Shirley (11 page)

“I have to write my letter.”

“I want to see it.”

“Well, then, we'll go,” she answered, giving in with surprising ease, as if she understood how desperately I needed to see the
mountain trail where Paula Welden had gone. I'd find a clue there, in the underbrush, that all the others had missed. I knew it. One left for me, a sign to tell me once and for all how it was possible to be from an honest-to-god family, a picture-perfect family like Paula Welden had, and still want to leave. As I was thinking this, Shirley pulled the baby's sweater off the bed. “Come on.” Was she resigned or mischievous? What was she thinking? I don't have any idea.

•   •   •

S
O
SHIRLEY
DID
NOT
WORK
THAT
DAY
, a rarity. Instead, we placed the baby in her blanket on the seat between us, and Shirley piloted the Morris Minor to Glastenbury Mountain. She drove with confidence, a perilous cigarette ash hovering over Natalie's swaddled form. It was a gray morning, one of those Vermont mysteries when the sky above and old snow on the ground muddle together to eliminate any sense of horizon, and trees and bushes become eerie iced sentinels along the road. I'd never taken an adventure with Shirley; each of our journeys had been purposeful—to visit her doctor or mine, to pick up a visitor at the train or a large package at the post office or Barry from school on one occasion when he wasn't feeling well. I'd sat in the back after Barry came to the car that afternoon; I preferred not to engage with the children, who by now preferred not to see me at all, as if I were the hired nurse sent to mind their mother. I'd made it clear that I was indifferent to them, and they'd eventually responded in kind. Even Sally, who'd at first been eager to be friends, to share novels she was reading or inquire solicitously about my pregnancy, now met my glance with a sullen indifference. The satisfaction was mine. The fervency with
which they loved their mother—and she them—was one of the few thorns in the hide of my happiness.

I can't blame the kids, in hindsight; nor did I blame them then. It had been my choice, from the start. They would have befriended me, had I allowed it.

(Sally, outside the bathroom door, my second morning there, a folded green towel in her arms. “I warmed it. That belly of yours deserves bunting. Here.”

“Thanks,” I said, lifting it from her proffered hands, imagining she saw herself in me, wanted friendship. “Thank your mother for me.”

And the flicker across her face, as if she wasn't sure whether to be amused or offended. She wanted to be fond of me. How Shirley-like she was, her bright, inquisitive gaze, the mobile stretch of her mouth, the vigor of her speech.)

One of the ways I could see how much the kids adored Shirley was physical; they touched her and rubbed against her like cats, sought her ample lap and her shoulder, jockeyed to sit close when they shared their schoolwork with her. Sally was the writer, the one Shirley seemed most drawn to. If Sally snapped at her mother defensively, Shirley would grow distracted and strange, unable to focus. She couldn't fake it when Sally upset her. But for her part, Shirley was often snippish with Jannie. Jannie seemed to tolerate gibes with an ease I admired. I barely knew Laurie, the elder son. Barry I saw the most of, and I envied him the most. She loved him simply. He was an easy, friendly boy—puppyish in his affection, but smart and funny—and Shirley would drop her chopping knife into the onions on the counter so that she could grab him and
ruffle his hair at the end of the school day. He'd nod at me politely, but he never said more than hello, rarely looked me in the eye. I'd have understood myself to be invisible, were it not for the way he sometimes jostled me roughly as he headed for his mother's hug. His shoves were purposeful, I could tell, the same way he'd leave the door to Fred's and my bedroom open and his book on the bed some afternoons. Shadows of his body creasing the white coverlet, a flaunted crime scene. The point was that if I would not be his friend, I was invisible.

But today I was alone with Shirley, no children vying for her attention. She was in a good mood. She seemed to like driving in the snow, the way the tires slid on icy snowpack and the engine strained in the effort to tackle the steepening slope. “We're going to Glastenbury, where she really disappeared,” she said, “not Baldy, not Bald Mountain, even though that's the one I used when I wrote about her.”

“You wrote about Paula Welden?”

Shirley's chin jutted all the way to the steering wheel; she was having trouble seeing the road, what with all the gray slosh the tires churned up and spat onto the window. “Of course,” she said. “I'm a practical housewife. I put every part of the chicken to use.” She paused, as if the icy road were suddenly more demanding. “My novel
Hangsaman
, well, I thought about her with that. And the story I mentioned. I called it Bad Mountain instead of Glastenbury. Short and to the point.”

“I feel funny about her, ever since you told me,” I admitted. “As if I could have been Paula, really.”

“You?”

I held Natalie tighter. “At least she had that father doing his best to find her.”

“You would never be like her,” Shirley said, in that same flat tone I'd heard before, when she denied knowing the girl.

“What was she like?” I asked carefully.

Shirley turned left, onto a wide, uneven road, so few tire tracks that each was visible in the plowed-down layer of snow. “I wouldn't know, Rose. How often must I remind you? I did not know the girl.”

“Did Stanley?”

“In those days, I knew all of Stanley's students,” she said evenly. Caught on some errant splash of icy muck, the windshield wipers screeched against the glass before settling back into a more easygoing
swish, swish
.

“I don't know why the story makes me feel so scared,” I whispered, as if Natalie in my lap might understand my weakness. “Even though she was the one who chose, you say it was her choice to go there. Disappearing, there is nothing worse than the idea of it.”

“Yes,” Shirley said, agreeing. “But you have Fred. He would make sure that you were found.”

“That's why you had to write her, to make her last.” And in that moment of understanding, despite what I was wondering—what
was
I wondering? What did I suspect? Certain that she was lying, although I did not know why—we were safer together than we might either ever hope to be, apart.

And then she said, “You can't let anything go to waste.”

“What story was it, the one you wrote?”

“‘The Missing Girl.' Have you gotten to it yet?” I was systematically reading through all the stories in Shirley's files, published and unpublished. On Shirley's dark days, and she still had them with relative frequency, I would look in on her mid-afternoon to discover she'd retreated to their bedroom, where she would hide under the covers until she could convince herself to emerge. With the vestige of tears visible still on her cheeks and along the bosom of one of the velvet dresses she favored, she'd not meet my gaze when she entered the kitchen to join me in the chopping of vegetables for the evening stew. We'd been trying to cook with more consideration for Stanley's heart condition, cutting butter and potatoes, and she would ask a question about what I'd done to brown the mushrooms or I'd ask whether baked squash would please that particular evening's company. She'd open the cupboard door and pull down plates, and we'd continue on as if the day had been a usual one. I'd not tell her my day had been spent reading her old stories and thumbing through witchcraft textbooks, imagining I'd find a spell to cheer her up. But of course she knew.

“It's in the recent files,” she said. “An amusing trifle, as Stanley would say.”

The narrow highway wound treacherously, so that an oncoming truck threatened to take ownership of our lane. Off Route 9, we turned onto an icy side road; I think it was called Woodford. The car skidded to the right, and I placed my hand firmly on Natalie's sleeping thigh. Shirley steadied the car with a similar maternal insistence. I hadn't realized I'd been holding my breath until I let it out with a long huff. She glanced at me, one brow lifted.

“We witches generally don't perish in snowdrifts,” she said.

“Houses drop on you.”

“We float proudly above the jeering mob before we plunge and perish in flames.”

I pulled Natalie onto my lap, where she gurgled peaceably and turned her head to nuzzle my waist. The blanket was too close to her mouth. I tucked it under and wiped a little bubble of saliva from her lips. Cold as the car was, it smelled of damp books and cigarette smoke, just like the rest of the rooms in the Hyman universe. It occurred to me that Natalie would always recognize this smell and call it home. Lucky girl.

“Ah, here's the entrance to the trail,” Shirley said, pulling around the ice-mudded parking circle. It was surrounded by a berm and a ring of skeletal bushes, and beyond that a stand of snow-hooded beeches. At the edge, brook water trickled over sharded boulders of ice, and in the distance I could hear the louder thundering of water in the river. I shivered, thinking about the forest where Hawthorne's Goodman Brown spies his neighbors (and perhaps his own new bride) en route to their coven meeting, and loses his love of life. Did I want to cross into such a dark, forbidding forest? What might become of me if I did?

“I meet my shadow in the deepening shade; I hear my echo in the echoing wood,”
Shirley said, her voice harsh. I should have known she would love Roethke as much as I. I'd studied him back at Temple University, and thought he spoke to me and for me like no one else I'd yet read. Anyone whose parents have failed them loves Roethke more than any other poet, I suppose. She reached for Natalie, and took my daughter to the breast of her fur coat. “Poor Paula Welden,” Shirley said, opening her car door, ancient metal
creaking in the sub-freezing air. “Deserved or not, she met her shadow here.”

“It's too cold for Natalie. She isn't dressed properly.” She wasn't, I'd not taken time to put on the sweater Shirley'd handed me, just grabbed the blanket from the crib and wrapped it around the baby, thinking there was no way in the world we'd be getting out of the car.

“It's fine. Cold air is good for babies!” Shirley tucked my blanketed infant inside the flaps of her open coat and tilted her head. “Come on.”

“Give her back, it's way too cold,” I said. “Give me the baby.”

“Don't be a silly girl, get out of the car.”

“No.”

“We can go to where Paula was last seen, one of the shelters. Just a short distance up the path. It's for hunters and summer hikers, and someone saw her there that afternoon. Come on, I want to see it.” The trail had been recently used, I could tell. Boot prints hardened to ice prints, several sets of them, as well as the wide swath of ice crumbs churned by snowshoes. But the icicles hanging from tree branches looked as fragile as cheap jewelry. It wasn't safe to take the baby up there.

“She'll catch a chill. Give her to me.” I could hear how tight and high my voice was; it hurt my own ears to speak so firmly. All I wanted was to have Natalie back, and yet I didn't open the car door and go around to get her. Instead, I leaned across the seat and held out my hands. “Give me Natalie,” I said.

“Case in point. Here you're given choice and you select the only direction that means staying still.”

“Give me my baby.”

Shirley seemed amused. “Our Rose has thorns.” But she bent down to hand me my daughter.

She left the door open, however, so that no matter how tightly I snuggled Natalie, she would be exposed to the same freezing temperatures in or out. Shirley pointed up the trail, and asked me if I could see the beginnings of the ridge. I shook my head no.

“Someone saw her up there, she went up the path and to the right, she made the right turn, Rose, and she argued with a man. That's what the newspapers said. She was seen up there.”

“We should go home.”

“But someone else saw her at the bus station in Bennington, buying a ticket to Canada, if I remember correctly, and somebody else saw her on a train heading south. Her parents broadcast a radio message asking her to return, no matter what.” She paused. “Come to think of it, I wrote a story about that, too.”

“It's too cold.”

“‘Louisa, Please Come Home,' I called it. It's a good one.”

I'd already read that one. She was right. It was my favorite of her stories. “Get in the car. It's too cold.”

For such a large woman, she drifted with delicacy, seeming to undulate over a snowdrift, undeterred by the frozen tire tracks that dimpled the unplowed lot. An imaginary creature has that freedom to move without regard to bulk or height; she was real, but sometimes I wondered. She called loudly, “You get used to the cold once you're out in it. See those berries? I'm going to get a branch.” A trio of trees, just off the parking area but ten feet or more from the path, so that she had to step deep into a crusted bank of snow. Her slight
Chinese slippers went dark; her stockings gleamed with damp; she seemed not to care at all. Turning to smile at me as she wrestled a branch heavy with red berries, her glasses glinting opaquely. Coat wide open, the pale skin of her plump cheeks barely flushed, I thought the whole heavy bulk of her might fall into the snowbank, and I held my breath. At the ready, even if it meant leaving Natalie on the seat and digging into the snow with cold hands to lift her. My treasured navy winter coat ruined in the effort, my shoes permanently stained and gritty. I opened the car door, clutching Natalie inside my coat—she would have been far more cozy had I let Shirley swathe her in the folds of her fur—and picked my way across the snow wash, furious at having compromised. Unwilling to do otherwise.