The Yonahlossee Riding Camp For Girls Part 31

"No, Thea. It's ours."

"It's not mine." I rose, and walked over to the window, peered over his shoulder. The sun was rising, and street sweepers were making a neat job of clearing the sidewalks. "There's all these people in the world, and we are only two of them. Mother and Father thought they were punis.h.i.+ng me, by sending me away. It was a reward, to stay here. But they were wrong. It was not a punishment."

"You learned so much, at camp." I could smell his breath, the particular tang it had whenever he hadn't slept long enough.

"I learned enough," I said. I took his hand, and squeezed it. "You should leave, too. Our lives are elsewhere."

He laughed. "Where?"

I shrugged. "Who knows? But G.o.d grants happiness only to those who seek it."

- The next day there was a knock on my door at noon. I was awake-I'd fallen asleep as the sun rose-but not dressed. I opened the door and found Mother, Sam behind her. He looked fresh, alert, and I wondered when or if he had slept after leaving my room. He caught my eye and looked away, and then Mother did, too, and I realized neither she nor my brother wanted to see me in my nightclothes. Of course.

"Shall we dine?" Mother asked, eyes averted, and I told them I'd be dressed in fifteen minutes, though it only took five. I waited on the edge of the bed, in a dress that was too small for me, covered my knees just barely and pinched my arms. It was pretty, though, white polka dots against brown fabric. I had picked it out from a catalogue last spring; it had arrived after I'd left. I had forgotten the dress existed. But there it was, hung in my closet by Mother, the plain fact of it greeting me after nearly a year. It had been expensive, and I'd wanted it so badly because of Georgie, because I wanted him to see me in it. Georgie's face came to me so quickly, then. It was all another life, I told myself while I waited on the edge of the bed, because I sensed Mother wanted me to wait for her, did not want me to come find her. All of it another life.

"Your hair," she said, in the elevator, held her hand flat and brushed the bottom, blunt edge of it, where Eva had cut it straight across. "It's pretty, Thea. Very pretty." I felt my cheeks flame; I couldn't help it. I turned my head, but Mother had already seen.

She and Sam and I ate a mainly silent meal in the hotel restaurant, which felt cavernous because it was so empty. Sam seemed distracted, watching the one other patron-an older man, dressed in a suit-reading and rereading the menu. Mother was subdued. She had not seemed subdued in her letters.

She barely touched her food, but made Sam finish what she could not, for fear the restaurant staff would think her greedy, wasteful. I had never before seen her want so badly to place herself in the good graces of strangers, and I realized that this was one of the rewards of hiding herself away from the world: she did not have to care. And it was exhausting, caring. I had gotten used to it, at Yonahlossee, but all the wondering of what other people thought of you-it could weigh on your mind. But sometimes it weighed pleasantly, when someone admired or wanted you. Mother had starved us, in that way.

I sipped my iced tea, which was not as good as Yonahlossee's, which Mother and Sam had never tasted, would never taste. Mother watched Sam closely as he gobbled down her sandwich-his appet.i.te seemed to have doubled in my absence-and her eyes darted back and forth from the waiter to her son. I almost could not believe it, except that I did. Our lives were unimaginable to us; if a year ago a fortune teller had read our future to Mother, she would have laughed, uproariously. She would have closed the door, then, and sealed us off again. But here we sat, our home dismantled, and Mother cared, deeply, about the opinions of a waiter, a waiter whose name she would never know.

"That was filling," she said, when our table had been cleared, "I think I'll go rest my eyes," and I realized that she worried about small things now because the big things had turned her sick. Which might be, I saw, to my advantage: no one had mentioned my disgraceful exit from camp.

I knocked softly on Sam's door after lunch, but he didn't answer. I thought perhaps he was sleeping. I hoped so, hoped that he wasn't avoiding me. He had been nice enough at lunch, but distant. I spent my afternoon writing letters: to Sissy and Eva and even a brief one to Mary Abbott. I was trying to be kind to her, as so many girls had been kind to me at Yonahlossee.

Father knocked on my door at six o'clock, promptly, the same time as the church bells down the street rang out, reminding me of Yonahlossee. We ate at six o'clock there, too, though Father of course would not know that.

Sam stood behind him, just like before.

"Your mother is not feeling well," Father said, and stepped aside so I could walk by, as if I were a lady. I met Sam's eye and understood that they were taking turns with us.

After we had ordered, Father asked me what I had learned at camp.

"Learned?"

"What did you read? Who did you study?"

I laughed, and Father looked at me strangely. "I learned to be around other girls," I said. Father nodded. This is what they had wanted, after all; he had told me so in his first letter. You will learn how to behave around other children there, Thea. I hope that is not too much to ask. I would never forget it. But Father did not remember what he had written; he looked vaguely disturbed, as if I were mocking him. Which I suppose I was, but not in the way he thought.

"Did you like it?" he asked. "After you settled in?" Sam looked at me, too; they wanted to know. They wanted me to tell them a story. But I would not. Yonahlossee was mine.

"I grew to love it," I said.

- The next morning, both Mother and Father appeared at my door, Sam behind them in his normal place.

"We thought we'd go for a drive," Father said. He smiled faintly, in his way. "And see our house."

Mother clung to Father as we made our way through the hotel, and s.h.i.+elded her eyes against the sun when we stepped outside. Sam looked out the window, at the shops we pa.s.sed, at Church Street Station, where I had arrived just the day before yesterday, at the groves of oranges the city eventually gave way to. The country, I thought; we'll live in the country again, because Mother couldn't bear to live in town. No one spoke in the car, not a single word, no one even tried, including myself. Now I was used to chatter, to noise, to the constant hum of girls' voices; I felt ready to burst, to explode this silence.

After a little while Father turned down a narrow road, and then turned again, after a minute or so, and I saw where my family would be living. It was pretty, Spanish-style white stucco topped by a red tile roof. Thick palm trees surrounded the house in a neat square. It was half the size, I estimated, of our home, but that house had been so big, too big, really, for the four of us.

"Is there a barn?" I asked, though it didn't matter.

"No," Father said, and led us inside, up the front steps. The door was locked. We had never, in all my life, locked our doors. But now it would be done, from this point on. We stepped inside the empty house, into an empty room, the walls stark white. I could see how it would be pretty, though, with Mother's touch. The ceilings were high, the staircase wrought iron, the wood floors even and richly brown.

"It's pretty," I said, turning to Father, and I could see that he still wanted to please me, us, that he hoped the house would be some sort of salve.

"Yes," he said, "isn't it?" And my mother did not seem to realize he'd asked that question of her.

"Yes," she said, finally. "Quite."

Sam and my father went to look at the garage, and my mother went back outside, to the car, I thought, to rest. I waited for a moment, tried to gather myself. It would not be easy; it would never be easy, and waiting would not change a thing. I went to the window and saw that Mother had not gone back to the car. She sat on the front steps, her legs folded neatly to the side of her.

She looked pitiful, and I was so angry with her, because I did not want to feel pity, which is the worst kind of feeling, for my mother. She should be beyond pity. Father seemed the same, quiet and kind. Sam was distant, but the elemental way he moved through the world, easily, naturally, was unchanged. But Mother was ruined. She had been taken away from her home. She had belonged to a place, not people.

I remembered a woman, a friend of Uncle George and Aunt Carrie's, coming to Emathla to see our house. She and her husband were going to build their own house, soon, and had heard ours was magnificent. And it was. But so easily destroyed: a fire, a hurricane, an old oak felled on its roof. A daughter behaving inappropriately.

I remembered Mother showing them all our rooms, even mine and Sam's, and the woman, who was very tall and thin, like a bird, saying, over and over, "Exquisite." I remembered her so clearly because we did not often have visitors. Aunt Carrie trailed behind; I closed my eyes against the image of her, trailing. I put my head in my hands; all these memories, of home before the mess, of Yonahlossee, swirling from my head like so much vapor.

"Exquisite," the woman kept saying, "exquisite," and I realized that our home was exquisite; I had never thought of it in any way before except to call it our home. By the end of the visit Mother seemed bored. And this woman was boring; she kept saying the same thing over and over, at each room. But Mother was bored because the woman was stating something so plain it did not need to be spoken. Like calling Mother beautiful. Like calling us lucky.

We stood on the front porch until their car had disappeared in a puff of dust and Mother took my hand.

"Well," she said, "let's get back to our exquisiteness, shall we?"

Now I watched her sit on the front steps, pretending to look at a yard that she would never love, in front of a house that would never be hers. Her house was her child, I realized; but no, that was wrong. Her house was her mother, her father; she took comfort in it, expected it to shelter her from life's slings and arrows.

I slipped through the front door quietly. The heat was at me immediately. There was no color in the yard, only the palm trees, and shrubbery. Surely my mother would add color.

"A nice yard," I said, from behind her, and she nodded but didn't speak. I sat down next to her, and she patted my knee, lightly.

"Mother," I said, "I want to leave again."

She turned to face me, languidly; she seemed to be moving underwater, and it occurred to me that Father might have given her medicine, for her headaches.

"Why not, I suppose," she said. "Why not?"

Her answer felt like a punch, a blow. I expected reluctance; no, I had wanted reluctance, some sign from her that she needed me. But I would have gone anyway, so wasn't I being a foolish girl? I was getting what I wanted, more easily than expected.

Tears came to my eyes. But then she spoke again, and her voice was firmer, like I remembered it. "I thought you might want to go away again. Once you had a taste of what it was like."

"You were right," I said, and began to cry, and hated myself for crying.

"Oh, Thea," my mother murmured, and pulled me close, and if I could have stopped time, stilled all the clocks, I would have. But I could not. I was just a girl. My mother was just a woman. "Beth mentioned something about a boy you were meeting." She laughed. "I thought there were no boys there, but of course, there are boys everywhere. You'll go somewhere else, and my advice to you, for whatever it's worth, is to find a kind boy." She stroked my hair. She sounded like her old self. "Find a kind boy, like Father. I was once in trouble with a boy." I tried to lift my head, to look at her, but she pressed it back to her chest. "Long before your father. It is such a wonderful kind of trouble to be in. As long as you can get out of it. And you couldn't quite." She paused. "Get out of it, I mean. Could you?"

She let go of my head, and I sat up, tried to look at the blurry world through my tears.

"I didn't leave because of a boy. You might not believe me, but I wanted to come back. I wanted to come back and see my brother."

"So that you could leave again?"

"What is there for me here?" I asked. "There is not even a horse, here."

Mother gazed at me for a moment. "It's true," she said, "it's true. There is nothing for you here, not anymore. I wanted something else for you and Sam," she said, her soft voice returned. "But that was my mistake, wasn't it? To think I could fiddle with your natures."

- The week leading up to the Fourth of July had been our last together, mine and Sam's, before what I had done was laid bare. There was something between us now, we both knew that, though of course neither of us had any idea, really.

It was pouring outside, in buckets. I flung myself from chair to chair, bored to death. I wandered into my brother's room, opened the door without knocking. He looked afraid, but he turned back to what he was doing when he saw it was me, not Mother.

"A nest," he explained, as I stood over him, "of baby squirrels."

"Only two?" Sam had raised squirrels before, but usually there were more of them. They were so ugly, the size of mice, hairless and pink, their eyes sealed shut. Sam had nestled them in an old blanket. It seemed impossible they would grow to be squirrels.

"A racc.o.o.n got the rest."

One of them s.h.i.+fted, and I reached my hand down to touch one- "Thea!"

"Sorry," I said. "I forgot."

"Mother would kill you," I said, after a moment. She didn't allow Sam's animals in the house.

Sam smiled. "No." He shook his head. "If she saw, her eyes wouldn't believe it."

But chances were Mother wouldn't come to Sam's room again; she'd already made the beds and straightened the upstairs.

I watched Sam try to feed one of the squirrels with one of Father's syringes, absent the needle.

"Is it milk?" I asked.

Sam shook his head. "Cow's milk would kill them. It's sugar water, warmed. They're doing better now, I think." The squirrel opened its mouth and began to suck, and even I was excited, in spite of myself. "There," Sam said, "there."

I watched him for a few moments. "There, there," he said, over and over, a refrain for the nursing squirrel.

"Why do you love squirrels so much?" I asked.

He shrugged. "Why do you like horses so much?"

There were so many reasons, but when I tried to name one good one, I couldn't.

"See?" Sam asked. "And besides, I don't love squirrels. I just . . . I like being outside. I like the natural world."

"The natural world," I repeated.

"Yes," Sam said. "The natural world."

He began to murmur to the squirrel again, and I fell back onto the bed, and closed my eyes against the sound of his voice.

I lay there, close to sleep, hearing my brother's pretty voice, still pretty even as it turned deeper and deeper, as it had over the past few months, changing to match his increasing height. My brother was a flower, unfolding, shooting toward the heavens.

- That night I went to his hotel room. It looked lived in, unlike mine. There was a jam jar filled with flowers on the bureau, and three snake skins, almost completely intact, with tiny holes where eyes used to reside. I touched one of them, very lightly.

"What happened to your terrariums?" I asked.

Sam perched on the edge of his bed, watching me.

"They're gone."

I nodded. "I'm leaving," I said.

"I know."

"You could leave, too. They would let you."

My voice sounded too urgent. But he should leave, too. He should not let this swallow him whole.

When he finally spoke, his voice was a challenge.

"But I don't want to leave, Thea. I don't want-" And he paused, but no, it was more than a pause. He stopped himself from saying whatever terrible thing he was going to say. But I knew.

"To be like me?" I asked.

He looked away. I knew I was right. It was not fair, of course. I had been made to go away. I had not abandoned him on purpose. But in the end I got the better deal. There were so many accidents in the world, some happy, some not. I would take what I had gotten.

I went to my brother and sat down next to him on the bed. My twin would not leave because he was a better son than I was daughter; he could not leave because he could not imagine life without them. Sam wasn't brave. He never had been. He was loyal and true and still belonged to my parents in a way I never would again. He wasn't brave, but one person could only be so many things. He was still my parents' child, and perhaps he always would be. Only time would tell.

"You're a Florida boy," I said. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the handkerchief I had taken with me to Yonahlossee. It looked no worse for the wear. I put it in his hand and closed his fingers around it.

He looked at it, and then at me. "Yes," he said softly, with his new voice. "Yes, I am."

- That night I lay in bed and tried to summon Sissy's eyes, Mr. Holmes's elegant hands, Naari's dainty face. But I could not remember. Everything was slipping from my mind. I rose and dressed in my Yonahlossee uniform; it was the only thing that fit. The clothes still smelled of Augusta House, and I tried not to cry, I tried not to want something I could never again have.

Outside, the air was thick with moisture, the moon hung over us like a fat face. There were a few people, scattered on the sidewalks. A door swung open and I glimpsed a crowded, smoky room, a man in front of a piano.

"Excuse me, miss," someone said, and I realized I was in someone's way. I stepped to the side and a man walked in front of me, and I recognized him as the bellhop my mother had almost forgotten to tip. A woman was on his arm, but I could only see the back of her, her sheer dress, her black hair. He gave no sign that he recognized me. I watched him slip away into the night, off to another place, or perhaps his home, where he would touch his girl, she would touch him, and the night would open like a flower.

I walked and walked. An hour, two. I lost track of time. I thought, foolishly, that I might see Sam. I knew he wandered at night. I knew he roamed. But there was no sign of him. I walked away from the streetlights, in the darkness. Mother had not taught us to fear the world; she had taught us to scorn it.

I finally arrived at Church Street, visible from a block away. I knew it would be busy here, or if not busy, alive in some way. There were people going places, people returning, always, always.

The sky zippered open, as it did in Florida, suddenly and violently, and the lightning lit the sky in a way that was beautiful and fierce. I was unafraid. Nothing in the natural world scared me. This lightning was far away, and I was surrounded by things taller than me, where the lightning would strike first.

I sat down on a covered bench, next to an old woman who was clearly waiting for a train. She asked me for the time and I looked at the giant clock above us and told her. She did not thank me; she was agitated, and I understood why.

"I'm going to Miami," she said. "And my train is so very, very late."

I almost laughed. Miami. Sam had told me there were thousands of acres of land there, abandoned by their owners, our uncle just one piece of it.