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A thought flashed into my mind. “Sylvia, Papa hasn’t spoken to you since Adelle was born, right?”

She nodded.

“But you’ve been in the rocking chair; it’s in your room. You haven’t heard him whispering since I’ve been sleeping there with you?”

She shook her head. “No, Audrina. Papa has no more secrets.”

I hugged myself when the chill rippled through my body. Then I put my hands over my ears.

They were all screaming at once, every ghost in the house.

Papa’s Revenge

Later, when Arden called to tell me he was taking a client to dinner, I said “Hello,” listened, and said “Good-bye.” He didn’t try to say more or ask me why I sounded like I did.

Sylvia was upstairs in the rocking chair with Adelle in her arms. We often went up there in the afternoons now. I had taught Sylvia one of the lullabies I remembered Momma singing to me. When Sylvia sang, she sounded like Momma, and sometimes I would find myself dozing off with Adelle. It made me happy. We often looked for ways to bring back something beautiful and tender from our past.

All through lunch, a lunch I didn’t eat, I listened to Sylvia talk about Adelle. Since the baby’s birth, a new fountain of words flowed from her lips. It was as if the traumatic delivery had jolted her ahead in years or awakened some sleeping undeveloped skills. Someone listening to her for the first time might easily assume that there was nothing abnormal about her, nothing at all.

It made it difficult for me to hate everything about her pregnancy and certainly made it impossible to regret Adelle’s birth. Look what had emerged from the darkest places in Whitefern. There sat Sylvia beside our beautiful child sleeping in her bassinet, both looking innocent and trustful. But I was once innocent and trustful, too. Something like that is sweet and pleasant to see, but in this world, it was like a door left open through which everything ugly, mean, and selfish could easily enter. It was why a loving parent must shut down her little boy or girl’s childhood as soon as possible and paste those memories into albums to be remembered, though never restored.

Sylvia didn’t notice how little I ate. She was too excited. She cleared the table, washed the dishes, and put everything away while I sat staring at the clock.

“Audrina,” she said, “we forgot to get a baby carriage.”

“What?”

She ran out and returned with a catalogue of infants’ clothing and equipment. She put it on the table opened to pictures of strollers and carriages.

“Yes,” I said. “We’ll get one soon. She isn’t ready yet, Sylvia.”

“Soon,” she said, nodding.

I left her and went outside for a while. I nee

ded to be alone, and whenever I felt maudlin and even frightened, I would stroll around the grounds, in and around the woods, comforting myself with the singing of the birds and the sight of squirrels going through their bursts of gymnastics as though they were performing for me. When I was very young, I never went too far from the property. The house always held me, as if there was an invisible chain hooked to my waist.

As I paused and looked up at Whitefern, I recalled overhearing my father arguing with my aunt Ellsbeth about allowing me to leave Whitefern and go to college.

“You’ve managed to tie her hand and foot to Sylvia. It’s not fair, what you’re doing. I know you love her, so let her go to college. Set her free, Damian, before it’s too late!” my aunt had cried, her voice full of desperation.

“Ellie,” my father had replied, “what would happen to Audrina if she left here? She’s too sensitive for the world out there. I’m sure she will never marry that boy, and he’ll find that out once he tries something. No man wants a woman who can’t respond, and I doubt she’ll ever learn how.”

Those words rang in my head, bonging like church bells. Had my father been right? Or had my aunt Ellsbeth been right to push for me to be free of Whitefern?

Was all that had happened decided the day I was born? Was Papa responsible for this now, molding me in a way that made it difficult to respond to a man, just as he had predicted? Could that justify what Arden had done, by any stretch of the imagination? Was I simply trying to find an answer that would make it possible for me to go on, blind and in denial?

There were no answers out here, no answers away from Whitefern. Whatever the answers were, they loomed inside, hovering in the corners with the secrets, waiting for me to pluck them like blackberries. I belonged inside. Maybe I was too sensitive for the world out there, Arden’s and Papa’s world, in which deception and dishonesty were the currencies to buy your way to happiness. Regrets, morality, even simple compassion were obstacles, lead weights on your ankles that would only sink you in the sea of competition. Papa was right, and Arden was right. I didn’t belong in that cutthroat world. As I saw too often, you couldn’t leave it outside your home once you swam in it.

I went back into the house and walked up the stairs slowly. I felt like I was in a hypnotic daze. I could feel the past, with all its voices, closing in on me. It was as if I was falling back through time with every step. There was Vera smiling at me from the doorway of her room, the way she often did when something I had done made someone in the house upset or when something I asked for was denied. Her smile told me that her usually insatiable jealousy was satisfied.

There was Aunt Ellsbeth with some clothing I had not put away properly, holding it up like evidence in a murder trial. I could hear her voice cutting my ears. “Do you think your mother would be happy to see this?”

I touched the wall above my head to be sure I was not shorter, not a little girl again. Then I walked to Sylvia’s room, my whole body as tight as a fist. For a while, I stood in the doorway. Watching Sylvia sing and rock intensified the rage building inside of me.

“Sylvia,” I said, “I want you to put Adelle in the bassinet now.”

She looked at the sleeping child and then did what I said.