The Unwelcomed Child (21 page)

“You shouldn’t have invited them in the first place. She thinks she can just walk in here after all these years, and everything will be forgiven?”

“She is our daughter.”

“Not anymore. That ended when she . . . when all this happened and she refused to accept responsibility.”

“She was raped,” Grandfather Prescott said. I looked up quickly. This argument had never been conducted in my presence.

“I’m talking about afterward,” Grandmother Myra said. “And you know how I felt about that . . . incident. She was bound to get herself into some trouble.”

Grandfather Prescott shook his head and stood up.

“You’d better go lie down,” my grandmother told him.

“I’m fine.”

“Fine,” she spat, and rose. “You’re inebriated.”

“I am not, thank you.”

She ignored him and looked at me. “Finish up here,” she ordered.

I hurried out with the dishes and silverware. While I washed and cleaned in the kitchen, the two of them continued their argument in the living room.

“She wasn’t here five minutes, and look what sort of an influence she had on that child,” I heard her say.

“She’s fine,” Grandfather Prescott said. “There was no influence.”

I held my breath, anticipating the next comment from my grandmother being why they shouldn’t send me to public school, but she didn’t say it, and they both quieted down, my grandmother surely quietly fuming. I made sure the kitchen was spotless, along with the dining-room table, before stepping into the living room.

Grandmother Myra looked up at me sharply. “What did she tell you out there? I want to know exactly,” she said.

“She told me how difficult things were for her when she left, how Uncle Brett had helped her find work.” I thought carefully for a moment and then added, “She said she could never take me to live with her. She couldn’t have the responsibility for a teenage girl.”

“Amen to that,” Grandmother Myra said. “I don’t expect this new marriage of hers will last long anyway. I don’t want to talk about her anymore. Go do your reading.”

I looked at Grandfather Prescott. He was huddled in his chair, looking more like a whipped puppy. He glanced at me and then looked away like someone who knew there was little more he could do. I left them and went to my room, a room that had never looked darker and more dismal. Despite the bad argument at dinner and the way my grandmother talked about my mother, I couldn’t help but envy her for her freedom, the places she had been, and the things she had seen. The contrast between where I was and where she was couldn’t be any starker.

And yet this was not the mother I had fantasized about. In my dreams, she was softer and more loving, even to my grandmother. Time had healed all wounds. The mother I had wanted was a mother who wanted me now more than anything, not this person who had arrived and left. This woman was still little more than a teenager. She wouldn’t have fled firing warnings back at me, warnings she thought I should consider. Where did she think I would run to anyway? Did she think life on the road, scrounging for some work to survive, would be my salvation? I didn’t have Uncle Brett into whose arms I could throw myself. We hadn’t even met. I would be more of a stranger to him than I was now to my mother.

It’s stupid to dream and to live in these fantasies,
I thought. I wouldn’t permit myself to do it anymore. Yes, I’d learn everything I had to learn to succeed out there, but I wouldn’t follow in my mother’s footsteps. She didn’t even remember the face of the young man who was my father, according to her. She had blundered into some trap and refused to acknowledge the results until she could do nothing about it, especially when she was back in the grip of my grandparents.

How did you learn to love a mother who wanted you to be disposed of and forgotten, either through abortion or through the anonymous world of orphans? I was just a blip on her radar screen. Now that she knew I existed, she had to look at me, and although for a few moments I had thought we could be friends, possibly even more, I realized that was even more of a fantasy than the ones I had preferred.

I fell asleep on a bed of disappointment. My grandparents argued late into the night. I heard them mumbling in the living room and then as they climbed the stairs to their bedroom. Their voices droned on as they reviewed what had happened. I was sure they both fell asleep thinking about the daughter they once had high hopes for, a little girl not yet stained by the temptations of the real world, not yet defiant, not yet so selfish that all she could do was service her own passions.

Maybe it was better to be like Grandmother Myra when it came to my mother. Maybe it was better to think she was gone forever, someone who had streaked in like a falling star and glittered just long enough to be noticed before she disappeared in the darkness forever. I welcomed sleep like the darkness that would drown out a glaring, painful light.

After I awoke and dressed, I went about the morning chores in silence, aware that my grandmother was watching me more closely to see if meeting my mother had changed me in some detrimental way. I asked her no questions and made no more comments about my mother. Neither she nor Grandfather Prescott mentioned her, either, but every time my grandmother began to speak to me, I held my breath, anticipating something that would mean my school enrollment was far from assured. She didn’t mention it.

Late in the morning, I had gone out onto the back porch and tied my ribbon on the banister. As soon as lunch was finished and my grandmother was satisfied, I went for my art equipment and supplies. My grandparents told me they were going to do some grocery shopping, and Grandfather Prescott said he needed some things from the hardware store.

“Your grandfather thinks we should try that restaurant we took you to on your birthday,” Grandmother Myra said, surprising me. “Somehow, in his wild imagination, he thinks doing that will cheer me up. We’ll leave about five-thirty,” she said. “You can wear one of the new dresses for school, if you like.”

“I will. Thank you, Grandmother,” I said. I smiled at my grandfather.

“Waste of time and money,” she muttered.

They left the house before I did. The silence seemed heavier. It was as if my mother’s visit, her presence in the house in which she had grown up, had changed the very air in it. Her voice and her laughter were still resonating, echoing in my ears. The sound of the phone ringing startled me. I looked at it for a moment. Probably the Marxes, I thought, and lifted the receiver.

“Hello, this is Elle,” I said, as I was taught to say.

“You can come live with me,” she said.

“What?”

“I feel terrible about leaving you there. I’m sorry I said that it wasn’t possible. Carlos is willing to take you in, too. We’ll manage. Whatever, your life will be better than what you’re living there. Here’s my address. Write it down.” She repeated it slowly. “We’re spending most of the year in Atlantic City, New Jersey. You don’t have to go to school if you don’t want to. We can find you some work in one of the hotels or restaurants.”

She paused. I said nothing.

“I expected my mother to answer the phone, not you, and I didn’t expect she would let you speak to me.”

“They’re out shopping,” I said.

“Perfect. Pack your things, and get on a bus. I’ll give you some credit-card numbers, and you can call ahead for your ticket. Call me on my cell phone and tell me the schedule. Here’s the number.” She dictated it twice. “We’ll be there to pick you up.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Sure you can. I did it, and I wasn’t all that much older than you are.”

“You were,” I said. “I’m only fifteen.”

“I felt sick leaving you there. It brought back all my ugly memories,” she said in reply.

“I’m not ready to leave,” I said. “I’m going to public school this fall.”

“Don’t be an idiot. Get out. I can see what she’s doing to you. She’s turned you into a house slave and probably convinced you that you’re well on the way to hell. Hell is in that house, believe me.”

“I can’t,” I said.

“I thought you had more grit in you. I thought you were more like me.”

“I’m not,” I said. I said it so fast. If I had thought first, I might not have said it so bluntly.

“I see. Well, you have my cell-phone number. Call me when you wake up. I have to go. I won’t call you again,” she warned. “I’m surprised I did, but as I said, I felt bad for you.”

Do you?
I thought.
Why didn’t you feel bad for me the day I was born? A month later, a year? Why didn’t you ever call to see what they really had done with me?

I hated how hard and cruel Grandmother Myra could be sometimes. I hated the fear of evil she had embedded in my very soul, how she had made me doubt my own self-worth so many times, and what she had prevented me from enjoying, but I didn’t think she was so terribly wrong about my mother now. I would fulfill the prophecy if I went off to be with this woman who had come bursting into my life and gone bursting out of it with lightning speed. Grandmother Myra wasn’t wrong.

“Thank you,” I said. “I appreciate your calling.”

“Christ, you even sound like her,” she said. “Good luck.”

She hung up.

I held the receiver for almost a minute, rehearing every word of our conversation. Then I hung it up slowly. I was trembling, because I thought she might be right. I should be packing and running.

But then my thoughts shifted to my picture and the lake and Mason.

There were other ways to escape, I concluded. I gathered my things again and hurried out into the woods to follow my path, looking back occasionally as I went. I was more like someone fleeing than someone rushing toward someplace or someone she wanted to see.

My mother was right about one thing.

I wasn’t living in the Garden of Eden.

But I’d be a fool not to realize that Satan had moved on to other gardens.

“I’ve got most of the afternoon,” I said as Mason guided the rowboat to the shore. He wore a pair of white shorts and a light blue tank top, and he was barefoot. He got out of the boat to load my art equipment and supplies. “There’s no dinner preparations. Tonight we’re going to the restaurant where I first saw you.”

“Oh, what’s the occasion?”

I didn’t want to get into my mother’s unexpected visit.

“No occasion. My grandfather talked my grandmother into doing it.”

He smiled and put his arm around my waist, kissed me softly on the lips, and lifted me comfortably into his arms. He didn’t move.

“Claudine can put all the makeup in the world on and teach you how to use it, but it won’t matter. You’re a naturally beautiful girl, Elle. I can’t get tired of saying it.”

“I don’t really want to put on a lot of makeup anyway,” I said, recalling how made-up my mother was.

“Good.” He kissed me again and set me softly in the rowboat. “You’ve got to meet my parents. They know I came to get you.”

He saw the look of concern on my face.

“Don’t worry. They are cool parents.”

It occurred to me as he started rowing back to the dock that I had never met any parents of anyone my age. What did “cool parents” mean? Understanding? Loving? Considerate? As wild as my mother? I didn’t have to wait long to find out.

As we pulled up to the dock, Mason’s father came walking quickly toward us. He was in bright red swimming trunks and a pair of black sandals. He looked as if he had been in the sun for months.

“Well, well, so this is the forest princess,” he said, and Mason laughed. Mason’s father reached down to help me out of the boat. As soon as I took his hand, he lifted me onto the dock, gazing into my face with a small smile on his. “I can see why you’ve captured Mason’s heart so quickly. I’m Mason’s father. You can call me Doug. Elle, is it?”

I nodded. I could barely speak. No grown man, not even my grandfather, ever had held me so closely. He released me and stepped back.

“What’s with the easel?”

“Elle draws and paints, Dad. I told you.”

“Right, right. You want to unload all that?”

“No. We’re planning on going to our island soon, and she’ll work there.”

“Fine. So you’re an artist, too,” Doug Spenser said.

“I’m just learning.”

“She’s a natural,” Mason told him.

“Best kind,” his father said. “Mason says you live in that quaint house just south of us. With your grandparents?”

“Yes.”

“Well, aren’t they lucky? My parents and Mona’s rarely see Mason and Claudine.”

“That’s not our fault, Dad.”

His father laughed. What did Mason mean? His parents kept them from seeing their grandparents?

“C’mon,” he said. “Before you get too involved, you have to meet Mona. She’s giving herself a facial, so don’t be frightened.”

Mason took my hand, and we followed his father back toward the house. Claudine stepped out through the patio door. She was in a brief orange bikini and had her hair in curlers.

“Ahhhh!” Doug Spenser cried, holding up his arms in front of his face. “A creature from the lagoon.”

“Very funny, Daddy boy,” Claudine said. “Hi, Elle.”

“Hi.”

“We’re having shrimp on the barbie for dinner if you can stay,” Doug Spenser said. “My specialty.”