Chapter Thirty-Four

chapter thirty-four

June 26, 1972

Sparrow Crest

Time is a funny thing, moving so fast and so slowly. I am ninety-five this year. I don’t understand how it happened. Will has been gone for so many years; my life with him feels like a dream I had. Sometimes, I look at my life the way I flip through a photograph album. Will and I at the hotel, standing on the balcony, his arm around me. Little Maggie learning to sew, making her first cross-stitch that turned out so well, we hung it in the front hall: To err is human, to forgive, divine. Back before she met Stephen—who gave her three healthy girls, each perfect and beautiful. How I love the children! Careening through this house, bringing it to life with their chatter and giggles.

I hear what Maggie and Stephen tell them about me: She’s going senile. Don’t listen to Grandma. She doesn’t know what she’s saying.

Maybe I am going senile. Maybe I don’t know what’s real and what isn’t anymore. The other afternoon, I was sitting by the pool reading my old diary. I had the strangest idea then that what was contained in those pages wasn’t meant to ever be found. That the story of the pool and the springs belonged to the water itself. So I tossed the book into the pool. My oldest granddaughter, Linda, screamed, dove down, and got it as it was sinking. “What’d you do that for?” she asked, holding the waterlogged book up. “Look, now it’s all ruined!” She flipped through the pages, saw the running and washed-away ink. “You can’t even read it now.”

Just as well.

Later, at dinner, there was much talk about how I got confused and threw my book into the pool. They all shook their heads, clucked their tongues. I said nothing. Let them think what they will.

Rita, the youngest, is most like my Maggie. Dark hair and eyes. Otherworldly. She slips up the attic steps into my room and crawls into bed with me at night, asks me to tell her stories, to braid her hair. The stories she loves most are about her mother when she was just a little girl. “I called her ‘little sparrow’ because when she was born, she looked like a little bird,” I tell Rita.

And sometimes, Rita tells me stories. She came to me last week, telling me all about her friend Martha who lives at the bottom of the pool.

“She says she’s lonely,” Rita told me. “She likes it when I come to play.”

“Stay away from her,” I said, my voice stern. “Stay away from the pool.”

But no one listens to me.

I tried to protect her. I did. I took out the needle I keep hidden in my mattress and scratched a little R into my thigh. My skin is so thin, fragile as trace paper. It bled and bled.

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I heard howling this morning, Maggie’s desperate wailing just after dawn. I heard and I knew what had happened. And the knowing split me open inside. I can no longer get down the stairs on my own. So I waited for them to tell me the terrible news, tell me what I already knew.

Maggie came upstairs hours later, after the sirens came and went, after the loud voices and footsteps of strangers left the house. Her dark hair was unkempt. She was still in her robe and nightgown, even though it was afternoon. Her eyes were black and wild.

“It’s happened,” she said, her voice sharp as a knife, her eyes swollen from crying. “What you warned me about. Accidental drowning, they say. But you and I, we know different, don’t we?” Maggie was sobbing, her whole body shaking.

I nodded.

“And do you know who I blame, Mother? Who I feel is truly at fault?”

I opened my mouth to say that we don’t know its true name, this thing that we have carefully balanced our lives around. It has many faces, some familiar. But whatever is behind it all, we have never known what to call it. Maybe the power isn’t singular, but a thing of many. Maybe the water is the spirits in it; a collective being of shared yearnings and hungers.

“You,” Maggie said. “You are to blame.”

She stared at me then with such loathing, such hatred, I felt my heart seize, shatter in my chest as if it were made of glass.

“If you had never come to this place, if you had let me die when I was an infant…” Her voice trailed off, lost to sobs.

I promised my delicate little sparrow the world. And in all the years that followed, I tried to give it to her. I reached for her, my beloved, my angel, the little girl I had wished to life. I touched her face before she flinched, pulled away as if she’d been burned.

“Miracles are not without their price, my darling,” I said.