The Unwelcomed Child Read online

  “Exactly. Because of the tight rein we’ve kept on her and keeping her away from bad influences.”

  They were both so quiet I thought that was that and was about to tiptoe back down the stairs. I turned, but my grandfather’s next comment froze me.

  “We should consider letting her attend a public school soon, Myra. She has to learn how to deal with other people, or she will be at a disadvantage, and that could lead to worse things.”

  “Public school,” she countered, making it sound like some den of iniquity, a place where eggs laid by Satan himself hatched daily.

  “Just think about it, will you? She’s not a child anymore. She needs to grow in many ways. Don’t forget, it was Adam’s innocence that led him to sin. If you’ve never seen the devil, you won’t recognize him when he comes. You’ve said that.”

  I heard her familiar grunt, which was not a yes and not a no. It wasn’t even a maybe. It was simply acknowledging that someday she’d have an answer. How I hoped it would be yes.

  “Just think about it,” he repeated.

  She said nothing.

  I quickly tiptoed down the stairway and returned to my room to finish my reading. For the first time in a long time, however, I found myself doing more fantasizing than thinking.

  It had been nearly ten days since my birthday dinner at Chipper’s, but a number of times, I had thought about the boy who was so handsome and had smiled so much at me. I replayed his “Happy birthday” in my mind and imagined him discovering who I was and where I lived. One day in my dream, he came over to see me. Naturally, in my fantasy, my grandmother would be appalled, but he would be so polite and deferential that she would have a very difficult time sending him off.

  Grandfather Prescott particularly would enjoy his company and conversation. I envisioned all sorts of work his father did. Maybe he ran a factory, too, or managed another kind of enterprise, one that his son would take over when he was ready. I even thought of him as already being a college student, maybe studying business so that he and my grandfather would have an interesting discussion. My grandmother would sit and listen and reluctantly admit that he was a decent young man. Afterward, she would give permission for him to return, and days later, we would be more boyfriend and girlfriend than just acquaintances.

  From there, I could see us holding hands, kissing, and maybe going a little further. I lay there pretending my hands were his and he was softly sliding them over my breasts and down my hips, over the small of my stomach, where my excitement began to build, my breath to quicken, and my heart to pound. When he touched me between my legs, I gasped. I put my hand on his wrist, but ever so gently, so that he didn’t stop.

  “What are you doing, missy?” I heard my grandmother cry from the hallway outside my room. I was on my bed. In the dim light, her silhouette looked larger. She was in her nightgown, with her hair down. I had no idea how long she had been watching me. She stepped closer. She didn’t use makeup, but at night, she would put cold cream on her face, and when she moved from the shadows into brighter light, she looked as if she were wearing a Kabuki mask.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I think . . . I’m going to have a monthly. Cramps,” I added.

  She studied me for a moment. I held my breath. I grew up believing that if anyone could tell the difference between what was true and what wasn’t, she could.

  “I’ll make you some raspberry tea,” she said.

  I breathed in relief. The tea was one of her home remedies, and to be honest, it did help when I had the cramps.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “It’s the only thing good about getting old,” she muttered. “That ends.”

  I lay there calming myself. She called me when my tea was ready and watched me drink it. I could practically feel her eyes studying every part of me, every movement in my face, and every breath I took. I had learned not to be intimidated by the way she concentrated her gaze on me, even though it was as if she had X-ray eyes and could see through my skin. I imagined that by now, I didn’t have a gesture or an expression with which she wasn’t quite familiar. She probably was always comparing me with my mother, looking for some sign that I had inherited the worst part of her. Or even worse than that, something from my evil biological father.

  Apparently, I passed her inspection. She didn’t look upset or critical. She looked surprisingly thoughtful. I knew something was coming. She wasn’t one to keep her thoughts to herself.

  “Your grandfather thinks you might be ready to attend public school next semester,” she said. “How would you feel about that?”

  I swallowed the remainder of my tea. Be casual, almost indifferent, I told myself. If you show too much excitement, she’ll think it’s not right.

  “I think I could manage the work,” I replied, shrugging.

  “Of course you could manage the work,” she snapped back at me. “You’re most likely way ahead of other students your age. I’m not talking about the work. It’s how you would deal with children your age, who are brought up in liberal homes, homes where their parents ignore what they do. The devil influences those he hopes to capture by speaking through their friends, instigating, tempting, and drawing them to the abyss.”

  “I’m not afraid of anyone’s influence over me. I feel stronger than they are,” I said. “Most of them probably don’t know much at all about the Bible and probably rarely say prayers except on Sundays.”

  She seemed to like that response, but her smile evaporated quickly. “Beware of arrogance, missy. It leads to tragedy, moral and spiritual tragedy.”

  “I know, Grandmother. You’ve shown me so many examples in the Bible.”

  “Umm,” she said. It was better than a grunt. It was her thoughtful leaning to say or do something I might like. “We’ll see,” she said. “We’ll see. Get to bed early. It will help with your monthly.”

  “I will. Thank you, Grandmother,” I said. I brought my cup to the sink, rinsed and washed and dried it, and put it back in the cupboard. She continued to watch me thoughtfully. “Good night,” I said.

  “Say your prayers louder and stronger than ever, Elle,” she told me. She sounded a little softer, especially when she used my name and didn’t just call me “missy.” “The older a young girl gets, the closer she gets to temptation and damnation. This is not the time to forget them.”

  “I won’t, Grandmother.”

  She watched me walk into my room and waited to see me go down on my knees. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her leave and turn off the light, and then I rose.

  I didn’t feel like prayers. I felt like dreams.

  What if the handsome boy I had seen was not as old as I thought? What if he was really my age or only a year older and the same was true for his sister? Most important, what if he and she attended the school I would enter?

  I envisioned my first day. After I was registered, I started for my homeroom, and lo and behold, there he was, coming down the hallway toward me, with his friends around him listening to his every word and hoping for his approval, because there was no way to think of him as being anything else but the most popular boy in the school. The moment he saw me, he paused and smiled. He looked as if he had just had one of his wonderful fantasies come to life, too. He told his friends to go on without him. They all looked from him to me and nodded, looking sly. Maybe they kidded him with some silly words of encouragement. Maybe they were jealous.

  “Hi,” he said. “You’re the birthday girl.”

  And it would begin.

  I curled up on my bed, embracing my pillow as if I were embracing him. I caressed it softly with my lips the way I would caress his face and find his lips. We would kiss and hold each other so tightly, until he relaxed, the words flowing from his warm breath, words of love, words that magically touched my heart.

  As I fantasized, I could feel waves of surprisingly new and stronger excitement building in my body. I pressed my comforter between my legs and kissed my pillow. The strong feeling undulated down from my
breasts, over my stomach, to settle between my legs. I couldn’t keep myself from moaning ever so slightly. The shock of how my feelings exploded again and again brought the blood up from my neck. I almost couldn’t breathe. Terrified of myself, I froze for a few moments and then pushed the pillow and the comforter away. I turned over onto my back and looked up at the picture of the baby Jesus. I knew it was only my imagination, but he looked unhappy, even a little angry.

  “Forgive me,” I whispered, and closed my eyes.

  When morning came, I welcomed how the brightness drove the memory of my passion down so deep in the caverns of my mind that it seemed to have been only a dream, a foolish young girl’s dream. I wouldn’t think about it. In fact, I worked harder on my chores, almost attacking the house as if it had become my enemy, every fleck of dust, every stain, and every spot something that had to be destroyed. My enthusiasm didn’t go unnoticed. First, my grandfather remarked about it, and then my grandmother told me I should go at it easier.

  “You’ll exhaust yourself and get sick,” she warned.

  “Sometimes you’re that exuberant about housework, Myra,” my grandfather said quickly. He seemed to want to come to my defense.

  “I know, and I have the aches and pains to prove it,” she told him. “I taught her to wipe off the dust and wash away the dirt but not the furniture itself.”

  “Can’t she have the day off, Myra? It’s beautiful today,” he told her. “There’s nothing that can’t wait.”

  “What would you do with a day off?” she asked me in a challenging tone. “And don’t tell me you’d go out back and think, think, think.”

  “No. I would like to go for a walk, maybe to the lake and back,” I said.

  “She can’t get into trouble doing that,” my grandfather said.

  “I saw some new fawns yesterday,” I told him.

  “Nature is spiritual,” he said. My grandmother looked as if she was weakening. “She needs more fresh air. She’s cooped up in here too much.”

  “She goes out with us.”

  “It’s not enough,” he insisted. I couldn’t believe how determined he sounded, but I made sure to look down and not smile at him. I knew her well enough to know she might think we had conspired.

  “To the lake and back,” she said. “Nowhere else. Is that understood? We don’t want to have to call the police to go looking for you.”

  “Oh, Myra.”

  “Well, if she strays too far, she could get lost,” she said.

  “She won’t. She’s not an idiot. You told me how bright she was when it comes to her schoolwork.”

  I looked at her, surprised. My grandmother had given me a compliment?

  “Schoolwork is not the real world,” she said. “And besides, you should make good use of every experience you have, even when you’re just taking a walk.”

  “I’ve been doing some drawing,” I confessed. I thought this might be as good a time as any to reveal it. I had been drawing for some time, but I was afraid of how she would view that, because it had nothing to do with my homeschool work and could in her opinion be wasteful.

  “Really?” my grandfather said. “We have to see some of that.”

  “I’ve always wanted to draw some ducks on the lake.”

  “Deborah used to tinker a bit with art,” my grandfather said.

  “She tinkered a bit with everything and never got serious about anything,” Grandmother Myra said.

  “True, but if Elle has any interest or talent in that direction, she inherited it from her,” he pointed out, so there would be no question about whether it was something I had inherited from the evil one. It seemed to satisfy my grandmother.

  “Be back in an hour.”

  “She needs more than that if she’s going to do some drawing, Myra. An artist has to contemplate her subject first, doesn’t she?”

  “Artist,” she muttered. “All right, but don’t be more than two hours,” she said. “I want you to peel some potatoes and dice some carrots and chop some onions for dinner.”

  “How is she going to know the difference between an hour and two?” Grandfather Prescott asked. “She has no watch. You should give her one of those Deborah left behind. You have them in that carton in the closet.”

  I knew it, I thought.

  She thought a moment and then shook her head. “None of them would work now. They all have dead batteries,” she said, and looked relieved about it.

  “Here,” Grandfather Prescott said, rising and slipping his watch off his wrist. “For now, you can use my watch.”

  “Thank you, Grandfather,” I said, and watched him slip it over my left hand. He made the band as tight as he could without it being too tight.

  “Feel okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t break that watch, missy,” Grandmother Myra said. “It’s a very expensive one.”

  “She won’t break it, and it’s not that expensive, Myra.”

  “If she gets too close to the water, she could get it wet, and it’s not waterproof.”

  “She won’t go swimming in it, Myra.”

  “I’ll be careful,” I said.

  As casually as I could, I went into my room, gathered my paper and pencils, and walked slowly toward the back door. I knew her eyes were on me.

  “Have a good time,” my grandfather called.

  I looked back and smiled. He smiled, but my grandmother’s face was as full of suspicion as ever. She didn’t even nod.

  I took a breath and stepped out as if I were someone fleeing, about to cross a border to safety, and then closed the door softly behind me. The sense of freedom seemed to cleanse my lungs. It was a most glorious day, with moderate temperatures and a soft, warm breeze just nudging the leaves on the trees. Small, puffy clouds looked as if they had been dabbed against the blue background. Maybe it was my wishful imagination, but as I stepped down and began to walk toward the forest, I thought the birds grew excited and called others to watch me enter their world.

  “You’ve been waiting for me, haven’t you?” I told them. “You’ve been waiting for me for a long time.”

  They chirped louder. A few moments later, I stepped into the cool, dark forest and felt as if I had entered another world and escaped from the one drifting away behind me. I didn’t look back. I was so excited about being alone and far from my grandmother’s scrutinizing eyes that my heart began to race. I walked faster, finding a natural path and pausing only to look at a narrow brook that seemed to erupt from under a pair of rocks and cut its path off to the right.

  I heard branches cracking and turned sharply to my left just in time to see a doe pause to look at me and then calmly trot off in the opposite direction. I was tempted to follow it. Where do deer go anyway? I wondered. They were always moving in the woods, probably looking for food, but they had to have someplace they thought of as home. Instead, I continued in the direction of the lake. The time my grandfather had taken me through the woods was so long ago that I had forgotten where we’d come out. The woods were thicker now anyway. I could remember nothing. I didn’t want to remember anything. I wanted this to be my first time.

  I walked faster when the brush and the trees thinned out, and then I paused, because I was sure I heard human voices. Could it be someone in a boat on the lake? Curiosity overwhelmed me. I sped up, nearly scratching myself on some low-hanging branches, and then, through an opening ahead, I saw the lake.

  It was narrower there. I had forgotten that some lucky people had homes close to or on the shores of the lake. When I stepped out of the forest into a small clearing, I saw that one of those houses was very close by. I heard laughter and then the sound of a screen door slamming shut. Moments later, two young people came around the corner of the house just across the water. There was a short dock with a rowboat attached. I pulled back as the two drew closer. One was a girl, and the other . . .

  The breath went out of me as sharply as if someone had punched me in the stomach. The sight of him walking baref
oot with his towel wrapped around him stunned me. There was no doubt. It was the young man from the restaurant, and the girl who followed him, playfully tossing grass at him, was his sister. They both walked out on the dock and stood looking out at the lake. I pulled myself farther back into the shadows when he turned in my direction. I was terrified he would see me spying.

  Suddenly, his sister turned on him and pushed him from behind. He screamed, his towel fell off, and, naked, he fell off the dock and into the water.

  Except for some vague drawings in the science textbook my grandmother reluctantly gave me, I had never seen what a naked male looked like. I knew their anatomy, just as well as I knew my own, but it was one thing to read some scientific information and a far different thing to see someone in the flesh, especially someone you had in your fantasy.

  He came up, spouting water like a whale, and shook his fist playfully at her. She laughed. He turned away and started to swim.

  Suddenly, she dropped her towel away and, also naked, dived into the lake.

  I brought my hands to the base of my throat and nervously watched them swim around each other and splash each other, and then I saw him go under the water and come up behind her. She screamed when he put his hand on the top of her head and pushed her under. She came up quickly and went after him. He swam quickly away and then went under and came up to the side of her but far enough away so she couldn’t get to him. They splashed each other playfully again, and then they both swam until they paused at one of the legs of the dock and treaded water while they talked softly. He was facing in my direction. I didn’t move, but just to my right, another deer appeared, this time a buck with a good rack. The young man pointed in my direction. Did he see the buck, or did he see me?

  She turned to look my way, too, and then she swam around to the other side of the dock and climbed up the short ladder. I thought she would wrap her towel around herself quickly, but instead, she sprawled out over it with her back facing the sun.

  He remained in the water, looking in my direction. The buck trotted off deeper into the woods, but the boy didn’t stop looking. I stepped back, hoping to be covered more heavily in the shadows, but I didn’t watch where I was going, and I fell over a thick dead tree limb. I didn’t cry out.