The Story She Left Behind

Chapter 4 Clara

The second-grade students buzzed with end-of-the-day energy as they returned their crayons to their wooden boxes and folded their drawings. Billy Markman ate another glob of paste and didn’t think I noticed. I headed toward his side to gently remove the jar from his hands when the overhead speaker buzzed with static.

“Mrs. Harrington, please come to Principal Alexander’s office.”

“Ohhh,” Gina, with the pigtails and lacy dress, said. “You’re in trouble.”

I smiled at the little girl and shivered in fake fear. “Oh no!”

The class laughed and started a chant. “Mrs. Harrington is in trouble.”

I motioned to my classroom assistant—a shy student teacher finishing her elementary school internship—to take over the class for the last few minutes.

After my daily admonition to “bring your inside feelings to the outside in your art,” I left the room.

I took my time walking to the principal’s office, enjoying the hush of empty hallways, the aroma of the spaghetti and meatball lunch wafting out of the cafeteria, and the framed pictures of the hundred-year history of the Bluffton Bobcats students lining the walls.

A photo of freckled me from third grade hung askew on the wall of fame, with the caption Illustrator on a shiny brass plaque. That little eight-year-old girl knew so little, with so much pain ahead of her. I was happy to be the me of now, no matter the circumstances: divorce, living in my childhood home, confronting an unknown future.

Sure, I wasn’t the traditional 1952 housewife, the epitome of a Woman’s Day magazine cover model. I didn’t own pearls or do housework in heels. I didn’t join the PTA or the Supper Club. I didn’t wear cute headbands and dresses with cinched waists. But this was my home, and I was loved. If a few moms looked at me sideways when I picked up Wynnie from school, or if I wasn’t invited to the newly minted Tupperware parties, I was fine with that.

There weren’t a lot of options for my skill set, teaching and illustrating, and I was lucky enough to be doing both.

I opened Jim’s office door without knocking.

I stopped short.

Wynnie stood in Jim’s office, which always reeked like an ashtray.

Her face was downcast and her chin nearly rested on the neckline of her blue dress with the smocked sailboats around the collar. The front of her dress was bunched into her knotted hands.

“Wynnie?”

She looked up at my voice. Her little pink glasses were crooked on her face, her wandering left eye trying to focus on me. Then she tossed her body into mine and buried her face in my art apron, her glasses falling to the ground. “I’m sorry, Mama.”

I picked up her glasses and asked Jim, “What happened?”

“She was hiding in a broom closet so she wouldn’t have to go home with her father.”

“But she comes home with me today,” I said, placing my finger under Wynnie’s chin to lift her face to mine and slide her glasses over her tear-filled blue eyes. “Wynnie?”

“Sorry, Mama. I got confused. I thought today was Friday.”

“I teach on Tuesday and Thursday,” I said. “You know that.”

“She scared her teacher to death.” Jim reiterated his stance. “Miss Perkins thought she lost Wynnie.” He paused. “Listen, we need to know if something is happening at home with her father.”

“Nothing like that,” I said, standing tall to face him with conviction. “Wynnie just likes being at home with me. Nat is a good man.”

“I hate the carnival, and Daddy said that’s where we’re going.”

Jim shook his head, his mouth like a puckered fish. “Well, little miss, you can’t hide from adults.” He looked at me and spoke. “They will assume that you ran away.”

Like your grandmother hung unspoken in the room. Bluffton was still reeling, twenty-five years later, from my mother’s disappearance. Decades of time passing didn’t mean much in a place like this.

“I’ll talk to her,” I said as the school bell clanged in the same dull tones it had when I was a child.

“I’m happy it’s Thursday, and I’m sorry if I scared anyone.” Wynnie wiped at her tears and lifted her chin to Jim Alexander.

He opened the door in dismissal.

We drove home in quiet camaraderie, Wynnie next to me on the bench seat of the station wagon reading The Borrowers , her face close to the page.

Inside the house, Wynnie dropped her daisy-covered lunch box on the front bench and ran outside to play in the back garden. I made my way to the den and saw the Bluffton Gazette lying open on the oak coffee table, folded to the center, where the headline read: Local Illustrator Wins Caldecott Award. Ah, Margo’s interview had been published that fast, in one day.

The story was printed in a column next to ads for Harvey’s Cafe and the new Electrolux washing machine, guaranteed to make a wife’s job easier. In the photo I smiled tensely, sporting a bob I had grown out long ago when I gave up the idea of a stylish hairstyle.

I skimmed the story, reluctant to read about myself. I was jittery to see what threads Margo had pulled from my life and our conversation. The last lines read: “Fate and destiny, they are ours to make. We choose from many fates.”

I sounded ridiculous! I crumpled the paper in my hands. Did I even believe the things I said?

Had I chosen my motherless fate? If I had, I’d been too young to know I was sending her away, that my choices would upend our world.

That morning when everything changed, that morning in 1927, I was eight years old when Mother ran to her writing room to capture a line that suddenly came to her. I want the sky to split open— that was it. She said it out loud, kissed me with the elation she felt when the right words found her, and then dashed off. “Be right back.”

This happened. Sometimes she’d return a minute after she’d written it down or an hour later, after she’d poured out what needed pouring. Her sudden disappearances were disorienting as a clap of thunder on a sunny day.

While I waited for her to return, I flopped from the couch to lie flat on the carpet, moving my tiny wooden dolls around the dollhouse Dad had made for me, the furniture exact replicas of our own.

A cigarette, Mom’s cigarette, teetered on the edge of a pale blue ashtray, the one Dad had given her for her birthday last year. A little glass-blown bird sat on the tray’s edge near two curved dents in its bowl.

Absorbed in the miniature version of our life, I didn’t see what was happening in the larger and realer version until I smelled the burning carpet. I must have accidentally toppled the cigarette from its ashtray when I’d moved to the floor.

The fire was alive. Otherworldly.

Flames were already racing from the base of the coffee table across the brown shag carpet and toward my dollhouse.

A spark leaped onto my fingers holding the small wooden doll, shocking me like the sting of a hornet. I dropped the doll onto the carpet, where the flames were hungry for the fiber.

I screamed for Mama, my voice ripping from fear.

A thousand new flames appeared, catching the ends of the curtains, gobbling the dangling pom-poms I’d sewn on with my mother, one by one, during a rainy afternoon. The flames inhaled the sleeve of my shirt with the tiny mouse ballerinas dancing on the fabric.

Her absence was as terrifying as the flames. Her ability to be there in full and then gone completely was something I had come to know, but now panic consumed me. Pain ripped through my hand and arm, the flames leaping from my sleeve as I froze, motionless and screaming.

She appeared at last, running to me, reaching for me. Her long dark hair flew free from the pins she usually wore; her red-and-white housedress with the cherries on it swayed.

She smothered the flames with a blanket, and then took me in her arms. She ran outside, carrying me and uttering Adorium over and over, as if this word, the one she created, would remedy the terror and pain.

A crow called from outside, and I shook myself from the memory, like shedding a heavy coat. I returned to my life, with twilight softening the contours of the den that had been restored over the years, the fire flaming only in my memory.

Knotty pine plank walls and a drafty sliding door to the back deck that overlooked the bay stood as always. The carpet had changed a few times through the years but somehow remained the dusty brown of a chestnut. This room held my worst nightmare, and yet there was nothing left to recall the flames and that singular day.

Outside, Wynnie knelt on the ground in the white-fenced-in garden. She squinted into the setting sun and placed another twig on the fairy house she was building. A white camellia was tucked in her hair. Her pink glasses reflected the light, her coppery curly hair springing loose from the braids I’d plaited it in that morning.

I slid open the door and called out: “Nearly time for dinner!”

She looked up and smiled. “Can Emjie come?”

“Yes! You two finish what you’re doing. It’s nearly dark.”

I folded the newspaper and tossed it into the brass bin next to the fireplace for kindling.

The last words Mother had written in this house echoed now: an incantation, a wish, and a curse.

I want the sky to split open.