“Then don’t look,” her grandmother said.
When Annie was in the fifth grade, she began staying at Charlene Daigle’s house more. Annie was still lively and talked incessantly, but there had been an incident with the long-forgotten tape recorder—a secret she shared with Jamie—and ever since the incident it was as though a skin was compressed round her own family: the farm, her quiet brother, her sulky sister, her smiling mother, who often said, “I feel sorry for the Daigles. He’s always so grumpy and he yells at the kids. We’re awfully lucky to have a happy family.” All of it made Annie picture a sausage, and she had poked a small hole in the casing and was trying to squirm out. Mr. Daigle did not really yell at his kids; in fact, when Annie and Charlene took a bath he often came in to wash them with a washcloth. Annie’s own father thought bodies were private and had recently become red-faced and yelled—yelled hard!—because Cindy had not wrapped her sanitary pad adequately with toilet paper before putting it in the garbage. He had made her come and get it and wrap it up more. It caused Annie to tremble inside; the skin of the sausage was shame. Her family was encased in shame. She felt this more than she thought it, the way children do. But she thought that when she was old enough for this awful thing to happen to her own body she would bury the things outside in the woods.
So she went to Charlene’s house after school and they made large snowpeople that Mr. Daigle sprayed with the hose so they would turn icy and glasslike by the morning. When it was too cold to be outside, Annie and Charlene made up stories and acted them out. Annie’s father, stopping by to get her, would stand with Mrs. Daigle and watch them. Mrs. Daigle wore red lipstick, there was something fierce about her; Elgin Appleby got a twinkle in his eye when he talked with her. It was not a look he got when he talked to his wife, and one Saturday afternoon Annie said quite suddenly, “This is a dumb play we made up. I want to go home.” Walking back up the road to their house she still held her father’s hand, as she had always done. Around them the fields were endless and white, edged by the dark trunks of spruce trees and their boughs weighed down with the snow. “Daddy,” she said, blurting it out, “what’s the most important thing to you?”
“You, of course.” He did not break his stride. “My family.” His answer was immediate and calm.
“And Mama?”
“The most important of all.”
Joy spilled around Annie, and in her memory it stayed that way for years. The walk back up the road to her house, holding her father’s hand, the fields quieting in their brightness, the trees darkening to a navy green, the milky sun that was the color of the snow. Once inside the house she knocked softly on the door of her brother’s room. He was in high school, and small hairs were on his upper lip. She closed the door behind her and said, “Nana’s just a mean old witch. Nobody likes her. Not one person.”
Her brother kept looking at the comic book he held open. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. But when Annie sighed and turned to go, he said, “Of course she’s an old hag. And don’t worry about her. You always exaggerate everything.” He was quoting his mother, who said that Annie exaggerated things.
The farm had belonged to Sylvia’s father. Elgin had lived three towns away, though he had originally come from Illinois; he had been raised in a trailer with a family that had no money, farm, or religion. He had worked on farms, though, and knew the business, and after he married Sylvia he took over the farm when his father-in-law died. At some point, before Annie’s memory, the house for her grandmother had been built. Until then she had lived in the main house with the rest of the family.
“Listen to this,” Jamie had said, coming to Annie one day before supper, and they went to the barn and huddled in the loft. “I hid it under Nana’s couch before Ma came over.” The tape recorder clicked and whirred. Then there was the clear voice of their grandmother saying to her daughter, “Sylvia, it gags me. I lie here and I want to vomit. But you’ve made your bed. So you lie in the bed you made, my dear.” And there was the sound of their mother crying. There was some murmur of a question. Should she speak to the priest? Their grandmother said, “I’d be too embarrassed, if I were you.”
It seemed to be forever, the white snow around them, her grandmother next door lying on her couch wanting to die, Annie still the one who chattered constantly. She was now an inch short of six feet and thin as a wire, her dark hair long and wavy. Her father found her one day behind the barn and he said, “I want you to stop going off into the woods the way you do. I don’t know what you’re up to there.” Her amazement had more to do with the disgust and anger of his expression. She said she was up to nothing. “I’m not asking you, I’m telling you, Annie, you stop or I’ll see to it you never leave this house.” She opened her mouth to say, Are you crazy?, but the thought touched her mind that maybe he was, and this frightened her in a way she had not known a person could be frightened. “Okay,” she said. But it turned out she could not stay away from the woods on days when the sun was bright. The physical world with its dappled light was her earliest friend, and it waited with its open-armed beauty to accept her sense of excitement that nothing else could bring. She learned the rhythms of those around her, where they would be and when, and she slipped into the woods closer to town, or behind the school, and there she would sing with gentleness and exuberance a song she’d made up years earlier, “I’m so glad that I’m living, just so glaaad that I’m living—” She was waiting.