Chapter 16
The news must have spread throughout Young Acres over the next few days because the residents were even more careful around Fern than they were before.
Or maybe, she started to think, they all knew her “trial week” had been pure bull.
Maybe it had happened to them too. Discarded by those whom they’d thought loved them—those whom they’d trusted.
She was allowed one telephone call per week, according to Mrs. Crane, but she didn’t want to waste it on her parents. She didn’t wish to speak to them, not ever again. Instead, Fern called Buchanan’s bank.
“What are you doing phoning me here?” His voice was hushed once he got on the line, as if others were standing near him, listening.
“I’m willing to work,” she told him. “I can earn a living and be on my own. Plenty of young ladies do it these days.”
“Fern.”
“Just listen—I could be a clerk or a secretary, or, I don’t know, you could stick me in a back room and have me count change. I just can’t stay here, Buchanan. I can’t go back home either, so that leaves me to strike out on my own.”
“Goddamn it, Fern. You’re asking me to get you a job here? At my place of employment? Are you serious?”
She let out a quiet breath, not wanting him to know how much his reaction stung. “If you don’t want me to work with you, then perhaps at another branch? You know people, you could put a good word in—”
“Be realistic. You can’t work in a public place.”
She swallowed hard. “Why not?”
The lump in her throat swelled.
His sigh was loud and staticky in her ear.
“You’re making things tougher than they have to be.
I hear that farm is jake. I’ll come visit you, how about that?
Father’s summer fete is coming up in a few weeks, so I’ve got some things to do to help plan for that, but maybe next month.
Or maybe in October when I can get a few days off. ”
She bit the inside of her cheek. Her throat cinched tight until she could only manage to say, “Goodbye, Buchanan.”
Fern hung up the receiver as his voice was coming through the line.
There was no one else. No one.
Cal didn’t count, of course. She couldn’t turn to him, not when his brother was nefarious, not when they both wanted revenge on Buchanan and her father for the loss of their sister.
Fern hated her brother and father right then, but that didn’t mean she wanted their lives destroyed. She didn’t want them killed.
By the following Friday, a large package had arrived for Fern. Margie had packed more clothes, a few books, stationary, and envelopes, and some additional things from her vanity. She’d included a note telling Fern to enjoy the country air. There was even an exclamation point. Fern cringed.
The adults at Young Acres earned a small wage by working on the estate, and Fern found an envelope in her mail slot in the first-floor corridor near the kitchen, that same Friday. Inside was her weekly pay. Two dollars.
She sat down at her desk that night and wrote a letter to Hannah Levy, thanking her for the loan a few weeks ago for her taxi fare.
She enclosed the two dollars and addressed an envelope, remembering the street address Cal had uttered while he’d been bleeding in the passenger seat of his Roadster.
Leaving Cal in Doctor Levy’s first-floor office, while he’d been murmuring incoherently about someone called Bets, was her last memory of him.
Each day, as she settled into her new routine at Young Acres, working in the library and having polite conversations with the other residents and some of the staff, the only time her pulse beat a little faster—the only time she actually felt alive—was when her mind skipped over to thinking of Cal.
She tried to purge him from her thoughts by taking a few walks around the grounds each day.
Sometimes, Caroline joined her. They’d walk slowly, and she’d pretend not to notice Caroline’s pronounced limp and staggered breathing.
But most of the time Fern walked alone, through the orchard and the vegetable gardens, or by a brook that fed into a trout pond.
Walking the grounds was so peaceful and quiet, which made not thinking about Cal even more difficult.
God, he’d hate it here.
“Hello,” a voice called from a row of shrubs one morning. Fern froze, startled. A man cautiously stuck his arm out from a shrub and waved. He had a bucket with a leather strap looped around his neck, and inside the bucket were small, black berries.
Fern let loose a breath and smiled. “Hello. I didn’t see you there.”
He stepped farther out, and she could see in full the scars that mangled his facial features.
They were healed, like Fern’s, but they warped his mouth, nose and one of his eyes in ways hers didn’t.
Instead of just appearing as melted wax, his scars pulled his right eye low, so that Fern could barely see his iris; one nostril was missing; and his bottom lip had a large, gouged-out area near the corner of his mouth.
“I’m picking currants for the kitchen,” he offered. “That’s where I usually spend most of my time.”
Fern nodded. “Do you make the currant muffins?”
He grinned and bobbed his head. “Indeed. I hope you’re asking because you like them and not because they taste bad.”
“Oh, no! They’re delicious.”
There was an awkward silence. But then he cut right to the chase. “You know, your scars aren’t all that bad.” He quickly added, “Compared to mine, of course. Not that any scars are easy to live with, but…well… maybe I shouldn’t have said anything, on account of you being new here and all.”
Patrice’s friend, Sarah, had said the same thing. But this man was right—no amount of visible scarring would be easy to bear. Fern supposed a person with a single scar marring their face would be as self-conscious of it as she was of hers, or this man was of his.
“How long have you been here?”
“Oh, seven years or so,” he answered breezily. He pointed to his face. “Got these in the war over in France. Shrapnel from a land mine.”
Many soldiers had come back disfigured and scarred after the Great War. To have left home as a whole man and then return as something else had to have been a struggle. At least for Fern, her memory never knew a time when she wasn’t scarred.
“House fire,” she said of her own scars. “Do you like it here, then?”
He shrugged. “Sure. It’s a beautiful spot. Quiet. People don’t stare or scream when they look at you. Out there, this is all we are,” he said, gesturing again to his face. “It’s all anyone really sees.”
Even to those who are supposed to love us, Fern wanted to add.
“You’ll get used to it here,” he said, sounding as certain about it as Mrs. Crane. “Just give it some time. I’m Bud, by the way.”
He held out his hand. She shook it. “Fern.”
Bud ducked back into the shrubs to collect more currants, and Fern continued on her walk.
But suddenly, she was too tired to go any further, so she turned around and headed back to the main house.
Out there, this is all we are. It’s all anyone really sees.
What Bud said rang through her mind again and again as she returned to the library.
It was how she had always felt too. But the thing was… she hadn’t felt that way with Cal.
He’d seen her beyond her scars, or at least, that’s how he’d made her feel. Cal never outwardly reacted to the sight of them. It was possible he was just too cool, too even keeled and restrained to show his emotion. But instinct told Fern he just didn’t care about them. They didn’t affect him.
And that’s what she’d always worried about—how her face would affect other people, whether they were family members or mere strangers on the street. She’d been thinking about everyone except herself.
The next week, a letter arrived from her mother.
She asked plenty of questions about Young Acres and how she was faring there but made no mention of having deceived Fern into her placement at the farm.
Fern put the letter away in her desk drawer, unable to even think about how to begin a response to her mother.
But the single sheet of paper weighed on her for the rest of the day, and the following day too.
She had to write back. Maybe confronting her mother through a letter would be better than on the telephone or even in person.
At last, on Sunday afternoon—after she’d been at Young Acres for nearly a month—Fern sat down at her desk and took out a sheet of stationary that Margie had packed.
Her ballpoint pen hovered over the top half of the light pink paper. She wrote the date and greeting, which were easy to write, then chewed the capped bottom of the pen while thinking.
A pert knock on her room’s door saved her.
“Come in,” she called, then twisted to see who it was. Not Caroline, whose knocks were as timid as a mouse. Lena, the blind woman from across the hall, pushed the door open. Her filmy eyes peered into the room.
“Fern, there’s a man here who wants to speak to you,” she said, a bit breathlessly. A hesitant smile fluttered about her lips. Fern was suspicious. Was this a prank?
“A man?”
“I answered the door because Mrs. Crane is visiting with little Ben’s family,” Lena explained.
Ben, a sweet and exuberant little boy with widely set eyes—mongolism, the superintendent had called his condition—was another resident, whose family made frequent trips to the estate.
Nearly every weekend. Fern tried not to envy him those family visits.
“He said he wanted to talk to you,” Lena finished.
Fern pushed back her chair, dismissing the possibility it was a prank. It had been a few weeks since her call to Buchanan. He’d said he would visit, but when Fern hung up on him, she’d never expected him to follow through with it.
“Is it my brother?” she asked, standing up.
Lena nervously patted her chest with her palm a few times. “Oh, I’m not sure. Is your brother’s name George Black?”
Fern’s knees folded. She slammed back down into the chair and stared at Lena, her lips parted and lungs empty. “George Black?”
“Yes. I told him I’d come get you.” Lena stepped back out into hallway and waited. “Fern?” she asked when, after a moment, she hadn’t responded. Or moved. “He’s waiting on the front lawn.”