Laura's Shadow, page 17
I offered up no defense of his character nor mine.
“Am I supposed to go fight a duel or something?” he continued. “Defend your honor?”
“Of course not.”
“Because honestly, Mariah, how do I know that your honor is worth defending?”
His question struck a blow. I staggered in my place, as if he’d taken a branch from one of the fledgling trees and struck me across my back. Immediately, regret formed on his face, and he dropped his voice to something more akin to comfort.
“Really, Sister, what do you want me to do?”
“Nothing. Don’t do anything. I’m sorry I bothered—” Tears choked my words, and I wanted nothing more than the ground to swallow me whole, like some tragic Greek figure. What if my brother, who had loved me all of his life, was a preview of Oscar’s reaction to the same news? I imagined myself, standing in dappled sunlight, telling Oscar Garland I was carrying his child, and his reaction.
What do you want me to do?
Out in the field, the harvester roared to life, calling Charles’s attention.
“Go,” I said. “There’s nothing to do now. But, please”—I thought of Merrill Gowan—”please don’t tell anyone.”
“Of course I won’t. But, you know,” he glanced down at my stomach and back up at me in a blink, “it’s not a secret you’ll be able to keep forever.”
“No, but I can keep it for now. We can keep it for now. Don’t even tell Katrina. She’d be …”
“I know.” Already my brother had become a man capable of knowing a woman’s thoughts.
I felt his reassuring squeeze to my arm before he ran back to the work. He passed Merrill on the way, who stayed his ground while allowing his gaze to bridge the distance between us. My hand came up in a small, involuntary, weak wave, and he responded in kind. Then, before I could give myself over to a most tempting collapse, I turned my back on his peacock-blue house and began the long trek home.
CHAPTER 11
TRIXIE
Trixie ran up the stairs, feeling every bit the guilty teenager as Cam’s kiss lingered on her lips. She stopped outside of GG’s door, giving herself a moment to catch her breath and gather her thoughts. Her goodbye to Cam had sounded like something akin to a dismissal, and for all she knew, he’d gathered the remains of their lunch and walked them to the kitchen himself. Unforgivable rudeness on her part—something for which her mother would surely chide her—but GG’s waking, coherent hours were as elusive and impermanent as dandelion spores, and she didn’t want to miss a bit.
“That little girl,” GG said the moment Trixie entered the room, “I keep thinking I’ve woken up back in time and it’s you. Although you never made so much noise.”
“She is a little noisemaker, isn’t she?”
“She is.”
Trixie scrutinized the old woman’s face, amused at the unspoken rejoinder. Even as a little girl, Trixie knew, somehow, that while her great-grandmother unquestioningly loved her, she’d never been one to indulge or dote.
“Your mother,” GG continued, “used to bribe you to sing. And to tell stories and play make-believe. You never did like to pretend, did you?”
Trixie shook her head. “I didn’t. The real world has always been interesting enough.”
“You seem interested in that doctor.”
“It’s Cam, GG. You remember him?”
GG’s thin, dry lips spread into a tight smile. “I do. And you were plenty interested in him back then, as I recall.”
Trixie felt her cheeks blush. “I was.”
“But not so much now?”
“Not so much, no.” She pulled a chair close to the bedside and sat, propping one elbow on the mattress and resting her chin in her palm. “But I don’t want to talk about me, GG. I’m not that interesting.”
“And you think I am, all of a sudden?”
Trixie chafed at the slight rebuke. “I—I didn’t know who you were.”
GG made a chuffing sound and lifted her thin hand dismissively. “I’m the same old woman you’ve always known. I haven’t become a new person. The story of who I am hasn’t changed.”
“But that’s just it. I don’t know your story. At all, apparently.”
“I spent a few weeks trapped in a cabin with that young woman playing school. That is all.”
“That isn’t all, GG. I can tell. I can see it in your eyes.”
GG had been averting her gaze but now looked straight at her. Age had not brought a single cloud across the pale blue of her iris, though her vision had dulled after a lifetime of reading by pre-electric light. A pair of thick-lensed glasses sat on the bedside table. Mom had said she rarely wore them anymore, the weight more cumbersome than the correction merited.
“We were nearly the same age, Miss Ingalls—Laura and I.”
“I gathered that from the book.”
“I’ve wondered, since, why God couldn’t divvy things up a little more evenly. She had everything.”
“But wasn’t she poor too?” Trixie had grown up on the stories of GG’s poverty, romanticizing the tales of such a spartan existence. She’d imagined it a thrill to live so close to death at the hands of hunger or disease or the very blizzards that never brought anything more exciting than a day home from school. “I mean, wasn’t Pa always losing the crop or getting kicked off his land or something?”
“She had a father. And a mother. A roof built for their family. A man who loved her.”
Here her weak voice tapered, and she managed a faint request for water. Trixie obliged, filling a glass at the bathroom sink, not wanting to risk breaking the story connection with a trip downstairs to the kitchen. She came back and waited patiently for GG to take a series of slow, careful sips, wondering if she should nudge with a question or wait for a new memory to flow. The silence was interrupted by the roar of a car engine—Cam leaving, apparently. For a moment, she considered getting up, going to the window, and waving goodbye, but GG’s silence anchored her, and the wait paid.
“I used to watch them,” GG said, her gaze fixed on the window, perhaps drawn by the sound.
“Watch who?”
“All of them. The young people. On Sunday afternoons like this—in the winter. They would get in their little cutters and drive up and down Joliet Street. I would be working if I could find it—mending and sewing and such. Or reading. And if Charles didn’t hire himself out, he’d be napping. Always said a morning at church made him more tired than a full day’s labor.”
“Your brother, Charles. Right?”
She made a small, affirmative sound. “The house where we rented a room would let us sit in the front parlor on Sunday afternoons, and it was warmer there most times, but I liked to save up to buy coal for our own little stove. We were up on the second floor, and I could see the whole street. Hear the jingle of the bells and the laughter. And the singing. Such a sound. There’s never been a movie I liked better than watching them fly.”
GG’s face lit up as she spoke, and Trixie knew her great-grandmother had transported herself to that time and place she vividly remembered reading about in the book.
“You never wanted to join them?”
“Who would ask me? Who would know to ask me? Charles and I never went to school when we moved to De Smet. We were invisible. I know it seems like a small town compared to your big city, but things weren’t so different. Like ran with like. Two penniless orphans? We weren’t like the other people our age. We didn’t go to socials and singing schools. I was an old woman before I was twenty.”
“Did you recognize her? Miss Ingalls—Laura—when you were watching the sledding party on the street?”
“You couldn’t miss her. She had a laugh that rang out above the bells and the most beautiful brown curls that poked out beneath her cap.” As she spoke, GG absently fingered the soft, white tendrils that floated near her brow. “She had twice the beauty that I would ever have, a double portion of everything I lacked. Joy and youth. Courtship. Love.” She brought a trembling hand to her mouth as if to catch the last word and somehow put it back.
“But you found love too, eventually?” Even as Trixie asked the question, a looming dread wrapped itself around the answer. “You married. Did my great-grandfather not love you?”
“He did,” she said behind her fingers, not looking Trixie in the eye.
The companion question was, of course, did she love him, but Trixie couldn’t bring herself to ask it. Instead, she moved to safer ground. “Did he not court you?”
GG dropped her hand. “There was no call for such a frivolous waste of time. We weren’t young when we got married. Either of us.”
“How old were you?” She searched her brain for this bit of trivia but found it nowhere.
“Twenty-six.”
“Ouch,” Trixie said with a lighthearted guffaw, pleased to see GG’s commiserative smile.
“Things were different then. You can have any sort of life you want now, can’t you?” She lifted a defiant, shaking fist. “Women’s lib!”
“Yes!” Trixie said, mirroring the gesture.
“Burn your brassiere!”
“Or don’t wear one!” This, she mock-shouted in a whisper.
GG’s face grew serious. “I don’t know if I ever would have married if circumstances were different.”
This ushered in an entire new series of questions to race through Trixie’s mind like blades on a snow-packed Sunday street, but she kept them to herself. For now. GG’s voice had grown soft again, and she showed little inclination to elaborate. Her lids seemed to be drooping, and Trixie was about to take her leave when the old woman’s feather-light grip stopped her.
“Will you be here tomorrow?”
“I will, yes.”
“Will you take me somewhere?”
Trixie’s first thought was of her car, hidden away with some mechanic. After that, she considered her great-grandmother’s health. Her frailty. “I don’t know, GG, if that would be the best idea.”
“You think I’m too weak.”
“No, no,” Trixie said, trying to sound reassuring. “It’s just that I don’t have my car. It’s in the shop. Something to do with the starter.”
“Then I’ll have to hold on another day. Or one more. There’s someplace I need to see before I die.”
Trixie redoubled her attempt to sound soothing and confident. “You aren’t dying anytime soon, GG.”
“I am, and I’ve made most of my peace.”
“Most?”
“We can only make true peace with the living. The rest we leave to God to reconcile.”
GG settled back into her pillow and closed her eyes as if exhausted from the conversation. Trixie felt the opposite, invigorated by questions and a driving desire to clean out everything left in her great-grandmother’s long-held cache of secret memories. But when her softly spoken questions—GG? What peace do you need to make?—were answered with even softer snores, Trixie brought the light quilt up to cover those familiar, age-spotted arms and slipped out of the room.
The house was quiet, holding with the Sunday tradition wherein each woman retired to her room for an afternoon of napping or reading (or an alternating series of both). Growing up, Trixie had been trained to roam quietly—if roam she must—and any television or radio was strictly forbidden. She grabbed a handful of pencils and her sketchbook from her room, but before heading downstairs, she ducked into GG’s room to snatch her copy of These Happy Golden Years. That is, GG’s copy, the one not-so-artfully disguised in the bedside detritus of a bedridden woman. In the kitchen, Trixie grabbed a pop from the fridge and a half-empty bag of Fritos before heading outside to the back porch.
It was her favorite time of a summer’s day, late afternoon when long shadows seemed to be reaching, ready to pull a blanket of darkness and tuck the world in for the night. She’d only have an hour or so of good light left. And a little more than that of silence before her mother and grandmother would descend, refreshed and ready to make a soup or sandwiches from the leftovers of the Sunday dinner.
Trixie opened her pop and, after carefully drying her fingers on a napkin, opened GG’s book. The pages were soft, the paper thin. The copyright page had a notice at the bottom that the book had been manufactured in accordance with government regulations for saving paper. Of course, she thought. It was printed while the country was at war. Everything rationed. How marvelous to think, really, that any priority at all would be given to the publication of children’s literature.
But then she thought of Samantha, longing for a taste of the world Laura Ingalls brought to life. Simple times full of simple pleasures, where every hardship created an opportunity for adventure. Darkness, disease, hunger—every threat met defeat under Wilder’s prose. She and her family triumphed in every book if not in their actual lives.
She turned to the page depicting those first students, her great-grandmother among them. The Sewell and Boyle illustrations were typical of the time—curved, rounded features lacking shading and detail. Trixie could not shake the fact that her own drawing style, at least for the Lost Laura comics, seemed to be a derivative of these depictions.
For a while, her eyes and mind cut a repeating path between the pages of the novel, the sketch pad on the table, and the place in the yard where she, Cam, and Samantha had shared their picnic. Slowly, a story formed—a five-day arc of Lost Laura in search of a picnic place in the city. Being chased off the front lawn of a massive suburban home. Kicked out of a busy nursery. A city park experience ruined by stray dogs and Frisbees. Finally, success. Her own back porch. In the rough sketch, she’s leaning against the enormous basket she’s been lugging around. In the final drawing, the window will be open with the drapes fluttering outside along with music notes from a distant radio.
Trixie jotted dialogue for all the strips along the margin of the page—quips that would disappear in the next breath if she didn’t write them down. In thinking of the last, Lost Laura would say something like All you need for a picnic is a good sandwich and fresh air. Then a longing look at the empty spot on the other side of the basket.
The readers would get it. Lost Laura’s growing fan base came with letters demanding a boyfriend. Up to now, Trixie had been against the idea. The whole point of the character was to bring out a budding spirit of independence. She was supposed to be this metaphor of womanhood, bewildered by all the changes in the world, equally confused and delighted by them. She was a female Rip Van Winkle, going to sleep as one of the March sisters and waking up as That Girl.
But even That Girl had a boyfriend.
Upstairs her great-grandmother, having lived the entirety of the century between Lost Laura’s worlds, had spoken of romantic regret. She’d had nothing to say about the wars she’d witnessed or the Great Depression she’d survived or the man she’d watched walk on the moon or the miracle of bread that came from the grocery store perfectly sliced and bagged. GG had the experience of flushing a toilet for the first time, of heating a stove with a twist of a knob, of pulling clean clothes from a machine and tossing them into a dryer (though she still preferred a clothesline in summer). She was a time machine. The young woman illustrated in the novel would not recognize the woman sleeping upstairs, would not be able to survive in this world if not for the slow, day-to-day progression of life. The chapters in this novel were a few of those days and may have been forgotten if they hadn’t been recorded. For anyone else, living in the pages of a national treasure would be an honor. A blessing even. But for GG Mariah, it seemed only to have unearthed everything she’d been denied over the course of her long, long life.
“Where did you get that?” Eugenie’s smoky voice interrupted Trixie’s reverie. Smoky was the best adjective to describe her voice, as her throat had been subjected to decades’ worth of cigarette smoke. She had stopped smoking only after a doctor’s warning that she would never see a woman in the White House if she continued with the habit. She had a glass of milky iced coffee made from what was left in the pot from this morning. The glass was one procured from a restaurant promotion; cubes of ice danced behind Porky Pig when she set it down on the table. She held out her hand for the book. “Did Mariah give this to you?”
“Sort of,” Trixie said, closing her sketchbook. She never liked to share works in progress. “I mean, she made me aware of its existence, then left it out in the open.”
Eugenie turned the book over and over in her hands. “She bought this the night you were born.”
“Yeah. She told me.”
“When the books first came out, she would brag on and on about how she knew Laura Ingalls. How she’d been one of her students when Laura was a teacher. How they were almost friends and ate their noon dinner together sometimes.”
“It’s cool, though, isn’t it? Knowing this famous person.”
“But always with an edge. She never bought any of the books. And this is a woman who bought every book she could get her hands on. Some of her favorites, like Jane Eyre? She had at least two copies—one for upstairs and one for downstairs. Just in case. Remember when we all went to Sioux Falls so she could get Jackie Collins to sign one of her books?”
“And Jackie Collins said, ‘Now, you, my dear, look like one of my readers.’”
Trixie and Eugenie delivered this line in perfect unison and laughed.
“She told that story every night at dinner for a year,” Eugenie said. “But she actually appeared in a Laura Ingalls Wilder book and never said a word about it.”
“But you knew?”
Eugenie set the book down and took a sip of her coffee. “Everybody in the hospital knew. And they knew exactly how she felt about it. She apparently stormed out of the waiting room, shouting at the top of her lungs, and I finally found her on the hospital lawn.” Eugenie’s countenance, pleasantly unattractive, took on an expression of actual fear. “It was freezing cold, you know, one of those cold summer nights, and she hadn’t even taken her coat. She was howling and hunched over like an animal. And when I ask her what’s wrong, thinking it might be that Alma’s up there with a baby and no husband, she thrusts the book out at me like this.” Eugenie gave a demonstration so forceful, Trixie jumped back in her seat. “And she says, ‘We don’t ever talk of this again. I don’t want to hear her name.’”
