Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (13 page)

       "I heard you," Molly said. Her voice sounded almost harsh. She saw Miriam shake her head at the sisters, and they fell silent. "We all heard you calling. You brought us home," Molly said, softening her voice with an effort.

       They hadn't asked her anything about the trip, about Washington, about her sketchbooks, which they had unpacked and must have looked at. Several times she had started to speak of the river, the ruins, and each time she had failed. There was no way she could make them understand. Presently she would have to get to work on the sketches, using them as guides and drawing in detail what she had seen, what it had been like from start to finish. But she didn't want to speak of it. Instead they talked of the valley and what had happened in the seven weeks of Molly's absence. Nothing, she thought. Nothing at all. Everything was exactly as it always had been.

       The sisters had been excused from work in order to speed Molly's recovery. They chatted and gossiped and caught up on mending and took walks and read together, and as Molly's strength returned, they played together on the mat in the middle of the room. Molly took no part in their play. Toward the end of the week, when they dragged the mat out and opened it, Miriam poured small glasses of amber wine and they toasted Molly and drew her to the mat with them. Her head was spinning pleasantly and she looked at Miriam, who smiled at her.

       How beautiful the sisters are, she thought, how silky their hair, and smooth their skin; each body was unmarred, flawless.

       "You've been away so long," Miriam whispered.

       "Something's still down there on the river," Molly said foolishly, wanting to weep.

       "Bring it home, darling. Reach out and bring back all the parts of you."

       And slowly she reached out for the other part of herself, the part that had watched and listened and had brought her peace. That was the part that had built the clear hard wall, she thought distantly. The wall had been built to protect her, and now she was tearing it down again.

       She felt she was speeding down the river, flying over the water, now swirling brown and muddy and dangerous, now smooth and deep blue-green and inviting, now white foam as it shattered over rocks . . . She sped down the river and tried to find that other self, to submerge it and become whole again with her sisters . . . Over her the trees murmured and beneath her the water whispered back, and she was between them, not touching either, and she knew that when she found that other self she would have to kill it, to destroy it totally, or the whispers would never go away. And she thought of the peace she had found, and the visions she had seen.

       Not yet! she cried silently, and stopped her race down the river, and was once more in the room with her sisters. Not yet, she thought again, quietly. She opened her eyes and smiled at Miriam, who was watching her anxiously.

       "Is it all right now?" Miriam asked.

       "Everything is fine," Molly said, and somewhere she thought she could hear that other voice murmur softly before it faded away. She reached out and put her arms about Miriam's body and drew her down to the mat and stroked her back, her hip, her thigh. "Everything is fine," she whispered again.

       Later, when the others slept, she stood shivering by the window and looked out at the valley. Autumn was very early. Each year it came a little earlier than the previous year. But it was warm in the large room; her chill was not caused by the season or the night air. She thought of the mat play and tears stood in her eyes. The sisters hadn't changed. The valley was unchanged. And yet everything was different. She knew something had died. Something else had come alive, and it frightened her and isolated her in a way that distance and the river had not been able to do.

       She looked at the dim forms on the beds and wondered if Miriam suspected. Molly's body had responded; she had laughed and wept with the others, and if there had been one part of her not involved, one part alive and watchful, it had not interfered.

       She could have done it, she thought. She could have destroyed that other part with Miriam's help, and the help of the sisters. She should have, she thought, and shivered again. Her thoughts were chaotic; there was something that had come to live within her, something that was vaguely threatening, and yet could give her peace as nothing else could. The beginnings of insanity, she thought wildly. She would become incoherent, scream at nothing, try to do violence to others or to herself. Or maybe she was going to die. Eternal peace. But what she had felt was not simply the absence of pain and fear, but the peace that comes after a great accomplishment, a fulfillment.

       And she knew it was important that she let the visions come, that she find time to be alone in order to allow them to fill her. She thought of the sisters despairingly: they would never permit her to be alone again. Together they made a whole; the absence of one of them left the others incomplete. They would call and call her.

       Now the harvest had been gathered; apples hung red and heavy on the trees, and the maples blazed like torches against endless blue skies. Sycamores and birches burned gold, and the sumac's red deepened until it looked almost black. Every morning each blade of grass was edged in frost; it gleamed and glistened until it was melted by the rising sun. The passion of the autumn colors never had been so intense, Molly thought. How the light under the maples changed! And the pale glow that surrounded the sycamores!

       "Molly?" Miriam's voice roused her from the window, and she turned reluctantly. "Molly, what are you doing?"

       "Nothing. Thinking of the work for today."

       Miriam paused. "Will it take you much longer? We miss you."

       "I don't think so," Molly said, and started for the door. Miriam moved slightly; her movement was enough to make Molly stop again. "Another two or three weeks," Molly said quickly, not wanting Miriam's hand on her arm.

       Miriam nodded, and the moment passed when she could have touched Molly, could have held her. She felt baffled. Again and again when she would have embraced Molly, the moment passed, just as it now had, and they stood apart, not touching.

       Molly left her in the large room, and presently Miriam walked to the hospital. "Are you too busy?" she asked, standing in the doorway to Ben's office. "I would like to talk with you."

       "Miriam?" The inflection was automatic, as was her slight nod. Only Miriam would come alone; a younger sister would have been accompanied by her. "Come in. It's about Molly, isn't it?"

       "Yes." She closed the door and sat down opposite his desk. His desk was covered with papers, notes, his medical notebook that he had carried on the trip with him. She looked from the papers to the man, and thought he was different too. Like Molly. Like all of them who had gone away.

       "You told me to come back if it didn't get better," she said. "She's worse than before. She's bringing unhappiness to all the sisters. Can't you do something for her?"

       Ben sighed and leaned back in his chair and looked at the ceiling. "It's going to take time."

       Miriam shook her head. "You said that before. How is Thomas, and Jed? How are you?"

       "We're all coming around," Ben said, smiling slightly. "She will too, Miriam. Believe me, she will."

       Miriam leaned toward him. "I don't believe you. I don't think she wants to come back to us. She's resisting us. I wish she hadn't come back at all if this is how she's going to be from now on. It's too hard on the other sisters." She had become very pale, and her voice shook; she turned away from him.

       "I'll speak to her," Ben said.

       Miriam drew a piece of paper from her pocket. She unfolded it and put it on his desk. "Look at that. What does it mean?"

       They were the caricatures Molly had sketched of the brothers early in the trip. Ben studied them, the one of himself in particular. Was he really that grim-looking? That determined? And surely his eyebrows were not that heavy and menacing?

       "She's mocking us! Mocking all of you. She has no right to make fun of our brothers like that," Miriam said. "She's watching all the time, watching her sisters as they work and play. She won't participate unless I give her wine, and even then I can feel a difference. Always watching us. Everyone."

       Ben smoothed the sketch paper and asked, "What do you propose we do, Miriam?"

       "I don't know. Make her stop working on the drawings of the trip. That's keeping her mind on it, on what happened. Make her join her sisters in their daily work, as she used to. Stop letting her isolate herself for hours in that small room."

       "She has to be alone to do the drawings," Ben said. "Just as I have to be alone to write my report, and Lewis has to be alone to assess the capabilities of the boat and the changes needed in it."

       "But you and Lewis, the others, are all doing it because you must, and she is doing it because she wants to. She wants to be alone! She looks for excuses to be alone, and she's working on other things, not just the trip drawings. Make her let you in that room, let you see what else she's been doing!"

       Ben nodded slowly. "I'll see her today," he said.

       After Miriam had gone, Ben studied the sketches again, and he smiled slightly. She certainly had captured them, he thought. Cruelly, coldly, and accurately. He folded the paper and put it in his leather pouch, and thought about Molly and the others.

       He had lied about Thomas. He wasn't back to normal, and might never be normal again. He had become almost totally dependent on his brothers. He refused to be separated from them even momentarily, and he slept with one or another of them every night. Jed was somewhat better, but he too showed a need for constant reassurance.

       Lewis seemed virtually untouched by the voyage. He had stepped out of this life and back into it almost casually. Harvey was nervous, but less so than he had been a week ago, much less than when he first rejoined his brothers. Eventually he would be well.

       And he, Ben. What about Ben? he asked himself mockingly. He was recovered, he decided.

       He went to talk to Molly. She had a room in the hospital administration wing. He tapped lightly at the door, then opened it before she answered. They so seldom closed doors, rarely in the day, but it seemed natural for her to have closed her door, just as he felt it natural to close his when he was working. He stood for a moment looking at her. Had she slid something under the paper that lay on her drawing board? He couldn't be certain. She sat with her back to the window, the board tilted before her.

       "Hello, Ben."

       "Can you spare a few minutes?"

       "Yes. Miriam sent you, didn't she? I thought she would."

       "Your sisters are very concerned about you."

       She looked down at the table and touched a paper.

       She was different, Ben thought. No one would ever mistake her for Miriam, or another of the sisters. He came around the table and looked at the drawing. Her sketch pad was open to a page filled with small, hastily done line drawings of buildings, ruined streets, hills of rubble. She was doing a full page of one section of Washington. For a moment he had a curious feeling of being there, seeing the devastation, the tragedy of a lost era; Molly had the power to put images from his mind onto paper. He turned and looked out the window at the hills, which were splashes of color now with the sun full on them.

       Watching him, Molly thought: neither Thomas nor Jed would talk with her at all. Thomas shied away as if she carried plague, and Jed remembered other things, urgent things he had to do. Harvey talked too much, and said nothing. And Lewis was too busy.

       But she could talk with Ben, she thought. They could relive the trip with each other, they could try to understand what had happened, for whatever had happened to her had happened to him. She could see it in his face, in the way he had turned so abruptly from her drawing. Something lay within him, ready to awaken, ready to whisper to him, if he would let it, just as it lay within her and changed the world she saw. It spoke to her, not in words, but in colors, in symbols that she didn't understand, in dreams, in visions that passed fleetingly through her mind. She watched him where he stood, with the sun shining on him. Light fell on his arm in a way that made each hair gleam golden, a forest of golden trees on a brown plain. He shifted and the twilight on the plain turned the trees black.

       "Little sister," he began, and she smiled and shook her head.

       "Don't call me that," she said. "Call me . . . whatever you want, but not that." She had disturbed him; a frown came and went, leaving his face unreadable. "Molly," she said. "Just call me Molly."

       But now he couldn't think what it was he had started to say to her. The difference was in her expression, he thought suddenly. Physically she was identical to Miriam, to the other sisters, only the expression was changed. She looked more mature, harder? That wasn't it, but he thought it was close to what he meant. Determined. Deeper.

       "I want to see you on a regular basis for a while," Ben said abruptly. He hadn't started to say that at all, hadn't even thought of it until he said it.

       Molly nodded slowly.

Still he hesitated, puzzled about what else he might say.

"You should set the time," Molly said gently.

       "Monday, Wednesday, Saturday, immediately after lunch," he said brusquely. He made a note in his book.

       "Starting today? Or should I wait until Monday?"

       She was mocking him, he thought angrily, and snapped his book shut. He wheeled about and strode to the door. "Today," he said.