Comes the Blind Fury (3 page)

“How the hell could people live like this? It’s obscene.” The butler’s pantry, containing a sink and a refrigerator, was larger than their dining room had been in Boston.

“It’s particularly obscene when you consider this place was built by a minister,” June observed archly.

Cal’s brows rose in surprise. “Who told you that?”

“Dr. Carson, of course. Who else?” Before Cal could make any reply, June had proceeded into the kitchen. This, she had already decided, was where the family would live.

It was a huge room, a fireplace dominating one wall, with two large stoves, and a walk-in refrigerator, which had been disconnected years earlier. When he had taken them through the house, Josiah Carson had suggested that they tear it out, but Cal had thought the old refrigerator would make an ideal wine cellar: perfectly
insulated, though prohibitively expensive to use for its original purpose.

June walked over to the sink and tried the tap. The pipes rattled for a few seconds, coughed twice, then produced a gushing stream of clear, unchlorinated water.

“Lovely,” June murmured. Her eyes went to the window, and her face lit up with a smile.

Beyond the window, some fifty feet from the house, there was an old brick building with a slate roof that had once been used as a potting-shed. It was the potting-shed that had convinced June that the house would be perfect for them. One look had told her that it could easily be changed into a studio—a studio where she could spend endless blissful hours with her canvases, developing a style that would be truly her own, something she had never been able to accomplish in Boston.

Seeing the smile on her face, Cal once more read his wife’s mind.

“Let’s see,” he said thoughtfully, brushing his hair back from his brow. “There’s the butler’s pantry to change into a dining room, and the potting-shed to change into a studio. Then I suppose I could change the barn into a workshop, the front parlor into a sauna, and the study into a surgery. Once that’s finished—”

“Oh, stop it!” June cried. “I promise you, I’ll do everything in the studio myself, and most of the butler’s pantry, too, All you have to do is unpack—and then get on with your country doctor act!”

“Promise?”

“Promise,” June said softly, coming into his arms and hugging him close. “Everything will be all right
now. I’m sure it will.” She wished she truly believed her own words.

Cal kissed his wife, then let his hand rest for a second on her rounded belly. Under his fingers, he could feel the baby move. “We’d better get upstairs and figure out where the nursery is going to be. Seems to me like this little critter is about to make its debut.”

“Not for six weeks yet, at least,” June replied. But she happily followed her husband upstairs, eager to decide which room could best be changed into a nursery.
There’s that word again
, she thought.
This seems to be our year to change
.

They found Michelle on the second floor, in a corner bedroom commanding a sweeping view of the bay, Devil’s Passage, and the ocean beyond. To the northeast, the village of Paradise Point stood in silhouette, the spires of its three tiny churches thrusting upward, while its neat white frame buildings huddled close together, as if to protect each other from the furies that raged constantly in the waters around them. June and Cal joined their daughter, and for a moment the small family stood together, examining their new world. Their arms slipped around each other, and for a long moment, they reveled in a closeness and warmth they hadn’t felt for a long time. It was June who finally brought them back to reality.

“We’d thought this might be the nursery,” she said tentatively. Michelle, seeming to come out of a trance, turned to them.

“Oh, no,” she said. “I want this room. Please?”

“But there’s a much bigger room on the other side of the house,” June objected. “This one’s so small …”

“But all I need is my bed and a chair,” Michelle
pleaded. “Can’t I have this one? I could sit on the window seat forever, just looking out.”

June and Cal looked at each other uncertainly, neither of them able to think of a reasonable objection. Then Michelle went to the closet, and the question was settled. Michelle reached up and groped around at the back of the closet shelf.

“There
is
something here,” she said triumphantly. “I had a feeling there was something in this closet, and I was right Look!”

In her hand, Michelle held a doll. Old and dusty, it had a porcelain face framed by hair almost as dark as her own and a little lace bonnet. Its gray dress, faded and torn, must once have been covered with ruffles, and on its feet were a tiny pair of cracked patent leather shoes. June and Cal stared at it in surprise.

“Where do you suppose it came from?” June wondered aloud.

“I’ll bet it’s been there for centuries,” Michelle said. “But it must have belonged to a little girl once, and this must have been her room. May I have it? Please?”

“The doll, or the room?” Cal asked.

“Both!” Michelle cried, sure her parents were about to give in.

“Well, I don’t see why not,” Cal said. “We’d probably do better to have the nursery right next to our room anyway. We can convert one of the dressing rooms, I suppose,” he added with an amused glance at June. Then he took the doll from Michelle and inspected it carefully. “It looks just like you,” he observed. “Same brown hair, same brown eyes. Same raggedy clothes!”

Michelle snatched the doll away from her father,
and stuck her tongue out at him. “If my clothes are raggedy, it’s your fault. If you couldn’t afford to dress me, you should have left me in the orphanage!”

“Michelle!” June gasped. “What a thing to say. You didn’t come from an orphanage …”

It wasn’t until her husband and her daughter began laughing that she realized it was a joke between them, and relaxed. Then the child inside her moved, and June suddenly found herself wondering what would happen when the baby arrived. Michelle had been an only child for so long. What would it be like for her? Would she feel threatened? June remembered everything she had read lately about sibling rivalry. What if Michelle hated the new baby? June put the thought out of her mind. Her eyes fell on the sea outside the window, the gulls wheeling overhead, the sun shining brightly. On the spur of the moment, she determined to spend as much time as she could enjoying the sun. It wouldn’t, after all, last forever. Fall was coming, and after that, winter. But for now, there was a warmth to the air. Impulsively, she left Cal and Michelle to begin unpacking while she went out to explore what was to be her studio.

They worked as quickly as they could, but the mountain of boxes seemed to remain as high as ever.

“Want to knock off a while, princess?” Cal finally asked. “There’s a couple of Cokes in the refrigerator.” Michelle promptly left the carton she was struggling with and preceded her father through the dining room, the butler’s pantry, and into the kitchen. She threw herself into a chair and grinned happily.

“Imagine—a butler’s pantry! Did Dr. Carson have a butler when he lived here?”

“I don’t think so,” Cal replied, expertly flipping the caps off two bottles and handing one to Michelle. “I think he lived here all by himself.”

Michelle’s eyes widened. “Really? That’d be creepy.”

“Place getting to you already?” There was a teasing tone to Cal’s voice that made Michelle grin.

“Not yet. But if anything comes creeping at me through the door tonight, things might change.” Her gaze went to the window, and she fell silent for a moment.

“Something on your mind, princess?” her father asked.

Michelle nodded, and when she faced her father, there was a seriousness in her eyes that struck Cal as being beyond her years.

“I’m glad we came here, Daddy,” she said finally. “I don’t want you to be unhappy anymore.”

“I haven’t been unhappy—” Cal began, but Michelle didn’t let him finish.

“Yes, you have,” she insisted. “I could always tell. For a while I thought you were mad at me, because you never came home from the hospital—”

“I was busy—”

Again she interrupted him. “But then you started coming home again, and you were still unhappy. It wasn’t until we decided to move out here that you started being happy again. Didn’t you like Boston?”

“It wasn’t Boston,” Cal began, unsure how to explain to his daughter what had happened. The image of a little boy flashed through his mind, but Cal forced it away immediately. “It was just me, I guess. I—I can’t really explain it.” He smiled suddenly. “I guess I just want to know the people I’m treating.”

Michelle turned the matter over in her mind and eventually nodded. “I think I know what you mean. Boston General was weird.”

“Weird? What do you mean?”

Michelle shrugged, searching for the right words. “I don’t know. It was like they never knew who you were. And when Mom and I went there, they never even knew we were your family. That snotty one in the main lobby always wanted to know why we wanted to see you. You’d think that after this many years, she’d have recognized us.…” Michelle’s voice trailed off, and she gazed at her father, wondering if he understood. Cal nodded.

“That’s it,” he said, relieved that he wouldn’t have to tell her the truth. “That’s it, exactly. And it was the same way with the people I treated. If I saw them three days later, I wouldn’t recognize
them
. If I’m going to be a doctor, I think I ought to have the fun of knowing who I’m helping.” He grinned at Michelle and decided to change the subject. “What about you? Any regrets?”

“About what?” Michelle asked.

“Coming out here. Leaving your friends. Changing schools. All the sorts of things girls your age are supposed to worry about.”

Michelle sipped on her Coke, then looked around the kitchen. “Harrison wasn’t such a great school,” she said at last. “The one in Paradise Point is much prettier.”

“And a lot smaller,” Cal pointed out.

“And it probably doesn’t have a bunch of kids wrecking it all the time, either,” Michelle added. “And as for friends, I’d have had to make new friends next year, anyway, wouldn’t I?”

Cal looked at her in surprise. “What do you mean?”

Michelle stared guiltily into her glass. “I heard you and Mom talking. Were you really going to send me to boarding school?”

“It wasn’t really decided yet—” he began lamely, but when he looked at Michelle’s eyes, he gave up the lie. “We thought it would be better for you,” he said. “Harrison was just getting too rough. You told us yourself you weren’t learning anything anymore. And anyway, it wasn’t boarding school. You’d have been home every day.”

“Well, this is better,” Michelle said. “I’ll make friends here, and I won’t have to make new friends next year. Will I?” There was a sudden anxiety in her eyes that made Cal want to reassure her.

“Of course not. Unless you hate it. Come to think of it, you’d better not hate it, because I’m not sure we’d be able to send you to private school on what I’m going to be making out here. But I want you to be happy, Princess. That’s very important to me.”

Michelle suddenly grinned, breaking the seriousness of the moment. “How could I not be happy? Everybody I know would do anything to be living here. We’ve got the ocean, and the forest, and this wonderful house. What more could I want?”

In a sudden burst of affection, Michelle threw herself into her father’s arms and kissed him.

“I love you, Daddy, really I do.”

“And I love you, too, princess,” Cal replied, his eyes moistening with affection. “I love you, too.” Then he disengaged himself from Michelle’s arms and stood up. “Come on. Let’s get back to those boxes before your mother sends both of us back to the orphanage!”

“I found it!” Michelle cried triumphantly. It was a big box, marked on every side with Michelle’s name. “Let’s take it up now, Daddy, please?” Michelle begged. “Everything I own is in it. Everything! Can’t I unpack it next? I mean, we don’t know where Mom wants everything anyway, and I could put all this stuff away myself. Please?”

Cal nodded his assent and helped her drag the immense box upstairs to the corner room that Michelle had claimed as her own.

“Want some help unpacking it?” he offered. Michelle shook her head vehemently. “And let you see what’s inside? If you knew what was in here, you’d make me throw half of it away.” In her mind’s eye, Michelle saw the jumble of old movie magazines—just the sort of thing her parents didn’t approve of—and the assorted souvenirs of her departing childhood that she had not been able to give up. “And don’t you dare tell Mom I said that,” she added, enlisting her father in a collaboration of silence to help her preserve her childish treasures.

Then, as Cal left her alone in the room, Michelle began ripping the carton open to unpack all her things, first onto the bed, then carefully hidden away in the closet and dresser.

It wasn’t until she’d put the last old toy away that she noticed the doll, still propped up on the window seat where she’d left it a few hours earlier. She went over to the window and picked it up, holding it level with her eyes.

“I’ll have to think of a name for you,” she said out loud. “Something old-fashioned, as old-fashioned as you.” She thought a moment, then smiled.