The Story of Beautiful Girl Page 19

  “I’m sorry,” Martha said as they settled onto the boat.

  “Sorry for what?” Julia said as she tied a life preserver around Rodney.

  Pete looked at Martha, then looked away. “Thank you,” he said softly.

  They pulled into Oyster River and then passed through Stage Harbor and out into the Sound. “Wow!” Julia said, looking all around. “I love it out here!” She pointed to something floating in the water.

  “That’s a buoy,” Pete said, anticipating her question.

  She pointed out to the horizon. “And that’s a really big sailboat.”

  Martha said, “Sailboats are something, aren’t they?”

  “And I know what these are.” Julia was looking toward a long spit of land covered with shiny black beasts. “Seals.”

  Pete said, “That’s right.”

  “It’s like they’re having a big party,” Julia said as they rounded a long shore that Pete explained was an island. “And what’s that?”

  “A weather station.”

  Julia hugged Rodney to her and began giving him a tour of the sights, pointing out anything else she knew—birds, fish, other boats in the distance. After a few moments, Pete turned to Martha, and as Julia continued her private conversation with the dog, he said very softly, “What do you think happens?”

  Martha looked at him. “What do you mean?”

  “After we leave here. This earth.” He returned to looking straight ahead, and she could see him swallow hard. “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know what I think.”

  “I don’t either.”

  Then Martha, remembering something she’d come across in a book she’d once read, said to Pete, “But I like that story. The one about the difference between heaven and”—she looked at Julia—“the other place.”

  “Tell me,” Pete said.

  “A man asks God to show him the difference between the two places. God takes him to a large hall, where a party of skinny, miserable people are sitting around a table filled with every kind of food you can think of, and God says, ‘This is’ ”—and Martha mouthed the word—“ ‘hell.’ The man notices all the people are wearing sleeves made of metal which don’t bend at the elbow, so when they pick up food, they can’t bring it to their mouths. Then God takes the man to another hall and says, ‘This is heaven.’ It’s just like the first, with people wearing sleeves of metal, sitting around a table heaped high with food. These people, though, are laughing and smiling, and the man sees why. Each person who picks up a piece of food turns and feeds it to the person beside him.”

  Pete was quiet a minute. Then he said, “That’s a nice story.”

  “It’s just a story.”

  “But it helps. Like having you and Julia here. It helps.”

  Suddenly Julia called out, “Look at that!” She pointed toward a strip of land.

  “Goodness,” Martha said.

  “What is that, Grammy?”

  “Why, it’s a lighthouse.”

  Pete said, “That’s the Chatham Lighthouse.”

  “Why’s it here, Pete?”

  “Lighthouses are towers that send out lights over the water, so ships know where the land is. It keeps them from running aground.”

  Martha said, “Ju-Ju, I once owned a lighthouse.”

  “You did?”

  “Not a big one. One that was tiny, like the size of ”—she thought—“one of your twigs. Uncle Landon made it for me long ago. I put it on my mailbox.”

  “The mailbox at the end of our driveway?”

  “A different mailbox. I was living somewhere else. I left the lighthouse behind when I moved away.”

  “Did it look like this, Grammy?”

  “No. It had a unique look. The top of it, where the light was, had the face of a man.”

  Pete said, “Landon must have had some imagination.”

  “He does. He was always quite creative.”

  Julia asked, “Did he give it to you for your birthday?”

  “No. For Christmas. He said he gave it to me because… I was lonely. He put it on my mailbox, and when the mail came every day, the carrier would move the lighthouse man from up to down. I’d listen all day for that squeak, and when it came I knew I’d have company.”

  “In letters?”

  “Yes.” Martha looked out at this lighthouse.

  “That’s funny,” Julia said, laughing. “A lighthouse with the head of a man.”

  “It was funny. It would make me smile every day. That lighthouse man worked.”

  “How nice it must be,” Pete said, “having students all over the country. And so many of them ready to do something kind for you.”

  “I’m very lucky,” she said.

  Then she turned to him and watched as he stared straight ahead, both hands on the wheel. And, as she would write in a letter to the future Julia, the answer she’d been seeking came; and there, on the water, she let herself feel the lump in her throat for the last time. Then she reached over and laid her hand on top of Pete’s.

  That night, Martha wrote a letter to one of her students, telling what she’d learned from the books and what she hoped he would do with the information.

  The next morning, she and Julia walked to the mailbox at the edge of their driveway. As they passed over twigs, Julia read what she saw on the ground. Now that she could add the twigs up into words, she easily found the ones that spelled her name.

  I might be just one small person, Martha thought. But even the small can make a difference.

  “Do you want to put this in?” Martha asked at the box.

  Julia took the envelope from her hands. “Who’s it going to?”

  “You tell me,” Martha said.

  Julia looked hard at the envelope, then said, “John-Michael!” Then she said, “That’s my uncle who works on TV!”

  “That’s right,” Martha said.

  Martha opened the mail door, and Julia stood on tiptoes and slid her Grammy’s letter in.

  A Change as Big as a Book

  LYNNIE

  1973

  Lynnie still could not tell time. But she knew, as she and Doreen walked down the path to Kate’s office, that since the night she lost Buddy and the baby, she’d seen the leaves fall many times from the trees. She looked up now as a chilly wind shook the last of the leaves loose. The confetti of reds and browns made her ache, the same as it did every year. Doreen, though, did not notice the leaves or Lynnie’s pained gaze. She was preoccupied with reporting the news, which consisted of anything she’d learned on her mail rounds earlier in the day. Today, she’d listened in the hall as two administrators discussed a new policy about TVs in the cottages: They were going to be encased in wire cages, so only staff could turn the channel. “They say it’ll cut down the fights. Sure. You know what it really means. No more Family Feud or Green Acres or Sesame Street. Just dumb old Guiding Light.” Then in the main office, she’d spotted new glasses on Uncle Luke’s secretary, Maude. “And let me tell you, if you saw her on the street, you’d swear she’s Jackie O.” Doreen was like a radio broadcast, and Lynnie usually enjoyed listening. But Lynnie was having trouble concentrating today, and not only because of the spell of sadness cast by the dying leaves.

  Lynnie was on her way to Kate’s office, and every autumn, on the day when the last of the leaves whirled off the trees just as they were doing today, Kate gave Lynnie a new book. Then Lynnie would sit at Kate’s desk, turning page after page while Kate read the story. Books amazed Lynnie. In a single book, a lonely elephant could come upon a speck of dust that contained an entire world—and fight powerful enemies to save it from destruction. A gentle bull could be forced into a bullring—but be so happy just smelling the flowers in ladies’ hair that he gets sent home to his garden. Books had great, big change. At the School, the changes were small.

  Take Albert, whom Lynnie could see in the parking lot up the hill right now, directing a car to a space, and who was the one deaf resident besides Buddy (B
uddy! she thought, her stomach taking off like a bird launching). Albert loved uniforms so much, whenever a man in a uniform appeared in their weekly movies, he’d squeal with joy. Lynnie had never figured out why—his signs weren’t like Buddy’s, who hadn’t understood him, either. But like Buddy, he’d gained the trust of higher-ups and was granted the privilege of choosing his own work, monitoring the parking lot. Someone gave him an old uniform, too, and in it he pointed staff to empty spaces and wiped parked cars with cloths. He seemed happier now, though Lynnie knew he still shared the one toothbrush in his cottage.

  But as she watched Albert through the showering leaves, she noticed something unusual: The driver of the car he was directing was Dr. Hagenbuch, who’d quit a while back. People who left almost never returned. Not only that, he was accompanied by two men she’d never seen. She turned to Doreen, but her friend was going on about the sparkles on Maude’s glasses. Lynnie looked toward the staff cottage. Maybe Kate would have an explanation.

  Lynnie was not on her way to Kate’s just to receive a book; the book was part of a festive occasion Kate called Lynnie Day, but which Lynnie didn’t quite understand, not being aware that today was the anniversary of the night she’d lost everything. She just understood that when the leaves fell every year, her grief thickened, and then, when Kate invited her to the office for Lynnie Day and treated Lynnie to cake and a new book, the grief thinned. Now Lynnie had four books—and lately, Kate had practiced counting them with her, helping her work hard to pronounce each number: one, two, three, four. She wondered why Kate had stopped at four—Lynnie enjoyed watching Sesame Street, so she’d learned that numbers went all the way up to ten. Then this morning, when Kate saw Lynnie at breakfast, she came up and said, “Today’s your next Lynnie Day! Are you ready to try saying ‘five’?”

  As Doreen and Lynnie rounded the last corner before Kate’s office, they saw Smokes and Clarence and the dogs sauntering down to the boys’ colony. Lynnie stopped moving for a moment, her breath caught in her throat. Though when Doreen kept on walking and chatting away, Lynnie reminded herself she shouldn’t be scared. The staff cottages had been shut down, so Smokes and Clarence were no longer around at night, and as long as Lynnie stayed in the company of other people during the day shifts, she felt safe. She still felt her legs and arms stiffen when she saw them, and she still jerked awake at night, her mouth going dry, her breath a hard draw. But the sounds she woke to weren’t what she heard over and over in her memory: men shouting and dogs barking, glass breaking and furniture crashing, shrieks echoing into the sleeping room and down the corridor where she’d run, the word Here! and the doorknob turning, No no no no! Now, when she woke in the middle of the night, she just heard snoring and sleep-talking, and instead of going tight with terror, she’d think of those three days of freedom. She’d think of how, after they’d dressed in the old lady’s clothes, Buddy made a circle of his pointer finger and thumb and slid the circle down one of Lynnie’s fingers, as if giving her a ring. Then she did the same for him, and when he made a sign for her and a sign for himself, she knew he meant wife, husband. Sometimes, when she would wake in the night, she would make those signs to herself, and then she could fall back asleep.

  “Here we are,” Doreen said as they mounted the steps to the staff cottage.

  Kate was standing outside her office door when they entered the building. “Hey, sweet pea,” she said, opening her arms, and Lynnie came inside and felt the arms close and inhaled the gardenia scent of Kate.

  The instant Kate led her into the office, Lynnie spotted the cake and wrapped book, both perched on the windowsill. Almost everything else was the same as ever—green metal desk, goosenecked lamp, typewriter, black glass ashtray, two gray chairs with crib-cage backs, file cabinets with Kate’s plants, and radio on the windowsill. Though this summer, a framed photo of Kate’s new boyfriend, Scott, appeared on the desk. Standing on a field chalked with white stripes, wearing a thick jacket with a picture of a lion, Scott was, Kate told her, a coach, which meant he helped high school boys play football better. That was around the time Kate started helping Lynnie try to speak.

  Behind her, Kate turned the lock in her door. Then Kate continued what she always did when she invited Lynnie here to practice speaking: She snapped on the radio. Lynnie liked the top forty tunes, and now a bouncy song came on that she particularly enjoyed: Tie a yellow ribbon round the old oak tree…

  Kate talked lower than the radio and loudly enough for Lynnie to hear. “It’s your fifth Lynnie Day,” she said with a big smile.

  Lynnie tried to look pleased, though the ache she’d felt on her walk here remained.

  “And I’m really happy to celebrate you today.”

  Lynnie pushed her lips up and felt a small smile appear on her face.

  Kate held her gaze for a moment, smiling back. But it wasn’t a mirror smile, where two people are lost in the same kind of smile together. It was a broken mirror smile, where the two smiles don’t match, and each person is thinking something the other is not, so they’re together and apart at the same time.

  Then Kate said, “I can light the candles first, or we can hold off on the cake and begin our practice.” She reached toward her ashtray, which was, as always, empty except for a book of matches. The ashtray used to be bursting with crushed cigarettes. After Kate met Scott there were fewer butts until one day there weren’t any.

  Kate lifted the matches. “Which should I do? Light the candles? Or practice?”

  Lynnie knew what Kate wanted. Kate had told her, “You’ve been silent for so long that your brain and your mouth don’t know how to work together anymore. But if you practice, even just a little every day, I think you’ll be able to speak again.” Lynnie could not bring herself to practice where others would know—speaking was so difficult, her mouth barely felt it belonged to her. The one exception was the laundry, where she would practice sometimes when all the washers and dryers were on, sloshing and thrumming, so Cheryl and Lourdes, loading laundry across the room, wouldn’t know.

  Still, she needed to feel more ready than she felt at the moment. So Lynnie pointed toward the matches.

  The tiny flames came up one by one, and as they did, Kate counted: “One, two, three, four, five.” She paused and added, “Do you want to try to say ‘five’?”

  Lynnie knew she’d make Kate happy if she tried. And truth be told, cake was tasty, but it made her think about Buddy’s sugar cubes. Practicing was a better way to take her mind off her sadness. So she shrugged and launched into the routine she’d learned would help get up her courage. She lowered her gaze and squeezed her fists together. Then she put one finger straight against her mouth, opened her lips, and pushed out her voice. “Uhhh,” she said. It felt as weak as lint.

  Kate, moving her lips and mouth slowly, overenunciated. “Five.”

  “Uhhh-iiii,” Lynnie said back.

  “Close!” Kate said. “Very good.”

  “Uhhh-iiii,” Lynnie repeated, this time louder.

  “Good!” Kate said, turning up the radio. “You know what comes in fives, right?”

  Lynnie held up her hand, spreading her fingers.

  “That’s right,” Kate said.

  Lynnie pointed to the number of plants on the windowsill.

  “Good,” Kate said. “And you know what Scott just taught me?” She drew her fingers together and motioned for Lynnie to do the same. “This is something the kids do when they score.” She leaned forward and slapped her palm against Lynnie’s.

  What a funny thing to do! Lynnie laughed. Then she hit her palm back against Kate’s. “Ennn!” she said.

  “Again?” Kate clarified.

  Lynnie nodded. “Ennn!”

  They did it once more, and Lynnie felt so great, knowing she was speaking something close to a word. Practicing was difficult, but it was fun with the right person.

  Still laughing, they lowered their hands. “I know,” Kate said, “I jumped the gun on the practice. Let’s have your cake
.”

  She brought the vanilla-frosted confection down from the window and pushed it across the desk. The flowers were all the colors Lynnie liked—blues and greens and reds and oranges. She inhaled the scent of the frosting, the wax on the candles, the chocolate hidden inside.

  Kate said, “To celebrate Lynnie!”

  Lynnie blew, counting the numbers in her head as each flame went out.

  Then she tore the wrapping paper. The book fell out of the paper and landed on the desk.

  She sat down. The drawing of a house smiled at her from the cover.

  “It’s called The Little House,” Kate said.

  The house looked like the face of a child, with full cheeks and big eyes. Lynnie touched the cover with her fingers, and then Kate sat down across the desk and opened the book. Lynnie, feeling a smile take over her face, strained to say a word she used to say with Nah-nah, “Wow-wee,” though the best she could manage was, “Eeee!”

  “You’re in a talky mood today,” Kate said. “I think I better turn up the radio.”

  Lynnie kept her eyes on the cover as Kate went to the window and turned the knob. The song had changed, and now she heard: You are the sunshine of my life. That’s why I’ll always stay around….

  Lynnie knew this song, too, and hummed along as she looked at the sweet little house, so she didn’t realize Kate was taking her time returning to the desk.

  “Well, that’s interesting,” Kate finally said.

  Lynnie looked up.

  Kate was still standing at the window, facing out. When she didn’t turn around or say anything more, Lynnie rose and joined her.

  Three men were walking slowly along the pathway. Lynnie recognized gray-haired Dr. Hagenbuch, who was pointing to buildings and talking. But she didn’t know the others: a young man with a Burt Reynolds mustache and handsome looks who was listening and nodding, hands in his blazer, and a chunky man with a ponytail who wore a loose coat.