When the Wind Blows (10 page)

“Of course, you know the very idea is unthinkable.”

“To whom?” Bill asked, not bothering to conceal the anger he was feeling toward the old woman.

“To everyone,” Edna stated as if it should be obvious. “Diana, with a child?” She snorted her con
tempt. “Impossible!” Her hand fell away from Diana’s shoulder, and she went back to her couch, as if the matter were closed. Silence hung over the room while Diana stared at her mother, her face reflecting the confusion of feelings that was churning inside her. But when she broke the silence, her voice was filled with renewed determination.

“I’m sorry, Mother, but I’m not going to refuse to do it.”

“Then I shall simply have to refuse for you.” Edna turned to Bill Henry. “Diana cannot possibly accept the guardianship,” she said. “I want you to notify the authorities and have them come and get Christie. Tomorrow would be best, I think.”

Bill glanced at Diana, who was now on her feet, her fists clenched, her face pale. Before she could speak, he went to her and put a gently restraining hand on her arm.

“I’m afraid it’s not that simple, Miss Edna,” he said. “The decision isn’t yours to make. Lyons appointed Diana Christie’s guardian, and unless she refuses, the courts will follow his instructions.”

“Against my wishes?” Edna’s eyes glared dangerously.

Bill smiled, enjoying the old woman’s discomfort. “Unless you have a compelling reason why Diana shouldn’t be made guardian, I don’t think you have a say in the matter at all. It’s up to Diana.”

“I see,” Edna said. “Very well, Dr. Henry. You’ve told us what you had to tell us. Now, if you don’t mind, I think we’d like to discuss this between ourselves.”

Diana stood up. Her voice, though shaking slightly, was still strong. “There’s nothing to discuss, Mother.” Then: “Bill, will you come out with me while I tell Christie?”

“Wouldn’t you rather do it by yourself?”

Diana grinned at him crookedly. “One thing Mother’s
right about—I don’t know much about having a child. But I’ll learn. For right now, though, I may need some help, and I could use your bedside manner. Okay?”

“Sure.” Suddenly he wanted to say something to Edna Amber, something to soften her defeat, but as he looked at her, he realized that if she were defeated, it didn’t show in her face. For a second his eyes met those of the old woman, but he quickly broke away from her furious gaze. He followed Diana out of the room, pulling the door shut behind them. A moment later there was a crash as Edna Amber vented her rage on a crystal vase. As she heard the shatter of glass Diana’s only reaction was a tightening in her jaws.

6

Edna Amber woke promptly at five o’clock in the morning, as she had every morning for fifty years. Ordinarily she would have propped herself up and spent the next hour reading, but this morning she left her bed immediately and laboriously climbed the stairs to the third floor.

She paused outside the nursery, listening, then unlocked the door and silently let herself into the room. On the daybed, Christie lay sleeping, her arms akimbo, her hair half hiding her face. Edna stood over the bed, looking down into the peaceful face. The past had come back to haunt her, and she was suddenly afraid.

It was hard for her to believe that this tiny child had the power to destroy her, yet she knew it was true. An impulse seized her, an impulse to lift her cane and smash it down into the sleeping face, to wipe away forever the soft blue eyes that reminded her so much of Diana when she had been the same age. But she wouldn’t let herself do it. The child, after all, had done nothing. It was Diana who was to blame, Diana who was insisting that they bring the child into the little world that she had so carefully constructed for them. But in the end it was going to be the child who suffered. One way or another, she knew this child would leave her house.

Her lips tightening with determination, Edna
turned away from the sleeping child and returned to her own room. An hour later, when Diana brought a pot of coffee up to her, Edna was propped up in her bed, a book open on her lap. She set the book aside and smiled at her daughter.

“I suppose I ought to apologize for the vase,” she said. Diana looked at her warily. “Oh, don’t worry—I’m not going to,” the old woman went on. “I suppose I’ve forgotten how, if I ever knew. But I don’t like fighting with you, Diana. I never have.”

“Then let’s not fight,” Diana replied.

“You know as well as I,” Edna went on, as if Diana had not spoken, “that I can’t let that child stay here. Don’t you?”

Diana suddenly felt tired. It was going to start again and go on all day. And the next day, and the next. How long? Until she gave in? But she had always given in to her mother. This time she wouldn’t.

“You can’t take her away from me, Mother. Elliot gave her to me, and she’s mine.”

“If he’d known about you, he wouldn’t have written that will You know that.”

Diana felt panic rising in her. There was nothing wrong with her—nothing at all. Wouldn’t her mother ever leave the past alone?

“That was years ago, Mother. It’s done.”

“Nothing’s ever done,” Edna replied. “The past is all there is, Diana. No matter what you do, or what you pretend, the past is there. You can’t ignore it.”

“You can’t ignore it, you mean!” The words burst from her in a torrent “You won’t let me forget, you won’t let me live, you won’t let me—” She groped for the right words, then found them. Her voice, strident a moment before, was suddenly calm. “You won’t let me grow up, Mother. You want me to be your little girl, until the day you die. But that’s the past, Mother—your precious past. I’m not a little girl anymore. I haven’t been a little girl for forty years. I’m a
woman, Mama, and there’s nothing you can do about it And now I’m going to be a mother, too. A mother—just like you.”

Diana’s eyes, locked to her mother’s, seemed to issue a challenge, then she turned and left the room. Edna, feeling suddenly drained, sagged back against the pillows.

   In the kitchen, Diana began preparing breakfast for herself and Christie. This morning, when she had awakened, she had decided that today was the day her life was beginning again. The funeral was past. Christie was hers now. This morning, she would begin establishing a routine for the child and begin the long process of making Christie her own.

She began preparing breakfast for Christie, unconsciously duplicating the meals her own mother had fed her when she was a child. She set a single place for Christie at the table, and when the little girl appeared a few minutes later, there was a glass of orange juice sitting by itself in front of her chair. Christie stared at it mutely, then looked at Diana.

“Is that all there is?” she asked shyly.

“That’s only the beginning,” Diana told her. “But it’s bad for you to mix your food when you eat it. Start with the orange juice, then you can have your eggs.”

Mystified, Christie drank the orange juice. At the bottom of the glass there was a shapeless, colorless mass of what seemed to be some kind of jelly. Christie stared at it in disgust.

“There’s something in my glass,” she finally said.

“Vaseline,” Diana explained to her, smiling across the room. “It’s very good for you—it lubricates your stomach so you won’t get indigestion.”

Christie felt her gorge rising as she realized she was expected to swallow the glutinous mass. She stared at it for a long time, wishing it would go away.

“Do I have to?”

Diana came to stand beside her. “It’s good for you,” she repeated. “All the time I was growing up I had a tablespoon of Vaseline before every meal. It didn’t hurt me, did it?”

Christie swallowed and reached into her glass with the spoon. “My father never made me eat Vaseline,” she said.

“Maybe your father didn’t love you as much as I do.”

“Christie gazed up into Diana’s face” but Diana was still smiling at her. Yet there was something in the set of Diana’s expression that told her it would be useless to argue. Shutting her eyes and taking a deep breath, Christie thrust the lump of Vaseline into her mouth.

It oozed between her teeth, a flavorless, shapeless bit of slime that she couldn’t swallow no matter how hard she tried. Suddenly she began gagging and ran across the kitchen to throw up her orange juice into the sink.

When she returned to the table, Diana had another spoonful of the stuff waiting for her.

“Don’t try to chew it,” Diana explained. “Think of it as a pill.” Somehow Christie managed to swallow the second dose.

Diana began serving breakfast.

First the eggs, soft-boiled.

Then a piece of toast.

Finally a bowl of cereal.

After what seemed like an eternity, Christie got through the strange meal.

When she was finished, she washed the dishes as Diana watched her, and listened as Diana explained the daily chores that she would be responsible for.

   Edna Amber watched from her window as Diana and Christie crossed the yard and let themselves into the chicken coop. The two of them, she reflected, looked for all the world like mother and daughter, much as she and Diana must have looked years ago.
Except that Christie wasn’t Diana’s daughter. Edna turned away from the window and began to dress.

Half an hour later she took the car keys from their hook by the kitchen door and went to the garage. She tugged at the heavy sliding door and for a moment feared that it wasn’t going to open. Then, with a protesting squeal, it began to move on its metal rollers. Edna pushed it wide, then maneuvered herself into the old Cadillac. She stared at the dashboard, studying it. It had been years since she’d last driven the car, but she told herself it was like swimming: once you learned, you never forgot. She started the engine, pushed the gear shift into reverse, and slowly backed out into the driveway. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Diana, standing in the chicken yard, staring at her.

She ignored her daughter and kept the car steadily moving down the drive until Diana, blocked by the mass of the house, disappeared from her view. In front of the house, she turned the car around, then proceeded down the long driveway. For the first time in nearly twenty years Edna Amber was driving herself to town.

Ten minutes later she eased the car into the noparking zone in front of the town hall, a narrow, two-story clapboard building with a bell tower rising from its roof. The bell was still used to warn the town of fire and to call the volunteers to man the engine. She left the keys in the ignition and wondered exactly what she was going to say to Dan Gurley.

As Edna sat in the old Cadillac the marshal sat in his office, unsurprised that Edna Amber had come to town today. Indeed, when he had seen her drive up, he had smiled to himself, remembering his conversation with Bill Henry the night before. It was the little girl; Edna Amber, he was sure, wanted to talk to him about Christie Lyons.

He was on his feet waiting for her when the door to his office opened and she came in. He offered her his
hand, but she ignored it. Instead she simply seated herself, and for a long moment stared at him.

“I find I need your advice, Daniel,” she began.

“Anything I can do, Miss Edna,” Gurley replied cordially, easing his large frame back into the chair behind his desk.

“It’s not an easy thing,” Edna continued. “It concerns Diana, and the little girl, Christine Lyons.”

Gurley raised his eyebrows. “Is there a problem?”

“The problem, Daniel, is that I want Christie taken somewhere else.”

“I see.” Gurley swung his chair around and stared out the window for a moment. Then, without turning back to face Edna, he spoke. “Is it me you want to talk to, or a lawyer?”

“When it becomes necessary to talk to a lawyer, Daniel, I will,” the old woman said tartly. “I came to you because I thought you could help me. I want to know how to have the child taken away from my daughter.”

Now Gurley swung around to face her again, his usually placid expression knotted into an angry frown. “I thought Bill Henry already explained that to you: it’s not up to you.”

“Dr. Henry told me that. What I need to know is under what circumstances it
would
be up to me. Can you tell me?”

Dan shrugged. “I suppose if you wanted to try to prove that Diana wasn’t competent to raise her, the courts might be inclined to set the will aside.”

“She’s not competent,” Edna stated.

“Are you prepared to go to court to prove it?”

Edna sat silently for a long time, turning the question over in her mind. She had known he would ask it, but had put off deciding how she would answer. Now she could put it off no longer.

“I may be,” she said at last. “I don’t want to hurt my daughter, Daniel, but I feel I have to do what’s right.”

Dan Gurley felt himself getting angry at the old woman. “Right for whom? Diana? Christie Lyons? Yourself?”

Edna’s eyes narrowed, and Dan could see her determination hardening. “For all of us,” she said firmly. “There are things you don’t know, Daniel. Things nobody here knows. I hope they are things I can take to my grave with me. But if that child is allowed to stay in my house, I can’t be responsible for what might happen.”