Willa smiled and reached out to stroke Bella’s smooth back.
Willa looked at Old Pepper. “How did you know that?” she asked him. “How could you know that?”
Old Pepper leaned back and put his arm around Bella.
“I did more than just look,” he said.
Willa grinned. “You’re smart, Pepper.”
Old Pepper grinned back at Willa.
“Wouldn’t know it, would you?” he said. “By just looking.”
Slowly, slowly again, Old Pepper got up. “Come, Bella-Marie. A walk.”
Willa watched them move slowly along the street, the metal of the leash between them gleaming in the sun.
“A walk,” Willa could hear Bella say as she waddled behind Old Pepper. “A walk.”
Porky came running up, two melting Popsicles in his hand.
“Okay, Jojo,” he said, sitting on the curb. “Say it like the rest of us.”
Jojo unwrapped a Popsicle, stuffing the paper covering in his pocket. The Popsicle was orange, and he licked it in long tongue slurps. He turned to Porky and smiled.
“Elephantent,” he said.
“Wonderful Wanda, beautiful Wanda,” said Ted.
“Don’t call me wonderful,” said Wanda, chewing on the long nail of her index finger.
“Look further. Look beneath the surface. Into my soul. What do you see?”
“Wonderful,” said Ted. “Beautiful,” said Ted.
“You may be right,” said Wanda thoughtfully.
The music was clear and sweet and hung lightly in the afternoon air. Aunt Crystal and Aunt Lulu sat on kitchen chairs near the garden, rehearsing. The cats were nearby, one asleep in the sun, stomach skyward, legs up. The others chased butterflies and lurked under the bird feeder, watching for a careless bird.
Aunt Crystal played her viola with gusto and a wandering vibrato, lunging into notes. Aunt Lulu had polished her flute to a gleam, and her foot tapped rhythmically and steadily. She was, it was clear, the metronome of the duet. Bella-Marie, beside herself with delight at the flute, sat under Lulu’s chair and rocked back and forth. There was a slight breeze, and the Unclaimed Treasures had clipped the music to the stands with clothespins to keep the pages from fluttering.
“A musical wash,” murmured Horace, sitting between Willa and Nicholas. They leaned up against a stone wall where Horace had some apples stored between rocks.
“What are they practicing for?” asked Willa.
“To get better,” said Nicholas. He sat, cross-legged, his sketchbook on his lap.
“You know what I mean,” said Willa, holding out her hand for an apple.
Horace rubbed an apple against his shirt and handed it to Willa.
“They’re playing at the opening,” he said. “At Dad’s show.”
Horace pulled his knees up, leaning his chin on them, and looked thoughtful. Willa looked over to her mother’s garden and frowned. Her mother, huge and clumsy, was weeding there, moving slowly between the rows on her knees like a giant slug. Willa closed her eyes and leaned back, shutting out her mother. Nicholas’s charcoal made soft scratching noises against the paper as he drew. The smell of grass was strong, and a sudden breeze made Willa open her eyes. Willa looked over to the apple tree, and from where she sat she could see the small apples. Just beginning to grow. Two weeks, it was. Two long weeks they had lived here. And in those two weeks Nicholas had become an artist. And Willa had found her true love. And the apples had come. A lifetime.
“You know,” said Willa, watching Aunt Crystal and Aunt Lulu, “the Unclaimed Treasures play pretty good.”
“Well,” corrected Nicholas, as she had known he would. “They play well.”
“Well, I know it well,” growled Willa. “I always say that wrong. I like good better.” She glared at Nicholas.
“Aunt Crystal used to be a famous violist,” said Horace. He took a bite from his apple. “She played all over the world.”
Willa sat up straight. “Aunt Crystal? She was? Why did she stop?”
Then, just as if she’d heard the word stop, Aunt Crystal shrieked and stopped playing, right in the middle of a phrase, the notes left hanging.
“It’s a cat,” explained Horace. “The cats love to jump after her bow.”
“Shame!” shrieked Aunt Crystal. She jumped up and ran after a cat. Blue. She chased him around the back of the garden, shaking her bow over her head. Willa saw her mother straighten up and shade her eyes, watching. Aunt Lulu waited patiently, fingering her flute without sound, as if this were part of the music, a silent cadenza, a bridge to the next theme.
“For shame, for shame!” they could hear Aunt Crystal shouting after Blue, who had disappeared behind the garden, beyond the compost pile, and on past the first line of trees bordering the woods. It was quiet then. And soon, the famous violist plodded back from behind the compost heap, past the garden and into the yard. She stopped, folding her arms on her big chest, glaring at the other cats. Aunt Lulu looked up. And behind her, unseen by Aunt Crystal, Willa could see Blue peeking around the fence post.
Aunt Crystal wiped her forehead, then sat. Aunt Lulu lifted her flute to her lips.
“E,” pronounced Aunt Crystal loudly.
And they played again.
Horace Morris sighed, a sound so soft that Willa might not have known except that his shoulders moved a bit. A sad gesture.
Willa reached over to touch him on the arm.
“Horace?” she whispered.
“They miss Mother,” he said, looking straight ahead. “They are playing a Beethoven trio.” He turned and looked at Willa. “Mother plays the violin. There are only two parts here. They miss her.” He turned to watch them play.
Willa’s heart moved, a sudden wrenching feeling that was new to her. They miss her? Willa took a bite of her apple, watching the sweet, sad look on Horace’s face. She turned and looked at her mother, who was standing, her hands behind her, rubbing her tired back. And then, across the yard, the kitchen door opened and Horace’s father, a paintbrush held loosely in his hand, came out the door. He stood for a moment, watching the Unclaimed Treasures. Then he sat on the steps, listening. No one else saw him but Willa. No one else saw his look, like Horace’s, sad and thoughtful. And the music went on, and Horace reached above his head for another apple, and the Unclaimed Treasures played two parts of a Beethoven trio in the afternoon.
7
The doctor’s office was hot, the walls the color of old butterscotch pudding, and it was full of fat women. They shifted and sighed like the ocean as they read their magazines, smiling at each other over the pages. It was, Willa thought, much like an orchestra. Each time the door to the office opened and another woman came in, they all moved and switched places for the new instrument. The doctor’s secretary was tall and thin, like a praying mantis, and she had an astonishing hairdo. Willa thought it was bad taste, or at least unkind, for the doctor to hire such a girl to sit in front of all the fat women. They must be all terrifically sad and depressed, though as she studied them they all seemed pleased to be fat. Maybe the world was all turned around, thought Willa. She pressed her fists into her eyelids, and suddenly, unaccountably, she began to feel sorry for the beautiful secretary.
Please, dear God, thought Willa, make the beautiful skinny secretary as fat and swollen as the rest. Make her have varicose veins; make her shift and sigh. Uncurl her hair, God. Amen and over.
It was one of Willa’s tests. One of her bargains. When I turn the corner the next person will be my next best friend. When I look up everyone will be dancing in the streets. If my true love smiles at me I will make salads and vacuum eternally. Willa opened her eyes and shifted in her seat with the last thought. Willa looked at the secretary, but the poor mantis was as beautiful as ever. She did have a run in her stocking, though she didn’t seem to know about it. Perhaps if Willa told her she, too, could be miserable.
Willa’s mother moved next to her and turned sideways so that her stomach bumped up again
st Willa’s elbow. Willa stared, half revolted, half curious. Suddenly, her mother’s stomach moved to one side, something pushing against Willa’s arm.
Willa jumped, still staring.
“Mom! Mom, look!”
Her mother turned a page and yawned.
“What?” she asked, her lips moving silently as she read a recipe.
Willa grabbed her mother’s arm.
“Look!” she whispered.
Her mother let the magazine fall to the chair, and she stared at Willa.
“Look,” whispered Willa, wide-eyed. She pointed to her mother’s stomach.
Her mother sighed and closed her eyes for a moment. Willa watched her open her eyes again and smiled slightly.
“The baby’s been doing that for quite a while, Willa.”
“That much?” asked Willa.
“Sometimes. Soon the baby will become quiet. Not move so much, when it’s ready to be born.”
“When is that? When is the baby coming?” asked Willa.
She looked up at her mother, waiting. And then, a strange look came over her mother’s face. A look that Willa had never seen before. The look was far away and it made her mother seem far away, too. It made Willa’s throat tighten, and she could feel the hair on her arms stand up. What was it?
Her mother shook her head a bit, then looked down at Willa.
“Three weeks,” she said softly. “About three weeks.”
“Mrs. Pinkerton?”
Willa and her mother looked up. The praying mantis was beckoning to her mother with a crooked finger. The fingernail was brightly polished. Willa thought of Wanda.
“I’ll be back,” said her mother.
And then she was gone, leaving Willa with an entire room of sighers and shifters.
Three weeks. In the murmurings of the room Willa was struck suddenly with that. It was too soon. Three weeks is too soon. I have to sit for the painting. The baby will interfere. I’ll have to help. Make dinners. Clean the house. Too soon. Willa sighed and looked around the room. Having babies gets in the way of true love.
The woman in the next chair leaned over.
“Aren’t you lucky, dear.”
“Me?” asked Willa. No one outside her family had ever called her dear.
“You’ll have a younger brother or sister,” said the woman, smiling. “You’ll share. Sharing is so nice.”
Sharing, thought Willa, was not nice. It was low on her list of things to hope for—along with flat feet or bad breath. Maybe she should tell the woman that, so she wouldn’t be disappointed when she had eleven children who did not share.
The door opened and Nicholas peered in. And in that moment, for some strange reason, Willa began to feel just as sorry for the woman as she had for the praying mantis. Please God, make sure all her brats share. Please make sure. Salads, God. Remember I’ll make salads.
“Sharing,” she announced to the woman, “is splendid fun.” Willa remembered reading that in a horrid children’s magazine once. “This is my younger brother, Nicholas. And we share . . . with great joy,” she finished in a rush.
The woman smiled and so did Nicholas.
“Two of you sharing,” said the woman. “That’s nice.”
“Joyous,” corrected Willa. Joyous was a favorite word of Willa’s.
“Joyous,” said the woman.
They both looked up at Nicholas, and so did everyone else in the room.
“Joyous,” said Nicholas, grinning suddenly.
Everyone grinned back at Nicholas, including the praying mantis, who had been typing as if a flood were coming.
When the door to the doctor’s inner office opened and their mother came out, there was an entire room of grinning sighers and shifters, one praying mantis, and Willa and Nicholas.
“Good-bye,” Willa told the room.
“’Bye.”
“See you, dear.”
Outside, Willa’s mother raised her eyebrows at them as they grinned down the hall.
“What was all that about?”
Willa and Nicholas laughed. They put their arms out, reaching behind their mother’s back.
“We’re sharing you, Mom,” said Willa, grabbing onto Nicholas’s hand. They pulled her with them, half running down the hall to the elevators.
“Well, you two sound happy,” she said, and for a moment her voice sounded happy, too.
“Joyous, Mom,” said Nicholas.
“Joyous,” said Willa, listening to her voice bounce off the marble walls.
Two people waiting for the elevator smiled at them as they waited.
Willa looked up to see her mother smile back. She looked almost, but not quite, joyous.
It was late evening, after the dishes had been cleared and washed and put away, when Willa found the picture that made her mother cry. She was cleaning out her mother’s purse, a huge bag that was always a tumble of money and wrappers and clipped articles. Once there was one earring at the bottom, the mate never to be found. When Willa was little she used to wear the earring on a chain around her neck.
“What’s this?”
It was not an earring that Willa held up. It was a picture. A strange picture, blurred and vague like a dream.
Nicholas looked up from the table where he was drawing. Their father looked over Willa’s shoulder. And Willa’s mother began to cry. Silently at first, then sobbing, her shoulders shaking.
Willa and Nicholas stared. Their father went over and put his arm around her, bending close to her, whispering in her ear. But she kept on crying.
Nicholas got up, moving over to where Willa stood, and gently took the picture out of her hand.
“A baby,” he said after a moment. “The baby. It’s a picture of the baby.”
Willa stared at the picture.
“How can you tell?”
Nicholas smiled.
“I am good”—he looked at Willa—“at seeing things beneath the surface. Remember? Like seeds and roots and night crawlers?”
Willa looked. Gradually, she began to make out the figure. A head, an elbow, an arm. Willa thought of the baby pushing against her arm that afternoon. Just that afternoon. Willa held her breath. This baby.
Willa’s father looked up.
“It is called a sonogram, taken with a machine in the doctor’s office. It shows us where the baby is in the mother.” He tightened his arm around her mother.
“Mama’s a little worried,” he said. “About the baby.”
Worried? Worried about what? It is only a baby, small and soft. What is there to worry about?
“Things can happen sometimes,” their father went on. “Mama is older—it’s been almost twelve years since she had you. There’s more risk.”
Risk?
“Mama’s had tests. We know the baby is healthy.” He pointed to the picture. “And this lets us know if the baby is in the right position to be born. And if it will be a safe birth.”
Safe birth?
It had never occurred to Willa that anything bad could happen. She looked at her mother, who was blowing her nose. And all of a sudden the same cold feeling came again—the one that had made her throat close in the doctor’s office.
You must do better than just look. Old Pepper’s words came back to her.
In that moment Willa knew exactly what the feeling was her mother felt.
She’s afraid. Willa looked down at the picture. In my mother is this baby. Tiny, curled? Asleep? Awake? Brown-haired like me? Like Nicholas? And a thought came that Willa had never allowed before.
It is real. The baby is real.
8
The white dress was beautiful. It made Willa feel beautiful. She tried it on while the Unclaimed Treasures whispered and oohed and threw up their hands in excitement. The material was stiff against her bare legs. The high lace neck made her feel tall and stately.
“She looks like—”
“Never mind now.” Aunt Crystal’s voice was sharp.
“The spitting image of—”
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“So,” interrupted Aunt Crystal, glaring at Aunt Lulu, who might, thought Willa, be going into a decline, “the hat does not have to fit, dear.” Dear again, thought Willa. Two times she was dear in two days. “You hold it in your hand, like so.” Aunt Crystal posed, holding the hat by her side, trailing the ribbons, looking like a plump old woman in love.
“Beautiful,” murmured Aunt Lulu.
And then Horace’s father came, looking distracted. He stopped and stared at Willa for one moment, opening his mouth as if he might say something. But then he shook his head and took her hand, leading her up the stairs to his attic studio, talking all the while. Willa looked at her hand in his. Though his hand felt cool, her own hand was hot.
“You look fine, Willa. Fine. Now I’ll put you over here by the window.” And he placed her where a slight breeze came in the window, rustling the ribbons of the hat and lifting her hair. She had never been in his studio before, and she was surprised to see that the limbs of the apple tree outside crawled up onto the roof.
The room was filled with canvases and cloths and the smell of paint. Along one wall there were paintings neatly stacked, the painted sides facing the wall. But as Willa slowly scanned the room, she saw that some of the paintings had fallen over. Some leaned against each other, precariously, like a set of dominoes. One painting lay on the floor, ignored. Another on a large easel facing Willa—the only one she could see from where she stood—was gray and beige with a blurred figure in the middle. Willa narrowed her eyes, trying to bring the painting into focus. The breeze pushed her hair across her cheek, and Willa felt a chill. A sudden sadness. She shook her head and pushed her hair back, trying to push the feeling away, too. It was a feeling coming much too often lately. Hard to chase away. “And you’ll be sad,” Nicholas had warned her when he had first learned that Matthew was her true love. And Willa was sad.
She watched Matthew, his brow furrowed, mixing paint and whistling softly to himself. And then, across the room, Willa saw a girl in a long white dress, standing still as stone. Willa held her breath as she stared at herself in the mirror. The dress made her look taller, older, even though she knew that the Unclaimed Treasures had taken up the hem, carefully cutting off the lace edges and sewing them back for her. Slowly, she straightened and lifted her chin. The dress was beautiful. The girl in the mirror was beautiful. Then what was wrong?