I played with Decca, or read to her, or sang her songs. She had not slept after that first visit. I lay awake at night and rose when Boone threw his rock and shook Sissy awake, hard. Boone, so handsome and nice; he waited outside like a trap, waited for Sissy to fall. I lay in Sissy’s bed and listened to her tiptoe out—she was so loud!—and hated her, hated Boone for making her furtive.
I hated the girls in Augusta House, who thought my visitation arrangement strange. “You only sit there?” Mary Abbott asked that night, sidling up beside me on the way to the bathhouse. “Why do you?” Wasn’t that very apparent? Achingly clear? But no, it was not. Only to me, only I knew.
Now I was awake and knew I would not get back to sleep, and felt so hot, so ready.
“Do you love me?” I imagined Sissy asking. “Do you love me? Me?”
“Do you love me?” He would ask me that.
“Why did you stay away for all that time?”
“Because I loved you,” he would say. He would put his hand on my breast, underneath my dress. Those slim, long fingers inside me, touching me, feeling parts of me, the odd pressures, the closeness.
Oh. I bit my pillow and there were sparks against my eyelids. If only this could last—longer, longer. If only, but it never did.
My breaths were quick but deep. My limbs were heavy against the sheets. I wiped between my legs with my handkerchief and left it there.
I could fall asleep now. I closed my eyes and was not ashamed. Mr. Holmes, Mr. Holmes, Mr. Holmes. When I closed my eyes, he was all I saw.
Dear Mother,
I do like my coat—thank you. It’s so nice I don’t know when I’ll wear it. It’s cold here, but beautiful. I think I prefer the cold to the heat. You can ride forever in the cold. I’m riding again, did you know? I don’t know what else to report. There’s nothing to report, I suppose. It’s cold and I’m riding and camp life is the same. We do the same thing every day, exactly, except for Sunday but then our Sundays are exactly alike so everything has its order.
You wouldn’t like it here, I don’t think. There isn’t any green in the winter except for the evergreens and they don’t really count, do they? Everything dies and the world is all one color—white—until spring. I never knew anything but colorful, humid Florida and I thought that was what I preferred, but truly it was simply what I knew. I wonder what the desert is like, or up north. Who knows what I prefer?
Mrs. Holmes was your friend? I didn’t know. I didn’t know you had friends. I would write more but we’re kept so busy. Don’t worry about me. Don’t even think about me.
—
M
y father spoke on the telephone,” Decca said. “To my mother.” I was reading to her from a book she loved, called
Winnie-the-Pooh
; she should keep still, the housekeeper told me. But Decca was back to her old self, a sling she had to wear to keep her right arm immobile so that her collarbone could heal the only evidence she had fallen. There was no need for me to come like this, I knew that, and though I told myself, and everyone else, that I came for Decca’s sake, really I came for my own. I wanted to see him.
“Oh?” I asked.
“Yes. Father sounded angry.”
I tried to hide my surprise. Mr. Holmes should speak more carefully. But clearly Decca did not know what this all meant.
“Why was he angry, Decca?”
“When will my sisters be here?” Her voice was plaintive. She missed them, I realized. She didn’t understand their absence. I understood. Boone had told Sissy that a boy at Harris Academy had been sent back to school with a suitcase full of money, and told to hide it. He’d stored it in his mattress. It was such a dumb hiding place I didn’t know if the story could be true, but the banks
were
failing, we all knew that; a girl’s uncle was president of First National, Charlotte’s bank that had closed in December. Yet the Harris boy’s family had money—he was at Harris, after all, not beneath the earth working in some mine. His father didn’t know what to do with their money, though, how to keep it safe, how to ensure that it would protect them.
There was enough money in the world for all of us to be here, to ride our horses, to wear our white clothes. I wondered if Mother’s citrus fortune was in a bank. Surely it was. I couldn’t imagine Mother hiding money among her furniture, her things. But I didn’t know, I realized, I didn’t know anything at all about how my family was handling their financial affairs. I had never known. The citrus income had shadowed us, all my life; it was impossible to imagine the Atwells without it: I saw now that it gave us an edge, a little way to feel better than people who did not have wealth from a distant, exotic source.
Mother would never have used the word
better
. We were simply different. Unique.
“Thea?”
I gazed at Decca, who looked at me curiously.
“They’ll be back soon,” I answered. I hated how vague I sounded, but I didn’t know how else to sound.
Mr. Holmes seemed angry on the telephone. I would have given my left arm to know why. But Decca was just a child—she might have misheard. Perhaps Mr. Holmes had sounded upset, not angry.
I wondered how much she remembered about the accident. It seemed a mercy, that she was too young to understand Rachel’s part in it.
Decca picked up her doll—its hair was patchy, its clothes smudged. It must have belonged to Sarabeth, then Rachel; finally, Decca. I had never had to share anything with Sam. I’d never liked dolls, but still I’d had at least half a dozen.
Decca whispered to her doll. I tried to listen to what she said but then drew back, embarrassed, a sixteen-year-old girl straining to hear the mutterings of a child. I should let Decca have her secrets.
If our lives had not been so blessed, if we had not had Mother’s money—if, if, if. But this particular line of possibilities had never occurred to me. Then Father would have had to live in a city, where there were more paying patients. Then Mother could not have kept herself, and us, so apart from everyone else. We might have lived hours from Gainesville. We might have only seen each other once a year, for Christmas.
We would not have had money to give them. We would not have been able to help. We would not have been better. We would not have been lucky.
Did my parents hope I’d been taught a lesson? They thought they’d sent me somewhere safe. Away from men, away from cousins. Georgie, Georgie must be—I tried not to think of Georgie here. I stood—Decca was still playing with her doll, the room was still ugly and stiff, I was still alone in this house with his child.
I thought we knew each other, my mother had said, and then, later: This will all be fine, do as you’re told, do as we say and this will all be for the best.
If my parents had kept me at home, I might have learned their lesson, I might have wanted to please them more than I wanted to please myself. In my head, I thought, if I can make Mr. Holmes love me, it will all be all right.
I
t was bitterly cold the next time we went to Gainesville. Aunt Carrie’s mother had taken a turn for the worse and died very suddenly, and we were going to offer our condolences. I’d wrapped a scarf around my neck and head and face, left room for only my eyes. I watched the landscape speed by, punctuated occasionally by houses: they all looked the same to me, splintering wood, windows that were glassless black squares.
Since Christmas I’d seen Georgie only three times, which was, I thought, less often than we usually saw the Gainesville Atwells. But how often we saw each other was never something I’d tallied before. But now—now I wanted to see my cousin more than I could ever remember wanting anything.
Mother was concentrating on driving, which was new to her. There weren’t many things that Mother wasn’t good at, but driving was one of them. This new car had a backseat, which I thought was the height of luxury; right now Sam sat in front with Mother, and I was sprawled across the mohair seat in back. Sam sat tensely. He was a little afraid of how fast we went in cars.
That morning I’d gone through Mother’s handbag, looking for the little pot of perfume she kept there. I’d found a blank envelope, unsealed, and inside a check made out to George Atwell for the largest sum of money I’d ever seen. Father’s nearly illegible signature bit into the thin paper.
I dabbed perfume behind my ears, as Mother always did. Georgie would be George Atwell one day, lose his nickname, and what would he do then? Would I be his wife? I steadied myself on the counter. I didn’t think I wanted to be his wife. But I knew from books that that’s what you did, when you kissed.
There were no houses on the final stretch of our drive, as they would have been sucked down by the bog. It seemed so near on either side: if we stopped, the animals would emerge from the groves of cabbage palm and the thick stands of maiden cane. The bobcats hid—we almost never saw them—but the alligators often sunned themselves on the edge of the road when it was warm, their gnarly, muddy skin, almost black, their improbably white teeth that were visible when they lazily snapped their jaws, as—what else could it mean—a warning.
It was perhaps my imagination that Mother sped through this stretch, that the automobile shook violently, that she did not slow down as she normally did for dips in the road. Father loved this leg of the drive; he thought central Florida possessed the most beautiful landscape in the world: a little bit of swamp, a little bit of forest.
At Georgie’s, we stepped out and waited while Mother gathered her things—a book for Aunt Carrie, a big crate of food: beans, Idella’s bread, preserves. Surely Georgie’s family did not need our food? I touched the sack of beans, and looked at Mother curiously.
“Just some extra things we had,” she said. I walked toward the house: Was it my imagination, that it looked grim, in need of sprucing up? It was a matter of fact that paint flaked from the windowsills, that a gutter was hanging by a thread. But things could not fall apart so quickly.
“Georgie’s at a neighbor’s,” Aunt Carrie told us after she had shown us into the living room. “He’ll be back soon,” she said, when she saw my face, which I tried to make look happy again. But I felt devastated. I’d waited for weeks!
“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said—Mother had coached me—and Aunt Carrie put her arm around my shoulders and pressed me to her. She felt sturdy, next to Mother, who was all angles.
“Both my parents are gone,” she said, her voice pitched as if she was asking me a question, and I realized she was close to tears.
“Carrie,” Mother said, and led my aunt to a chair, “it will be fine.”
“Will it, Elizabeth?” She offered my mother a thin smile. “You sound like our president.” This had all turned Aunt Carrie mean, I realized.
Mother laughed nervously, and Sam and I slipped away.
“Want to go out back?” he asked, but I did not. I did not want to observe the natural world today; I did not want to follow Sam around.
“I’m tired,” I said, even though I wasn’t. Sam looked at me for a second—I always went with him—and I didn’t meet his eye.
“All right,” he said, hurt. “I’ll go by myself.”
I was sorry, but not sorry enough to go with him. I went to my aunt and uncle’s bedroom, where I could think. Their bed was unmade. Beds were so rarely unmade in my world.
I pressed my forehead against the window and watched until Sam disappeared into the woods. Last night we’d stayed up far past our bedtimes and took turns reading to each other an Agatha Christie mystery we’d read a thousand times already. I spent nearly all my time with Sam—he should not be hurt now. I looked at my hands, my nails that I had carefully trimmed last night, painted with oil. They were not a child’s hands. I stood and gathered my hair into a knot. I’d worn it down, brushed it ten different ways, decided on a side part.
I fell asleep in Aunt Carrie and Uncle George’s bed; I opened my eyes and Georgie was there, and I felt as if I’d summoned my cousin through a dream.
I held out my hand. Sleep had calmed me. My fingers gleamed in the soft lamplight.
“Where is Sam?”
“Outside. Mother is showing Sam and your mother her first azaleas.” He paused. “We’ll hear when they come back in.”
He rubbed my hand, I watched him, he rubbed my hand gently with his thumb and I wanted to moan.
He traced my eyebrow with his finger, lightly. “So pretty.”
“Do you think Sam knows?”
He shook his head. “I’m almost certain he doesn’t.”
That was enough, in that moment. I looked out the window and was surprised to see that it had turned dark while I slept.
“You look so old,” I said, and he did, standing there with one hand in his trouser pocket, the other over mine, kneading slowly but insistently. I sat up and kissed him, he leaned down and opened his mouth, put his tongue into mine.
“Open your mouth, Thea, like this.”
I did what he said. He turned his head away and I didn’t know what he was doing, but then I saw he was taking his jacket off. The idea thrilled me: he was taking his clothes off, he was going to stay. He faced me again. I watched him for a moment. He was breathing heavily, his face was flushed. I knew that I was calm—calmer, certainly, than Georgie.
“Come here,” I said.
“Yes,” he said, “yes, yes,” and he climbed on top of me, propped himself up with his elbows. I wanted him closer, I pressed my hands hard against his back and at first he resisted but then he relented and he was pushing into me, and I wanted it, he was pushing into me and I reached down between us and felt for the hard pressure of his penis. I knew it would be there. It felt not like I expected it would, it felt swollen and very soft. I reached—
“No, no,” he whispered, “not yet. Just feel me from the outside.” So I touched him like he wanted, gingerly at first, but he kept pushing himself into my hand, harder and harder, and so I touched him harder, ran my fingers firmly along the length of it, and Georgie moaned while he was kissing me, moaned and moaned.
I ached. I pressed him to where I ached, shifted so that it touched more, harder, and I pressed and pressed and when it happened it was different, it was quicker, and when I was finished Georgie was still moving on top of me, kissing me, kissing my neck, my chest.
“Oh.”
“What?” he asked.
I shook my head. He didn’t know what I had just done. Georgie stood up suddenly. His pants were tented at his crotch. I’d done that, too.
“We should go down,” he whispered, “they’ll wonder.”
I sat up and unknotted my hair.
“You’re so pretty,” he said, and knelt in front of me, put his head in my lap. I combed his hair with my fingers. We heard the screen door slam, and then footsteps. “What if they catch us?”
“I thought you weren’t worried?” I asked.
“I’m not,” he said, “not really.”
“I’m not either.” In that moment I was so certain that they wouldn’t. This was nothing they could conceive of, I felt. That we were in his parents’ bedroom seemed to prove the strength of our secret.
And it was true, neither of our mothers had seemed to notice anything when we went downstairs, Georgie first, me ten or so minutes later, counting the seconds aloud because Uncle George and Aunt Carrie’s clock wasn’t wound.
By the time I came down Mother was gathering her things. Sam looked bored. But I caught his eye and smiled, and he smiled back.
—
O
n the way home I pretended to sleep in the backseat, so that I could think freely about my cousin.
“Are you all right, Sam?” my mother asked. So she could feel it also: Sam seemed too quiet.
“Sam?” Mother asked again. She turned to look at him, and the car swerved. “I hate this contraption,” Mother muttered, shaken. “Sam, why so quiet? If you don’t tell me I’ll have to look at you again.”
I smiled. When Sam spoke, I knew he was smiling, too, from his voice. “Georgie—”
I bit my lip, hard. He could tell Mother right now, and this would all be over. And in that instant, Mother and I both waiting, poised for Sam to speak again, I almost wanted him to tell her. “He ignored me, today.” His voice was plaintive. I felt relieved that his malaise had nothing to do with me; then guilty. Georgie and I had both ignored Sam today.
“Things are a little tense right now, in your cousin’s family,” Mother said, finally. I could tell she was thinking of how to frame it so that Sam would best understand.
“Why?”
“They might lose their house, Sam.”
My eyes flew open. I wanted so badly to speak, but I did not want to enter this conversation. To do so would feel like a betrayal, of Georgie.
“They won’t,” my mother continued, “because this family is generous, and we’re glad to help. It’s what family does. But it’s hard for your uncle to accept charity. And it’s hard for Georgie to know all of this. He shouldn’t ignore you, but put yourself in his shoes. It must be hard for him, to see you.” It made sense, suddenly, why we hadn’t seen them in almost a month.
For as long as I could remember, we’d had more than my cousin’s family. We were two children; one child, in those days, was noticeable. My father was brighter. And my mother won, in every contest, when put next to my aunt. My mother was from a wealthy family, with connections. And she was beautiful; my aunt was plain. I felt all this, but I didn’t think much of it. And I did not have a girl cousin to compete with. I did not have to be prettier, or more graceful, or brighter.
But of course I knew my mother was wrong: Georgie had ignored Sam not because he was embarrassed or petty but because he only wanted me.
“Yeah, well,” Sam said. “He didn’t ignore Thea.”
And I smiled: Sam was right. But then Mother spoke.
“Thea’s a girl,” Mother said.
For an instant I thought she meant that I was too pretty for a boy like Georgie to ignore. But then she spoke again.
“She doesn’t matter like you do.”
I felt as if the wind had been knocked out of me. My heart beat so loudly I was sure Mother would hear it. But I calmed myself: I knew how to do that, because of Sasi. Horses could smell fear.
The shacks we had passed on the way up were lit by firelight, now. I tried to find some sign of poverty, but I didn’t know what to look for. I was angry, suddenly, that my parents had kept me away from everything real.
Mother was wrong. I mattered, I thought, and tried to let the sound of the wind against the car lull me to sleep. I mattered. My name was Theodora Atwell, and I mattered to Georgie Atwell.