Authors: Paula Fox

The Village by the Sea (12 page)

Emma ate three of them. “I forgot to get any breakfast,” she explained.

Her mother reached out her arm and pulled Emma to her side. “It can't have been a picnic,” she said. “You didn't complain when I called you up. That was such a help.”

Emma felt uneasy. She was concealing not just the misery Aunt Bea had caused her, but the immense pleasure she and Bertie had had in the making of their village.

But Emma was more sleepy than she was uneasy. The heat in the front seat of the car was like warm molasses. She knew she was sinking into it. Her mother said something. “Yes,” she said as alertly as she could, not knowing what she was answering. She didn't wake up until her mother shook her gently. The car was idling in front of the apartment house. She was home.

“You go in,” her mother said. “Daddy is waiting. I have to park this heap somewhere until I return it to the rental agency.”

He stood with the door wide open. He was wearing a thin, short-sleeved blue shirt and his skin was rosy. He even looked a little plump. Emma walked in and set down her suitcase and shopping bag. She felt a strange shyness, as though she were meeting him for the first time, until he put his arms around her.

“I'm much stronger,” he said. “The hospital itself makes a person a little sick but I'm all over that. Put your stuff away. I made you lunch. It's chocolate pudding.”

She laughed and he let her go.

“Just chocolate pudding?” she asked.

“Lots of it,” he said.

She went to her room. When she woke up tomorrow she would hear city summer sounds outside her window. It would be getting hot pretty soon but she wouldn't mind that too much. She wouldn't ever have to wake up in the silence of the big log house, figuring out how to avoid Aunt Bea.

In the kitchen, she sat down at the small round table where they ate most of their meals unless there was company, when her mother would set up two card tables in the living room for the guests.

Her father had put toasted peanut butter sandwiches in a straw basket. There was a big bowl of chocolate pudding.

“Mom's parking?” he asked, watching her eat.

She nodded. There didn't seem to be a lot to sayânot yet anyhow. She wondered what those two were doing now out on Peconic Bay? There would be the steaming teapot, and Uncle Crispin sifting through his music if he had a lesson today. Aunt Bea might lay out a hand of solitaire. Maybe she wouldn't slap the cards down on the table without Emma around. Maybe she wouldn't think so much about all the wrongs that had been done to her without Emma to remind her of all the old ghosts, the big trunk in the closed room upstairs. Would she think about the village? How she had kicked it away?

“You're thinking so hard,” her father observed.

“Yes,” she said, looking at him, smiling. He didn't ask her what she was thinking about. But she could feel that he was waiting.

“Will you get your diary? While we wait for Mom, you can read me what you want to from it.”

“I'm sure I didn't write anything except the first day,” she said. She couldn't recall what she had written.

“We can start with that,” he said. “Then you can just tell me.”

She got up and went to her room and took the diary from the bag. There was so little in it, it was easy to find what she'd written.

I'm here,
it said.
Uncle Crispin is really nice. The bay and the beach are great. Aunt Bea is
â

Something had been added where she had left off. It wasn't in her handwriting. The letters were big and plump and round. “
Aunt Bea is
â” she read aloud,
“a sad bad old woman.”

She put down the diary on the table. Only a few hours ago, when Emma had gone downstairs in the big log house, she remembered she had heard the sound of those white moccasins whispering across the floor. Aunt Bea had gone into her room, had written those words about herself in the diary.

The lump she had felt inside ever since she had told herself she hated Aunt Bea dissolved all at once. She breathed deeply. It felt like the first real breath she had taken in days; it was like what her father had described to her, “drawing up a pail of fresh cold water from a well.”

Aunt Bea
would
have looked in her diary. It was just like her. But what she had written for Emma to see was not like her, not as Emma had known her. It wasn't an apology. It was, Emma felt, something deeper, a secret about herself.

She would keep it a secret, Emma knew, all of it. She picked up the diary. It was as though she was holding Aunt Bea in her hand, and she had grown as light as the piece of balsa wood Bertie had found that said:
Lodgings.
She took the diary and put it on a shelf in her closet.

When she walked back into the kitchen, her father smiled up at her expectantly.

“I hardly wrote a word,” she said. “But I'll tell you about it.”

She sat down. “We built a village, my friend Bertie and I,” she began.

About the Author

Paula Fox is a notable figure in contemporary American literature. She has earned wide acclaim for her children's books, as well as for her novels and memoirs for adults. Born in New York City on April 22, 1923, her early years were turbulent. She moved from upstate New York to Cuba to California, and from one school to another. An avid reader at a young age, her love of literature sustained her through the difficulties of an unsettled childhood. At first, Fox taught high school, writing only when occasion permitted. Soon, however, she was able to devote herself to writing full-time, but kept a foot in the classroom by teaching creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania, New York University, and the State University of New York.

In her novels for young readers, Fox fearlessly tackles difficult topics such as death, race, and illness. She has received many distinguished literary awards including a Newbery Medal for
The Slave Dancer
(1974), a National Book Award for
A Place Apart
(1983), and a Newbery Honor for
One-Eyed Cat
(1984). Worldwide recognition for Fox's contribution to literature for children came with the presentation of the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1978.

Fox's novels for adults have also been highly praised. Her 2002 memoir,
Borrowed Finery
, received the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir, and in 2013 the
Paris Review
presented her with the Hadada Award, honoring her contribution to literature and the writing community. In 2011, Fox was inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame.

Fox lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband, the writer Martin Greenberg.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Cover design by Connie Gabbert

ISBN: 978-1-5040-3745-7

This edition published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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