there’s nothing else to do. Maine nights can get pretty cold and long. I can’t tell you how often the cable goes out. And our guard is down. Ever notice how you feel more self-conscious in the daytime? Everything is so logical in daytime. So literal. But at night,” she opened her hand to the sky like she was releasing the stars into the firmament, “you just believe more. You think more. You say more.”

I followed an invisible path from her fingertips to the darkening sky and saw the faint, glimmer of daylight dying. “I’ll do it,” I said quietly as the sea’s song called the stars out of the blackness. I wouldn’t have agreed to spend time with the boy an hour ago when the humiliation was fresh, when my clothes were dripping – when the sun was beaming. But here, in the dimness, I let my guard down. I believed more. I thought more. I closed my eyes and listened to the ghosts of words in the air.

All through that night voices weaved in and out of my dreams, replaying the spent day: My father’s eager questions when I called home after dessert mixed with Cleo’s sulking for taking so long to phone and her unsympathetic laughter when I told her about my ordeal with the child prodigy. The clipped shouts of the boaters jumped in between Sarah’s soft narratives and even the nameless photographs on the stair hallway flashed like an album flipping its pages. I woke cocooned in my grandmother’s quilt as a wet, gray fog curled against the window panes.

The house was eerily silent. I tiptoed downstairs in case Sarah was still asleep but her room was empty. The beach seemed the only possible place to look so I zipped up my sweatshirt and picked my way through the cold grass. The fog stuck to the water, growing thicker as I neared the noisy waves. At last I made out Sarah’s hazy shape perched on a boulder by the water’s edge. She called out good morning in a surprised voice and I waved, concentrating on my steps. No falling in the ocean today.

“Did I wake you?” she asked apologetically. “I couldn’t sleep so I came to sit for a while.”

“No, I never heard you. I just couldn’t find you so I decided to look here.” I took a chilly seat on a smaller rock beside hers.

“I’m glad you did. You’ll want to see this.” I asked her ‘
See what?’
and she pointed up to the brightest part of the gray sky. “The sun will burn off all this fog as soon as it gets going and we’ll have a beautiful day. Crystal clear. I thought we’d go into town, maybe even take the ferry over to the island, see some of the tourist towns.” We discussed plans enthusiastically for a few moments before we both lapsed back into quiet, looking over the ocean. Stakes of blinding light sliced through the clouds and hit the rippling water. “There it goes…” Sarah said, and sure enough, the cloying mist spread like a great bird extending its wings, lifted off the sea, and disappeared. It took no more than ten minutes. “You never get used to her,” Sarah commented in awe. “She flattens our houses, sinks our ships, wears out our men, and still, we wake up just to look at her.”

I gazed at Sarah, more mesmerized by her words than the ocean. A question mounted in my chest, overflowed to my lips. “Then why did my mother leave?” Gulls cried raucously and fell through the sky as Sarah turned her head away from me. I watched the locks of her rumpled morning hair flutter against her shoulders.

“She couldn’t forgive us. Couldn’t forgive me. We all failed her. It took me a long time to see that.” Sarah turned back to me, a plaintive look in her eyes. “I can’t tell you the entire story, Jennifer, because I don’t know it all. I was gone for a lot of it. I’ve waited twenty years to hear what really happened. But I can tell you what I know.”

I looked squarely into her eyes and then down at my toes which pulled up, to avoid the spray. “Do other people know? Am I the only one who has no idea what happened here?” That question was indefinably important to me.

Sarah inhaled thoughtfully and pushed her lips together. “Lots of people have a piece. You might be the first one, oddly enough, in the right situation to put the puzzle together.” She looked harder at me like there was a riddle to solve in my face. “Imagine that. The one who didn’t even know there was a puzzle,” she murmured before she scooped up her shoes from the floor of broken seashells and slid down from her rock. “But you should at least have a good breakfast in you before we delve into the dark mysteries of your family, agreed?” She smiled brightly.

“Fair enough,” I agreed and stood, brushing off the seat of my pajamas.

“Good! Lobster and eggs?” She laughed before I could answer. “Truly, the best of Maine is wasted on you, Jennifer,” she called as she sprinted lithely over the slick terrain like a skipping child. I stumbled less gracefully and caught up to her when she paused at the top of the beach. “I might be able to tell you why she left, but I can’t tell you how.” Her inscrutable expression swirled with emotion as she looked at me.

We walked back to the house and Sarah made an egg soufflé while I showered and dressed. While Sarah dressed I perused the bookshelf, wondering how to pick a line for the reading that night when two sharp thumps resounded on the porch steps and the screen door opened with a loud click.

“Sarah?” A girl’s voice called loudly. “Sarah.” This time louder with impatience.

The water was still running in Sarah’s room so I crossed the living room and opened the front door. A little girl, no more than five, with curly red hair frowned at me. Before I could say a word she blurted, “Are you Jennifer?”

“Yes,” I answered, studying her strange eyes. They looked Asian in shape, but they were a wild mix of yellow and green. And who ever heard of an Asian red-head? With
curly
hair? “But I don’t know who you are.”

“I’m Darcy,” she said, clearly annoyed at my thick-headedness. She rolled her eyes when I continued to look perplexed and said slowly, as if I spoke another language, “Darcy
Cass
.” She took a deft step past me, pushing me aside to make room for herself while she looked around. “Where’s Sarah?”

“In the shower. Did she know you were coming? Are you here alone?” I stuck my head back out the front door and scanned the street and yard looking for an adult. Nobody.

She walked past me and flopped on to the couch, her short legs sticking straight out in front of her. “I always come,” Darcy said. She looked at me curiously and I returned the stare. “Nathan said you weren’t pretty,” she said flatly.

Her words had the force of a physical blow, but I managed to hide the shaking in my voice. “You know Nathan?”

“He’s my brother,” she said the entire sentence in the exact voice that a person would say “Duh!” I didn’t like this kid any more than I liked her brother.

“But
I
think you’re pretty,” she said, giving me her first smile, complete with two dimples that reminded me of Cleo.

Okay, a little better. “Thank you.” The shower turned off and I breathed a sigh of relief. I could go get Sarah and let her deal with the little one. Then realizing this might be my last minute alone with the girl I spun around and said quietly, “Your brother said I wasn’t pretty?” She nodded with glee. “Why would he just say that?”

Darcy bobbed her legs up and down against the cushions and said, “Because Claude kept asking about you and kept asking if you were pretty and he said ‘knock it off. Shut up. No.’ And he said that you were scared of crabs.” Her words rushed out without pause and my face went red.

“I’m
not
afraid of crabs.” I whispered vehemently. “Who’s Claude?”

“My biggest sister.” Darcy smiled, enjoying the question game.

“Your big sister asked about me?” None of this made sense yet.

“No. My
biggest
sister. Hester is my big sister and Claude is my
biggest
sister.”

“How many of you are there?” I asked.
Are you all this rude?

“Four,” we answered simultaneously, because I suddenly remembered Sarah saying she cooked for her friend with four children. That made Darcy giggle and I couldn’t resist smiling back. Manners completely aside, I’d rarely seen a more adorable child, despite having taught swimming lessons to hundreds of kids in the Optimist Club for two years.

Before Darcy could say anything else, Sarah appeared in her robe. “I thought I heard you, Darcy,” she said as Darcy sprang up to hug her. “Are you being good?” Sarah asked in a doubtful tone.