The Yonahlossee Riding Camp For Girls Part 21

"Beautiful."

He smiled. "Are you supposed to give yourself compliments? I was going to say something else. You're so . . ."

I waited. He pushed his fingers farther into me, and it was such an odd pressure that I loved.

"Exceptional," he said. "Beautiful, too, but there are so many beautiful girls. Be something besides that, Thea."

"All right," I said. "I'll try."

He took himself out and I touched him, but he shook his head. "No, just lie there. Just lie there."

"And be exceptional."

"Yes." He kept his fingers inside me as he touched himself and looked at me until he came, and then he seemed like he was in great pain for an instant, closed his eyes and cursed.

We lay there on the rug together afterward.

"Can I ask you something?"

"Nothing too complicated, please," Mr. Holmes said. He patted my hand. I smiled. Everything was so easy, now. If I could lie right here forever, shut the door on my life and everything it held, I would. In that moment, I would have.

"Thea?" His voice was gentle.

"Mr. Holmes-"

"Jesus. Please call me Henry. I'm begging you."

I turned and faced him. He placed his palm on my torso. "So strong."

"You know Mrs. Holmes knew my mother?"

"Yes."

I waited for him to tense-he rarely spoke of Mrs. Holmes-but he didn't.

"Do you think you'll ever leave?"

He was quiet for a long time. "I'm sorry," I finally said. "Never-"

"No, it's all right. In a way. Will I ever leave Yonahlossee? It's a question I ask myself, of course. In a way I like it here. When I was young all I wanted to do was leave Boston. I hated it there. And then I left." He seemed lost in thought.

"Where did you go?" I asked.

"New Orleans. And then we ended up here. I thought the South would be different. And it was. But not different enough." He turned to me. "But you can never really leave your home, can you?"

"I didn't want to leave," I said. "I loved my home."

He lifted a handful of my hair and inspected it. "You had such long hair when you came here. And then you cut it off, like everyone else." He smiled. "You should remember that the sins of youth seem very far away when you're no longer young."

I said nothing. I thought of my mother, my father, my brother. Sasi. My first pony, before Sasi, dead for years now.

"Do you see your family at all now?" I asked.

He shook his head. "After my father died, Beth and I met my mother in Philadelphia, when Sarabeth was a baby. But since then, no."

"What did you do?"

I must have sounded stricken, because he propped himself up on his elbow and touched my cheek. "Thea, Thea. I didn't do anything. My parents wanted me to be a certain person, and I wasn't that person. I was a great disappointment. But-and this took me years to realize-they were a great disappointment to me as well." He watched me. "Thea, I don't know what you did, but you came here so that your family could forget. So that you could forget, so that when you leave here what happened will have disappeared."

"I ruined my family."

"I doubt that," he said quietly. "If your family was ruined, it wasn't because of you."

"They trusted me."

"Who?"

"My parents, my brother."

"Your brother may have trusted you, but your parents never did. Parents never trust their children. I don't know what happened exactly, and you don't need to tell me. I believed for a long time that I had shamed my family. But it's in a family's best interest to make a child believe that." He spoke quietly, but also firmly. He taught a single cla.s.s at Yonahlossee, an advanced literature seminar that the senior girls took. I wondered if this was how he explained the characters in books to his cla.s.s. It seemed so important to him that I understand what he meant.

I nodded, but said nothing.

"Do you really see? You're sixteen years old. What your family thinks of you seems like everything. But it's not. They have their own interests to protect. I wish I'd known that, how much a family has to protect, how sometimes a child interferes with that."

"You know it now."

"Was that a question? I do. Yes, I do." He paused. "You have a brother, correct? Did they send him away, too?" But they weren't really questions, none of them.

"I have a cousin, too," I said.

"And where is he?"

I shook my head. "I don't know," I said finally.

The light was becoming dim behind the curtains. Mr. Holmes kissed my forehead and held me very close. "So your brother is home. Your cousin is some place unnamed. And you are here. With me." He drew his finger across my lips. "They traded you, Thea. They sent you here and kept your brother." I started to speak, but he shook his head. "Don't believe them," he said very softly. "Don't ever believe what is said about you."

I took his hand and put it in between my legs, and he looked at me uncertainly, and then he understood, and his fingers were cold at first. He knew better than Georgie what to do. He knew how to prop himself up on his elbow, so that he could watch me. He moved his fingers slowly, and I was not embarra.s.sed, or shy to look at him, as I usually was.

"You're very wet, Thea. And exceptional."

There was something in his tone that I couldn't quite place. "Faster, please."

"Certainly."

I touched my b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and closed my eyes. He knew how to lead me very carefully up this path; he would not go too quickly, or slowly. I moaned, which I could do because the house was empty. I bucked against his hand, and he pushed me down, gently. My eyes were closed but I saw anyway-in quick flashes I saw my mother, my brother, Sasi, and then Georgie, Georgie, Georgie-and his hand disappeared, everything disappeared, and there were only bright flashes and my cousin's face.

I opened my eyes and stopped his hand. He was watching me very carefully. I pulled his head onto my chest, and we lay there like that for a while, until I heard the bell ring, and I tried to hold Georgie's face in my mind. It was the first time in a long time I had thought of him and not felt pain.

- So: I knew this would end, I knew Mrs. Holmes would return. It was the end of February. She would be back by mid-March. But I had always been expert at ignoring the unalterable. Sometimes it was as if G.o.d was watching, had narrowed His vision until Yonahlossee appeared, nestled in the mountains. I had wanted something very badly, and then I had gotten it, and the getting kept getting better.

Winter began to disappear. Lifted, like a second skin. Docey took away our comforters from the ends of our beds. Our yellow-and-blue scarves disappeared from our closets, along with our sweaters. We thawed, too; everyone seemed prettier, nicer, fresher in the spring air.

I spent every afternoon at Masters, and our days began to feel like years. It began to feel like we had known each other for a very long time. Mr. Holmes peeled away the layers of Yonahlossee in a way Sissy couldn't. She was one of the girls, she didn't have the vantage point he did. He told me Jettie's drinking was a known problem, that Mrs. Holmes would have sent her away years ago but for Henny, who convinced her that keeping Jettie on was their Christian duty. He told me Yonahlossee was keeping King in exchange for Leona's tuition, which hadn't been paid in over a year. He told me Katherine Hayes's father wasn't doing as well as Katherine thought, that her grandfather had stepped in and paid her tuition; that her uncle had shot himself because he was about to be arrested. He liked the Kentucky girls best because they were the least mannered. And the Florida girls, he'd said, and grinned. I like them, too.

- I came back early from French cla.s.s because I didn't feel well. My stomach was troubling me-cramps, it was that time of the month.

Docey was mopping the floors, her back turned. She was humming some tuneless melody, but I was certain she'd heard me. I waited for her to turn around, acknowledge me, but she drew the mop around and around, over the same spot. From the back she almost looked like one of us.

"Docey?"

She turned then, but said nothing.

"I'm going to lie down for a bit." I stopped short of asking her if this was fine.

She nodded, and watched me while I stepped out of my boots, tiptoed across the damp floor. She didn't offer to help. My stockings were wet, now. I lay back on my bed and peeled them off, surprised by the feel of my bare legs against the quilt. I closed my eyes and pretended to drift off.

Yesterday Mr. Holmes was melancholy, told me I'd forget this place. But I couldn't imagine.

Mr. Holmes's breath tasted like gin. Juniper berries, he'd told me, the perfume of the evergreens. If we had been married and a wedding portrait taken, we would not have seemed an unusual couple. Mr. Holmes was thirty-one. Women married men twice their age all the time. His hair was thick and glossy-Eva had joked she'd die for his hair-his carriage boyish, his lips very red. I carried my youth in the way I moved, in my speech and furtive gestures. But I didn't look young when I stood still.

A sharp sound. I sat up, disoriented. My mouth was dry.

"You were saying things," Docey said. She was cleaning under Mary Abbott's desk.

"Was I?" I got up and poured myself a drink of water. "What?"

"Nonsense. Nonsense words."

For a second I was frightened I'd revealed something. It had been a week since I'd seen Leona in the Square. Now we avoided each other, as if we had come to some mutual decision. I'd gone over and over my comings and goings from Masters. There was no possible way she knew anything. I'd thought of Emmy, too, but Leona wasn't the kind of girl to ever talk to a servant. I liked to think that there was some sort of mutual understanding between the two of us, that she knew I knew about King, that I felt sorry for her, a pure form of pity. But Leona wouldn't want to be pitied.

"Do you know Emmy, Docey? From Masters?"

She smiled, almost smirked. I was about to ask again when she answered: "She's my sister." She turned to face me, then looked me in the eye for the first time that day. Her lazy eye darted crazily.

"I didn't know."

Docey went back to her work. "I didn't know," I repeated. I should have known. I watched Docey drag her rag over the desk, carefully, paying attention to the finials and k.n.o.bs-carefully, but quickly-and knew suddenly that they spoke of us.

"But your hair is brown." I paused. "You don't look alike." And this was true: Emmy was pretty, and Docey wasn't.

"Do you look like your sister?" Her tone was pointed.

"I don't have a sister."

"None?" She seemed surprised.

I shook my head. "I have a brother. And we do look alike, we're twins."

"A twin?" she asked. It was the first time I had ever heard her sound pleased. "What's that like?"

I smiled. "It's all I've ever known," I said. "It's like there's another you, out there."

"I don't know if I'd like that."

"You wouldn't like it or not like it, if you had it. It would just be . . . how things are."

Docey said nothing. I watched her lazy eye. I wondered if it could be fixed, if there was some corrective method available, or if people with lazy eyes simply had to live with them. I wondered what she saw, right now-did my face stay still? Did it move, wildly? But of course Docey would never be able to fix her eye.

I realized I'd been staring. "How many siblings do you have?" I asked, and then thought she might not know what that meant. I flushed. "Brothers-"

"Twelve," she said. "Twelve," she repeated.

I was astonished. I couldn't even name twelve relations. Between Georgie's family and mine, there were only seven.

Docey smiled at the shock on my face.

"What do they do?" I asked.

"What do they do?" she repeated. She shrugged, and I understood how vile Yonahlossee must appear to Emmy and Docey. Mary Abbott's father, the preacher, had written of two little boys who lived not far from here, up in the mountains. They had died from eating poisonous berries. All the other girls thought they simply hadn't known they were poisonous, but of course they had; in Florida I had known exactly which berries I could eat, which would send me straight to death. And surely these boys had spent as much time outside as I had, or more. They'd eaten them because they were starving. I wanted to apologize to Docey, but for what? Luck, fortune, fate.

She'd turned away from me anyway, bent down, and wound up the woven rug beneath the desk into a tight roll. She seemed to linger. I helped Mother clean, I was familiar with the desperation it entailed, born of futility. It was a fixed system of entropy, like Father had explained by tossing a coin.

"Do you like to clean?"

Docey laughed. It was a stupid question. Mother liked to clean, enjoyed ordering her world like that. But this wasn't Docey's world; it was ours. I turned to slip my shoes on and then leave, but then she spoke.

"I don't mind it." But she was lying, we both knew that.

- He was quiet today, sat almost mournfully with his gin. His s.h.i.+rt was b.u.t.toned crookedly, and though Mr. Holmes was somber, his s.h.i.+rt made him seem playful.

"Let's go out back." I rose and Mr. Holmes followed. I knew he would, he was in his pa.s.sive mood.

It was a little bit thrilling to walk through the parts of the house I'd never seen-the dining room, to a formal sitting room whose French doors opened onto the porch. There was a table next to the window, heavy with gla.s.s bottles, their necks slender. I went to it. The sight, up close, was a marvel-various exotic plants that I'd never seen before, growing in bottles like model s.h.i.+ps.

"Beth's." Mr. Holmes had come up behind me. I remembered that Mrs. Holmes loved to garden. He picked one up. "She sends away for the seeds."

I imagined all the attention they must require, the special tools, the careful nurturing. I had not thought Mrs. Holmes capable of magic like this.

The back porch was clearly built for entertaining-there was a bar in the corner, and cl.u.s.ters of small tables surrounded by chairs. I imagined fathers of alumna who came out here with Mr. Holmes to admire the view and talk-about what? The purpose of a place like this. The goal of women's education. Things that none of us girls ever spoke about.

I didn't want to be here anymore, where fathers came and spoke of their daughters with Mr. Holmes. "Let's go outside," I said.

"I have such a headache."

"The fresh air will help," I said.

He opened the screen door to the woods that lay beyond the porch. Outside, the footing was rocky, but it was fine because Mr. Holmes had to offer me his hand, and he seemed reluctant to touch me, today.