Whisper Hollow (26 page)

“I won’t tell.”

He looked up, his eyes pleading. “Do you still love me?”

She looked down at him. “Yes, I love you,” she said, the weight of her whole short life pushing down on her.

“You do?”

“Of course I love you,” she said in a whisper.

“No matter what?”

“I’ll always love you, Eagan,” she said. “You’re my brother.”

Then she stuffed the wad of panties deep into the front pocket of her apron, took a deep breath, and said in her soft, clear voice, “Now dry yourself off. I’ll go down and get your breakfast.”

Lidia knew how girls got pregnant. Her mother had told her not long before she died, unexpectedly, just two weeks shy of Lidia’s fourteenth birthday. Girls grew up early in Verra. Her mother knew that fourteen was not too tender an age for that kind of information, and she didn’t want Lidia to have to find out about it on her own. From partially informed girls whispering behind cupped hands on the playground. From the steel-haired and disapproving physical education teacher at the school. From poorly written books. Her mother, from experience, knew that some of the most important facts were often omitted during that particularly delicate transfer of knowledge. But what her mother hadn’t known — could never have imagined — was how young her daughter would be when she would have to draw upon that education. When her cycle hadn’t started two weeks after her brother raped her, Lidia knew that what kept her from wanting to crawl out of bed wasn’t merely shame.

Her bleeding, like the rest of her, was regular from the very start. She’d never had to run to the school nurse in the middle of the day as Peggy sometimes did, her face as red as the spot on her skirt. Peggy had eventually started keeping a change of
clothes with her. Of course none of the girls would comment if she returned from a restroom break wearing a different skirt, but more than once the boys did, in their boorish, ignorant way. “What’s with the costume change, Peggy? You got so many outfits you have to wear two a day?” While they snickered and elbowed one another, she’d put her hand on one blooming hip and retort with a smile, “Oh I just wanted to give you a variety of things to look at, since you can’t seem to keep your eyes off me.” Then she’d saunter off as the other boys turned their laughter toward her flush-faced victim.

Every twenty-eight days for the past two years, Lidia had put on a Kotex pad and belt under her clothes. If she was going to school or into town, she put an extra into her purse. Usually by lunchtime it would have started. But this week, after nine straight days of wearing pads that never needed changing, she woke up from a dream in which she’d been trying to save a newborn bird that had fallen from its nest. She knew, even before she was fully awake, there would be no time-of-the-month in January.

After school that Friday, Danny met her as usual on the front steps to walk or drive her home. “Want to see
My Fair Lady
tomorrow night?” he asked as they shuffled down Main Street through the powder dusting of snow.

“Really? You want to see that again?”

“I don’t mind. I know you liked it.”

She had liked it. Danny had driven her all the way to Charleston to see it in the big theater there the week of Christmas break. She’d been enchanted by Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle, a poor East End flower girl with a Cockney accent, and found herself later trying to mimic the upper-class accent Eliza had acquired in the movie. “The rain in Spain stays
mainly in the plain,” she’d said to herself over and over, with elongated vowels.

That had been just a month — and a lifetime — ago.

“It’s just you seem a little down in the dumps lately,” Danny continued. “Thought it might perk you up. We don’t have to go, though. I don’t really care what we do, long as we’re together.” He reached over and held her mittened hand.

She looked at him and smiled. Under the wool, she could feel his class ring press into her middle and pinkie fingers. When he’d given it to her at the end of that previous summer, she’d wrapped it in adhesive tape until it fit. At night, after she lay down to sleep — Eagan gone for his hoot-owl shift — she would twist it around her wedding finger in the dark, imagining their future. They’d leave Verra and move to Charleston, or someplace else close enough to visit but far enough away to start a life of their own. Danny would become a lawyer like he wanted. Maybe she’d even go to law school, too.

“That sounds nice. Yes. I’d like to see it again.”

Danny held open the movie theater door and then skipped ahead of her on the pavement singing, “I’m getting married in the morning. Ding dong! The bells are gonna chime. Punch me and jail me, stamp me and mail me. But get me to the church on time!” His breath steamed into the cold air. He twirled and laughed as only a seventeen-year-old senior boy with a letter jacket and an infallible throwing arm could. Even in her distracted state of mind, Lidia laughed as he swung himself around a lamppost and tried to emulate Alfred Doolittle’s march-dance with knees and elbows akimbo.

When he grabbed her around the waist and picked her up, she stopped laughing. The baby.

“Down!”

“I’m just joshing you, silly.”

She put her thumb beneath her waistband and gave it a tiny tug. It would be months before she would need the slack, she knew. But the idea of him — in two days she’d already begun to think of it as
him
— being crushed made her uncomfortable. Protective.

Then she relaxed again. “I know,” she said. “I’m just cold. Let’s get to the car.”

It was more than an hour’s drive back to Verra. The interstate was quick, but the road up into the mountains was steep and tedious. They listened to the radio station until the static took over, then Danny reached over and snapped it off. For the next five or ten miles, they rode in comfortable silence, until Lidia pointed ahead to a scenic overview and said, “Pull off up there.”

“There? Why?”

“Just pull off.”

“It’s cold out. Can you wait? We’ll be home in a quarter hour.”

“I don’t need the restroom.”

He glanced at her. “Okay.”

On a wide lip of the mountain face, he slowed to a gravelly stop. If they were standing outside, they’d have had an unrestrained view of a river hundreds of feet below. He put the car in park.

“Cut the engine,” she said.

He did. Lidia closed her eyes to adjust to the blackness of the new moon, then looked up through the window. Snow fell from trillions of winking stars.

“You all right?”

She reached out with her left hand and felt for his, then pressed his ring, secure on her finger, into his large, warm hand, and exhaled. Peggy, with her womanly figure and cheeky
bravado, acted like she knew so much. But Lidia knew that she’d only ever been kissed — and only once at that — by the younger brother of a classmate during a basement game of spin the bottle. Peggy had never had a steady, barely even went on dates. Before she got home after school, she wiped her lipstick off so her daddy wouldn’t see. Her mother wouldn’t notice her wearing makeup even if she hadn’t started drinking by then, but Peggy wouldn’t risk her daddy’s wrath.

And certainly, Peggy had never pulled off the side of the road on a makeshift lovers’ lane in the dead cold of winter.

Lidia squeezed Danny’s hand, and then turned to face him. She moved slowly to the center of the bench seat, until she was so close she could feel his heartbeat quicken. Then she moved closer.

During the countless kisses before this, she’d always closed her eyes. She never knew what Danny’s face looked like when their lips touched, because it always seemed natural to keep them closed. Tonight, she kept them open. Tonight, she kissed him with more purpose than longing.

She put her hand inside his collar, and felt the warmth of his neck. Without moving her lips from his, she twisted her body so that she was facing him, sliding between his lap and the steering wheel, moving astride.

“Whoa,” he said, breaking contact. “What’s gotten into you, Lid?”

“I think it’s time.”

“Time for what?”

“To go all the way.”

He blinked several times in the darkness. “No.”

“Yes.”

“We said we were going to wait.”

She held up her ring finger. “We’re going to get married eventually, aren’t we?”

“Jeez, Lid. I haven’t even asked for your hand.”

“It’s obvious, isn’t it? How things are going? Even Daddy knows your intentions.”

Danny pressed himself back into the leather seat. “Yes, but …”

“But, nothing,” she said. “I’m here, I love you. Why wait?”

“You ain’t never said ‘I love you’ before.”

“It’s not an easy thing to say.”

“I love you, Liddie.”

She nodded.

“Are you sure you want to?” he asked.

She answered by taking his hand and holding it firm as she climbed over the bench into the backseat. He hesitated.

“Come here,” she said.

He swung one long, muscular leg over the top of the seat and then the other, holding himself up by straight-arming the front and back seats. Lidia scooted down until she was horizontal, resting her head on the armrest in the door. She moved her hair away from the ashtray embedded there. “Come here,” she said again.

“Lid, I don’t know about this.”

“I do.”

“I … I’ve never done it before.”

She closed her eyes. Then she inhaled deeply, filling her chest with air and pressing her tiny breasts upward. “I haven’t either.”

In the darkness, he couldn’t see her. Couldn’t see if her expression matched her voice. By then, as she pulled him down on top of her, kissing his neck and untucking his button-down shirt from his slacks, he was losing his ability to discern anything, anyway.

They fumbled in the narrow span of seat, bumping into the backrest and armrest and window. Took turns apologizing and
sighing. Danny moaned as he found his tentative way inside her. Lidia, pretending virginity, cried out when he first entered her. This time, at least, she was ready. Nonetheless, her tears were real.

He finished quickly, and immediately apologized. “Are you all right? Did I hurt you?”

“No.” She shook her head. “No.”

He moved to sitting, and shimmied his slacks up from around his ankles. “Do you feel okay? Do you need anything?” Danny buckled his belt, slid the rawhide leather into the loop.

She shook her head. “I’m fine.”

“I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

Before he climbed into the driver’s seat, he looked at her, bewildered and happy. He held out his hand for her to follow, and she did.

Soon he had started the engine, flipped on the headlights, and backed away from the mountain edge. He looked at her again just before he pulled back onto the hairpin road that would take them into Verra. “You may have just made me the happiest guy on the planet.”

She smiled back. “I hope so,” she said, then buttoned her blouse and climbed back into his letterman sweater. She ran her hand across her belly once more, under the cloak of starlit darkness, and thought of a name: Gabriel. Archangel, spirit of truth. It wasn’t his fault his origins would be a lie.

As they descended the long stretch of snow-covered mountain road into their hometown, Lidia began to sing in a voice so low it was nearly a whisper: “I’m getting married in the morning. Ding dong! The bells are gonna chime. Punch me and jail me, stamp me and mail me. But get me to the church on time.”

From the kitchen, Lidia could hear the creak of the screen door opening, then a knock on the door behind it. She put the lid back on the pot, rinsed her hands, and went to the living room. Before she opened the door, she took a deep breath and tried to calm her flared nerves. But when she saw Danny standing there with his hands buried in his pockets, and that broad smile he always had for her, she relaxed.

“Hi,” he said.

She reached out for his arm. “Come in. It’s cold. Dinner’s almost ready.”

He stepped into the warmth and looked around. “Nobody’s home?”

“Daddy took Eagan to Charleston to see a different doctor. He hasn’t … he hasn’t been feeling very well lately.”

“You sure you don’t want to go to the dance?” he asked, removing his coat and following her into the kitchen.

“I’m sure.”

“The whole school’s gonna be there.”

“I’d rather be with just you.”

“Me too,” he said, and caught her with a fast kiss as she moved past him. “How long you think they’ll be gone?”

She swatted him with a dishtowel. “Not long enough for that.”

“You can’t blame a guy for asking, can you?”

Since that first time, hovering inside his car somewhere between a river-rushed mountain and a starlit sky, they’d made love only three more times. Emboldened, Danny would have liked more opportunities to discover this new pleasure and improve their technique, but the last few times they’d had the opportunity, Lidia suffered from a certain nausea that made bending into strange backseat positions too uncomfortable to enjoy.

He walked over and took the dishtowel she’d slung over her shoulder, dragging it slowly down her chest with a wink. Balling it, he used it to lift the pot lid, which released a draft of steam. “That smells great.”

“Kielbasa,” she said. “Your favorite.” She’d cooked all the family’s meals since her mother died, but this was the first time she’d cooked for Danny. Lidia opened a drawer and pulled out her mother’s wedding silverware, then tore off two pieces of paper towel and folded them, precisely, into triangles — an arrangement that seemed slightly more formal than the plain rectangular one she usually made — then set them into two places at the small kitchen table.

“Did you talk to my mama or something?” He picked up a wooden spoon and bent into the mist to stir. “What else is in here?”

She laughed. “You don’t think I know how to make kielbasa? Let’s see. Potatoes, carrots, peppers, onions, beans, cabbage.” She counted them off on six fingers, squinting at the ceiling to remember. “Oh, and salt and pepper.” She took the spoon from him, then the pot lid. “Satisfied?”

“Completely.” He backed against the counter and heaved himself up.