Whitefern (7 page)

There was a chill in the air, and I realized the temperature must have taken a dive during the night. When I glanced out the window, I saw it was raining lightly, the drops sparkling like liquid ice. The wind had stripped many of the trees in the woods of their
once pretty orange and brown leaves. The branches looked like the arms of spidery skeletons. I hated this time of the year. It lasted too long for me, and we couldn't avoid it. Our house had woods on three sides.

But at least Whitefern was comfortable all year round now. A few years ago, Papa had upgraded the bathrooms and bedrooms and installed central heating in the old house, except for two unused rooms on the first floor in the rear. Before I took my shower, I put up the thermostat, and afterward, I chose warmer clothes to wear, a pair of heavier jeans and a pink cable-knit sweater. A good part of the morning had already passed. By the time I walked out of the bedroom, I felt certain Sylvia would be up and waiting for me in the kitchen. She hadn't come looking for me. She probably thought I had gone down without her.

I started down the stairs and then hesitated. It was too quiet below. I listened for the sound of the rocking chair but didn't hear that, either. She wouldn't start painting without her breakfast. I went to her bedroom. Of course, my biggest fear was that she had gone out of the house and to the cemetery again. Maybe she had been there most of the night!

I breathed with relief. She was still sleeping, but her blanket was cast aside and she was naked. How odd, I thought. Had it been that hot in here? I looked at her thermostat. She had never touched any thermostats in the house. She didn't understand them. Hers hadn't been pushed up at all, and the room temperature
was a little below sixty. I picked up her blanket and put it gently on the bed. She stirred and looked up
at me.

“Were you that hot last night, Sylvia?” I asked. Maybe her dreams and tossing and turning had put her in a sweat.

“Hot?”

“Your blanket was on the floor.” She looked at herself and then at me, seeming very confused. Then she shook her head. She looked like she was going to cry.

“It's all right. Nothing's wrong, Sylvia. Are you hungry? Let's make a bigger breakfast this morning, omelets and toast, okay?”

“With cheese?”

“Yes,” I said, smiling. “With cheese. Do you want to take a shower first?”

“Yes,” she said. “Shower.”

I picked out clothes for her and set out her shoes and socks while she showered. Then I sat her at her vanity table and brushed out her hair. When I stood behind her and looked at her in the mirror, I thought she was truly beautiful, angelic. For some reason, even more so this morning. Her cheeks looked rosy, her lips full, and her eyes brighter than ever.

What a dirty trick nature had played on her, to give her this much beauty but not enough mentally to have a wonderful life. She could easily attract a handsome, young, wealthy man who would devote himself to her, build her a bigger home than Whitefern and all the jewelry and clothes she could want. Every man like that would turn to look at her now, but a moment
later, when he tried to speak to her, he would surely lose his enthusiasm quickly and look for a fast exit.

And she wouldn't even understand why.

“Let's go down,” I said.

She put her hand on mine on her shoulder and smiled.

“What, Sylvia?” I asked, smiling back at her.

“Audrina,” she said. “Baby. Coming.”

A Tree of Secrets

Right after Sylvia and I finished breakfast, there was an early but quick brushing of snowflakes. The rain that had begun falling at daybreak suddenly was captured by a breath of winter. I had intended to go shopping for food but hesitated when I saw the snow. I hoped that it would soon turn back to only cold rain. It did, and the roads didn't freeze over.

Weather of all sorts fascinated Sylvia, especially snowflakes. When she was little, she loved holding up her palms and letting the flakes fall into them and melt. Papa had once told her that rain and melting snowflakes were like the sky crying. That fascinated her. Actually, she loved the surprises of all seasons and the wonder of spring flowers, rich green leaves, and the birds returning after winter. I never appreciated the abundance of nature that surrounded us as much as she did.

Aunt Ellsbeth used to say, “That girl will be a child until her dying day.” When it came to her appreciation of Mother Nature, I didn't think that was such a terrible prediction. The rest of us seemed to ignore how beautiful the outside world could be, perhaps because
we were so shut up inside our own. Our world was lit with the lights we cast over ourselves with our petty jealousies. Who had time to look at the stars?

Sylvia never paid much attention to what month we were in, and if told, she wouldn't remember when asked later. The poor girl couldn't even remember her own birthday. Whenever I told her it was her birthday tomorrow, she would look astonished. I knew that if I was going to help her develop, I had to work on her memory, get her to associate things. She was improving, but lately I had begun to suspect that the problem was more a question of what she thought was important enough to remember rather than the failure of memory itself.

Anyone who heard this would immediately say, “Well, my birthday is important. How could I ever be expected to forget that?”

But that memory wasn't so simple for Sylvia.

Before she died, Vera was fond of reminding Sylvia that my and Sylvia's mother had died giving birth to her. I caught her saying things like “If you hadn't made it so difficult to be born, your mother would have lived,” or “You were so afraid of being born, you tried to stop it, and that killed your mother.” Of course, she was right there on every one of Sylvia's birthdays, between the time Sylvia understood what a birthday was and Vera's accidental death, to ask, “How could you be happy it's your birthday? Your mother died on this day. You should spend the whole day kneeling at her grave and asking her to forgive you.”

No wonder Sylvia was not looking forward to it
enough to remember it, or if she did remember, she would pretend not to, I was sure. I constantly told her that our mother's dying was not her fault. “A baby can't purposely do that,” I told her, after I had shouted at Vera, and Papa told her the same thing in his way, too, although I knew now that he wasn't eager to bring Sylvia home from the hospital quickly. He made all sorts of excuses about her weight, illness, anything he could think of to keep her from being released to our care. It took him quite a while to accept that he would have such a daughter and to look at her and not think about my mother. Nevertheless, to this day, Arden insisted that Sylvia had no concept of what had happened, no matter what terrible things Vera had told her.

“To tell you the truth, I don't think she even understands the concept of death. It wasn't too long ago that I saw her beating a dead bird with a stick to try to get it up and flying again. You've seen her do things like that, too.”

I couldn't help wondering if he was right, but the death of your mother was such a deep loss, even a mother you saw only in photographs. How could you not be affected by it, think about it often, and blame yourself?

“I wouldn't worry about it. You have to be an adult to feel guilty,” Arden once said as a response to my fears for Sylvia. “You have to develop a conscience, and that takes a little more intelligence than she possesses.”

I didn't come right out and ask him the question about him that always haunted me, but I thought it,
especially then:
Was that why it took you so long to confess about witnessing what had happened to me and not stopping it or telling anyone else about it so the bad boys could be punished?
Is that your excuse, that you were still a child and you didn't have a fully developed conscience yet?

I did think there was some truth to what he was saying, however. Adults were always warning us not to be in a hurry to grow up. Maybe this was a big part of why. Growing up meant responsibility, and responsibility brought guilt as well as satisfaction. In the end, conscience would always be king.

In any case, I wasn't going to stop trying to help Sylvia grow more mature in any way I could. Educating her was a big part of it. Whether I liked it or not, I had to be as good as any special education teacher in a public school. Papa put the responsibility on me when I was young, and I naturally continued it all after his death. I was motivated by that one big fear Papa had put into my head: if something happened to me, Sylvia would find herself in some institution where she was sure to be abused. I would have let Papa down in a very big way just by dying. I wanted so much for Sylvia to be able to survive on her own, to learn enough of the basics to get by.

Ever since she was fourteen, when I looked at her and realized she had developed a woman's figure almost overnight, I knew she would need special care and protection. I realized she had a beautiful face and a shapely young body. It was then that a girl really became vulnerable and needed to know how to protect
herself and what to look for in a man's face that would tell her he was lusting after her only for his own selfish pleasure. I didn't think it was possible to get her to recognize that. She had a child's trusting nature. The warnings and alarm bells simply were not hooked up inside her the way they were for most girls and women.

Of course, she knew nothing about what had happened to me. Even if Arden or Papa had made some reference to it in her presence, it was as if they had spoken a foreign language. For a moment, she might listen, but then it would pass right through her and be gone like a breeze.

Occasionally, when she was younger, Papa would warn her about being alone, especially going too far away from the house by herself. But the smile on her face would tell anyone that she had no idea what terrible things he was afraid would befall her. She would nod and go on with whatever she was doing. He would look at me with frustration but also with a warning that I'd better protect her. I should be her shadow, the way she was his.

I spent almost all my free time with her. I worked on Sylvia's writing, spelling, and math and still did even today. One of the exercises was my dictating our shopping list for the supermarket. She sat at the table and painstakingly copied down the items, sometimes looking at the boxes or bottles to get the spelling right. I was amused at how important that was to her. Lately, she had become much better at it. She had good handwriting, probably because of her artistic talent. If
a cashier saw our list, he or she usually had a compliment for whoever had printed it.

“My sister does that,” I would say proudly.

Nothing brought Sylvia's shyness out more than when she was given a compliment. She would always look down to hide her smile, and her face would flush with embarrassment. I would tell her to say thank you, and sometimes she did, but usually with her head lowered, afraid to look strangers in the eye.

At the supermarket today, though, she behaved differently. I didn't have to tell her to say thank you, and when she did, she looked at the person to whom she was speaking. She was also more energetic and eager to find the items on the shelves. I stood back for most of the shopping and watched her go down the list, filling our cart without my telling her where to go.

If Arden could see her today, I thought, he wouldn't ridicule her so much or belittle the work I had been doing with her all these years.

Of course, I wondered what had given her this burst of energy and new self-confidence. From the little she had said about the night before, about going to the first Audrina's bedroom and sitting in the rocking chair, I gathered that what she had imagined had made her feel more important, because Papa had come to her and not to me or to Arden. She was eager to get home, help me put away the groceries, and go back up to the cupola to finish her new picture.

“I'm going to speak to someone today to help arrange for you to have an art teacher come to the house to show you things, different techniques and ways to
make your pictures more beautiful, Sylvia. You still want me to do that?”

She thought a moment and nodded.

“All right. When I find the right person, Sylvia, I would like you not to talk to him or her about Papa and the rocking chair. Papa and the rocking chair are our secret, right?”

“Yes. I'll never tell,” she said, putting her hand over her heart and hooking her pinkie with mine to make a pinkie promise. Like a little girl, she obviously enjoyed the idea of having a secret with her older sister.

“Okay,” I said, “our secret.”

After she went up to the cupola, I called the first person who came to mind for advice about something like this, Mrs. Haider, the retired principal of Whitefern High School. She had always been very kind to me and had taken a personal interest in me when I finally began to attend the public school. Because Whitefern was a relatively small town, our school was small enough for her to know some private information about her students.

She knew I had been homeschooled, of course, and that I had lost my mother when she had given birth to Sylvia. She knew of Sylvia, but, like most people, she didn't know very much about her, because in those years, Sylvia was rarely seen. After her retirement, I had seen Mrs. Haider occasionally in the village, and she was always quite friendly and very correct about how she asked questions. I never got the impression that she was a town gossip. I had no hesitations about telling her things concerning my family. She always
ended her conversations with me by saying, “I hope all goes well with you, Audrina.”

Her smile was sincere. She was a pretty woman, always perfectly put together, with coordinating colors and style. Her green eyes were still vibrantly emerald and contrasted nicely with her snow-white hair layered in an attractive bob.

Mrs. Haider was a widow with three adult children, all of whom had families but lived far away, her son in New York and her two daughters in South Carolina. She had seven grandchildren and lived in a modest two-story house on the north side of Whitefern.

When she answered her phone this morning, she sounded absolutely delighted to hear from me. She listened patiently while I described Sylvia as best I could and what I wanted for her now.

“That's very commendable of you, Audrina. I think that's a brilliant idea, and I know just the person for this assignment. As it turns out, Mr. Price, one of our art teachers, retired just last year, and from what his wife has been telling me, he is quite bored. They're not travelers, and he hates golf,” she said, laughing. “Why don't I call him for you and, if he's interested, give him your phone number?”

“Thank you, Mrs. Haider,” I said. “That's very kind.”

“Oh, indeed,” she said. “I, too, like the idea that I can continue to be of some use.” She laughed again.

After I hung up, I called Arden at his office.

“He's in a meeting, Mrs. Lowe,” Mrs. Crown said. “Is this an emergency?”

She sounded annoyed. A woman in her forties and married to a bank teller, Barton Crown, a man Arden called an untrustworthy leech, Mrs. Crown was a little too protective of Arden, in my opinion. I didn't think there was any doubt she'd rather he was her husband. She was a plain-looking woman with one of those complexions Momma used to call “an unripe peach.” Her makeup seemed to fade as the day progressed, leaving her looking bloodless, with dark brown eyes. Aunt Ellsbeth would say, “She shows cleavage in hopes you won't look at her face.”

“Oh, no, but please have him call me as soon as he's free.”

“Yes, I will,” she said. “As soon as that's possible.”

I didn't say thank you. I just hung up.

Less than a half hour later, Mr. Price called to tell me he would love to be of some assistance.

“When would you like me to begin?” he asked, sounding very eager. I guessed Mrs. Haider wasn't exaggerating when she said he was bored with his retirement.

“As soon as you wish,” I said. We hadn't even discussed the cost.

“I could come this afternoon to get acquainted with the young lady. How's three o'clock?”

“Yes, that would be fine,” I said. “Perhaps we should discuss the cost.”

“Oh, I'm sure we'll come to a mutually satisfactory arrangement,” he said. “I think it's important first that your sister be comfortable with me.”