I have two friends at school—the Viking goddess and Roger Kelly. The three of us eat lunch together and share some classes, and Roger and I are in the school band. Making arrangements to see Jo or Roger after school or on weekends is difficult, however: everything has to be thought about in advance. Jo’s mother has made no secret of the fact that she hates the long drive up to our house, and I think she regards my father as suspicious. If there’s to be a sleepover, I usually stay at Jo’s. I don’t have sleepovers with Roger, of course, but we sometimes play basketball after school, and I come home on the late bus.
When I lived in New York, I had more than two friends. There were four fourth-grade classes in my elementary school alone, and there were three elementary schools in our town. I went to sleepovers often and had them at my house as well. I took dance lessons and gymnastics and was a Brownie and a Girl Scout. I had a lavender-and-white bedroom with a canopy bed, and I could fit six or seven girls and their sleeping bags on the thick carpet. We watched movies in the living room and then went upstairs at eleven, which is the latest my parents would let us stay up. We did our nails or played Truth or Dare until after midnight, learning how to fall down giggling without waking my parents.
When Clara was six months old, she was moved into her own bedroom next to mine. My friends liked to play with her when they came to visit. They tried to braid her hair, but she never had enough hair for any braid to be satisfying. Her room was yellow and orange and blue, largely because I’d painted one wall with yellow and orange and blue fish, in different shapes and sizes, fish such as you’d never come across in a lifetime, even in the Caribbean. I sometimes used to wonder, after we moved to New Hampshire, what the new owners did with that room, if they left the yellow and orange and blue fish swimming through the water, or if they painted the wall white, erasing my artwork the way our family seemed to have been erased—with one large roller.
When I first moved to Shepherd, I was ragged and raw and prone to sudden fits of weeping, difficult to hide in a one-room schoolhouse. To compensate for my lack of emotional control, I pretended to an air of weariness and disdain, as if as a New Yorker I was so far ahead of my peers that I hardly need bother to pay attention in class. I was disabused of this notion in a gradual way, and by May I’d finally caught up in math.
In the scrub on our land were dozens of raspberry bushes that my father and I stumbled across one July day the first summer in New Hampshire. We picked the berries and brought them back to the house and, for a time, ate them with everything (on cereal, on ice cream, with steak). Because there were more raspberries on the land than he and I could consume, I decided to sell them at the end of the road. My father encouraged me to ask Sweetser if he knew where I might come by a few dozen wooden fruit boxes. Sweetser, who seemed to be able to procure almost anything on demand, sold me several tall stacks for five dollars, waiving the payment and calling it a loan, which I repaid with pride at the end of the first week.
Each morning, in my denim shorts and pastel T-shirts, I would pick the raspberries in the brush and put them in a basket that hung from my shoulder. When I had enough berries, I’d ride my bicycle the length of our dirt road to its entrance. There I had a card table and a plastic lawn chair set up. I’d fill the fruit boxes with the raspberries and then sit and wait. I could count on at least four customers a day: a woman whose name I never did learn, but who seemed to have a lot of houseguests; Mrs. Clapper, who was a visiting nurse and who used to take a box each day to one of her patients; Mr. Bolduc, who went by every morning to get the newspaper and his mail in town; and Mr. Sweetser, who had no reason that I could ever see to drive by our road, but there he was (I don’t believe he ever missed a day). I might have four or five other customers who were doubtless so surprised to see a girl selling raspberries on that remote wooded road that they felt a moral obligation to stop. Altogether I would spend an hour picking the berries, twenty minutes riding to and fro on my bike, and three or four hours at the stand—an approximate total of six hours. I sold the berries for seventy-five cents a box, and if lucky I’d make six dollars a day. Six days at the stand (some days spent under a rigged umbrella when it rained) might yield thirty-six dollars a week, which, when I was ten and eleven years old, seemed a small fortune. I would sit in my chair and sometimes read, but mostly I’d stare off into space, occasionally noticing the way a pair of monarchs folded into each other when they mated, or the way the Queen Anne’s lace seemed to have popped open overnight. I learned to daydream that summer, and it was then that I conceived of the idea of Clara as still growing. She’d have been almost two years old that first summer and probably a nuisance, but I imagined her wandering into weeds and wildflowers, the top of her head lost below the yellow and magenta blossoms, or reaching for a raspberry and tipping over a pint box. I imagined her on her tummy on top of my card table taking a nap while I stroked her back.
Sunday is the anniversary of my mother’s and Clara’s deaths. I know it and my father knows it, but neither of us speaks of it all day. I know my father remembers, because he keeps walking from the barn to the house and back to the barn again, as if he can’t decide what to do with himself. He looks at me when he thinks I’m not aware of it. He wants to say something but is unsure of what will happen to both of us if he does. He takes a shower at midday, which he almost never does, and spends a long time in his bedroom, where I know there is a picture of my mother and me and Clara. I am twelve and keenly aware of milestones and anniversaries, and I think the day should be marked.
“Dad,” I say when he finally comes out of the bedroom. “Can we go to Butson’s Market?”
“What for?” he asks.
“I think they sell flowers there.”
He doesn’t ask me what the flowers are for.
The sun has been out for two days. I wear my jacket open. My father has on only a sweater. He’s shaved, and his hair is clean, and he’s not an embarrassment to be with, which is an improvement over the previous year. On the first anniversary of the accident, my father sat in the barn all day and didn’t move. I felt lonely and sad and in need of comfort, but I didn’t have the courage to walk to the barn and see what I might find there: my father in the Dad position, his mouth open as if his nose were stuffed, his eyes vacant, seeing only images from the past. Instead I looked through my album, made a beaded necklace, answered the phone when my grandmother called, and then I cried for so long that she finally insisted I go get my father.
At Butson’s Market, my father searches for dishwashing liquid while I stand in front of the refrigerated shelves that hold the bunches of flowers. There are daisies and carnations, baby’s breath and roses, and even though the bouquets are all more or less alike, I spend a lot of time trying to decide which is best. The carnations look fake pink and bother me. One bouquet, almost entirely yellow, has a long creepy-looking flower in its center that might be a lily.
“That one’s pretty,” my father says, pointing to a bouquet that is mostly lavender and white.
“What are those bluish-purple flowers?” I ask.
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think Mom would like them?”
“I think she would,” he says.
I clutch the bouquet all the way home, trying to decide where to put it. We have a Mason jar in a cabinet in the kitchen. I’ll arrange them in that, I think, but I won’t leave them in the kitchen. I could set them on the coffee table in the den, though that seems a little ordinary to me. If I put them in my father’s room, I won’t be able to see them. In the end, I set them on the shelf in the back hallway. I sit across from the flowers on the bench and admire them. My father says, “They look nice,” as he goes out to the barn.
But something is still bothering me. They don’t seem right inside the house, and more important, I’m afraid my mother and Clara won’t be able to see them. It’s illogical, of course—if Clara and my mother have become spirits who actually can see down to Earth, then surely they can see through houses?
??but I can’t shake the notion. I put on my jacket and walk the Mason jar to the edge of the clearing before the woods begin. I set the jar in the snow.
I stand back. The flowers seem more alive in the sunshine. I know they’ll die before morning, but I am oddly satisfied.
I think about my mother and Clara. I shut my eyes. I imagine them vividly. I do this periodically in order to keep the images clear and sharp. The pictures in my mind have warmth and smell and movement, treasures I cannot afford to lose.
On the last day before Christmas vacation, we have a party in our homeroom at school. In New York we had combined Hanukkah-Christmas celebrations, but in New Hampshire it is simply a Christmas party, there being no one in our school in need of Hanukkah. Gifts are exchanged, and the boys are annoyingly manic because of the half day. I’ve drawn Molly Curran’s name and have given her, in keeping with a lifelong propensity to give gifts I really want for myself, a kit with twenty different colors of nail polish in it. I’ve gotten a tape of the Police from Billy Brock, who’s clearly operating on the same principle and, worse, doesn’t know me very well, since I don’t own a tape player. On the bus on the way home from school, I debate asking my father for a tape player instead of a washing machine for Christmas. Is it too late, I wonder, to ask for both?
After I hang up my jacket, I find my father in his shop. He’s consumed with preparations for a glue-up, a precise and panicky procedure that in fifteen minutes can ruin weeks of painstaking woodwork. One has to set the glue, bring the components together, apply suitable clamping pressure, test the squareness, and then clean up the excess—all in about a minute and a half. My father is making a drawer, the first of two that will be fitted into the openings of a small sideboard he has to finish before Christmas. It is his first commission.
“How was school?” he asks.
“Good,” I say.
“Last day.”
“Yup.”
“How was the party?”
“Good.”
“What did you get?”
“A tape of the Police.”
I look him in the eye and hope he is thinking, Tape player: good idea for Nicky for Christmas.
The day marks a week and two days since my father and I walked into the woods and found a baby. I’ve been unable to keep from thinking about what might have happened to Baby Doris had we not found her. I’ve imagined the sleeping bag a frozen cocoon with long icicles falling like daggers all around her. In a second call to Dr. Gibson, my father learned that the baby’s toes would not have to be amputated. “She’s a fighter,” the doctor told my father, a comment which, when relayed to me, filled me with pride. We also learned that she is to be collected today by social services and delivered to a temporary foster home. This information upset me greatly when I heard it, since I liked having the baby in the hospital, having her contained there. We won’t be told where she is going. The whole process strikes me as being a lot like the witness protection program, with its anonymity and its new cast of characters: new mother, new father, new brothers and sisters. We won’t even be told the baby’s new name. Forever, to us, she will have to be Baby Doris.
I leave my father and walk back into the house and into the kitchen, where I make myself a cup of hot chocolate. I stick an English muffin into the toaster and have an image of my mother mixing up a bowl of cottage cheese and peanut butter. Just the day before, I had a memory of my mother in her garden, bent straight over, her legs tanned, her shorts riding high on her thighs. My father was on the John Deere, headed toward my swing set. Because he was staring at my mother (trying, I think now, to get a good look at her from the front), he mowed right into the swing set, the prow of the John Deere catching on a swing and riding it up into the air. My father leapt off backwards and rolled out of the way. The engine cut out as he fell, but when he stood the mower was still stuck in the swing, its nose pointed skyward. My mother began to laugh, putting the back of her hand to her mouth.
And last night I had a memory of my mother lying beside my father on their bed, the loose strap of the slip in which she slept revealing part of an engorged breast. They were talking softly so as not to wake Clara, barely a week old, in a cot next to the bed. What had they been talking about? Why had I gone into the room? I can’t remember. As they whispered, a stain began to blossom on my mother’s slip, the milk leaking with surprising fluidity, an enormous flowering. I remember my mother’s hand going to her breast and her whispering to my father, Oh, Rob; oh, look.
In the kitchen I smell smoke. The English muffin is stuck in the toaster. I pull the plug, remove the muffin with a fork, and Frisbee the charred puck into the sink.
I hear a knock then, and I think it’s a branch tapping against the side of the house. Then I hear the human rhythm: three taps, a pause. Another three. Another pause. I think it might be the detective again, and I wonder if I should say my father isn’t home. But what if the detective just barges through and finds out I am lying? Can I be prosecuted for lying to an officer of the law? I move to the cloakroom and open the door.
A couple stands on the steps, and I see behind them that it has begun snowing lightly. The woman has large, square glasses with blue-tinted frames and a hairdo one can’t come by in the entire state of New Hampshire: sleek and thick and blunt cut. She wears glossy lipstick the color of cherries that matches her leather gloves. She has on a white down jacket she clearly hasn’t bought at L. L. Bean. The man unzips his black ski parka, smiles, and says, “We heard down at the antiques store that someone called Mr. Dillon makes furniture that looks like Shaker. Are we in the right place?”
I say, yes, they are, but I am puzzled. Hasn’t it been more than a week since Sweetser told the couple about my father’s furniture? Where have they been in the meantime? In a time warp? I tell them to come inside because of the snow and that I’ll be right back. I have to get my father, I add.
“Dad,” I say when I reach his shop, “there are two people here who want to see your furniture.”
I’ve interrupted him in the middle of the glue-up. He shakes his head vigorously, as if to say, For heaven’s sake, Nicky, not now.
“I’ll take them to the front room,” I offer.
The man and the woman stomp the snow from their boots onto the mat. I tell them that my dad will be with them soon, and that I’ll take them to see the furniture. The woman glances over at the man and smiles, as if to say, Isn’t she cute?
We walk through the kitchen and the dining room that is now a den. We pass the room my father and I never enter, the room that is like a shrine. I show them into the front room, where the furniture is: two straight-back chairs; three small tables; a low, square cocktail table; a walnut dining table; an oak bookcase; and a small cabinet.
“My goodness,” the woman says.
“I see what the man at the antiques store meant,” the man says. “This looks very much like Shaker.”
“Simple but beautiful,” the woman says.
“Good finish,” the man says.
I wonder if they are complimenting my father’s work for my benefit; if when I leave the room, negative comments will emerge. When people come to look at the furniture, my father almost always excuses himself and goes outside for a smoke. He hates being a salesman. Customers usually come in pairs—couples from Massachusetts or New York looking to take something back with them to the house or the apartment, something to remember the weekend or the vacation by. I am idly thinking about how to bug the showroom when my father enters, wiping his hands on a rag. “Sorry about that,” he says as he crosses the threshold.
My father hasn’t shaved, and he hasn’t cut his hair. The lids of his eyes are pink-rimmed. Oh God, has he been crying? No, I tell myself, it’s the glue; his eyes are pink because of the fumes. He’s covered with sawdust, and he looks, frankly, frightening.
There’s a moment of silence. Two moments anyway. Enough to make me look over at the man, who is staring at my father, and then over at my father, who is staring bac
k at him.
“Robert?” the man asks.
“Steve,” my father says.
The two men advance to shake each other’s hand.
“I heard you’d moved somewhere in New England,” Steve says in a disbelieving voice, as if he cannot credit what he is seeing. “I just never thought . . . Virginia, this is Robert Dillon. We used to work together in the city.”
Virginia steps forward and shakes my father’s hand. His hand is rough and callused, and I know it smells of turpentine.
“This is my daughter, Nicky,” my father says.
“We’ve met,” Steve says, smiling in my direction. “She showed us in.”
There’s another moment of silence.
“Well,” Steve says. “Your work is beautiful. Just beautiful. Isn’t it, Virginia?”
“Yes,” Virginia says. “Very beautiful. The man at the antiques store was right. It bears a strong resemblance to Shaker.”
I glance at my father, and his face makes my stomach feel hollow.
“Listen,” Steve says, putting his hand to his forehead. “I just wanted to say . . . I never got a chance to tell you how sorry I was. About . . . you know.”
My father gives a quick shake of his head.
“You remember,” Steve says to his girlfriend or his wife. “I told you about the man whose wife and baby . . . ?”
“Oh! Oh, yes!” Virginia says in a gush of comprehension. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” she adds. “It must have been so hard.”
My father is silent. Virginia clutches her pocketbook to her chest. Steve clears his throat and looks around the room.
“Are you still with Porter?” my father asks.
“No, I’m on my own now,” Steve says with apparent relief at the change of subject. “I bought two condos in a building on Fifty-seventh Street a year ago.” He pauses. “Worth twice what I paid for them already. We live in one, and I use the other for an office. I’ve got three guys working for me.”