“Did they tell you about Charlene?” her grandmother said.
“Charlene Daigle?” Annie turned to look at the old woman. “What about her?”
“She’s started a chapter for incest people. Incest Survivors, I believe they’re called.”
“Are you serious?”
“Soon as that father died, she started it. Ran an article in the newspaper, said one out of five children are sexually abused. Honestly, Annie. What a world.”
“But that’s awful. Poor Charlene!”
“She looked pretty good in her picture. Heavier. She’s gotten heavier.”
“My God,” Annie said softly.
Cindy had said quietly, “We must have been the laughingstock of the county.”
“No,” Jamie had said to her. “Whatever he did, he hid.”
Annie had seen how their distress showed in their guarded faces. “Oh,” she had said, feeling maternal, protective, toward them. “It doesn’t really matter.”
But it did! Oh, it did.
Back in the main house, Sylvia sat with her children for supper in the kitchen. “I heard about Charlene,” Annie said. “It’s unbelievably sad.”
“If it’s true,” answered Sylvia.
Annie looked at her siblings, but they looked at the food they moved into their mouths. “Why would it not be true? Why would someone make that up?” Jamie shrugged, and Annie saw—or felt she saw—that Charlene’s burdens were nothing to them; their own universe and its wild recent unmooring were all that mattered now. Sylvia went upstairs to bed, and the three siblings sat talking by the wood stove. Jamie especially could not stop talking. Their once silent father in his state of dementia seemed unable to keep himself from spilling forth all he had held on to secretly for years, and Jamie, who had been silent himself, now had to tumble all he heard before them. “One time they saw you in the woods, Annie, and he was always afraid after that that you’d find them.” Annie nodded. Cindy looked at her sister with a pained face, as though Annie should have more of a reaction than that. Annie put her hand over her sister’s for a moment. “But one of the strangest things he said,” Jamie reported, sitting back, “was that he drove us to school so he could, just for those moments, be near Seth Potter. He didn’t even see him, dropping us off. But he liked knowing he was close to him each morning. That Seth was only a few feet away, inside the school.”
“Oh God, it makes me sick,” Cindy said.
Jamie squinted at the wood stove. “It puzzles me, is all.”
The vulnerability of their faces Annie could almost not bear. She looked around the small kitchen, the wallpaper with water stains streaking down it, the rocking chair their father had always sat in, the cushion now with a rip large enough to show the stuffing, the teakettle on the stove that had been the same one for years, the curtain across the top of the window with a fine spray of cobwebs between it and the pane. Annie looked back at her siblings. They may not have felt the daily dread that poor Charlene had lived with. But the truth was always there. They had grown up on shame; it was the nutrient of their soil. Yet, oddly, it was her father she felt she understood the best. And for a moment Annie wondered at this, that her brother and sister, good, responsible, decent, fair-minded, had never known the passion that caused a person to risk everything they had, everything they held dear heedlessly put in danger—simply to be near the white dazzle of the sun that somehow for those moments seemed to leave the earth behind.
Gift
Abel Blaine was late.
A meeting with directors from all over the state had gone too long, and all afternoon Abel had sat in the conference room with its rich cherry table stretching like a dark ice rink down the center, the people around it trying to sit up straighter the more tired they became. A young girl from the Rockford region, who Abel felt was carefully dressed for her first company presentation—he was moved by this—had talked on and on, people looking at Abel with increasing panic—Make her stop—because he was the man in charge. Perspiring lightly, he had finally stood and put his papers into his briefcase, and thanked the girl—woman, woman! you could not call them girls these days, for the love of God—and she blushed and sat down and didn’t seem to know where to look for a few minutes until people on their way out spoke to her nicely, as did Abel himself. Then Abel was finally in his car, on the expressway, then steering through the narrow snowy streets, and pleased, as he so often was, by the sight of his large brick house, which tonight had a tiny white light twinkling from each window.