“Why would she lie?” James asked.
“I dunno,” Dicey said.
“Dicey?”
“Yeah, Maybeth.”
“Why did Momma go?”
Dicey looked at Maybeth’s round and worried face. She looked down the quiet street, where no cars were parked, where all the houses were the same and had the same closed and empty faces.
“I don’t know, Maybeth, but I can tell you what I think.”
Maybeth waited.
“I think she got so worried about so many things, about money and us, about what she could do to take care of us, about not being able to do anything to make things better—I think it all piled up inside her so that she just quit. She felt so sad and sorry then, and lost—remember how she’d go out and not come back for hours? I think she got lost outside those times, the way she was lost inside.”
“Amnesia,” James suggested.
“Maybe. So she decided that she’d ask Aunt Cilla to help us, because she couldn’t help us anymore. And maybe, when she went off into the Mall, maybe she’d run out of money and she couldn’t take us any farther and all the things that had piled up inside her head sort of exploded there. And she just forgot us. Like amnesia, where you forget everything, even who you are. She couldn’t stand to think and worry anymore. Everything she thought of, every place she went to, it all looked so sad and hopeless and she couldn’t do anything about it—so it all exploded and left her brain empty.” Empty. That was the way Momma had looked those last months. As if she were far away from them.
“Will she be better now?” Sammy asked. “Do you think?”
“Maybe she’s not even here,” James said.
“She has to be,” Sammy said.
“Why?” James asked. Dicey thought of stopping the conversation, but decided not to.
“Because,” Sammy said.
“Because is no reason,” James said.
“Because, if she isn’t here, then I don’t know where she is. And she doesn’t know where I am. And how can she find me?”
“Maybe she doesn’t want to find you, or any of us,” James said. “That’s what Dicey said, that she had to get away from us.”
“Momma loves me,” Sammy said. His chin stuck out in the stubborn way.
“Yes, she does,” Dicey said. “And so do I.”
Because she did, she loved all of them. That had kind of sneaked up on her over their journey.
“See?” Sammy said to James. “I told you.”
“But that doesn’t prove anything,” James protested.
Sammy didn’t pay any attention to him.
The sun moved slowly across a white sky. At the end of the long summer afternoon, or at the beginning of the long summer evening, the street gradually filled up with traffic, and the sidewalk became crowded with people. One after another, buses stopped at the corner and a short parade of men and women climbed off. Some carried briefcases, some grocery bags. They walked on, down the street or up the street. Some went up the stoops of the gray houses, pulled out keys, unlocked doors and went in. Others walked on, around corners, out of sight. No children lived on these streets.
The Tillermans silently watched the people move to and fro past them. Nobody looked at them. Most of the men and women walked with their eyes toward the ground, or fixed blankly ahead. Sammy moved closer to Dicey and held on to her forearm with his small, tense hand. He did not say a word, but his eyes flicked back and forth. He was looking for Momma.
Dicey just watched the people, with no particular thought in her mind. She could not do any more. From now on, things would happen to them.
She saw men in workshirts with tired shoulders, carrying plain black lunchboxes. She saw women in brightly flowered summer dresses, the dresses wilted by the heat as if they were real flowers, the women’s faces sagging after the work-day.
A short round woman wearing high-heeled shoes walked toward the steps where they sat. She actually looked at them and seemed surprised, but she walked on past them. A man in a green khaki suit, carrying a scuffed briefcase, stared at them for a minute before he let himself into the house next door.
A few minutes later, a woman of the same age as the man, about fifty Dicey guessed, struggled up the steps to the next-door house, carrying two huge bags of groceries. She noticed the Tillermans just as she pulled the door closed behind her and her eyes widened.
The little round woman in high heels walked past again, from the opposite direction and on the opposite side of the street. She stared at them. She was wearing a plain black cotton dress and had short gray hair that was permanented into sausagelike curls that bounced and jiggled on her round head. She walked as if her feet hurt her, as if she had been standing and walking in the high-heeled shoes all day long. Dicey wondered where she was going.
The people coming home from work had filled the street for a while; now they thinned out, melted away into houses, out of sight. All the sounds were faint ones from distant traffic or from the humming of air-conditioners up and down the block. A solitary man wearing shorts and sneakers walked his dog on the opposite side of the street.
The round woman came toward them again. This time, as at first, she was on their side of the street and looking at the ground. She held her purse in both hands, protectively close against her side. Dicey thought she must be old.
She stopped about three feet away and looked at them. At first only Dicey was looking back at her, into pale blue eyes that blinked behind plastic-framed glasses sitting high up on her nose. She wasn’t that old after all, close up.
“What do you want?” the woman asked. “What are you doing here? What do you want here?” Her voice was high and a little scared. Her lips pursed.
Dicey stood up. “We’re the Tillermans,” she said. She named them all. The woman’s expression did not change.
Dicey knew then that Momma was not here.
Dicey kept on talking. “I’m hoping you’re our aunt, our great-aunt, Mrs. Cilla Logan.”
Then the woman’s expression did change. A little half-smile, a silly helpless smile, fluttered her mouth. “That is Mother,” she said. “Not me. I’m her daughter. That is, I was her daughter.” She fumbled around in her purse and took out keys. “Mother passed on this last March,” she said. Dicey had a sinking feeling in her stomach. “But do come in. There’s no need to stand talking on the front stoop.”
The woman unlocked the door and stepped inside. The Tillermans followed. It was dark and stuffy after the summer evening sunlight. They entered a narrow hallway that led to the rear of the house, passed a room with thin curtains, passed a narrow dark staircase going up and went into a kitchen.
The kitchen was large enough for all five of them, but not big. Sunlight made it brighter than the rest of the house. It was shiny clean. The gray linoleum floor gleamed, the refrigerator shone, the windows, looking over a tiny yard, were polished. There was a formica-topped table in the center of the room, and the woman told the Tillermans to sit at the four chairs that surrounded it. She opened the windows and the back door, then fetched herself a chair from the front room, putting it beside Maybeth. Before she sat down, she put some water into a kettle, put the kettle on the stove and took a mug out of a cupboard. As she did all this, she spoke to them in starts and stops. “Yes, Mother passed away. You couldn’t have known. It was her heart. Her heart was always weak, but we never knew. She wouldn’t complain, you see. She was only in her seventies. Seventy-two. A wonderful person—everybody said how wonderful she was. It was a shock to me. I found her, when I came back from work. Sitting in her chair by the window. A Wednesday it was. We had a high mass for her.” She sighed, the kettle whistled, and she poured water into her mug. She dunked a teabag, in and out, in and out. “I have been—not quite the same since Mother went away. People have said that to me. It has been hard for me.”
She turned to face them, and Dicey saw little tears gathering in her little eyes. She took off her glasses and polished them on a paper t
owel.
The Tillermans sat silent, their mouths clamped shut, not knowing what to say. The woman sat down at the table with them. She sipped at her tea. James looked at Dicey and raised and lowered his eyebrows, as Windy had. Dicey smothered a giggle.
“And then, of course, to see four children on my doorstep. Well, I had no idea. You don’t mind, do you? You aren’t offended? I was afraid. You hear of such strange things happening these days. Especially to women who live alone. I live alone now. I hoped you would go away. If Mother were here, of course . . . ” Her voice drifted off, her eyes drifted away from them and out to the windows.
Nobody spoke.
Finally, the woman gathered herself together with a kind of shake over her whole body. “But what am I thinking of? Are you thirsty? I don’t know what I have for children to drink. Living alone, I don’t keep much food in the house.”
“Please,” Maybeth said, “I would like a glass of water.”
The woman looked at her. She smiled at Maybeth and said, “Of course, you all would like a drink of water, wouldn’t you? What a pretty child you are. Really, like an angel. I was a pretty child too. Everyone said so—and we have photographs.”
She got them each a little jelly glass full of water. They drank quickly and then Dicey refilled them once, twice, three times. The woman smiled absently.
“What are you doing here?” the woman asked, as if the question had just occurred to her. “Where are your parents? Who did you say you were?”
“We are the Tillermans,” Dicey said again. She announced all of their names again, “James, Maybeth, Sammy, and I’m Dicey.”
The woman repeated their names softly to herself. “My mother’s maiden name was Hackett,” she said.
“Our mother,” Dicey began. She looked sharply at Sammy in case he might be about to interrupt, “is your mother’s niece. We used to get a card and letter from your mother every Christmas, and Momma would read it to us. That’s how we knew about Aunt Cilla, and her address. But I don’t even know your name.”
“Eunice Logan,” the woman said. “Miss Eunice Logan. That makes us cousins, you know.”
“Does it?”
“Yes, because your grandmother was my mother’s sister. That means your mother and I are first cousins. Does that make us second cousins?”
“I don’t know,” Dicey said.
“Your grandmother would be Abigail Tillerman. Abigail Hackett she was before she married. Priscilla Hackett was my mother, you see. Before she married.”
“Do we have a grandmother?” Dicey asked.
“Of course. Everyone does. But where are your parents? Are they visiting in Bridgeport?”
Dicey found herself ready to lie again. She could say they were visiting and the children had come to meet Aunt Cilla, and then later the Tillermans could go off and—and do what? If she lied, then she would get herself into a box. They had come such a long way. They had to have some kind of help from this cousin she’d never even heard of before. (That was strange too, that Aunt Cilla had never mentioned a daughter.) If Cousin Eunice didn’t help them, they would have to go to the police. Dicey had to tell the truth.
But first she had to say it to Sammy. Say it out loud. “Momma’s not here, Sammy,” Dicey said.
He nodded, and tears welled up in his eyes. Dicey reached over and put her hand on top of his. He laid his forehead on her hand and closed his eyes.
“You don’t know where your mother is?”
“No,” Dicey said. “She ran away, I think. Anyway, she disappeared. We were on our way here to find Aunt Cilla, so we just came along. We hoped she’d be here.”
“Where’s your father?”
“He’s been gone for years,” James said, his voice sharp.
“You’re alone?” Cousin Eunice asked. They nodded. “Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear. You poor, sweet little things. I don’t know what to think. I have to ask advice. Will you excuse me to make a phone call? You’re absolutely alone? I don’t know what should be done.”
She hurried out of the room, swinging the door closed behind her. Sammy raised his head and Dicey retrieved her hand, now a little wet. “I don’t understand,” Sammy said.
“Neither do I,” Dicey answered. “She’d never heard of us, you know that? And we’d never heard of her. But Momma answered those letters, every year.”
“What should we do?” James asked.
“Tell the truth and see what happens,” Dicey said. “We can’t do anything else. Can we? James?”
“We could take off again, and look out for ourselves until—”
“Until what?” Dicey asked.
“Until we grow up?”
“We could,” Dicey agreed. “We always might do that and we’d figure a way out, I guess. But for now I think we shouldn’t, unless we have to. We don’t have any idea where Momma is, and I want to find out. Maybe this Cousin Eunice will take care of us—I could work later and pay her back. That’s what I’m hoping will happen. Just so we’re together.”
“Is Momma gone for always?” Maybeth asked.
“I don’t know,” Dicey said. “She might as well be.”
“Don’t say that!” Sammy cried. “Don’t you ever!”
Cousin Eunice returned. “My friend—he’s an advisor really, he’s my spiritual counselor—he’ll be by after supper. We have to get some more food—I have only two dinners in the freezer. Dicey? Can you go to a store and get three TV dinners? I don’t know what kind you children prefer. Is that all right?”
“Of course,” Dicey said. She flushed and said, “We don’t have any money.”
“None?”
“None. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry—I feel so sorry for you—I don’t understand what has happened—”
“Neither do we,” Dicey answered.
“How could you? You’re only children.” She reached for her purse and took out ten dollars. “This will be enough. You must want milk, children should drink milk. And fruit? Can you decide what you need? Will this be enough?”
Dicey nodded.
“The grocer is two blocks away, just around a corner. You go up the street, turn right, and you’ll see it. But don’t talk to strangers.”
Dicey nodded, lowering her head to hide her smile.
“And you should call me ‘Eunice.’ Cousin Eunice. Because we’re cousins. And could you pick out a cake from the frozen foods? Something light, perhaps lemon; something that will sit well with tea.”
Dicey walked to the store, not thinking about anything in particular, just taking it slow. There was a kind of pool of sadness in her heart, she thought, and she wondered why it should be so. Not only for Momma, because she had not expected to find Momma here. She didn’t ever expect to see Momma again, she realized. The sadness was for themselves, even though they were much better off now than they had been, say, just last night at this time. Dicey picked out three chicken TV dinners and went to the fruit counter.
Once again, everything had changed on them. Perhaps it was all this changing that made her sad. Or perhaps the disappointment, after finally arriving at Aunt Cilla’s house, and finding only Eunice there, whom they had never heard of. A stranger. Who pitied them.
Probably, they could never go back to New Haven. She wished they could have stayed there longer. She wished she knew something more about those two young men. She didn’t even know their last names. Or phone numbers. Or address. Stewart hadn’t even stayed to find out if the Tillermans would be all right. The Tillermans had just drifted through his life, touch in, touch out, and gone without a thought.
Dicey paid for her purchases and walked slowly back to the little gray house. Maybe it was just that she was away from the ocean, the salt water with its tides and turbulence, that made her sad.
Father Joseph, Cousin Eunice’s friend, was a priest, a slender, restless man with thick gray hair and deep lines in his forehead. He had cool, thoughtful light-brown eyes, deep set, and a thin mouth. He wore shiny blac
k trousers and jacket, a black shirt-front, and the band of white, crisp and stiff, around his neck. Cousin Eunice introduced him and fluttered nervously around him on her high-heeled shoes, bringing him a cup of tea and offering him a tray with a little china pitcher of milk and a little china bowl of sugar cubes.
Father Joseph did not show pity for the Tillermans as Eunice had. They sat together in the living room, on the chairs and the floor. He asked them about their home in Provincetown and their school, about Momma, about living in a summer resort area, about the fishing fleet and about books. After a while, he suggested that the younger children go to bed, while he and Cousin Eunice and Dicey made some plans.
“But they have no nightclothes,” Cousin Eunice said.
“We can sleep in our underwear,” Dicey said. “We washed everything out last night.”
The priest remarked, “You did? You do seem to have managed well.”
Dicey took the younger ones upstairs. James protested, but she told him: “We’re guests. We’re strangers here. She didn’t even know we existed, and she’s trying to help us. Let’s just do as we’re told, okay?”
James and Sammy were to sleep in the small back bedroom that looked out over the yard, in a double bed. Maybeth would sleep in the other twin bed in Cousin Eunice’s room. Maybeth looked small lying there, her curls spread behind her on the pillow, her hands folded over the clean sheets. “You okay, Maybeth?” Dicey asked.
The little girl nodded.
“I think I liked it better when we all slept in the same place,” Dicey said, smiling at her. “Like that first night.”
Maybeth nodded.
“I expect I’ll be sleeping in with James and Sammy, on the floor, or downstairs on the sofa,” Dicey said. “If you want me.”
“It’s okay, Dicey,” Maybeth said. “I won’t be lonely.”
“Lonely? All cramped together here in this little house? Why I’ll hear you if you roll over. I’ll hear you if you sneeze—and come running.”
Maybeth smiled at Dicey and closed her hazel eyes.
Dicey went back downstairs, where the adults awaited her in the living room, which was cluttered with the kinds of things collected over a lifetime, pictures and little china figurines and pillows stuffed with pine needles.