Chapter 8
8
Bliss
Twenty-Four Years Before
The sight of the house Jack Bettencourt led Bliss to that sunny, disjointed afternoon stopped her cold, and she must have gasped aloud, because both boy and dog stopped, too, and turned to study her curiously.
“What’s the matter?” Jack asked, sounding a little impatient. He probably wanted to dispense with the wandering stranger he’d found in the woods and get back to his favorite fishing hole.
Bliss was too stunned to speak, at least for the first few moments.
The house was the one Madison lived in, the one she herself had spied on from time to time, when she had nothing better to do.
At the same time, it wasn’t .
It was smaller, and far less grand.
The screened-in sunporch was gone, and the back door was high off the ground, with four steps below it, made of stones most likely hauled there from the creek, stuck together with what Jack would later describe as mortar.
There were no flowerbeds, no rosebushes.
The vegetable patch remained, and it was flourishing and abuzz with bees, but it was in a different place, over to one side of the house, not butting up to the edge of the woods, the way Bliss remembered.
All that confused her so much that the pit of her stomach quivered, and the cut on her head hurt like sin, but another surprise soon appeared.
A woman came out of the back door, carrying a basket of wet clothes, holding her burden in a way that allowed her to see where she was stepping.
Her hair was the same color as Jack’s, a sort of taffy color, pinned up in a style that puffed out around her pretty face.
It was the woman’s clothing, though, that made Bliss wonder if she was still lying where she’d fallen, dreaming of a place that couldn’t possibly be real.
The lady wore a long black skirt, matching pinchy-looking shoes that buttoned up the front, and a blue blouse with puffy sleeves and buttons that went up her chest and stopped just beneath her chin.
Singing a song, something about glory, she walked over to the clothesline—another thing that didn’t exist at the Bettencourt Hall that Bliss knew—set the basket down, took out a boy’s shirt, and gave it a shake so brisk that it made a snapping sound. Then she hung the shirt from the clothesline using huge wooden pegs.
The dog—Hobo?—barked and ran toward the woman, and that was when she stopped singing, turned her head and saw Jack approaching with a stranger.
Her face crumpled for a moment, not out of disgust, Bliss thought with relief, but out of curiosity and surprise.
Forgetting the laundry, she walked over to where Bliss stood, with Jack looking on, and gave a sort of frowny-smile.
“Well, now,” she said, and her voice was just as nice when she spoke as when she sang. “Who is this?” A frown shunted aside the smile as she took in Bliss’s bloody forehead. “Mercy! What’s happened to you, child?”
“This here is Bliss Morgan,” Jack said, just when Bliss was beginning to wonder if he’d gone mute. It was clear enough that he and the woman were both as puzzled by Bliss’s clothes as she was by theirs. “I found her down by the creek, just a little while ago.”
He said this like she wasn’t standing right there. Like she was an interesting rock or an arrowhead, discovered and brought home for show-and-tell.
“Bliss Morgan,” the woman repeated. “What a lovely name.” Her attention, which felt like a blessing, or a burst of sunshine on a dark day, turned to Jack. “And do not say ‘this here.’ It isn’t proper English.”
“This is my ma,” Jack said, and the absence of “here” was so plain that it seemed to leave a gap in the sentence. “Mrs. Matthew Bettencourt. My pa’s dead, so it’s just me and Ma and Hobo hereabouts.”
“Katherine Bettencourt,” the woman said, introducing herself, even though her son had already done that, all the while regarding Bliss with benign perplexity. She made no mention of her dead husband. “Let’s go inside and see what we can do about that cut.”
Bliss hesitated.
The dream was so vivid by then that she was on the verge of tears.
And she never cried, in a dream or wide awake; no, not even when her dad bopped her one on the back of her head for getting underfoot or talking when he wanted quiet.
“Who are your folks, dear?” Katherine Bettencourt continued, taking Bliss firmly by the hand and leading her past the clothesline and the full laundry basket and the small blue shirt dangling from its huge pegs. “Where do you live?”
Bliss had no idea how to answer the second question, because now she was wondering if this place was real, and she’d only imagined the other one, where she shared a broken-down shell of a camper with her no-good father and, up until a few weeks ago, her runaround mother.
So she said nothing.
She let Mrs. Bettencourt lead her up the stone steps and into a spacious kitchen, dimly lit and deliciously cool.
The furniture was very solid, and Bliss had never seen anything like it.
There was no refrigerator, and the stove was a large, clunky black metal thing with chrome on it, though it looked nothing like a car.
Mrs. Bettencourt pulled out a chair. Weak-kneed, Bliss sank into it without being told to do so.
“Is the child unable to speak?” she asked Jack, who hovered nearby, curious himself.
“Nope,” Jack answered. “I heard her talk before. I think maybe she’s just scared.”
His mother gathered up a dented metal basin, some bandages, a misshapen bar of yellow soap, a washcloth, and something in a brown bottle. Medicine, Bliss figured, though she was still too shook up to speak. “You run down to the Simmons place and borrow a horse,” the lady went on, busy pouring water from a tea kettle into the basin. Steam rose from it. “Ride straight to Marshal Claridge’s office and tell him we’ve got a lost little girl out here, and he needs to come see to the matter as soon as he can.”
Bliss stiffened in the hard chair with its high back.
Mrs. Bettencourt was sending for a marshal?
But a marshal was a cop , right?
Maybe she’d be arrested, and that wouldn’t be cool, even in a dream.
Bliss considered bolting, but the plain fact was, she knew her legs wouldn’t hold her up. Besides, if this was a dream—and surely it had to be—she’d wake up soon, find herself lying under a tree or on a soft bed of moss or even in the cramped little berth in the camper, and everything would go back to normal.
The thought of that made her a little sad.
At last, she found her voice, though it was very, very small. “I’m not a crook,” she said. “Please don’t get the police.”
Mrs. Bettencourt regarded Bliss with concern and sympathy. “Why, child,” she said gently, but with emphasis, “you’re not in trouble. We need the marshal to help us find your family, that’s all.”
Did she even have a family?
In the world where this house was big and modern, with no clothesline in the yard and the vegetable patch where it was supposed to be, down at the bottom of the big yard, she had Duke and Mona. There, her name was Bliss Morgan, and she lived in an old camper.
This world, on the other hand, was very different.
Which one was real?
Was she still Bliss, like before?
Too many questions flew around her head like birds, plucking at her hair with their beaks, pecking little holes in her scalp, which was already hurting plenty.
Jack had taken off right away, obeying his mother’s instructions, and now Bliss was alone with this kindly woman, in her strange clothes, with her shiny caramel hair fluffed out around her face.
Bliss felt her lower lip wobble as she searched her brain for something to say.
“Never you mind, now,” Mrs. Bettencourt soothed, dipping a corner of the washcloth into the basin of hot water and gently wiping at Bliss’s forehead. “I reckon you’ll tell me—or the marshal, once he gets here—what we need to know.”
For a little while, Bliss was calmer. She even relaxed, as Mrs. Bettencourt washed her face; there was something so comforting about that.
“This is going to sting, I’m afraid,” the woman said moments later, reaching for the brown bottle after she had cleaned the cut and the area around it. “I don’t think you’ll have a scar, though. Head wounds bleed a lot, even when they’re not particularly serious.”
Bliss had lapsed deeper into her haze, so that she barely heard the warning, but when Mrs. Bettencourt soaked another corner of the washcloth in smelly medicine and touched it to the cut, she sat up straight again, eyes wide-open, and scrambled to her feet.
“Ouch!” she yelled.
Mrs. Bettencourt set the cloth aside, placed her hands lightly on Bliss’s now quivering shoulders, and pressed her very gently back into her chair. “The worst is over,” she said matter-of-factly. She was a person who knew what she was doing—or firmly believed that she did.
“I need to go home now,” Bliss said, once she’d breathed her way through the awful sting of that medicine.
A while ago, when she stayed with Gran and managed to scrape a knee or an elbow roller-skating on the sidewalk in front of the house, out would come the medicine, and it would always sting like anything.
That was because it was killing germs, Gran would say. And that was a good thing.
Well, today, those germs weren’t going down easy.
They were fighting back .
“The marshal will take you back to your own people soon,” Mrs. Bettencourt replied, deftly wrapping a long strip of white cloth around Bliss’s head, like a sweatband. “And you mustn’t worry. He’s a very nice man, Marshal Claridge is.”
“I can find my own way back,” Bliss responded, though without much confidence that she could. She’d tried, after all, to go home, if that old camper could be called a home, and found it gone.
Only her favorite tree, the Grandfather, had remained of the place she remembered.
“You’ve been hurt,” Mrs. Bettencourt said with a shake of her head. “I can’t allow you to wander off all alone. In the meantime, I think you could use some food. You look very thin, young lady.”
Again, the woman’s eyes took in Bliss’s shorts and T-shirt. Again, her forehead crumpled.
“Your clothes—” she began, but then, evidently at a loss for what else to say, she fell silent again. “I do declare, I’ve never seen such garments, especially on a girl.”
“I might be an orphan,” Bliss suggested, letting the comment on her clothes pass, and thinking of the vanished camper. There had been no sign of Duke, or of his beat-up old truck. Not even tire tracks dug into the grassy dirt. “I’m not sure.”
Mrs. Bettencourt’s eyes, which were hazel in color, like her son’s, like Madison’s, widened slightly. She laid her hand on her chest and opened her fingers wide. “An orphan?” she echoed. “My stars. Did someone abandon you? Is that what happened?”
Bliss considered her options.
She was no liar, but when she woke up, none of this would matter anyhow. It would be a weird story she could tell Madison, the next time they met in the cemetery for a picnic.
Besides, in a very real way, she had been left to take care of herself, so she was kind of an orphan.
And there was never any certainty that her dad would come home after the next binge, was there? And her mother was already long gone, maybe this time forever.
“Yes,” Bliss said, and her lip wobbled again, and she let the tears come, simply because she was tired of trying to hold them back.
Her head hurt. She was hungry.
And the whole world—or at least, her world—had gone plumb crazy.
“What happened, exactly?” Mrs. Bettencourt had left off her puttering and sat herself down in a chair, looking closely at Bliss.
“My mom and dad are gone,” Bliss said, telling just a teeny-tiny lie. “They left me down there by the creek. That’s where I was when Jack came and found me.”
An odd look came over Mrs. Bettencourt’s face when Bliss mentioned her parents, a sort of catch in the rhythm of things, like when you were running a smooth string between your fingers and you hit a knot you didn’t expect. “Your mom and dad,” Katherine echoed, as though taken aback. Then, after a few moments’ recovery, she went on to ask, “They left you?”
Bliss nodded, amazed at how true a lie could feel. “Yes,” she said. “I guess they got tired of me. I can be pretty pesky.”
“When did this happen?”
Bliss considered her answer for several moments.
Her stomach rumbled so loud, Mrs. Bettencourt heard it and got to her feet.
“Today,” Bliss said, figuring she was on a roll now, and might as well keep on going. “We were camping,” she elaborated, warming to the story and to Jack’s mother’s attentive sympathy. “I woke up and they were gone. They took everything and just—went.”
Inwardly, Bliss smiled. The tall tale was definitely growing on her.
“That’s terrible ,” Mrs. Bettencourt said.
She rose from her chair and walked over to a wooden box with a handle in front.
When she opened it, a soft and refreshing chill came from inside.
An icebox.
Bliss had read about them in stories about the olden days.
Soon, Mrs. Bettencourt had put together a meal.
Some kind of meat, stuck between two thick slices of homemade bread, slathered with butter. Real butter, not margarine. A bowl of pears, taken from a jar brought from a shelf on the far wall, where there were numerous other jars, filled with things like beans and carrots and peeled tomatoes.
A tall glass of milk was set before her, too.
Bliss ate fiercely, trying to mind her manners, like her Gran had taught her to do, but unable to slow down.
Her stomach was like a cave dug into a mountainside, with a bear roaring inside it.
By the time Jack and Hobo returned, accompanied by a man riding a mule and wearing a funny round hat, Bliss was ready to curl up somewhere and sleep, though she didn’t really want to do that and wake up back in the camper, with her belly grinding at her backbone because she’d only dreamed she’d had something to eat.
“The marshal was out in the countryside someplace,” Jack explained as he and the man and the dog entered, one by one. “So I brought Doc Wiggins.”
Doc Wiggins was a small man, wearing funny clothes—a checkered vest over a heavy cotton shirt, baggy pants and suspenders.
He nodded to Mrs. Bettencourt as he entered the kitchen, removing his hat, hanging it on a peg next to the door.
“I hear you took a bad fall,” he said to Bliss, carefully removing the bandage Jack’s mother had tied around her head.
He made a tsk-tsk sound as he examined the wound. Shook his gray head a couple of times.
He had a beard and a big mustache, both the same color as his hair.
“You did a good job, Katherine,” he said. Then, drawing up a chair, he sat down facing Bliss, and they were almost knee to knee, which would have scared Bliss a little if she hadn’t sensed that he was kind, like Mrs. Bettencourt.
He caught Bliss’s chin in one hand, though lightly, and squinted as he peered into her eyes.
“Pupils look all right,” he mused, as if thinking out loud. “Probably no concussion, so it’ll be fine if she wants to sleep for a while. Get her strength back.”
Don’t talk about me, M-mister , Bliss thought, but didn’t quite dare say, like I’m not even here. Talk to me.
That was when Jack handed Doc Wiggins a battered leather bag, black, but spotted with wear.
Bliss hoped he wasn’t about to give her a shot.
She’d had all her vaccinations—Gran had seen to that—but every one of them had hurt, and she figured she’d already hurt enough for one day, bonking her head like she had.
Instead of a needle, the doctor produced a stethoscope.
Listened to her heart, nodding as he did so, and then her lungs.
“Fit as a fiddle,” he said, finally.
Then, at long last, he looked at Bliss and asked, “Where are your kinfolk, little one, and where in the name of all that’s holy did you get those clothes?”
Bliss didn’t even have to open her mouth to answer, because Mrs. Bettencourt jumped right in and told the story Bliss had just told her , though she didn’t explain about the clothes.
The doctor listened carefully, accepted the cup of cold lemonade Mrs. Bettencourt poured from a pitcher stored in the icebox, and spoke of other things—the doings of the “townsfolk,” as he put it, the state of the nation—doomed for sure—and the new mule he was considering buying, since it was time to replace old Shadrach, the one he was riding now.
Bliss fell asleep in her chair.
And when she woke up, hours later, it was dark outside, and she was in a bed, and Jack’s mother was sitting in a rocking chair close by, like if something bad tried to happen, she wanted to be there to stop it right then.
So, Bliss thought, she was still dreaming.
Or maybe she was in a coma.
She smiled and went back to sleep.