Candles Burning (32 page)

I felt like a handkerchief snatched back from the wind by a huge and powerful hand. The door closed and I was on the inside.

Petrified as I was, I could hardly breathe, let alone speak.
I had not heard Mrs. Mank on the other side of the door
. And now I was her prisoner.

She let go of me and my bare feet found safe contact with the floor.

I still felt frail. She was close enough to force me to tip my head to see her face. As she moved away, she began to resume normal proportions. I was hot and miserable with humiliation, but beginning to feel the instinct for survival. A thousand lies buzzed like wasps in my head.

Mrs. Mank dropped into Miz Verlow's chair behind the small desk. She was wearing little half-moon glasses framed in silver.

“Sit down and hold your tongue.”

I did as I was told, sitting directly on the floor with my legs crossed. I had to look up at her again. The tiny windowless room seemed smaller than it ever had before, and I realized that I had never been inside it when the door was closed.

She tapped Miz Verlow's address book on the desk. “You won't find Fennie Verlow's number in this. Merry hardly needs to keep her sister's telephone number in a book, any more than Fennie needs to write down Merry's number.”

I felt stupid. Of course two sisters would know each other's telephone numbers by heart. There was no surprise in Mrs. Mank knowing what I was up to and what I was looking for. I felt her reading me as easily as I could hear a ghost crab skedaddle across the sand.

I tried a feint. “You don't like Mama very much, do you?”

“Your mother?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Why shouldn't I like your mother?”

“Because you know what she's like. You do, don't you?”

She smiled her chilly smile at me. “Does that mean you know what Roberta Carroll Dakin is like as well?

I nodded.

“But it seems to me that you love her very much, and that you love her despite whatever reservations you may entertain of her character and conduct.”

“She's my mama. I'm supposed to love her.”

“ ‘Supposed to'? Whose rule is that?”

“Mama's.”

“I don't for one minute believe you do things just because your mother tells you to.”

Before I could tell any lies contrary to her assertion, Mrs. Mank continued, “Of course, God also tells you to love your mother—in the Bible, in Sunday school classes, and through the mouths of Christians. Of course, I think it's fair to say that the god of the Jews and the Christ who suffered and died on the cross never had to deal with Roberta Carroll Dakin day in and day out.”

Mrs. Mank's observation stunned me, as being both sacrilege and truth.

With bland indifference, Mrs. Mank asked, “Oh, do you believe in God? And the Bible? And Jesus and Heaven and Hell and the Communion of Saints and the Forgiveness of Sins?”

“Yes.” I was not lying. It had never occurred to me that any of those things might not be true.

“Yes, of course you do. You're only seven. You should profess belief in the accepted wisdom of your elders. I'm asking, ‘Do you believe in all those things—God, the Bible, Jesus, Heaven and Hell, the Forgiveness of Sins, and the Resurrection of the Corrupted Body?' ”

“No.” The word was out of my mouth without hesitation. If those things were true, I grasped instantly, Mrs. Mank would not have asked me if I believed them.

“Do you believe in them the way that you believe in yourself—in what you think, and what you feel?”

“No.” I thought for a moment, before adding something that was not entirely true. “I believe in you too.”

“You have no reason to.” Mrs. Mank went on, “Society also tells you that you should love your mother. In general, society is a better voice to listen to than either God or Roberta Carroll Dakin, but society isn't always right. At least not for you.”

“But I do love Mama.” I was frustrated and confused. I had questions to ask Mrs. Mank but her interrogation of me had put them right out of my mind.

“And you should.”

“Why?”

“Why
should
you love Roberta Carroll Dakin? And why
do
you love her?” Before I could answer, Mrs. Mank provided it. “You love her because she is your mama. Because you are a child and you believe as a child. You believe that you need your mama to survive. But think about it—you must know otherwise. Did you ever give a thought to the idea that your father might die before he did? He did die, and you are still alive.”

My throat closed and I scrambled across the floor to kneel at Mrs. Mank's small feet in their handmade shoes.

“Please don't kill Mama!” I cried.

Mrs. Mank looked down at me, her small mouth twitching derisively.

“I am not responsible for your mother's life. Neither are you. She is.”

My eyes were hot with unshed tears, barely held back out of some instinct that I must not reveal weakness.

“If you ever hurt her,” I blurted, and started to blubber and sob.

“You'll do what?” Mrs. Mank said in a bored voice. “Calley Dakin, I don't give a damn whether your mama lives, dies, is raptured up to Heaven or reborn as a gnat.”

The words by themselves should not have been reassuring but they were. Mrs. Mank had no plan to harm Mama. The hovering horror of the two mad women who had torn Daddy limb from limb vanished. About this, I did believe Mrs. Mank.

I knuckled the tears into my eye sockets. A handkerchief appeared in front of my face, at the tips of Mrs. Mank's fingers.

“Snot and red-eyed tears are unbecoming, especially with as little as you have for looks. You had better learn to stifle them.”

I wiped my face dry and blew my nose. I did not offer to return the handkerchief, which in any case was not monogrammed or of any fine fabric but simply an everyday handkerchief. I did not believe that it was Mrs. Mank's at all.

“However,” Mrs. Mank said slowly, “if you wish to keep your mother alive, you must keep her here. Elsewhere, her enemies—your father's enemies—will find her. Shall I tell you a secret, Calliope Carroll Dakin?”

A bolt of terror left me weak. I did not want to know a secret. Already I knew too many.

Frantic to divert the unwelcome knowledge, I choked out, “I know the secret.”

“You do?” Mrs. Mank seemed amused. “Well, then, I guess I don't need to tell you.”

Was I let down? Worse. It was like diving down the laundry chute: an instant of wild exultation at my own derring-do, wiped away by sheer unmitigated terror of the consequences so foolishly ignored. The certainty that I was mistaken, that I should have listened, seized me as surely as Mrs. Mank had at the door to Miz Verlow's office.

I found myself, still dazed, outside the office door closing on Mrs. Mank. She had put me out as unceremoniously as she had hoisted me into the office.

I was quite certain that Mrs. Mank had wanted me to duck the secret. Manipulation was a second language to me, learned at Mama's knee. It seemed more natural to me than straightforward behavior. Mrs. Mank was another manipulator, the greatest I had yet encountered, and I feared her, without knowing why her string-pulling was so much more dangerous than Mama's or Mamadee's.

It wasn't just physical fear that sent me racing to the beach. I was driven by the instinct that the beach was where I would be able to breathe.

I ran without the joy that normally possessed me in my beach races. Between my bare toes, the sand was almost cold. The feel of it spritzing away from my toes digging into it made me feel real again. Outside. Outside was itself, and never pretended to be anything else. It didn't care how I took it.

A black gleam in the water caught my eye. When I slowed to a trot to look at the Gulf, the gleam sank into the water but another rose nearby: dolphins at play. I clutched my knees and watched the dolphins. The sight of their permanent grins calmed me; the racket of my heartbeat faded and slowed.

Throwing myself down, I stared up at the sky: it was half of everything, roofless, and even with birds in it, mostly a vast emptiness.

I rolled over to study the sand: pearly grit in uncountable quantity, full of itself as the sky was empty of itself. The sand was marble, Miz Verlow had told me, washed out of Alabama and Georgia over thousands of years before anybody called those places Alabama and Georgia, slow ground to infinite particles in the rivers that carried it. Marble like a rich dead person's headstone. The image of the one my daddy should have came to me: Joe Cane Dakin, RIP. Are-Eye-Pee spelled rip.

I let the din of the restless sand and the rootless sea bear me down. A draft of wind, a sweep of shadow, a crack of vast wings overhead, and I could bear it no longer. I scuttled up the face of the dune into the tall grasses—sea oats and panic grass some of them were—I had found them in my field guides. Panic grass. My head was all apanic, so I must be in the right place, I thought. Sea oats. No oats to see on them. They were the tallest grasses, with raggedy tops where the seeds had been earlier. Other grasses as yet nameless to me. The beach grass did not grow in carpets as lawn grass grows. It sprouted in hanks and billows on the dune face, and clumped along the crest and down the back dune. Thick, tripping vines snaked among the grasses. On the back of the dune sweet-smelling shrubs grew in oases of green and grey-green and blue-green. The sand showed between them like grout between tiles. Despite the natural undulation of the sand in hills and hollows, its grains were not blown about by the wind as the beach sand's were, nor did they roll underfoot as loosely.

At the crest of the dune, in among the grasses, I dropped to my knees and dug with my hands in the hard-edged crystalline grains, hollowing out a place in the shade. The grasses whispered to me, touching me with the most fleeting, creepy caresses. Sand slipped under my nails, and into my mouth and dried my spit. The shade dappled my arms and hands, the sun striped warmth upon my back. I rolled up into the hollow that I had made.

The waves surged upon the shore below and just yards away. I breathed in the salted air. My heart and my lungs found the rhythm of the water. Wet voices surged amid out and in, rollick and curl up, retreat and advance. The voices drowned.

“CALLEY Dakin! Calley Dakin!”

The echo of my name condensed out of my oblivion: Miz Verlow, calling me. My eyes opened to a darkened day: Twilight had come on, cooler and quieter and more desolate. Yet even in the thickening shade of the tall grasses I saw as well as if it were noon. Better, without the glare.

A mouse crouched very close, right next to my face against the sand. It licked the side of my mouth with its very tiny tongue. Its eyes were brilliant in their blackness, and the beat of its heart a tiny paradiddle.

“Calley Dakin!”

For fear of frightening the mouse, I did not move.

The mouse gave the corner of my mouth a final lick and sat back for a second. It looked almost satisfied.

Miz Verlow advanced upon me from the back of the dune as surely as if she had a map of where I was. The swishing of the tall grasses announced her approach.

The mouse jumped. It seemed to unzip the sand with its tiny paws. The dimple filled at once behind it, and the sand became as seamless as sand can't help but be.

Miz Verlow looked down at me. “I won't ask if you heard me calling.”

My mouth was dry. I could manage no more than a mumble. “I was asleep.”

“Evidently.”

I scrambled to my feet. “I saw a mouse! It was white!”

“Of course it was. That's the color of the beach mice here. You are late for supper.”

She spun right around and set off toward the house. I lunged after her, then paused to glance back at where I had been, in my nest in the grass. The sea oats, the panic grass, the grasses whose names I did not yet know, thousands of them, scratched against beach and sky, were all the same, like the grains of sand heaped up to make the dunes and washed down to make the beach, like the drops of water poured together to make the Gulf. My heart sank; I would never find it again. With a catch in my throat, I scrambled after Miz Verlow.

I feared needlessly, as one so often does. Over the years, the moon showed me that self-made hollow anytime I looked. Only on the night of the new moon was it hidden from me. No mouse ever showed itself to me there again, though I saw the beach mice off and on in other locations, but I watched the phases of the moon there. There, I made pets of raccoons, training them to bring me oysters to trade for kitchen leftovers. From there, I spied upon the sea turtles come ashore to lay their eggs and bury them. When sea oats flagged out in seed, I shook out their heads to feed the birds, coaxing them to perch on my fingers. By night, I watched the night-dark waters roil and dash into lacings of spray, or in a quieter mood, rising and falling as smoothly as the breast of a sleeper, under clouds visible even in the dark.

But on that night, after washing and putting on a dress, I was that much later arriving at the table. My plate was cold but not unappetizing, at least to me, as my stomach had woken and was yowling that it had not been fed since breakfast.

Mama spared me an irritated glance that foretold a tongue-lashing later on. Cleonie's arrival at Mama's right shoulder with a plate of lemon meringue pie distracted her. But only for a few seconds, before Mama returned to making quick anxious glances at Mrs. Mank.

Miz Verlow sat at Mrs. Mank's right. To Mrs. Mank's left was a woman whom I had never seen before. Every week so far had brought guests unknown to me, occasionally even at midweek. The only distinction the woman held for me at that moment was her position so close to Mrs. Mank. No one bothered to introduce me and she paid me no mind.