On Little Wings Read online

  “He puts his sisters to bed? What about his mother?”

  Sarah’s shoulders rose once and fell heavily. “She could do it. Sometimes she does, but Nathan’s … more reliable. She’s not bad – just too young to have four children.”

  I asked how old Mrs. Cass was and Sarah corrected me again. “Miss Becker. She’s mid-thirties. It’s not her physical age I’m talking about,” she hinted with raised eyes.

  “I thought you were her friend,” I said in confusion as I registered a slightly bitter edge to Sarah’s voice.

  “Oh, I am. Loosely. I love her children. I care about what she does, but she’s not my favorite role model.” She modulated her message to sound more courteous. “Judith has her good points, though. I don’t mean to disparage her. She does her best.” Sarah looked around the room, twisting her torso to see the bookshelves behind her. She changed the subject by asking me, “Do you want to search poems, essays or novels for your line?”

  She suggested I start with poems for our first reading because stumbling across something poignant in an entire novel can be difficult. “It’s usually easier to find something in a book that you are already reading. That way you have the context,” she explained. “Poetry is supposed to be on the top two shelves of that bookcase,” she said pointing. “But I get careless and they get scattered. But you can start there.”

  I took down an antique Tennyson with a damaged spine and perused the pages. The time passed steadily as we browsed for lines, piling discarded books in precarious stacks, loading our laps with potential favorites, and occasionally sharing some of our finds. Sarah chose one first but refused to let me see it. My father called halfway through my search to ask about the day and I had to cut him short to take a call from Cleo. I tried to skim the literature while talking to her but I just ended up failing at both. I either lost my place in the poems or took too long to answer her simple questions. “Cleo,” I finally told her, “let me call you back in the morning when I have time to tell you everything.” I tried to stress the word everything to suggest her waiting would pay off. That finally appeased her and I hung up the phone while Sarah smiled and shook her head.

  “Oh, to be young,” she murmured without further comment. When a light tap sounded on the front door, I quickly decided between two books and grabbed the Tennyson, my ferry ticket stuck between two pages to mark the poem I picked.

  “We’ll be right out,” Sarah said, not rushing as she set a few more books on the crowded coffee table. Charlie raced to the door, scratching it until Sarah yelled his name sharply. Sarah grabbed a bookmark, left the book behind and led the way outside. I didn’t ask questions, just followed, throat tight, stomach trembling like I was stepping onto a stage instead of a small porch.

  Nathan sat on the porch rail, his back against the slender post, with a battered paperback in his hand. He nodded at me with a clenched jaw. His face looked too young for the grim, thoughtful line of his mouth. Since he didn’t say hello, neither did I. I seated myself on one of the two wooden chairs, leaving the other one for Sarah. She looked at both of us and said, “Nathan, my niece, Jennifer Newsom. Jennifer, my friend and student, Nathan Moore.”

  “Hi,” I murmured. He only nodded again. The silence was not uncomfortable: It was agonizing. I broke it with a halting apology. “I’m sorry … about yesterday. I didn’t know you lived here.”

  His eyes scrunched in thought and a muscle in his cheek flexed. “No problem. Sorry I scared you,” he offered me a quick glance before returning his eyes to the ground.

  “Okay, good.” Sarah said matter-of-factly. Then she turned just to Nathan and asked him about his day, and gave a quick sketch of our day’s activities.

  At last he addressed me again, “Did you like the island?” There existed in his voice an intangible challenge.

  “Of course,” I answered, my own tone just as defensive and clipped as his. The scene of the island’s tiny white village rose in my mind, the flowers laid in straight, blooming lines. “Not quite as much as Smithport, but all the same, it was beautiful.”

  His head jerked, “Why not as much?” This time he allowed his wide, narrow eyes to meet mine and I stared a moment before answering. His face was a study in contradictions: The vulnerable, intelligent eyes, the slightly flaring nose, the ruddy cheeks, his firm jaw, the feathery, long eyelashes and the crooked scar. He seemed pieced together by an indecisive creator who didn’t know exactly what he was making. But for all that being said, the result was not unpleasant to look at.

  “I don’t know. It’s a little pretty-picture for me. If it were real it would be like a Utopia, but it feels a bit contrived…” Then, knowing it would tickle their fierce Maine pride I added casually, “too many tourists.”

  Nathan’s lips pulled up at one corner, stretching his scar.

  “I told you she’d be a Smither,” Sarah said almost smugly. Nathan lifted one shoulder and smirked, but didn’t argue. “So I’ll go first tonight,” Sarah said, and then turned and spoke only to me, “We tend to trade, but there’s no real rule or schedule.” She raised the laminated bookmark, its yarn tassel hanging limply against her fingers, “It takes a thousand voices to tell a single story. A Native American saying,” she finished.

  I waited a moment before asking, “Is that all?”

  “Yep,” Sarah said with a smile.

  It seemed too easy.

  “Why did you pick that one tonight?” Nathan asked, rubbing one eyebrow.

  “Because this bookmark was stuck in one of the books I picked up and it seemed right for tonight. I think it fits. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about stories. My own, Claire’s, and now Jennifer’s.” She gave me a meaningful look and I knew she hadn’t forgotten her promise. “So, do you two think it’s true?”

  “I can’t find an argument,” Nathan said. “Not without getting metaphysical.”

  “Makes sense to me,” I agreed.

  “A rare consensus,” Sarah teased. “I guess we’ll enjoy it while we can. Okay, then. Nathan, you’re up. And thanks for sparing us the metaphysics.”

  He gave her a fleeting, reluctant look. “I have to read the entire poem tonight or the last stanza won’t make sense.” I heard Nathan’s words, but I didn’t notice what he said. My attention focused on something I hadn’t noticed before in his short answers.

  “Is that your accent?” I asked in astonishment.

  His eyes widened in annoyance as he waited for me to answer my own question.

  Sarah laughed and pointed to Nathan. “She’s not used to it. She doesn’t know it but she’s made me feel very normal for the last two days.”

  I asked her what she meant and she told me that it had been nice to have someone around who sounded like her for a change. “But you grew up here,” I protested. “Why don’t you sound the same?”

  “I grew up here with my mother from New York. Private schools in New York. She always said that we could eat like Smithers, live like Smithers, fish like Smithers, even smell like Smithers, but no daughters of hers would talk like Smithers.” Sarah grinned brilliantly. “She taught us to speak. And she untaught what we learned from the locals.”

  “Smell like Smithers?” Nathan scoffed.

  “My father had the most incredible Maine accent, rich and musical and a symphony for the ears. I could listen to him forever,” her wistful words faded as she spoke.

  “So your mother let him talk like a Smither?” I asked.

  Sarah huffed, “She loved his voice like I did. Men can get away with it. But she’s right, it’s not very elegant on a woman. It is a voice that belongs to the watermen.”

  Nathan asked if he could continue, his eyes sparking with amusement at our conversation. Sarah quieted and instead of giving him her attention she closed her eyes and leaned back in her chair, lifting the front two legs off the floorboards.

  “You’ll crack your head open,” Nathan intoned dully.

  Instead of cracking her head, she just cracked one eye. “You�
�re off duty,” she said. “Save it for the little girls.”

  Nathan sighed and opened his book. I looked between the two, feeling momentarily invisible. Their half sentences, cryptic references, meant nothing to me, but the relationship fascinated me. Not quite mother and son, but close. She seemed almost like an aunt. I stared at Nathan, resenting the decades he had her all to himself. I put aside my indignation when he began reading Ozymandias by Percy Shelly, his voice sounding normal until his accent snuck out, peeking unexpectedly behind syllables, surprising me, pleasing me. I understood how Sarah listened to her father for hours. Something about a rugged voice reciting an old British poem made a thrilling mix. Like his face. He came to the last stanza and paused, interrupting his lines. “So this stanza is the one I like best.”

  Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair?’

  Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

  Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

  The lone and level sands stretch far away.

  “He wrote it about a monument built for a Pharaoh. A millennia later, there is nothing left of the man but a broken statue half buried in the sand. I liked the image.”

  I imagined the sands blowing against the bleak scene of the lost Egyptian empire before my mind traveled to the vast, unfathomable waters of the ocean behind us. Both seemed wildly desolate to me.

  “The lonely sands stretch away from all of us. From the wrecks of our lives,” Sarah said delicately. Nathan asked her what she meant but she smiled sadly and said she lost her train of thought.

  “I had it for a moment, I could see it. Funny how some things only make sense for a second,” she said, covering her lips with her fingers. Charlie pulled his head up from the planks and looked at her, thumping his tail once in what seemed like sympathy.

  “It’s God,” Nathan said, startling me.

  “What’s God?” I asked.

  “Those flashes, those moments of truth. He is too much for us to see all at once. Maybe it’s like looking at the sun. Just too much.” The tension in Nathan’s face ebbed as he spoke, his icy guard slowly melting. He spoke with disconcerting sincerity.

  “Are you religious today, Nathan?” Sarah mused.

  That made a true smile break across his face. “I usually am, Sarah. Have to keep an open mind,” he tapped the side of his head.

  “Too open …” Sarah interrupted.

  “And your blessed brain will fall out. You would know,” Nathan gave her a taunting smile. I peered in bewilderment at her face and then his, trying to interpret their conversation.

  “He’s mocking me because I’m always trying something,” Sarah explained to me. “I used to be a good Methodist. Some days I truly think I still am. But there is a streak of Evangelical in me and some Southern Baptist because sometimes I want to stand up and shout my Hallelujahs. Not demurely, not reverently, but pull it out of my diaphragm and really bellow!”

  Nathan shook his head tolerantly and in his softer countenance I could see some of the quiet boy that Sarah loved. “So she’s a mess of faith. When you believe everything, you don’t really believe anything, in my opinion,” Nathan said like a parent speaking of their child.

  “I’m not a mess – I’m a work in progress,” Sarah laughed. “I have narrowed it down to Christianity, so that should count for something. But I do like a lot of the good pagan rituals. And incense - no one uses incense like the Catholics. What ambiance!”

  Nathan snorted and pretended to hit his head against the porch post. “You are no more decisive than I am,” Sarah rebuffed. “I’m not church hopping, truly.” She insisted. “I’m … keeping my options open.” At that we all laughed and for the first time I noticed how the sound harmonized with the ocean song, adding light to the thunderous depths. “Okay, I’ve been ridiculed enough tonight. It’s Jennifer’s turn to read.” Sarah leaned toward my chair.

  I swallowed once, my chin dipping down shyly. “It’s Tennyson,” I said, my voice cracking as I moved from laughter to reciting. I brushed my hair behind my shoulders, picked up my book and opened it to the marked page. “Just the few lines, right?” I asked nervously.

  “Whatever you want,” Sarah assured me. Nathan relaxed his head against the post and turned away from me so I only saw the curving plane of his cheek, the corner of his eye and the muscles in his neck as I began.

  “Break, break, break,

  On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!

  And I would that my tongue could utter

  The thoughts that arise in me.”

  My voice faded with each line, until the last came out in a hoarse whisper. An unwelcome tear burned the side of my eye, slowly closed my throat. I wanted to turn my face away, but they already knew. If only Nathan wasn’t sitting five feet away from me. At least he had the decency not to look at me. He kept his gaze shifted up to the sky and I copied, noticing the black, spiky silhouettes of the pine trees against the canvas of night. I held my eyes wide open in the breezy air and blinked to force the tear back in.

  “You love her, don’t you?” Sarah asked. I already knew when someone said her in that reverent tone it meant the sea.

  My throat croaked from a word I started and quitted. I paused, groping for the truth. “She is strange to me.” I let my thoughts finish before the slow words rolled out. “Beautiful and intimidating and … strange.”

  “She is a woman,” Nathan said, his accent subtle, but rich, in his quiet words.

  Sarah turned toward the house as if she could see through it to the midnight waves and we lapsed into a comfortable quiet, each listening to the ocean’s whispers. What the sea said to Nathan or Sarah, I cannot say, but to me she cooed something like “Once upon a time …”

  CHAPTER 14

  Almost as imperceptibly as the stars steal into the dark sky, Nathan slipped away with a simple, unassuming “goodnight.” Once we were alone, I turned to Sarah to find her gaze fixed on me, which gave me a queer feeling of being stared at by my future self. If only I could end up so elegant!

  Her lips parted slowly and I expected her to say something about the lines or Nathan or even the night. Instead she began without preamble and said very softly, very gently, “The story begins so beautifully.” I blinked and dragged in a long breath while my limbs stiffened. I needed to know, but the thought of listening to a story that ended in the complete destruction of my family made me feel ill. I poised rigidly in my chair, a part of me, somewhere between my stomach and my spine, trembling timorously. “It was my senior year. My senior recital. Everything good at home. My father was having a tough time with his sardine catches and putting in some factory hours, but nothing out of the ordinary. I’d been accepted into the theater and art department at the University of Maine and I was practicing my valedictorian speech. I was going to be a dancer. And save the world in my spare time. All the normal plans of a naïve idealist.

  “Then a few weeks before my graduation my father came down with the flu. We thought it was the flu. After two weeks of throwing up and stomachaches he went to see the doctor.” Sarah stopped and I watched her eyes fill with tears that grew heavy and fell before she could even blink them away. “Cancer. They thought pancreatic. They couldn’t be sure because it spread everywhere. It was eating him alive. He died a month later, right after I graduated.” My gut twisted and I pushed my lips hard together, hating the words sliding into my ears. “He couldn’t go. He was, well, he was mostly already gone.” Her swimming eyes pulled me into their depths of dark sorrow. “It was so fast, Jennifer. From perfect and strong and laughing to … dead.” The last word hit like an iron club, thudding against my soul in a terrible finality. “So fast.

  “So I went off to college, dazed and in denial. I cannot tell you how many times I picked up the phone to call my dad …” her voice faded into nothing and I waited until she resumed. “We were always close. So I think I sort of detached. I didn’t come home much, took summer classes, kept my vacations short. Always an excuse not to be here. Because he w
asn’t here. I couldn’t stand it. I thought of my feelings a lot. I didn’t really consider what it did to Claire to lose Dad and then me. I was a terrible sister.”

  Chester clawed at the door and let out a deep cry, interrupting Sarah’s hypnotic words. I quickly opened the door and scooped him up, grateful for something warm to hold as the icy words crystallized inside me. I sat cross-legged on the porch and said a quiet “I’m sorry” as I settled Chester into my lap.

  Sarah watched the cat lean into my hand and let out a booming purr, but her expression remained empty, distant. “My Junior year of college I was starting to put life back together, falling in love, getting good parts in the productions. Healing. And then …” she stopped, indecision in her eyes, her posture hesitant. “I … I went on a research trip with a friend over the summer. I was gone for six weeks.” She raised her head, a more business-like tone to her voice. “You see, life is about timing sometimes. Often. And my timing … it’s like a curse out of Shakespeare. I just do everything at the wrong time. When I got back to school my roommates were frantic, saying they called the police, everything they could think of to get a hold of me. I asked them why – they knew where I was going – and they said I needed to call my sister right away. They barely looked at me, Jennifer. I refused to call until someone told me what was wrong and they refused to say anything. I yelled at them, they yelled back. I knew it was bad.

  “So, I called. Claire answered the phone and started crying, just sobbing, and asked me where I had been and if I was okay. I told her I was fine, I’d been on a trip just like I’d told them, and asked her what was wrong. She said, ‘Mother, Sarah. Mother had a stroke.’” Sarah’s hands halted in midair. “I froze. If I ever go to hell I will recognize it from that moment. My entire body full of a painful fire I couldn’t escape. And then it got a thousand times worse. She said, ‘She died, Sarah. I’m so sorry. We tried to find you. We did everything. We couldn’t wait any longer.’”