The Flight of Gemma Hardy_ A Novel - Margot Livesey [33]
“I remember that,” said Miriam. “She looked so hang-dog when the police brought her back. Still, people don’t always say what they mean.”
“So,” I prompted, “eleven from thirteen leaves two?”
Miriam too had lost her mother, although not until the summer she was four. I envied her her hazy memories of being sung to sleep and of tending some tall blue flowers in the garden. Since then she had been brought up by her father, a livestock auctioneer. They lived in Galashiels, the town I had seen from the train.
“All the farmers say that if anyone can get you a fair price for a cow it’s Goodall. He likes cattle more than children.”
He had enrolled her at Claypoole when she was eight, the autumn after she broke her leg. She’d been visiting a farm with him when a horse kicked her.
“I hate horses,” I said. “Big, stupid animals. Did it hurt?”
Miriam smiled. “I like that you hate them too. Half the girls here are horse-mad. At first it didn’t hurt much more than the time I fell off the garden wall, but it got worse each day instead of better.”
Her father, she explained, was afraid of doctors—he insisted they’d killed her mother—and he hadn’t taken her to one until she finally collapsed on the stairs. “He felt terrible when they showed him the X-ray. I was on crutches for four months.”
She went home only twice a year, for a week at Christmas and two weeks around her birthday in July. Don’t you mind? I asked, but she said no. The house was freezing, her father was mostly gone, and she’d come home from her first term at Claypoole to find that her beloved spaniel, Spencer, had been put to sleep. She looked so sad as she said this last part that I told her one of Mrs. Marsden’s stories about a selkie, a seal-woman. “She had brown hair and brown eyes like you,” I said. “Her name was Selina and she applied to be a housekeeper to a man with one daughter.”
Miriam was almost four inches taller than me, and three years older, but most of the time I forgot these differences, and I was sure she did too. One evening, though, when I described my aunt and how she’d gradually banished me from the family, Miriam suggested she might be jealous. “Like Titania with Oberon,” she said. We had been reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
“Jealous? What could she be jealous of? I didn’t have a changeling boy, or anything else she wanted.” I scratched my calf, wiped my forehead. How could Miriam be so mistaken?
“I’m only guessing,” she said calmly. “As you get older, Gemma, you’ll understand things that don’t make sense now. Think how much you’ve changed since you left Iceland. You’re going to change that much again in the next ten years.”
She had never before pointed out my youth, and I was stung. “I’ll be older soon,” I said. “My birthday’s next week. Tell me the things I don’t know.”
Miriam patted my knee. “Don’t be grumpy. I’m just saying that people’s feelings aren’t like arithmetic; they don’t always add up. As for telling you, I don’t know if I can. Some things you can learn from other people and books; some you have to live through. I’ll never know what it’s like to live in Iceland and have feet and feet of snow.”
She said all this so nicely that I stopped being upset and told her about the “No man is an island” sermon my uncle had been working on when he died. “He said words are the stepping-stones between one person and another. Sometimes they’re under water and you have to wait for them to surface again.”
“I like paddling,” said Miriam. Then she quizzed me about Puck’s role in the play.
The next week, when the Bryants were away and Ross had the other girls playing hockey, I led Miriam to the working girls’ bathroom. “There’s something