The Story of Beautiful Girl
RACHEL SIMON
NEW YORK BOSTON
For those who were put away
Telling our stories is holy work.
—The Reverend Nancy Lane, Ph.D.
HIDING
1968
A
t the end of the night that would change everything, the widow stood on her porch and watched as the young woman was marched down her front drive and shoved into the sedan. The girl did not fight back, bound and tied as she was, nor did she cry out into the chill autumn rain, so surely the doctor and his attendants thought they had won. They did not know, as the car doors slammed shut, the engine came on, and the driver steered them down the muddy hill toward the road, that the widow and the girl in the backseat had just defied them right under their noses. The widow waited until the taillights reached the bottom of the drive, then turned and entered her house. And as she stood at the foot of the staircase, hoping they’d show mercy to the young woman and worrying about the whereabouts of the runaway man, the widow heard the sound the doctor hadn’t been seeking. It was the sound that would always connect her to the girl and forever make her remember the man. It was the sweet, deep breaths of a hidden person. A sleeping stranger. A baby.
That November day had seemed as ordinary as any in the widow’s seventy years. The mail carrier had delivered letters, birds had flown south across her fields, and storm clouds had wheeled across the Pennsylvania sky. The farm animals were fed; the dishes were
used and washed; new letters were placed in the roadside mailbox. Dusk fell. The widow lit the logs in the fireplace and settled into her reading chair. Then, perhaps thirty pages later, the clouds cracked open, releasing a deluge that made such a din that she peered over her tortoiseshell glasses toward the living room window. To her surprise, the rain cascaded so heavily, the glass looked opaque. After half a century on this farm, she’d seen no sights like this before; she would mention it in her letters tomorrow. Drawing the lamp closer, she lowered her eyes to her book.
For many hours, she shut out the din and concentrated on the page—a biography of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., gone just a few months from this life—but then became aware of a knocking on her door. She turned. Soon after their wedding day, when her husband was building onto the original one-room house to make room for a wife, she realized he’d never remarked on the view, with its sweeping fields, dense woods, and distant mountains, all watched over by the colorful vault of the sky. He lived here simply because the farm had been in his family and was thirty rolling miles, an hour’s drive, and a county line away from the closest town, Well’s Bottom, where she was a schoolteacher. As she’d watched the walls go up, she noticed how few windows he’d included, and how small each was, and understood she’d have to be satisfied with meager portions of the landscape. The front door, for instance, was all wood and no glass, with only a single window set in the wall to its left. But tonight’s storm obscured even that limited view. So the widow crossed the living room and turned the knob on the door.
She thought, at first, that there were two of them. A man and a woman. From under the roof of the porch, the man, a Negro, looked at her with startled eyes, as if unaware that the door upon which he’d been knocking had just pulled back. The woman beside him did not look up. Her skin was pale, and she was biting her lip. Her face was bone-bare, with shadows in every rise and dip. Was
the woman as lean as she seemed? It was impossible to tell; she was covered in a gray blanket. No, several blankets. Wool, like bedding issued in the war, draped into layers of hoods and capes. The man’s arm lay protectively around the woman’s shoulders.
The widow turned back to the man. He too wore coverings, but they were not the same as the woman’s.
USED CARS
, read one.
OPEN TILL NINE
, read another. The widow recognized them as large signs from businesses in Well’s Bottom. Water was pouring off them, as it was from the sodden wool; her porch was now a puddle.
Dread squeezed the widow’s chest. Five years into retirement, she was long past the time when she knew all the faces in Well’s Bottom, and she did not know these. She should slam the door, call the police. Her husband’s rifle was upstairs; was she agile enough to bound up to their bedroom? But the man’s startled look was now melting toward desperation, and she knew they were running from something. The widow’s breath came out heavily. She wished she were not alone. Yet they were alone, too, and cold and frightened.
“Who are you?” the widow asked.
The woman slowly lifted her eyes. The widow caught the movement, but no sooner had she tilted her gaze up—the widow was slight, five feet one, and the woman before her was tall, though not as tall as the man—than the woman jerked her head back down.
Unlike the woman, the man had not acknowledged the widow’s voice. But he had noticed his companion’s quick gesture and retreat, and in response he gently rubbed her shoulder. It was a touch of tenderness, and even in the dim light that reached the porch from her reading lamp, the widow knew it was a look of caring. Yet she did not know that, in a trance of seeing what she’d forgotten she’d once felt herself, her face, too, revealed so much she was not saying.
The man looked back at the widow. A pleading came into his
eyes, and he lifted his free hand. The widow flinched, thinking he was preparing to strike her. Instead he opened his fingers and flicked them toward the inside of the house, like a flipbook of a bird flying.
That’s when the widow realized the man could not hear.
“Oh,” she said, breath expelling her ignorance. “Please come in.”
She stepped aside. The man moved his hands in front of the woman. The woman nodded and clasped one of his hands, and they stepped over the threshold.
“You must be—are you?—please,” the widow mumbled, until, as she closed the door, her thin, schoolteacher voice finally settled on the proper statement: “Let’s get you out of those wet things.” Immediately she thought herself foolish; the man could not hear, the woman was focused on the lamp, and anyway, their backs were to her. As one they crept across the living room, their makeshift raincoats dripping, but the widow couldn’t bring herself to say anything. They appeared too relieved to be inside, mindful only of the closeness between them.
The man walked with muscular legs protruding from the oversize signs. His was evidently a body accustomed to labor, though why his legs were bare in November, the widow could not imagine. As for the woman, the blankets hung too low for a glimpse of anything aside from shoes—shoes that seemed too large. The woman’s gait was uneven, her posture a slouch. Yellow curls wisped out from the woolen hood, and the widow thought,
She is like a child.
The fire had gone low, and now the widow drew open the fireplace screen and added a log. Behind her she heard the woman grunt. She turned. The woman was gazing at the fire, and as the widow watched, the woman’s face filled with curiosity. The man tightened his arm around her shoulder.
There were only two chairs by the fire: her reading chair, with muslin covers over the worn armrests, and the wooden chair
where her husband had read his sporting magazines and westerns. The sofa sat farther back.
I should offer that,
she thought. Before she could, they lowered themselves to the chairs.
The widow stepped back and took them in. Her husband had lost the hearing in one ear before he’d passed away; otherwise she’d never known a person who couldn’t hear. And she’d never known someone quite like this woman.
I should be scared,
she told herself. But she thought of the passage in Matthew, which she’d not been in church to hear for years: “I was a stranger and you invited me in.”
She moved toward the kitchen and glanced back as she crossed the dining room. They were still huddled together. The man’s hands were aloft, gesturing his words. The woman was grunting again, the sound easing like an assent.
Give them privacy,
the widow told herself. Everyone needs privacy; most children could not add 13 + 29 if you stood behind their shoulders. Privacy could go too far, though; look at her husband, his heart encircled by silence. Look at her now. Except for monthly trips to the market, she was alone three hundred sixty-four days a year, one degree short of a full circle of privacy. Though there was that one degree, Christmas Day, when the students of hers who’d blown like seeds across the country returned with children and grandchildren to visit relatives in Well’s Bottom, then stopped in at the widow’s open house. Her privacy was so complete, it was almost zero.
But almost zero,
her student John-Michael once said,
is totally different from zero.
The widow let herself into the kitchen and put on the kettle. Yet even as she pulled down the flour, sugar, and oats she’d need for cookies, she asked herself larger questions.
Who are they? Why are they out in this storm?
The thought returned the pounding rain to her awareness. The river between the counties was sure to flood. She couldn’t hear her spoon in the batter.
In clear weather she could hear a great deal from her house. The
songs of birds. The distant gurgle of the river. The rare vehicle out on Old Creamery Road, half a mile down the slope of her drive. Even the mail carrier’s truck, his AM radio wafting up her fields. But the best sound came when the mail carrier idled at her curb and flipped the mailbox flag from up, where she’d placed it the evening before as she’d secured newly composed correspondence to her students in the box, to horizontal, once the carrier ferried her greetings away. She hadn’t always heard that mailbox flag. Then Landon, the student who’d loved making dioramas and had grown up to be an artist, fashioned a little metal lighthouse that, one Christmas, he gave her as a gift, then attached to the mailbox with a brass hinge. It wasn’t just any lighthouse. When it was laid flat, the sign of no outgoing letters, its windows were dark, though when it was vertical, its windows lit up—and revealed the top of the lighthouse to be the head of a man. Her lighthouse man, she thought of it. How she loved hearing its brass hinge squeak.