This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [100]
“I catch one,” Heidi said, wading farther in.
“You’re too little to go deeper,” I said. “You can’t even swim.”
Sandy had been teaching us how to swim down at the coves, but only I could stay afloat, though the cold water of the ocean made practicing less than appealing. Heidi kept moving forward, so I splashed her. She turned and splashed me. I splashed her again and she stepped back into the water, fell, and slipped under. The water was the color of pale tea near the sandy edge, so I could see her open eyes register the shock. She came up and immediately began to wail, sucking in air between the sputter of exhales.
“You got me wet!” she gasped.
“You have to listen,” I said, then turned and leaped across the softness of moss to the tree-house path, bumping past Pam as I ran.
Chapter Ten
Loss
Sue, Lissie, and Heidi on the beach in Westport, Massachusetts, while visiting family (Photograph courtesy of the author.)
“Heidi. Hi-di. Heidi Ho. Ho-di.”
Again and again Mama called, breaking into the train of my story about the mountain people. “And the little people were hiding behind a rock because they didn’t want to get hurt. The big people were coming and the little people were scared. ‘The big people are coming, the big people are coming,’ they called, ‘Run and hide in the cave.’ ”
The loft was stuffy and hot, the floorboards printing their grain on my leg. I shifted position and wiggled my tongue in the hole left by my lost tooth.
“Lissie,” Mama called. My muscles clenched in place. Big people. Hide. “Lissie!” Again. She peeked up from below.
“Oh, there you are,” Mama said. “Skates is here. Where’s Heidi?”
“I don’t know.”
“Come say hello to Skates.”
My body unbent from the crouch and shuffled backward down the ladder. It was a little cooler below, but no breeze, air thick as molasses. The swing hung unmoving from the ash tree. I listened for words from the leaves. Nothing. Then I heard Mama’s scream.
Just that morning the gardens were bustling as usual with apprentices and customers and vegetables needing to be picked. It was a humid-hot day, a Saturday near the end of July. Baby Clara was strapped to Mama’s back in Heidi’s old sling, sleeping mouth-open as Mama cooked lunch, skin glowing and tan from summer. Skates was coming to visit, and Mama needed time to clean the house, to hide from her mother-in-law the chaos her life had become: Bess and Papa having breakfast together that morning, mud tracked in from the gardens, piles of laundry to be washed by hand, Heidi and I running around the small kitchen pulling each other’s hair and screaming.
“One more scream, and you’re out,” Mama yelled, her mind tumbling over itself.
“Pull my hair, and you’ll die,” I said to Heidi.
She pulled my braid. I screamed.
“Out.” Mama pointed to the screen door, sweat shining on her forehead from the heat of the wood cookstove. Around the stone patio of the farmhouse, the daylilies panted their orange tongues in the heat. Rain had fallen the night before, and the air was heavy, as if waiting to rain again.
“I’m going to the woodshed,” I said, marching away across the yard and climbing up the woodshed ladder to my perch in the loft.
Heidi followed me, reaching up the ladder that she was afraid to climb alone. “Uppie.”
“No,” I said, but after a while she came back again with a little red boat in her hands.
“Come an’ play with me,” she begged.
“No,” I said. “I’m busy.”
When the workday ended—at noon on Saturdays—some apprentices hiked down to Redman’s Cove, accessed from a path across the road from the campground. They swam and relaxed on the beach, and Sandy started on one of her marathon swims. By the time everyone headed back up the path, Sandy was just the arc of an arm far out in the sequined water. Pam and Paul were sitting in the cool of the gravel pit by the road when someone came running over from the campground.