Whitefern Read online

  “You don’t tend your garden, and weeds will grow. And it’s not the fault of the weeds!” Aunt Ellsbeth would tell both Vera and me. Her condemning voice echoed in the hallways. “Your father gave you one important responsibility, and you failed him. You failed him!”

  Vera’s laughter naturally followed, resonating through the hallways in my house of memories. Sometimes I went about with my hands over my ears. But the voices were inside my head, haunting, pouncing, eager to remind me that I was all twisted and beaten down, forever poisoned by the lust of the boys who had killed the real Audrina in me, the little girl her father had cherished. No baths, no shampoos, not even sandpaper on my skin, could scrub away the disgrace. How could my father have any faith and confidence in me? Aunt Ellsbeth and Vera were always there to remind me of that question. They expected failure no matter what I did. Nothing made them happier, because it proved them right.

  How did you kill ghosts?

  There was nothing in Sylvia’s behavior to encourage this. She didn’t mope around looking lost and melancholy all the time like any victim of such abuse would. If anything, she seemed to have more energy than she had before. Absent from her psyche was any embarrassment. She was still very interested in her artwork and spent more time in the cupola experimenting with her watercolors the way Mr. Price had taught her. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help it. Whenever she mentioned something about drawing and painting, I didn’t react with the enthusiasm she expected. I would never ask her to stop her artwork, but it seemed contaminated in my mind now, as contaminated as I believed I was deep down inside. I knew she was surprised and upset by my subdued reactions to everything she showed me proudly. I hated flashing smiles and those terribly meaningless words, “That’s nice.”

  At times, I thought Arden paid more attention to her at dinner and afterward than he did to me. Maybe I was imagining it, but she seemed to become more interested in the things he said. She laughed at his jokes even if she didn’t fully understand them, and when he addressed her now, she seemed to try harder to do whatever he asked. He asked nicely, too, not like before, when he would snap an order at her as if she was a pet hound. When I made a reference to his changed behavior toward my sister, he said, “We’ve got to do all we can to keep her from feeling guilty, Audrina, feeling like it was her fault. It’ll set her back years if we don’t.”

  “Since when did her feelings matter so much to you?” I countered, annoyed at his tone. He sounded like I was the one who was making things more difficult, like I was trying to shift the blame from myself to her.

  “Since I realized I was the head of this household and responsible for your and Sylvia’s welfare,” he replied. “That’s since when.”

  He sounded so sincere that I couldn’t contradict him, challenge him, or accuse him of being sarcastic.

  “I would have thought you, of all people, would be pleased,” he added.

  “I am,” I said, now feeling a little ashamed. “I’m just . . . surprised.”

  “Happily, I hope.”

  “Yes, happily, Arden, happily.”

  I left it at that, but despite how well both Arden and Sylvia were doing after what I considered a serious and terrible event at Whitefern, I could not simply forget it and go on the way they apparently were. To them, it was as though Mr. Price had never come to instruct her and had never taken advantage of her, while it haunted me. I shuddered to remember what I’d seen when I opened the cupola door. How much further would things have gone if I hadn’t made the discovery, if I had continued to avoid going to the cupola because I thought that would make Sylvia more comfortable?

  Needless to say, what had happened to Sylvia revived my own gruesome memories. Were all the women of Whitefern under some curse to suffer at the hands of some man? In the days and weeks that followed, I moved about under a dark cloud. I dozed off more than usual and had no sooner finished with dinner than I announced that I was tired and would go up for a hot bath and bed. At first, Arden seemed not to notice the difference in me, but one night after dinner, he ordered me to come to the living room. I thought he was going to start on the paperwork, and I was ready to give in, but to my surprise, he was more upset about me, about the way I had been behaving.

  “You’ve got to stop beating yourself up for what happened, Audrina. Nobody would have expected you to be suspicious of a retired schoolteacher apparently quite well liked at the school where he had taught. Don’t forget, the principal recommended him to you.”

  “I know,” I said. “But I’m sure there were clues I missed.”

  “What clues?”

  “The way he spoke to her, admired her, smiled at her, and the little whispering I saw him do with her.”

  “Ridiculous.” He thought a moment. “But I see how heavily your misplaced guilt is weighing on you. You’re sure to get yourself sick. Maybe you should see Dr. Prescott,” he suggested.

  “Why? I’m not sick yet.”

  “There are all kinds of sickness, Audrina. You might need some sort of medication for this . . . depression. I think they’re called mood enhancers. One of my clients was telling me about it the other day. His wife suffers from depression.”

  “Any doctor would first want to know why I was depressed. He’d want to know why, and I’d be terribly embarrassed, Arden, even with Dr. Prescott, maybe especially with Dr. Prescott. He was here sometimes when Papa told me to watch over Sylvia closely and warned me time and time again how vulnerable she was. No, no, I’ll deal with it myself,” I said. “Give me time.”

  “Time? How much more time? I pretended for weeks not to notice, hoping that you would do just as you say, deal with it yourself, but you haven’t, and I fear you never will. I’m afraid to invite anyone to dinner or take you out like this,” he insisted, raising his voice. “A man with a growing business like mine can’t have an emotional invalid for a wife.”

  I started to cry.

  “All right, all right,” he said more calmly. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll see about it for you.”

  “I don’t think I’d like—”

  “Stop worrying about it, I said. I’ll look after you. I made promises to your father, too, you know, and one of them was to always be concerned about your welfare. Please let me fulfill that promise I made to him.”

  What more could I say once he invoked my father? The next day, he came home with a prescription for me. It didn’t have my name on it, but he said that was because the doctor didn’t actually examine me.

  “It’s a common one,” he said. “Harmless. Try it for a while. As you see, it’s best to take it in the evening, after dinner.”

  I turned the pill bottle around in my fingers and shook my head. “I’m not fond of pills, Arden. You know that.”

  “This is not anything terrible. It’s just to help you manage. It’s time to do something. Sylvia is becoming affected by your dark moods, too, Audrina. She’s even starting to eat poorly, and I fear she’s losing interest in her art. She might be blaming herself or thinking we’re both blaming her now. She’ll get sickly and return to the half vegetable she was. Is that what you want?”

  “No, I don’t want that, of course not.”

  “Well, she may be slow about many things, but she’s not blind. Anyone, even Sylvia, can see that you’re not looking after yourself as well as you usually do. Sometimes you look like a hag, a bag lady wandering aimlessly.”

  “I do?”

  “Yes, you do. I didn’t want to say anything, but someone who saw you at the supermarket commented to me about you.”

  “Who? What was said? When?”

  “It doesn’t matter who. They were concerned because of how you looked, how void of energy you seemed. They thought you were seriously ill. Why do you think I’ve avoided bringing anyone here? Half the time now, you don’t even put on lipstick, and I don’t know if you realized it, but you wore the same dress three days
in a row this week.”

  “I did? Why didn’t you say something?”

  “I didn’t want to bring it up. I wasn’t sure if it would do good or add to the bad, but how can we go forward and do wonderful things for Sylvia and for ourselves if you are so depressed all the time?” He pushed the pills back at me. “Take them for a week or so, and let’s see how you do. Okay?”

  I looked at the pill bottle again and nodded. He was right. I couldn’t go on the way I was. That night, I took the first one. I felt a little dizzy and even a little silly. We had wine at dinner and an after-dinner drink, too. He said the doctor had said I could drink a little with the pills.

  Arden put on music, and for the first time I could remember, he made Sylvia dance with him. She was bashful and afraid, but he showed her some steps, and then she started to do it. They both looked clumsy to me, and I laughed again. Sylvia beamed, believing she was doing something I wanted her to do and that she was bringing smiles back to my dreary face.

  Arden got me up to dance, too, but I didn’t have the energy to go on and on. Finally, I collapsed onto the sofa while they went back at it. I closed my eyes, my face frozen in a silly smile, and fell asleep. I had no idea how long I slept. I woke with a start and looked around. There was only a small lamp lit, and both Arden and Sylvia were gone.

  When I stood up, the room started to spin, and I fell back onto the sofa.

  “Arden?” I called. I looked at the nearest clock. It was two in the morning. “Arden?”

  I struggled to my feet, made my way to the stairs, and started up. It seemed to take me ten times as long as usual. Every once in a while, I paused, listened, and took a deep breath before continuing. When I turned to head toward our bedroom, I felt the hallway spin and pressed my palm against the wall to steady myself. In the room, there was a nightlight on, but Arden was in bed, facedown, asleep. I stood there looking at him and desperately tried to remember what had happened. Everything was so vague.

  I went to the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. My hair was wild, and my eyes looked terribly bloodshot. I washed my face and struggled to get undressed and into bed. Arden moaned and turned over with his back to me. I wondered about Sylvia, but I was just too tired to go check on her. In moments, I was asleep again.

  The dream I had that night was so vivid that when I awoke, I questioned whether it was really a dream. In it, I had sat up in bed because I was sure I heard whispering in the hallway. I had turned to wake up Arden and realized he wasn’t there. So I’d risen and slowly made my way to the doorway to listen. There was definitely someone whispering. Confused and intrigued, I’d stepped out and made my way down the hallway toward the rocking-chair room. I’d stopped when I saw Arden outside the doorway, the door half open, talking.

  What was he saying?

  To whom?

  I’d drawn close enough to look through the doorway and had seen Sylvia in the rocking chair, half naked the way she had been in the cupola, her head back, her eyes closed, rocking.

  “What are you doing?” I’d cried out.

  Arden had turned to look at me, and when he did, he had my father’s face.

  My father was looking at me, and he was angry that I was disturbing Sylvia in the rocking chair. His face had been full of such fury that I gasped.

  “Papa?”

  My legs had turned to water and floated away as I sank into the cool darkness beneath me.

  But when I opened my eyes again, I was back in my bed. The morning light rushed in around me, and the bedroom exploded in a kaleidoscope of colors from the stained-glass windows, the same colors that had turned Momma’s and my hair into chameleon hair because it was sometimes flaxen blond with gold. There were strands of auburn, bright red, chestnut brown, and copper. And sometimes in a passing ray of sunshine, our hair looked white. Papa had loved the strange prism-like color of our hair. He loved the way the light played on everything in Whitefern. I was seeing it all this morning the way Papa would see it. It was as if time had not passed and I was a little girl again.

  I turned onto my back and looked up at the ceiling. What exactly had happened last night? When did I pass out? Why did Arden leave me there? And the dream, the dream . . .

  When I looked at the clock, I was shocked to see that it was nearly one in the afternoon. I had never slept this long.

  “Sylvia?” I called. I listened but heard nothing. Of course, Arden would have gotten up, dressed, and been long gone.

  I groaned as I got up again, scrubbed my cheeks with my palms, and went into the bathroom. The face I saw in the mirror looked like it belonged to Rip Van Winkle, the face of someone who had slept for years. There were spidery creases in my cheeks, and my hair was like a garden of weeds growing in all directions. My eyes were gray and lifeless.

  There was no point in standing there and waiting for the memory of the night before to return. I threw off my nightgown and stepped into the shower, deliberating whether to turn on cold water to jerk every sleeping muscle in my body awake. When I got back out, I felt more like Lazarus, happy to have stepped out of a grave. I quickly dried myself off, then hurriedly dressed and started down the stairs.

  “Sylvia,” I called. “Are you downstairs?”

  At first, I heard nothing, and then I heard her answer me, but from above. She was in the cupola. I turned and went up to her. She was seated at her easel and leaning over her work. She sat back, and I saw the baby she had begun to draw now completed and painted in watercolors. Only she had painted his eyes a flaming red, so bright they looked like a fire was burning behind them. Every little detail of the baby’s face was just as vivid, from the twist in his mouth that gave him a ridiculing smile to the thinness of his slightly pointed nose and the gauntness in his cheeks. She had drawn a baby, but it looked like a man in a baby’s body.

  “Why did you paint him like that?” I asked, my voice breathless.

  “It’s how Papa told me to paint him.” She paused. “He’s coming.”

  “That’s not a pretty baby, Sylvia. You told me you were going to draw a pretty baby.”

  She looked up at me angrily. She hadn’t looked at me that way for a very long time, since when she was a little girl and I would tell her she couldn’t have something.

  “It’s Papa’s pretty baby,” she insisted.

  “All right. All right. Draw and paint what you want. Did you have your breakfast?”

  “Yes. Arden and I had breakfast.”

  “Arden and you? You got up yourself when he got up?”

  She looked back at her picture. “I think the baby is beautiful.”

  “Good. Look, I’m sorry I slept so late. I don’t know what happened. It was probably that pill I took,” I said. She had no idea what I was talking about, but I continued. “I shouldn’t have had anything alcoholic with it. I guess I just passed out. I’m surprised neither of you woke me. You left me downstairs.”

  She continued to stare at her picture. I didn’t know if she even heard me or if she understood why I was upset. She slowly turned and looked up at me, her eyelids narrow as she focused on her thoughts. “Babies are grown first inside you. When it’s time for them to come out, God pushes them gently, and they flow out,” she recited. “They have to be delivered to you. That’s the man’s job. Afterward, you carry the baby around like a mailman carries a letter in his pouch, and then the letter has to be opened.”

  “Who told you all that? Did Mr. Price tell you that? Well? Answer me. Did he?”

  “Papa told me,” she said.

  “When? When?”

  “I don’t remember,” she said, and looked back at her picture. “Maybe he never told you, and that’s why you don’t have a baby yet.” She smiled. “But you will. There’s a baby coming . . . see?”

  “Not that baby, I hope,” I said. “Did Mr. Price ever take off his clothes when he was with you, Sylvia?” />
  “I don’t remember,” she said too quickly.

  “It won’t be your fault if he did. Did he?”

  “I don’t remember,” she said. She smiled again. “I made you lunch. Egg salad. Is it time for lunch?”

  “Oh, Sylvia,” I said, shaking my head. I glanced at her baby painting. “Yes, it’s time for lunch. I hope you’ll work on a prettier baby now.”

  Looking at the image, she simply said, “If Papa tells me.”

  Feeling exhausted again, I started out. She followed me, babbling about her egg salad, describing every step of the process the way I had taught her. I made myself some coffee and toast and actually ate the egg salad. It was delicious. She ate some, too, being as messy as ever.

  Arden called a little while later to see how I was. “I tried to pick you up, but I wasn’t exactly in a steady enough condition myself,” he explained. “I figured you’d come up when you were ready. We had a good time, though. It’s been long in coming. Good to hear some laughter in our house, wouldn’t you say?”

  “If I could remember it, yes,” I said.

  He laughed. “That’s all right. You drank a little too much. I’ll make sure that doesn’t happen again.”

  “I don’t think I want to take another pill, Arden.”

  “It did what it was supposed to, Audrina. Your sister was happy again. It felt good. Let’s try to keep our house pleasant now. This coming weekend, I’ll take both of you to Don’s Steak House. It’s a bit of a ride, but the food’s great.”

  “You will?”

  “Yes, I will. As long as you make an effort, too. Okay?”

  I paused, thinking. Could he be right?

  “Okay?”

  “Yes, Arden, okay,” I said.