The Talk-Funny Girl (38 page)

W
hen Lily was about four months old and strong enough, and when Christmas was approaching, and when, finally, the newspapers had gone quiet about the story and all of us were just waiting for the trial, and when I had let the feelings about my mother and father sink a small distance beneath the routine of my new life, I told Sands I wanted to take the baby to see her father. Aunt Elaine didn’t like the idea at all, but I insisted.

On a cold day in the middle of December, I wrapped Lily up in flannel pajamas and a blanket, set her car seat between me and Sands, and we drove northeast across the state to where my father was being held until the trial could start. The hills were white with deep snow, and they had a black-brown stubble of hardwood trees on them. A weak, gray sun pushed through the clouds.

Quiet in the best of times, since the death of my mother and everything that had followed it, Sands was diving down into new depths of silence. Sometimes we’d go the whole morning without saying five words to each other.

After a few miles he said, “When the first part of the cathedral’s completely finished, sometime around your next birthday, I’m going into business full-time. The cathedral worked out like an advertisement, the way I hoped it would. I’ve already had three jobs offered that I want to take, and the money will come in handy. Two walls and a small stone house at an apple orchard a ways south of us. Jasse’s. Where we got the pies that time with … my mother.”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t like to think about the cathedral being done. I looked out at the hills. In her sleep, Lily was holding on tight to one of my fingers.

“I’ll need a partner,” Sands went on. “Business partner, I mean. If you’re interested, you have the job. We can still work on the cathedral in between. I want to make it bigger, build a bell tower, for one thing. I have a feeling I’ll be working on it until I’m too old to lift stone.”

I looked at him, then away. I studied the cold white fields.

“You could make, I think, about thirty thousand dollars a year or more, if we did it right. Maybe not at first, but it wouldn’t be so long until we could each make that much if we worked hard.”

It was not a number I could say anything back to. At that point in my life, it wasn’t a number I could fold into my mind. I looked over at him once, to see if he might be making a bad joke, but Sands didn’t make bad jokes, or many jokes at all usually, and from his face I could tell he was serious. Deluded, maybe, but serious.

“It would be a favor to me,” he said. “Because then you could buy your own truck and I wouldn’t have to drive you all the time.”

Just when you think someone doesn’t make jokes is when they start making them, I told myself. I said, “I’ll drive better than you someday.”

“I hope so.” He wobbled the truck from side to side in the lane and smiled. “What about it, though, Laney? The business partner idea?”

“I could do it,” I said, but I felt I might as well be agreeing to go up into space or run for governor of New Hampshire.

“If you’re going to raise Lily, or partly raise her, we could find a way to work that out. Time-wise, I mean.”

“I’m going to raise her. She’s my own sister.”

“You’re good at it,” Sands said. “Anyone can see that.”

Out of all the mess of emotions inside me at that moment—going to see my father, feeling my sister clutching my hand, listening to talk about a thirty-thousand-dollar-a-year future—I was trying to think of a way to ask Sands if he would help raise Lily, too, if that was something he might think about. But just then she stirred and started crying. We pulled into a rest area, where I changed her diaper and fed her from the warmed-up bottle I’d put in a heating pack before we left. I walked her around in the fresh air, but just for a minute, because it was too cold for a baby to be out longer than that, and I was starting to worry we wouldn’t make it in time to see my father.

We got back in the truck and drove another half hour. There were few houses. Lily slept and slept. When we saw a sign for the correctional
facility, Sands put on his blinker and said, “What do you think about when you’re quiet all the time lately? Your parents?”

I shook my head. I felt a twist of something in my belly, and, after hesitating for so long, I hoped the words would come out right when I was finally able to speak them. At the bottom of the exit ramp I said, “What living in the rectory would be.” Then I thought a moment and added, “But some men don’t have a like for children that near.”

I could see I’d made him happy. He said, very proud and happy then, some of the little boy still showing, “Some men aren’t me.”

T
he prison was set back from the road on a flat, ugly stretch of land with hills in the distance and no houses nearby. From the banks at the sides of the road, I could see how much more snow had fallen there than in our river valley—it looked to be deeper than my waist in the flat fields. We came to a sign and turned onto the prison access road. There was a guardhouse with a long metal arm across the road and, a few hundred yards beyond it, two rows of tall chain-link fences with razor wire on top, and beyond them, the guard towers and high gray walls. There wasn’t the slightest chance that even a man like my father could escape from a place like that, and for a minute I pondered the drudgery of endless days leading only to old age and death, and I felt a drip of pity for him, and for my grandfather in another building not far away. The feeling lasted only until I thought about the fear he and my mother had passed on, the sorrow they’d draped over the girls’ families, the terror. Inside my mind, to let those thoughts drift away, I said my sister’s name.

We parked and walked toward the building in the frigid air. I held Lily tight against my breast, adjusted the pink cap on her head. I lifted the blanket up around her cheeks. At the door there were guards with guns, and a man and then a woman checking us, asking us questions about what we were carrying, making us take everything out of our pockets and leave it there on a table. And then more doors, so loud and
gray and cold seeming that I held the baby close against me and rocked her. Finally, there was a room where Sands couldn’t enter. I went in—another female guard checked me everywhere and checked to see there was nothing inside Lily’s clothes and inside her diaper or blanket—and then finally I stepped into another room and up to a wall, half-glass, where there was a row of stools with torn gray cushions glued onto the top of them. I sat on the one the guard pointed to, and I waited there, rocking the baby and murmuring to her so she wouldn’t be afraid.

In a short while I saw my father come through a door. His clothes were orange, a color he hated; his beard was gone and his hair cut shorter than I’d ever seen it. He looked small and too white-faced there. I could tell nothing from his eyes. He sat on a stool on the other side of the glass and at first he kept his gaze turned down and away from me. I spoke into the microphone but he wouldn’t look and wouldn’t look and wouldn’t look, and then he did. His eyes went quickly over the baby and then up into my eyes and remained there, still and dark. There was something in them that I remembered. It was something most people would not see. I remembered him telling me not to look away when the squirrel had been caught in his trap, and so I didn’t look away then.

“Pa, this for here is Lily,” I said, finding our language coming into my mouth again, automatically. I turned my sister so she was partly facing him. “Your girl.”

My father kept his eyes up on my eyes and wouldn’t look down. I shook the baby a bit, gently, lifted her a few inches, moved the blanket and cap away so he could have a better view of her face. My father blinked and kept his eyes up and looked at me like I had come all that way only to torture him.

“I just wanted for you to see on her,” I said. “How the way she’s growing up. Near to Christmas and everything I just had a thought to want to.”

My father looked away and down, a movement that, in the past, would have been accompanied by spitting. But there was no spitting in that room.

“Is it too bad on you here?” I asked him, because I couldn’t say anything else of what I had planned to say to him.

“Enh,” my father answered, jerking his jaw down and to the side the way he always had.

“Good then. I’m happy of that. I just wanted for you to see on her is all. I could to bring her again if you wanted of it, so you can see when how she grows.”

My father looked at me for a long time then. He looked at me out of the dark confusion of his innermost self, as if there was one enormous, impossible question there that occupied him night and day. Behind him the guard shifted his weight from one foot to the other. My father’s eyes went down to Lily for less than the time it would take to count to two, and I saw something wobble and almost break in him. I thought, almost, that he would burst into tears. But then a crust formed over those feelings. I could see it very plainly. His eyes came up again. “Enh,” he said, and he stood up quickly without saying good-bye or anything else to me, and then all I could see was the back of him, one side tilted down, the shoulders rounded, going away. Something wobbled and broke in me then. I could feel it break inside me like a dead branch snapping off a tree in winter.

Thirty-three

L
eaving the prison, I felt as though I had an emptiness in me that started on my skin and went in and in and didn’t stop. Sands and I had coffee in a town not far from the highway, in a place where they had moose and deer antlers on the walls and one stuffed fox. I gave Lily the rest of the bottle, still warm, and we ate something, too. I went to the bathroom and stayed in there a while, trying to breathe and pray the prayer Sands had taught me, trying to let everything go, to let it be what it was, to let my life be the life I had been given. It was very hard.

When we were back in the truck and had been riding for a while, Sands saw that I’d been crying and he said, “You’ve had a rough growing up, compared to a lot of people.”

I looked over at him. His face was a nice face, I thought, compared to the faces of most of the men I knew, a kind face with a little winter light on it just then. His way was a good way compared to theirs. He didn’t try so hard to protect himself, to keep all the hurt of life away. He had the courage not to do that, and I remember thinking then that I wanted to find that same courage in myself.

I folded back the edge of the blanket far enough to see that Lily was asleep. She seemed so peaceful there. I wondered, as I often did
then, how you went about keeping a life that way in this world. How you kept the pain off it, at least for a while. How you stopped the river of the past from flooding over your present-day feelings. She twisted around, let out a small cry, and then fell back to sleep.

“Do you ever think it’s unfair?” Sands asked me.

“You can’t ever know what might come later to fair it up.”

“Right, but do you ever wonder why things happen to some people and not others?”

“My father and mother used to say there’s a penance for them to pay. My mother said it even about herself.”

“You really believe that?”

“I don’t know.” I was looking out at the porcupine hills.

“Maybe we’ve finished paying now,” Sands said, “both of us.”

“There’s a place where you do,” I said. “A time when you finish it off, I think. Heaven, maybe. Or before.”

It fell dark not long after we turned onto the smaller highway. A sliver of a moon came up behind the clouds, and I saw a bright star I recalled my father telling me was Venus. We passed near the edge of the town where I had gone to school, and though we didn’t say anything, both of us looked in that direction, as if we might see the roof of the Connecticut River Cathedral there, behind the hills. We went across the river and up onto the interstate.

Near Watsonboro there were more houses on the hillsides, more lights, and then we took the exit and were going along the old two-lane highway not far from the river, with houses on both sides, some of them lit up with Christmas lights and plastic Santa Clauses and plastic angels. Lily cried a bit. I lifted her out of the car seat and rocked her and told her it wouldn’t be long now until we were home, and she’d have something warm to eat and another clean diaper, and be able to sleep in her nice bed all by herself. Sands stopped the truck at a red light. I moved the blanket away from my sister’s face and turned her so she was facing out the side window and I said, “Look, Lily. Look
at those houses. There are nice people living in those houses. A lot of good people living there.”

When I said those words that way I felt Sands turn toward me. I put my hand on the downy top of my sister’s head, very gently, and I held it there, so the girl would know what someone in the world felt for her.

Epilogue