The Story of Beautiful Girl (24 page)

“They are?” Pete said. “Can I see it?” He examined the twig. “Well. It
is
better.”

“Even Rodney knows it’s better,” Julia said, indicating Pete’s dog. “Right, Rodney?”

“Ruff,” Rodney said.

They all laughed. They’d met when Julia was eleven months old, on the first day Martha and Julia arrived on the Cape, when Pete had just finished repairing trim on his son’s house, getting it ready for Gary’s transfer to Denver. When Martha had gone over to meet him and his dog, Pete had smiled. For the next eight months, he was their welcoming committee. He’d grown up on the Cape, built houses for decades, and was a good source for shops, libraries, and doctors. Man and dog would stop by every week, Pete whistling as they got out of his Jeep. Martha told him how grateful they were that he checked in on them, with his wife
in the nursing home and him visiting her every day. He’d say, “It’s only neighborly, Matilda.” Then last week, when she and Julia returned to the Cape, he’d added, “It’s been a long time, and kids grow fast.” He’d held her gaze, and then Martha had said, “It’s so good to see an old friend.” She didn’t add that she was wearying of cultivating new friends only to move on. So when Martha told him today that they were going to the library for Storytime and he asked to come along, she was pleased.

“You know why letters come in capitals and littles?” Julia said. “Because little letters are baby letters. Capital letters are grown up. And they take care of the little letters. Like a family.”

“Didn’t you say capitals are better?” Pete said.

“Capitals
are
better. They can drive and turn apples into butter and bake bread and sew. They know everything! Baby letters only know this”—she brought her fingers to her eyes as if she were examining a pebble—“much.” She slipped her hand back into Martha’s.

How Martha treasured holding Julia’s hand. Once as small as an acorn, it was now as big as a maple leaf. If only Martha could hold time as tightly as she could hold this little hand.

“What’s that?” Julia asked. “That bird banging on the tree.”

“It’s called a woodpecker.”

“I’ve heard of that. Woody Woodpecker.” She laughed the cartoon character’s laugh. “And what’s that one, Pete? The red bird up there?”

“That’s a cardinal.”

“It’s pretty.”

Martha said, “It’s also different from most other birds.”

“Because it’s red?”

“That’s only part of why. Cardinals are also one of the only birds who—”

Martha stopped. If she said “mate for life,” she might invite
discussion of mommies and daddies, and it had been hard enough when Julia, a few months ago, asked if she had them. Martha, toweling Julia off after a bath, was caught unprepared. Slowly, trying to say as little as possible, Martha said that Julia’s parents had passed away when Julia was little. “They loved you very much. That’s why they asked me to… that’s why they wanted someone to adopt you. They wanted someone who would take care of you forever, and who would love you as much as they did.” Julia said, “So I’ll never see my mommy and daddy?” Martha drew her into a hug, hoping no one who’d heard her made-up stories would try to fill in the gaps. “I’m here, Ju-Ju,” she said.

So, watching the red bird fly to a branch and begin its lively song, Martha brought up the other rare trait that cardinals are known for. “Most of the time, man cardinals sing very complicated songs and lady cardinals don’t sing at all. But sometimes when a man cardinal sings, if the lady he loves is nearby, she starts singing the same song at the same time. It makes it easy for them to find each other. And it makes for the prettiest sound you ever heard.”

“You kidding?” Pete asked.

“No. It’s called song matching.”

The cardinal was singing, but no matching song was singing back.

“He’s all alone,” Julia finally said.

They rounded the corner to the front of the library. “Here we are, Ju-Ju.”

“Look what I collected,” Julia said, showing them the four twigs she’d acquired on their walk: Y, I, T, and V. “Do they spell anything?”

Pete said, “Not quite.”

“I bet they spell a silly word,” Julia said. “Like ooga-booga.” She laughed. “Grammy, will you put them in your pocket so we can
take them home?” She handed over the letters that spelled no word. Then she ran across the brick sidewalk toward the library door.

Martha looked over at Pete. “You don’t have to come in with us,” she said.

“I don’t see Ann until three o’clock. This kind of thing is what retirement’s for.”

“Storytime?” Martha asked with a smile.

“And bakery after,” he said. He nodded ahead. “Shall we?”

But how much longer would she have to maintain this charade?

She couldn’t stop herself from asking the question, as she and Pete found adult chairs in the room with the children’s books, Julia hunkered down in a children’s seat, and normalcy resounded all around them: toddlers sucking thumbs, older children striving to look mature, mothers motioning to sons and daughters to behave, big brothers and sisters grabbing pictureless books in the corners of the room. The scene could only have been more normal if Martha belonged in it.

As they waited for the reader to get the children settled down, Martha wondered how many grown-ups here were harboring secrets. Until Julia entered her life, she would have thought few people engaged in deceit, but once she’d joined their ranks, she realized that without even knowing it, she had long been an honorary member. She’d just told her stories only to herself, tales that she was living a life rich in satisfaction. It wasn’t that she hadn’t felt something was amiss—she knew it every time she reached over to Earl in the bed and he turned away, or she looked out her small windows into the sky and thought of her son, lying namelessly in his grave. Yet her disappointment was so fathomless that it had never elevated itself to thought. Only when she met Henry
and Graciela had it occurred to her that for decades she’d needed to cry. Did any of the people sitting here feel that lump in their throats, too?

The Storytime reader held up the first book for the day. Julia flashed a smile, then took on her serious expression, looking as if this book were the most important thing in the world.
She’ll be a good student,
Martha thought.
I must do everything I can to get to see that.

Without turning her head, Martha moved her gaze toward Pete. He sat with his thick, callused hands in his lap, wedding ring the only adornment. Here was a person who was living honestly. He’d showed her this when he came over last night with fresh clam chowder for their dinner. He’d played cards with Julia afterward and then, incredibly, washed the dishes while Martha read Julia her bedtime story. After Julia was asleep, Martha made him hot cocoa, and they sat and talked and looked out over the Sound as the moon rose into the night.

“Ann’s Parkinson’s worse,” he finally said when Martha dared ask. “She can’t talk. It breaks my heart, going to see her.”

Martha sat quietly. With Earl, her silence had arisen from meekness. With her students and new friends, it was due to concealment. Though she’d also come to understand, in these last few years, that silence made space for other people’s words, which was important for those who needed to be listened to. Pete was one of those people.

He sat adjusting the place mats. Then he said, “We used to do everything together. She ran the business during the day, I helped out at night, and after Gary was out of the house we went out on our boat. Now I go with Rodney. It’s like when you replace an old oak door with one of those ugly hollow doors they make. You still have a door, but that’s all you have.”

She nodded.

He went on. “Everyone around here says I’m the most loyal husband they’ve ever seen. But—it’s hard to say this, I hope you don’t mind me saying it—I’ve gotten used to her not being there. I couldn’t stand it for the longest time. Now I say, ‘Well, Pete, what’s for dinner?’ You get used to new ways of living.”

She wanted to say she wondered if she’d ever get used to living as “Matilda.” She wanted to say Earl had spent years not telling her as much as Pete just did. She wanted to say
she
had never told
herself
that much—until she became a different Martha.

Does Pete feel a lump in his throat
? she wondered as the Storytime reader led a hand-clap game. Not because he was lying to himself, but because he no longer had an oak door?

“What?” he said, noticing Martha looking at him.

“Oh. Nothing.”

“You sure about that?”

“Well, I’m… just worried about Rodney.”

He pointed toward the library windows. There was Rodney outside the glass, paws on the sill, staring into the room. “Man’s best friend,” he said with a smile. She let herself laugh.

A couple of young mothers turned around, and she realized her laugh had come just as the hand clapping stopped. It was as embarrassing as being caught passing notes in class.

She put her hand on her forehead, but underneath she glanced to Pete and saw him smiling gently at her. “Shh,” he mouthed playfully.

As the salty air chilled and the leaves edged with gold, Pete became a regular fixture on their library outings. Martha looked forward so much to these mornings that several weeks passed before she realized she could now do something she’d been longing to do.

Since those first groggy hours in Henry’s hotel, Martha had
been asking herself questions she had not shared with others, much less felt equipped to answer. One day after Julia ran to the children’s room of the library, Martha stopped Pete and asked if he would mind staying with Ju-Ju while she hunkered down with a book in the adult section. She was just going to browse, she added, trying to make her request sound casual, even spontaneous. She didn’t want him to know she had several books waiting, some ordered from distant libraries, others noncirculating.

“’Long as we can still go to the bakery after,” Pete told her.

That day, and for many weeks, as Julia and Pete sat in the children’s room, Martha read.

Her readings took her through the history of institutions, from their origins as almshouses where people with disabilities were housed with other social rejects, like orphans and criminals, to the ghastly places they’d become: enormous facilities where thousands of individuals had nothing to do and where a chronic lack of funding meant decrepit buildings, minimal staff, weak medical care, filthy conditions, and abuse. She thought of Lynnie again, so beautiful in her white dress, so happy beside Number Forty-two. Then Martha imagined her now.

Something
has
to change
, Martha would think at the end of every library session, when Julia and Pete would stand near the entrance to the adult section, waving to her. She would close the books and rise in a daze.

As the leaves shook free of the trees, Martha thought constantly about the horrors she had read about and how long they’d been going on. She could barely concentrate on her sewing, her cooking. Sometimes when Julia was watching television, she would look over, and seeing Martha holding her knitting without moving the needles, she would say, “What’s the matter, Grammy?”

“I’m just lost in thought,” Martha would say.

“Don’t worry,” Julia would say. “You can’t get lost. I’m here.”

Once, when Pete was able to sit for Julia, Martha drove far away, to one of these institutions. It was not easy to find, and even local gas station attendants weren’t sure where it was. Finally she got there and sat for hours outside the brick entryway. It was so big, and there were so many Lynnies inside. And there were so many others just like it, all around the country.

At last she drove off, and as she made her way down rural roads, she spotted a chapel. It was so similar to the one that Earl made clear they would never enter again. She pulled over, and after telling herself she ought to move on, she walked to the door. It opened beneath her hands, and when she stepped inside, she peered at the blue and red light coming through the stained-glass windows and saw candles along the walls, illuminating the pews. She stood a minute as the door closed behind her, and when it clicked shut and no one appeared, she knew she was alone. She made her way to a pew and took a seat. In the silence and colored light, she thumbed through the hymnals and prayer books but could not find anything that seemed to address what she had on her mind. So she lowered her head to her hands and waited for prayerful words to come. For a long time she sat, and then what finally came was a question.

What can I, just one small person, do?

It was mid-November. Pete hadn’t come around for a few weeks, and then one afternoon he called and asked if they’d like to take a ride on his motorboat. Julia had often said she wanted to go out on the water. Martha told him, “It would be our pleasure.”

Pete wore a somber look when he arrived to pick them up. He said all the right things—“Nice looking outfit, Ju-Ju,” noticing her pink dress and pop beads; “Haven’t meant to be a stranger,” he said to Martha. There was a heaviness to his voice and stubble on
his face. By the end of the fifteen minutes it took to reach Oyster Pond, where Julia read, on the side of the boat,
“Two If By Sea,”
and he said, “Ann was a descendant of Paul Revere,” Martha knew what had happened.

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