Saying Grace

  “Hello, bird,” Bonnie had murmured to it, completely unsurprised. “Hello bird. You got away, didn’t you? You got away and now your pin feathers have grown out and you can fly, can’t you bird? Good for you.” Rue had been amazed.

  Catherine Trainer found Bonnie sitting under a tree, crocheting what looked like a snowflake in fine linen thread. Bonnie was wearing a black leotard, a long Indian wrap skirt, and ballet slippers. Catherine tried to guess her age but couldn’t. Her long neck and torso bent and moved as she sat cross-legged, as if she needed to be constantly subtly stretching, warming her muscles in case her dance should begin.

  Bonnie looked up at Catherine’s troubled face and gave her a welcoming smile. Catherine settled down on the grass beside her. It was very nice to find her out here under a tree, this psychologist girl. Catherine had never talked to a psychologist and would not have liked to be seen going into one’s office.

  “Look at that bad blue jay,” said Catherine. “Look how close he comes to you.”

  Bonnie nodded and made a noise in her throat at the bird.

  “Do you know a lot about birds?”

  “Hardly anything,” said Bonnie. “I like them though.” She made the sound again and the jay cocked his head at her. Catherine watched the bird, and then told Bonnie all about Lyndie, and Bonnie listened carefully.

  “Tell me again where she was bruised,” she said.

  “Here. And here. That I saw. Do you know the Sales?”

  “Not Mrs. Sale. I met Mr. Sale when he came to the science building to donate a computer.”

  Catherine stared at the grass. “Don’t you think something terrible is going on? When a child is hurt and tells different stories about what happened? To make up a thing like that ghost?”

  “Children make up stories for so many different reasons.”

  “But she went to bed with a broken bone in her arm! And didn’t tell her parents?”

  “I agree it sounds like something’s wrong. But I wouldn’t want to say what, based on so little information. Would Lyndie like to talk to me?”

  “What will you do if she tells you a ghost pushed her down the stairs?”

  Bonnie laughed. “I kind of liked the ghost. I’d like to hear more about it.”

  Catherine said, “When a child is injured and can’t tell how it happened the same way twice in a row, it means someone beat her up.”

  “It can mean that.”

  “The police came and talked to us! It’s a classic case!”

  “Catherine, children get hurt a lot of different ways. And they tell big stories for a lot of reasons. She’s got your attention by doing it, hasn’t she?”

  “We signed that piece of paper. From the State of California. If it even might be child abuse, you have to report it. If you suspect.”

  Bonnie looked troubled. “Have you talked to Rue?”

  “No, she isn’t here. I heard her mother is sick.”

  “That’s too bad. But the child has had medical attention, for the moment. I think we should talk to Rue. There could be all kinds of ramifications we don’t know about.”

  “You’re probably right,” said Catherine.

  But Catherine didn’t really think Bonnie was right, and thus didn’t hear what she said.

  Catherine thought about the ghost, the angry weeping woman, and felt a strange stroke of pity for her. She thought about that poor hurt little girl, trying to be brave, and the look in her eyes as she told Catherine her story. She thought about it all evening, and talked it over with Norman, as she did everything. And by morning she had come to believe that Bonnie had quite agreed with her, certainly Norman did; that when a person is being misunderstood or hurt it is terribly important that she learn that somebody cares, and believes her. So before she left for class Friday morning, Catherine telephoned Child Protective Services.

  Rue’s mother had grown querulous and miserable in the hospital, and her father had determined to take her home. He couldn’t tell Rue on the phone what exactly had been so desperate, but he said she hadn’t taken to it, and they better get her out. “Do you want me to come?” Rue had asked.

  There was a brief pause before her father said, “No, no, we’ll be fine.” So Rue said, “I’ll be in Bangor tomorrow night, and I’ll rent a car, so don’t worry, and don’t wait up; I won’t be in before midnight.” When he didn’t tell her not to come, she realized he’d been wanting her for days.

  Even at the top of the airplane stairs, as you stand above the tarmac in Bangor, the crisp smell of fir washes over you, cleansing ether from a northern world. The airport was virtually deserted at ten o’clock at night. The car rental desk had closed but the agent left Rue’s contract and car keys with the airline baggage handlers. She was soon driving alone on nearly deserted roads, with black pine woods on either side of her, opening here and again to farmers’ fields. She drove carefully, watching for deer, and grateful it still lacked two weeks of hunting season, a time that had grown increasingly frightening throughout the state. During November even the dogs wore blaze orange and her father reported that Howard Schwarz braided blaze orange into his cow’s mane, and painted C-O-W on her sides with dayglow paint. A woman in Brewer had been killed hanging out wash in her own backyard, and another in Surry found some drunk had shot her donkey.

  She had an hour and a half to home, to sort out her feelings about seeing her mother stricken. Jeannette was a proud and cool woman with a great need for others to see her dignity. Rue hoped they would not embarrass each other. She hoped she could be some help to her father without making him feel that he needed help. The car was underpowered and the upholstery reeked of cigar smoke. As she drove she kept the windows open to the pine-perfumed night air, although the temperature was certainly in the forties. She wondered what Henry was doing. Then she wondered what Georgia was doing, and liked knowing they were in the same time zone. She tried the radio but it was AM only, and at this time of night she got a jumble of overlapping stations, either hard rock or call-in shows, the strongest signal being KDKA in Pittsburgh. She turned it off and drove in cold scented silence.

  There was a light on in the kitchen when she pulled into the yard of the house where she grew up. The house was a nineteenth-century farmhouse, with boxy little rooms to hold heat and wood-burning stoves in the kitchen, parlor, and best upstairs bedroom. She was struck at how much it was like the house in which she now lived, except that the California rooms were breezier with much bigger windows, since the farmers there were not facing three months a year of subzero weather. When she was a little girl in this house, they used to live in the kitchen and keep the stove cranked up to a zillion in winter. You got used to piercing cold outdoors, so that a windless day and five above zero seemed positively balmy, but when you were inside, you wanted to be warm through your bones.

  Rue went in the back door quietly. The familiar smell of the kitchen swamped her so that she stood for a moment in the doorway, breathing it in as if every minute of the years she had lived here was still here and you could smell them.

  She hoped her parents were asleep, but when she closed the kitchen door softly she heard her father stir in his chair in the parlor. She went in to him.

  He looked just the same. Lean, with a long-jawed lined face, thick hair, and pale blue eyes. If he had been asleep he didn’t look it. He got up, kissed her, and told her in the same words he always used that it was awfully nice to have her home. She felt as if she had just come back from boarding school.

  “Is Mother here?” she asked. She had still been in Ellsworth when they last spoke. He nodded.

  “I told her you said not to wait up, but she wants to see you. She slept a lot of this afternoon, so don’t worry about waking her.”

  “How is she?”

  He considered this question carefully.

  “She’s not too bad. I don’t think she can see too awful good. She says the headache is better.”

  This gave Rue very little idea what to expect. But she left
her father, saying she wouldn’t be long, and climbed the stairs.

  In the bedroom her parents had shared for fifty-odd years, her mother lay looking so waxy that Rue’s heart nearly stopped when she saw her. She thought she must have died since her father went downstairs. But as she walked softly across the floor, her mother’s eyes opened, and her spirit, which must have been floating nearby, went into her body and animated it, so that at once, as if by conjuring, the object became a woman. Jeannette smiled, and Rue bent over to kiss her cheek. Her mother pulled herself up on the pillows.

  “I made him take me out of there,” she said. Her speech seemed entirely normal, as near as Rue could tell.

  “I know you did. Good for you.”

  “They put a needle in your arm and leave it there, so you’re attached to this…” she couldn’t finish the description, but gestured such that Rue knew she meant the IV bottle, hanging from its aluminum cart beside her bed, which might have been dripping in drugs or just sugar water to keep her strength up.

  “I guess they have to do that,” said Rue, though she knew from being a doctor’s wife that it was often done out of routine and not reason. “I bet you hated it.”

  Her mother nodded and rolled her eyes as if her daughter was a mind-reader. Rue was unused to having her mother’s approval, let alone to having her mother think she had any special gifts, so it was a new experience to be thought a mind-reader, and where her mother was concerned she dreaded new experiences.

  “I had to tinkle,” said her mother in a stage whisper. “I didn’t tell him this. I had to tinkle in the middle of the night and I rang the bell, I rang and rang and rang, and nobody came.”

  “Oh, Mother…” said Rue. “Where were the nurses?”

  Her mother made a face. It was a deep mystery.

  “Finally a nurse came down the hall and I shouted, “Yoo hoo—yoo hoo—and she came, and I said ‘I have to tinkle,’ and she said ‘I’m not on duty on this floor.’”

  “Oh Mother.”

  “And off she went, trip trap, trip trap.” This was the noise the goats made crossing the bridge in The Three Billy Goats Gruff. The copy of the story that her mother had read aloud was in the next room, as was apparently her whole childhood. And her mother still spoke in a code to her daughter, special words and signs that only she and Rue shared, that only Rue would know. Trip trap, trip trap, the nurse went away, and—what did that make Jeannette? The troll?

  Rue waited to hear the end of the story. Her mother was looking at her, a look full of drama. Finally it dawned on Rue that the end of the story was that…she needed to get up, and nobody came, and she had a needle in her arm, trapping her in the bed and…the inevitable had happened.

  “Oh Mother!”

  “I couldn’t tell Him,” she said, meaning of course her husband of fifty-four years. “I just told him I wouldn’t spend another night in that place.”

  “I’m shocked. I’m glad you put your foot down.”

  “I did,” said Jeannette.

  They both looked at each other and Rue began to picture exactly what kind of commotion her mother had made, before and after this disaster. She said gravely, “I like the yoo-hoo part.” And began to smile. Her mother demonstrated this high point, so that Rue pictured her, upright in her hospital gown, yodeling at the goat-footed nurse.

  “How long can you stay?” asked her mother.

  “Till Sunday. I have a three o’clock plane.” She hoped her mother would be pleased with almost the whole weekend.

  “Three o’clock? Can’t you stay for Sunday supper?” her mother asked, as if only willfulness or thoughtlessness could explain this odd planning.

  “I’m sorry—I can’t.”

  Her mother seemed to sag a little. Then she said, “Do you have exams?”

  Rue was momentarily frozen.

  “No, I have a job, Mother. I run a school. You know that.”

  “Of course I know that,” her mother said smoothly. There was a brief pause. “I meant, is it exam time at school? At Country?”

  After a moment Rue said, “No, it’s only October. We don’t have exams until right before Christmas.”

  “I don’t believe in this new business, you know,” said her mother. Rue waited. Finally her mother said, “This not giving grades. This business where they don’t have tests. Life is a test. They have a new principal here at the Consolidated, she’s got the whole town in an uproar….”

  “Yes, I know you feel that way.” At Country, there were no letter grades until fifth grade, and no exams until seventh. She had no way of knowing if her mother remembered this and couldn’t resist provoking, or if she had eliminated it, along with so much other unwanted information. Her mother kept all Rue’s swimming ribbons and award certificates framed in Rue’s old room. She had her National Merit Scholar certificate over the wood stove, and her college and graduate degrees beside them. It still pained her that Rue wouldn’t give her her Phi Beta Kappa key, so Jeannette could have it put on a charm bracelet for her.

  “How is Georgia…” her mother asked. She was clearly reluctant to let Rue leave, though her fatigue was now palpable.

  “She sounds very well, Mother. She’s at The Juilliard School, in New York, you know.”

  “The Juilliard School!” Her mother made a sort of actressy face of delight. “Juilliard! Mother wanted me to go to the Conservatory, too, you know. But I said Juilliard or nothing.” Rue did know. This was a seminal story in her mother’s history, and every time Rue told her about Georgia, the news got routed to a side track, while the great engine of her mother’s disappointment came charging up the main line with fresh news from 1938.

  “Georgia—at The Juilliard School. And she’s playing the…”

  “Singing, Mother. She’s a soprano. Lyric.”

  “Soprano!” exclaimed her mother, losing interest. She herself had played the piano.

  “Mother—you should try to sleep. We’ll have plenty of time in the morning.”

  “I don’t need much sleep,” said her mother. Rue thought she had just been asleep, with her eyes open, and snapped herself back.

  “I know. That’s good—I’ll see you early, then.” She got up. “Would you like this light on?”

  “No—no—not this one. I want the one in the bathroom.” Rue went into the bathroom and turned on the ceiling light. The old white tiles had been replaced by something plastic and textured, with baskets of blue flowers on each square. The old claw-footed tub was freshly scrubbed, and her father had put out her mother’s monogrammed towels. The towels had been a wedding present and now had loose threads along the warp at each side where the hem had worn away.

  “Not that…not that one the…”

  Rue turned on the light built into the mirror, and turned off the overhead light.

  “…one beside the…oh the…”

  “Mirror, Mother.” Rue came out and left the door standing open.

  “No that’s too…”

  Rue closed it until there was just a sliver of light and looked toward the bed. Her mother waved her hand toward the ceiling. Rue opened the door a few more inches. The hand dropped, satisfied. Rue went back to the bed and stood looking down.

  “I’m sorry to be such a…nuisance,” said her mother.

  “Don’t be silly. I’m so glad to be here.” Her mother nodded.

  “Are you ready to have this light off?”

  She shook her head NO. “Leave it for Daddy.”

  Rue tiptoed out to find her father sitting on the bed in her childhood room, with the light on and door open, waiting for her. She went in.

  “I thought you might sleep in the guest room while she’s sick,” said Rue.

  “No, we’ll do all right,” he said. She looked at him in the light and thought he looked drained.

  “I’m sorry to keep you up so late.”

  “It’s good for us. Change in routine.” He stood up, and she realized with a shock that he was now hardly more than an inch taller tha
n she. “There were some phone calls for you, earlier.”

  “Important?”

  “Fellah sounded pretty druv’ up. It was a Mr. Herring.”

  Rue thought for just a moment to get from herring to kipper. “Kip,” she said.

  “Yes. And Mike, he called twice.”

  “Thank you, Daddy. Sleep well—do you mind if I use the phone in the kitchen?”

  “That’ll be fine.”

  “Can I bring you anything?”

  “Not a thing.” She watched him make his way quietly into the darkened bedroom and close the door behind him.

  She watched him walk off, and when his bedroom door closed behind him, she made her way back down the narrow darkened staircase to the pitch-black kitchen. For a moment she couldn’t find the light switch; she was feeling for the switch in her kitchen at home.

  That’s it,” yelled Chandler Kip into the phone, when Rue returned his call at 10 p.m., Pacific Time. “That’s it, she’s a nutcase, she’s making a laughingstock of the school. I want her fired, Rue, and if you won’t do it, I’ll do it myself.”

  “No, Chandler, you will not. Look, could you hold on just a minute? Hold on, I’ll be right back to you. I’d like you to tell me again what happened.” Rue was cursing herself for not getting through to Mike Dianda before she called Chandler. Mike’s line had been busy for ten minutes and it was getting late to call. She did not want to have this conversation without knowing both sides to the story. The kitchen was cold and the coals in the wood stove were almost ash, and she’d had a long day and frankly didn’t want to have the conversation at all. But. She put new kindling and a couple of birch logs into the stove, and went back to the phone.