The Unwelcomed Child (8 page)

Fortunately, I still had a good half hour, so I went back to my drawing, but suddenly, I was sure I heard the cracking of branches, and then I heard their voices. They couldn’t be walking through the forest naked, but how else would they be if they did what I thought they might and swam to where I had been on the shore? I closed my pad and rose, listening.

“Hey!” I heard the boy call. “Hello?”

“Hello?” his sister called, and then laughed. “You imagined it, you idiot,” she said.

“No, I didn’t. I’m sure I saw her.”

“The princess of the woods.”

“I saw her,” he insisted.

I couldn’t move. I should run, I thought, but I would make too much noise. They would hear me and be more inclined to follow. The sound of the footsteps grew louder.

“Let’s go back, Mason. This is ridiculous,” I heard the girl say.

They were very close now. I turned slowly to my left and looked between a pair of large maple trees. I could see them, both with towels wrapped around their bodies. They hadn’t swum. They must have decided to use their rowboat. I held my breath. The girl started to turn, and her brother put his hand on her right arm. She paused, and he nodded in my direction.

He had seen me. I felt the blood rise into my face. I wanted to run, but my feet felt cemented to the spot, and I was afraid that if I started, I would fall on my face and look even more ridiculous. He took a few steps toward me, and then he smiled.

“Hey,” he said, pointing at me. “I know you. You’re the birthday girl.”

“What?” his sister asked, coming up alongside him. “Who is she?”

“She’s the girl who had a birthday dinner in Chipper’s when we were there with Mom and Dad.”

“Oh,” his sister said.

He continued to walk toward me. I hugged my notepad against my breasts and waited. Both he and his sister were barefoot.

“You live nearby?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. I nodded toward my grandparents’ house. “Back that way.”

“What’s your name?”

“Elle,” I said.

“Well?” he said, turning to his sister. “Meet my imagination. Are you satisfied now?”

“What are you doing spying on us?” she demanded, not happy about being wrong.

“She wasn’t spying on us. Were you?” he asked. He smiled, liking the idea. “How many times have you done it?”

I shook my head. “Never.”

His sister looked as if she didn’t believe me. “Why haven’t we ever seen you at the lake?” she asked.

“I haven’t been at the lake for a long time.”

“How long?”

“Years,” I said.

“Why not, if you live so close?”

I didn’t answer.

“You were spying on us, and you have been many times,” she insisted.

“No, really. I’m not lying.”

“You’re not being very friendly, Claudine, cross-examining her like this. Please excuse my sister’s behavior. She doesn’t meet many people in the forest,” he said, smiling.

I looked at her. Suddenly, she looked a little amused. Her smile started in her eyes and curled around her soft, full lips. I saw again how the resemblances between them were so clear.

“What are you holding so dearly?” she asked me.

“My drawing pad,” I said, but I didn’t show it to her.

“You’re an artist. That’s it,” her brother said. “She came to the lake to be inspired, like Renoir’s famous
Near the Lake
painting. My mother has a print of that in her bedroom back home.”

“Back home?”

“We’re from Manhattan. This is only our summer home,” he said. “Our parents go back and forth. Dad’s an attorney, and Mom has her own decorating business.”

“Don’t be so eager to tell her our life story, Mason.”

He laughed.

“Were you drawing us?” the girl asked. “Is that why you were spying, hiding in the bushes, and why you’re clinging so desperately to your pad?”

“No,” I said, feeling the blush come into my face at the very thought.

“What if she was? This is terrific. We don’t know anyone close to our age here. I’m Mason Spenser, by the way, and this is my impolite sister, Claudine.”

“Yes, we’re twins,” Claudine said, like someone who was asked the same question all the time. “I’m older.”

“By four minutes.”

“Vive la différence,”
she said.

“Ha, ha,” Mason said.

“You know what that means, Elle?” she asked.

I shook my head.

“It’s French for ‘long live the difference.’ People say it when they’re happy or proud of the difference,” she added, sounding a little like my grandmother when she was homeschooling me, but she turned her eyes on Mason. “I have more wisdom, being older.”

“Ignore her, Elle. She likes to act superior.”

“Only because I am,” Claudine followed. “So what else do you do around here, besides spy on your neighbors once every ten years or so?”

“I wasn’t spying,” I insisted. “I went to the lake to draw ducks and heard you laughing and then saw you go swimming.”

“Sounds plausible,” Mason said.

“So what are you going to do now, run home and tell everyone you saw a naked boy and girl swimming?”

“No. I wouldn’t do that. I can’t do that,” I added, but she didn’t pick up on my point.

“You should come swimming with us,” Mason said.

I must have looked quite shocked, because he immediately laughed.

“Don’t worry. You can wear a bathing suit, and we’ll put ours on if you come,” he said.

“Speak for yourself,” Claudine said.

“I always do.”

“People think that because we’re twins, what one of us believes the other does, too. Nothing could be further from the truth,” she told me. “If anything, I tell him what to do and think. I have better grades in school. Half the time, I have to do his homework.”

“She likes to blow her own horn,” Mason said, and she punched him in the shoulder. He cried out and rocked as if the punch was strong enough to knock him over.

I noticed how her towel slipped a bit, revealing more of her breasts. She saw where I was looking and smiled but didn’t pull up the towel. I looked down quickly.

“What birthday was it?” Claudine asked.

“My fifteenth,” I said.

“Fifteen? I would have said seventeen,” Mason said. “We’re seventeen.”

“I’m four minutes more than your seventeen,” she told him.

“So you’ll die four minutes before I do.”

“If we die on the same day,” she replied.

“We were born on the same day, weren’t we?”

“Don’t be stupid. You’re making a bad impression on the forest nymph.”

“I’m not a forest nymph,” I said.

“I don’t mean nymphomaniac,” she said. “Unless, of course, you are one.”

Mason slapped her a little bit harder than playfully, and she slapped him back.

“You’re the one making the bad impression,” he told her. He looked really upset.

She looked at me and reconsidered.

“Sorry. Actually, I meant I was sure you were a virgin. You have that virginal air about you.”

“What?” I knew what it meant, but the only time I had ever heard the word spoken was in reference to the Virgin Mary. Was it proper to say the word in front of a male?

“Of course, maybe I’m wrong. Most of the girls who have lost their innocence in our school act in public like they haven’t gone further than a peck on the cheek. Do you go to school here? I can’t imagine it being much of a school.”

“My sister’s picture is next to the word
snob
in the dictionary,” Mason said. “We attend a private school.”

“No, I don’t go to the school here. Yet,” I added.

“Where do you go?” she asked, a slightly amused smile on her face. “You go to a private school, too?”

“No. I’m in homeschooling.”

“Homeschooling?” She looked at Mason. He looked a little shocked. “Aren’t you too old for that?”

“I’m probably going to the public school this year,” I said.

They both stared at me as if they had trouble understanding or digesting my words.

“I keep forgetting where we are,” she said. “Around here, I bet the iPhone means I’ll call you.”

“The what?”

“See?”

“Will you stop?” he said.

She stuck her tongue out at him and then turned back to me. “You didn’t get that watch for your birthday, did you?” she asked, nodding at Grandfather Prescott’s watch on my wrist.

“No. It’s my grandfather’s. I don’t have a watch.”

“You don’t have a watch? Do you have electricity, indoor bathrooms?”

“Claudine! Stop picking on her,” Mason said.

“I’m not picking on her. Who doesn’t have a watch these days?”

“Plenty of people who need money for food. You know the percentage of people in poverty these days?”

“Oh, you’re so pedantic. Don’t let him start one of his speeches,” she told me. “He’ll wear down your ears.”

“Those couldn’t have been your parents with you at the restaurant the other night, right?” Mason asked.

“No. They’re my grandparents.”

“Why weren’t your parents there?” Claudine asked.

I didn’t reply.

“Do you live with your grandparents?” she asked me quickly, as if she had just discovered something very important.

“Yes,” I said.

“Do your parents live there, too?” Mason asked.

I shook my head.

“I bet they’re divorced. Is that it?” Claudine asked.

“No.”

“Did one or both pass away?” Mason asked.

“I have to go,” I said. I backed away.

“Hey, let’s see what you drew,” he said.

“It’s nothing,” I said. “I’ve got to go. I can’t be late.”

“Why not? Is it a very important date, Alice? I’m late. I’m late for a very important date. Alice!” Claudine shouted.

“My name is Elle,” I said, and she laughed. “Don’t call me Alice. I didn’t fall down a hole.”

I started walking quickly, still holding my pad tightly against my breasts.

“Come on back tomorrow,” he called after me. “We’ll pick you up in the rowboat.”

I glanced back. They were both standing there looking after me. Claudine poked him, and he poked her back a little roughly.

“Just for that, you swim back!” she shouted at him. Then she ran into the woods.

He waved to me, and then he ran after her, shouting, “Like hell I will!”

I stood there listening to them disappear into the woods. Then I turned and walked slowly the rest of the way, my ears still ringing with the happy-go-lucky tone in their voices and their laughter but my body trembling as if all my bones were vibrating. Their innocent questions about my parents were a good prologue to what I was sure I would get when and if I entered a public school. It would be only natural for the other students to want to know more about me. How was I to answer? How was I to explain? Would I reveal that I had no father, no mother, or make up some story? Could I just come right out and tell them my mother had been raped, and as a result I had been born, and she had run off?

I was afraid to ask Grandmother Myra what I should say. She might interpret that to mean that I was afraid of going to school and then reject the idea. And yet I was confident that she knew those questions would come. Surely she would prepare me for them. Perhaps she had to prepare herself for them first. One thing was certain, she would never expect me to have confronted any girl or boy of my age during a seemingly innocent walk to the lake and have all these things come up.

When I entered through the back door, she looked up from the food she was setting out on the island in the center of the kitchen. She wiped her hands on a dish towel and gave me that studied look I was anticipating. Then she looked up at the clock and nodded.

“So?” she asked. “Where did you go? What did you draw?”

“There were no ducks on the lake when I got there, at least where I was, but I saw this doe standing not more than fifteen feet away and got a good look at its face.”

I turned my pad and showed her my preliminary sketch.

She nodded. “Better than what your so-called mother could do,” she said.

I guessed that as long as I was compared with my mother, I could find some appreciation in her words and looks. I was getting to the point where I was happy I had a mother, her daughter, with whom she found so much fault now. I couldn’t lose if she continually compared me with her.

My grandfather walked into the kitchen.

“Did I hear we have a drawing?”

“Just a start, Grandfather,” I said, and showed it to him. He took it from my hands and looked at it keenly, as if he were a professional art critic.

“Love how you’ve captured her eyes,” he said.

“Good,” my grandmother said. “Go wash your hands, and help me prepare dinner.”

Grandfather Prescott handed my pad back.

“Can I go again tomorrow?” I asked.

“If the weather permits,” my grandmother said. “After you do your chores and finish the assignments I’ve given you.”

Although the twins made me very nervous, I was intrigued with the idea of seeing them again. I dared not think of going swimming with them, not only because I couldn’t swim but because they’d surely have many more questions that were difficult for me to answer. Even if I wasn’t able to do that, I thought I would stay up all night if I had to in order to finish the schoolwork and be able to go back into the woods and to the lake.

I headed first for my room and then into the bathroom. In between, I heard Grandfather Prescott say, “I told you she would be just fine, and she does have an artistic talent, Myra.”

My grandmother gave her famous grunt.

Later, at dinner, after I described the place I had discovered under the pine trees, my grandfather casually suggested he might take a walk with me the next day. My heart sank, first because I was afraid that Mason and Claudine might come looking for me again and second because I wanted to be able to observe them again if they didn’t, keeping myself a little less obvious.

“Don’t worry,” he added. “I won’t hang around and look over your shoulder while you draw. I was thinking, Myra, that we should get her some watercolors. We did that for Deborah.”

“Wasted money.”

“Won’t be for Elle,” Grandfather Prescott insisted. “She’ll need the brushes and, what do you call that thing for holding the painting while you work on it?”