The Unwelcomed Child (7 page)

“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 barefoot 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.

But I heard him laugh anyway. When I looked back, I saw that he was shouting something to his sister.

And I knew.

He had seen me.

I started to run for home and stopped when I realized I had been gone almost an hour and had nothing to show for it on my paper. I hadn’t drawn a line. My grandmother was sure to question me about where I had been and what I had been doing instead, and I was afraid my face would reveal what I had seen. She was too good at reading me not to notice that something had affected me deeply. It put me into a small panic.

I walked in a circle through some brush and paused at a small clear area under a group of pine trees. There was a matted pine-needle floor over the forest’s dark earth. The scents were very strong but refreshing. I looked back toward the lake, wondering if the boy had decided to swim in my direction. Surely he wouldn’t step out of the lake naked to look for me, would he? What about his sister? Did he tell her he had seen me? Was that what he shouted back to her? Was she swimming in my direction, too?

I was so confused about what I had seen. It couldn’t be common for brothers and sisters that age to swim naked with each other, could it? They looked as if they had been doing it for years. Many times, I wished I had a brother or a sister, younger or older, I didn’t care. At least there would be someone else close to my age living in the house. We would help each other understand and prepare ourselves for what went on in the world outside my grandparents’ restricted one. Sometimes I felt I was actually on another planet and spoke another language.

I felt so stupid for falling over that log and running away. I was sure I had looked comical to him. There was so much I didn’t know about how people actually behaved, especially males and females my age when they were together. All I knew now was that the sight of them both totally naked and unconcerned about it excited and astounded me. I had no doubt what Grandmother Myra would do if she had any idea about what I had seen. She’d put me under lock and key. She might even throw away the key.

There was a large boulder just to my right. I went to it and sat. The sun was still high enough in the sky to pour strong rays through the tops of the trees and give my little natural art studio a magical look and feel. It helped me calm down. I opened my drawing pad and set it comfortably on my lap. Then I closed my eyes and tried to get a good image of the lake, but it was impossible to think of it without seeing the boy fly off the dock after his sister had pushed him. That image of him flailing in the air naked brought heat to my face.

Don’t try to draw the lake right now,
I thought.
Draw some trees, and imagine that doe you saw earlier standing in the midst of them.
Thinking of doing something else was the only way to get my mind off what I had seen. I started, but what I drew first looked childish, so I ripped off the page and started again, this time going much more slowly. When I had outlined the trees, I began to draw the doe, concentrating on its eyes. I got so involved in my picture that I was able to push the sight and sounds of the two I had seen far enough back in my mind to do what I thought was a decent preliminary sketch.

When the sunlight was more blocked out by the trees around me, I assumed too much time might have passed and anxiously checked Grandfather Prescott’s watch. Claiming that I had been so involved in my drawing that I had lost track of time wouldn’t work as a good excuse for my grandmother. She was always ready to pounce on any sign of daydreaming. She thought it was fantasizing, and fantasizing always opened the door to something evil.