Shipping News, The - E. Annie Proulx [60]
“Do you think she’s normal, Aunt?”
The aunt blew on her tea, looked at Quoyle. Cautious expression. Looked hard at Quoyle as though he were a new kind of leather she might buy.
“Those bad dreams. And her temper. And—” He stopped. Was sayings things badly.
“Well,” said the aunt. “Just think of what’s happened. She’s lost members of her family. Moved to a strange place. The old house. New people. Her grandparents, her mother. I’m not sure she understands what’s happened. She says sometimes that they are still in New York. Things are upside down for her. I suppose they are for all of us.”
“All of that,” said Quoyle drinking his tea savagely, “but there’s something”—and his gut rumbled like a train—“something [133] else. I don’t know how to say it, but that’s what I’m talking about.” The words “personality disorder”—the Mockingburg kindergarten teacher’s words when Bunny pushed other children and hogged the crayons.
“Give me an example of what you mean.”
A dreary cloud settled on Quoyle. “Well, Bunny doesn’t like the color of the house. That dark green.” That sounded idiotic. It was what had happened in the kitchen. He could overlook the rest. The stewed cod and the squidburger came. Quoyle bit at the squidburger as though at wrist ropes.
“The nightmares, for one thing. And the way she cries and yells over nothing. At six, six and a half, a kid shouldn’t behave like that. You remember how she thought she saw a dog the first day we came to the house? Scared stiff of a white dog with red eyes? How we looked and looked and never saw a track nor trace?” Quoyle’s voice roughened. He’d give anything to be away. Yet plowed on.
“Yes, of course I remember.” The fork scraping away on the aunt’s dish, kitchen heat, the din of knives, swelling laughter. “There was another white dog adventure couple weeks ago. You know that little white stone I had on my garden rock? If you squinted at it it looked like a dog’s head? She come pounding on the door, yelling her head off. I thought something terrible’d happened. Couldn’t get her to stop yelling and tell me what was the matter. At last she holds out her hand. There’s a tiny cut on one finger, tiny, about a quarter of an inch long. One drop of blood. I put a bandage on it and she calmed down. Wouldn’t say how she got the cut. But a couple days later she says to me that she threw away ‘the dog-face stone’ and it bit her. She says it was a dog bite on her finger.”
The aunt laughed to show it wasn’t anything to have a fit about.
“That’s what I mean. She imagines these things.” Quoyle had swallowed the squidburger. He was stifled. The aunt was making nothing out of something, sliding away from things that needed to be said. The people behind him were listening. He could feel their attention. Whispered. “Look, I’m concerned. I really am. Worried [134] sick, in fact. Saturday morning when you went to pick up your package? We just came in to make lunch. I was going to heat up some soup. Sunshine was struggling with her boots—you know she wants to take her own boots off. Bunny was getting out the box of crackers for the soup, she was opening the box and the waxed paper inside was crackling when all of a sudden she stops. She stares at the door. She starts to cry. Aunt, I swear she was scared to death. She says, ‘Daddy, the dog is scratching on the door. Lock the door!’ Then she starts to scream. Sunshine sitting there with one boot in her hands, holding her breath. I should have opened the door to show her there was nothing there, but instead I locked it. You know why? Because I was afraid there might be something there. The force of her fear was that strong.”
“Tch,” said the aunt.
“Yes,” said Quoyle. “And the minute I locked it she stopped screaming and picked up the cracker