Annie was skinny and lively and so prone to talkativeness that her mother was not altogether sorry when the child spent hours by herself in the woods playing with sticks or making angels in the snow. Annie was the only Appleby child to inherit the Acadian olive skin tone and dark hair from her mother and grandmother, and the sight of her red hat and dark head coming across the snowfields was as common as seeing a nuthatch at the birdfeeder. One morning when Annie was five and going to kindergarten she told the car full of children—her brother and sister and the Daigle boys and Charlene—that God spoke to her when she was outside in the woods. Her sister said, “You’re so stupid, why don’t you shut up.” Annie bounced on the seat beside her father and she said, “He does, though! God talks to me.” Her sister asked how did he do that, and Annie answered, “He puts thoughts in my head.” Annie looked up at her father then, and saw something in his eyes as he turned to look at her that stayed with her always, something that did not seem like her father, not yet, something that seemed not good. “You all get out,” he said when he pulled up in front of the school. “I have to speak to Annie.” When the car doors had slammed shut he said to his daughter, “What is it you saw in the woods?”
She thought about this. “I saw the trees and chickadees.”
Her father stayed silent a long time, gazing over the top of the steering wheel. Annie had never been scared of her father the way Charlene was scared of hers. And Annie wasn’t scared of her mother, who was the cozier parent but not the more important one. “Go on now.” Her father nodded at her, and she pushed herself across the seat, her snow pants squeaking, and he leaned and got the door, saying “Watch your fingers” before he pulled it shut.
That was the year Jamie did not like his teacher. “He makes me sick,” Jamie said, throwing his boots into the mudroom. Like his father, Jamie was not a talker, and Sylvia, watching this, had a quick flush come to her face.
“Is Mr. Potter mean to you?”
“No.”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know.”
Jamie was in the fourth grade, and Sylvia loved him more than she loved her daughters; it was that he caused an almost unbearable sweetness to spread through her. That he should suffer anything was intolerable. She loved Annie gently because the child was so strange and harmless. The middle child, Cindy, Sylvia loved with a mild generosity. Cindy was the dullest of the three and probably the most like her mother.
It was also the year Jamie saved up his money and gave his father a tape recorder for his birthday. This turned into a terrible moment because his father, after unwrapping the present with barely any rips to the wrapping paper, the way he always unwrapped things, said, “You’re the one who wants a tape recorder, James. It’s indecent to give someone a present you want yourself, though it happens all the time.”
“Elgin,” Sylvia murmured. It was true that Jamie had wanted a tape recorder, and his pale cheeks burned red. The tape recorder was put away on the top shelf of the coat closet.
Annie, talkative as she was, did not mention this to anyone, including her grandmother next door. Her grandmother’s house was a small square house, and in the long white months of winter the house seemed stark and bare naked, the windows like eyes stuck open, looking toward the farm. The old woman was from the St. John Valley and was said to have been beautiful in her day. Annie’s mother had once been beautiful too, photos showed that. Now the old woman was stick-thin, and tiny wrinkles covered her face. “I would like to die,” she said languidly from where she lay on her couch. Annie sat cross-legged in the big chair nearby. Her grandmother drew in the air with her finger. “I would like to close my eyes right now and pass away.” She lifted her head of white hair and looked over at Annie. “I’m blue,” she added. She put her head back down.
“I’d miss you,” said Annie. It was a Saturday and it had snowed all day, the flakes big and wet and thick, sticking to the lower windowpanes in curves.
“You wouldn’t. You only come over here to get a piece of candy. You have a brother and a sister to talk to. I don’t know why the three of you don’t play together.”
“We’re not in the appetite.” Annie had once asked her brother to play cards and he had said he was not in the appetite. She picked at a hole in her sock. “Our teacher says if you look at the fields right after it snows and the sun is shining hard you can get blind.” Annie craned her neck to see out the window.