A Knot in the Grain (20 page)

But she kept imagining that she felt it there every time she came into the attic, and that every time she opened the closet door, it—it was like a faithful dog, she thought, hoping to be invited to jump up from its bed in the corner and go for a walk. And you always felt guilty, because you knew about the hopefulness. Sorry, she thought at it, no walks. You stay there. For now. Till I decide what to do with you. She had no desire to investigate the attic-over-the-attic further. Her first sight of it had made her think she would want to do just that: explore everything, take down every book, look in every file, find out who the secret belonged to, why, when, how. But she kept remembering the tingle up her arm—and the way the stairs had
thrown
themselves back into their gap, after all the trouble she'd had getting them down in the first place. It didn't make sense. It wasn't as if she had discovered a secret spring; the stairs were stuck, wood tight-swelled against wood, hinges that hadn't been asked to work in decades.

It's like a fairy story, she thought. Girl finds magical box in attic, all things start coming right. Boring old boyfriend takes up with someone else, stops rubbing away at her, new car—well, sort of—suddenly happens against all odds. All I need now is some friends.

The silence happened again, at once, eagerly.
No!
she yelled—silently—and there was a quiver, as of a scolded dog, and then not only was there no silence, but there never had been any silence. Sorry, she said—silently—to the … dog-metaphor. Sorry. I know you're … oh, hell! Am I losing my mind here? I can't be talking to a
box
.

That afternoon, after she finished weeding the garden, she curled up on the porch swing and started reading
The Mayor of Casterbridge
. It was the only title she recognized on the living room shelves. Dad's historical research books were all out (although not all on shelves) but not very many
reading
books. It wasn't
Lord of the Rings
(which she had read eight times), but it was easier to get into than
War and Peace
had been.

The next afternoon her father took her down to the garage to see her car, a little blue boxy thing that started as soon as she turned the key,
clunka clunka clunka
, an absolutely reliable noise, she could tell. The sort of engine noise that not only any self-respecting dog would recognize coming up the driveway, but even parents would know was you and not some stranger. “Clunker,” she said, “and so I dub thee, to be mine own true, um, knight, or I suppose charger or palfrey or ambling pad.”

And the day after that she drove it to Dunkin' Donuts to buy a box for her father, even though it was a Wednesday, even though family tradition said that Dunkin' Donuts, junk food in capital letters, was only a weekend splurge—and because while her father was the only admitted addict, Annabelle and her mother always somehow got through their four each too, and the boxes came home carefully arranged with everyone's favorites. Annabelle had gotten up early to do this, even knowing that her parents must hear Clunker starting up, assuming that they would assume that girl with new car can't keep herself away from it, even at six-thirty in the morning in July. Mom and Dad were only barely unsticking their eyelids over their first cups of coffee by the time she got back; she could see “weekend splurge” trying to assert itself on their faces, and failing. “Well, we had doughnuts our first day in the new house,” she said. “I don't see why we shouldn't have doughnuts our first day with a new car.”

“It'll give us strength for standing in line at Motor Vehicles this afternoon,” Dad said, looking gloomy, but reaching for the box.

She loaded up her knapsack with library books after they returned (successfully) from the DMV and, despite the temptation to throw them in Clunker's back seat, took the walk to the library by the river, with the sun baking down on her and her back under the canvas knapsack running with sweat. As she was unloading them onto the “return” counter, she looked up and saw the girl who'd said “hi” several weeks ago, coming out of the young adult room with another girl Annabelle didn't recognize. Annabelle stiffened, but kept unloading, more slowly. She'd been catching up on the new stuff by authors she'd officially given up and privately missed—Peter Dickinson, Diana Wynne Jones, Margaret Mahy—and had
Mistress Masham's Repose
and a couple of Lang's fairy books besides. There were ten or twelve of them altogether. The girls glanced at the books, and the one who'd smiled smiled again, and again Annabelle couldn't tell if it was a friendly smile or a scornful one. But she glanced up and caught Annabelle's eye. “Hi,” said Annabelle, a little too loudly. “Hi,” said the girl, composedly, but the other girl was already half a step ahead, and the two of them went on, past Annabelle and out the door into the street.

Annabelle stood staring at her pile of books a moment, and then turned and went … not home. Back to the house she now lived in. Even Clunker sitting out front no longer cheered her. She went upstairs to her attic and began writing a letter to Bridget.

By the end of July they had peas and beans and lettuce and spinach, and basil for pesto, and dill to put on the fish they caught in the stream (Dad had asked about that at the garage, too). In August Annabelle stared at the sweet corn, willing it to grow, to not be eaten by worms and birds before the human beings got to it. She finished
The Mayor of Casterbridge
and began
Great Expectations
. Dad had disappeared into his word processor and Mom into soft sculpture orders, and unpacking was at a kind of standstill, so Annabelle had found
Great Expectations
at the library.
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
was on the shelves at home, but she didn't want to read any more Hardy, too grim, and all that landscape, it struck too near: lots of landscape, no one to talk to. Dickens was better, there was stuff to laugh at in Dickens so the sad parts were okay, you didn't feel like you were going to get lost in them.

Her favorite shoes lost a heel, tearing the leather badly in the process. “Oh, hell!” she said, looking at the mess. “I don't want to give these shoes up yet!” The silence put a nose in, questioningly, and this time she let it. The next day she drove Clunker to the next town, about half an hour from their village, and the first shoe-repair store she saw said no, past mending, but that there was this fellow at the other end of town who might do it, and he did.

“Good shoes,” he said. “Worth saving. I'll have to patch that, you know; it won't be quite the same color leather, but you rub a lot of mink oil in and a little polish over and no one will know. Cost you, though. Lot of work.”

“That's okay,” she said. “I really like those shoes.”

The sweet corn was amazing: almost no worms, and while the birds got some of it, there was so much that it didn't matter. The living room was still hedged with stacks of books and book boxes, but Mom had gotten out of the dining room and into her room upstairs, and although Annabelle managed to step on a needle and Dad a pin the first evening they tried using the dining room as a dining room, Mom, nothing daunted, invited two sets of neighbors over for dinner two days later. (“Where are the good place mats?” she shouted, an hour before their guests arrived. “I unpacked them
weeks
ago!”) The Websters were about her parents' age, but their kids were Averil and Ted and Sylvia's age, and lived in California and Montana, and didn't come back East very often. The Gardners' kids were still little, seven, nine, and eleven, and although on their best behavior, a fair amount of melted butter made its way to various inappropriate places.

Everyone raved about the sweet corn. “I've never tasted anything like it, in the fifty years I've lived here,” said Mr. Webster, halfway through his third ear. (He ate four, before he gave up, as did most of the grown-ups.) Annabelle went out about halfway through dinner to pick more while her mother boiled more water. “Thanks,” Annabelle muttered, through her teeth, to the rows of corn, but she was speaking to a box in the attic.

When she got back in, she could hear snatches of the conversation from the dining room. “—can't seem to do anything about it. The fellows in Albany don't give a damn; one little tourist town more or less. They're much more interested in the kind of mass development that could go on all around here—more New York City bedrooms, you know.”

“We're a little far out for that, surely,” said Dad.

“Little you know,” said Mrs. Webster. “But you don't have to care why; you do have to care that they're going to do it.”

“Do what?” said Annabelle to her mother, over their hands busy husking corn.

“Highway,” said her mother. “Your dad's been hearing about it—at the garage, of course—and this Mr. Webster is the head of the committee to try and stop them. He sounds like he knows what he's talking about”—this was high praise from Mom, who could tell blusterers from the real thing—“but apparently they're not getting very far. Construction is due to start this fall.”

“—if you felt like it. I'd rather you didn't sue, of course, but there's no doubt that old Walker's heirs heard about the highway plans and figured they'd better scratch together some cooperation quick to realize anything at all out of the property.”

“But we like it here,” said Dad, and Annabelle could hear that he meant it; that it was no longer just that he and Mom had gotten a good price for the house.

“Good. Terrific. I'll send you copies of sample letters tomorrow. In fact, I'll bring them around. I suppose I don't need to tell you not to copy them straight out? Even congresspeople aren't so stupid that they don't notice—or their secretaries notice for them—the same letter coming in a hundred times. But” —and Annabelle could hear the change of tone, back to general dinner party conversation—“it's in all our interests to preserve the best cornfield in New York State.” Annabelle took her cue, and carried the platter of fresh corn into the dining room.

The house was fuller of people after that—more like it had been in the old house, except these people were all grownups. Dad had always had colleagues he brought home, tweedy people with short hair, blue-jeaned people with shaggy hair. Mom had a stranger assortment of friends, from the dour brown lady who ran the local Laundromat (which Mom hadn't used since the first six months they'd lived in that town, till the washing machine went in), whose thick East Indian accent baby Annabelle was the first to understand, to various arts and crafts types, some of whom showed up clinking with beaded hair and bracelets and talked about auras and past lives. Now they had political activists—polite political activists, with neat hair and polo shirts, but with the gleam in the eye and the edge to the voice that told you what they really were.

Annabelle painted a few posters and stuffed some envelopes, but as much as she was growing to love her riverside walk, she could not persuade herself that she cared enough to get really involved. It wasn't that she still hoped that if things didn't work out here, they could go back to their old lives; they couldn't. The new people were in their old house—Bridget said they had repapered most of the downstairs, and taken out the old mock chandelier in the living room and put in track lighting—you didn't get to go back. Annabelle knew that. Maybe if there had been some kids her own age involved in this highway thing; there probably were; but she didn't know where they were or what they did, and she was too—proud? discouraged? alienated?—to go to the effort of asking.

She knew her parents were worrying about her, but she also knew that so long as she didn't make a show of being disoriented or unhappy, they would leave her alone a while longer. So she went on taking care of the garden, and going to the library, and ignoring the implications of the box in the closet that she believed she didn't really believe in, and smiling occasionally even if she didn't mean it. Enough to keep her parents from doing anything about worrying about her.

By the end of August only Bridget was writing to her regularly any more. Annabelle wrote back, but found it hard to have anything to say; weeding the garden wasn't very interesting, or actually it was interesting, the feel of earth on your hands, dirt under your fingernails, the surprising satisfaction every time a weed came up with that tiny
rip
that told you you got the roots and not just pulled the top off, the heat, the sun, the bugs, the occasional whiff of cool river—but it didn't go in a letter very well. It was what kept Annabelle going, but it wasn't anything she could talk about. This seemed to be part of not having anyone to talk to. It was very confusing. It was as if she were forgetting something vital. And so she spent more and more of her time in the garden, where talking was superfluous. She finished
Great Expectations
and began
Barchester Towers
.

School was starting in two weeks. The shops all had
BACK TO SCHOOL SALE
banners in their windows. She stopped herself from wishing for the perfect winter coat, half out of a feeling that Clunker—and the corn, and her shoes—were enough, half out of not being sure she wanted to know what her perfect winter coat really was—and a spare half being angry with herself for thinking consciously about the whole thing. The box in the closet was just an old box full of junk. That's all. It was her imagination that her closet felt wistful. That she could taste it, like a mist, when she opened the closet door. That it tasted like an old sadness sweeping back in after new hope.

But the sense of old sadness stayed with her, till she began to feel that it was her own, that it was not that she had left her friends and the shape of her life behind in her old town, but that she had always felt out of place and lonely, and that she was … old, old. That she had felt this way for a long, long time. She had a nightmare, ten days before the first day of school, in which she looked in her mirror and her hair was grey, and she was squinting through thick glasses—one battered earpiece was held in place by a bit of twisted wire—and she stared at herself, knowing she'd done nothing with her life, knowing that she'd given up.… She sat bolt upright, gasping. It was morning; in fact she'd overslept. She'd had a nightmare because she'd overslept, and because school was starting, and she was afraid to go to this new school.