This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [113]
There was something else I didn’t want to remember. When Heidi drowned, my heart grew a hidden thought. Maybe now I’ll get the attention I need, it whispered. Maybe now our family will be happy again. But it didn’t work out like that at all.
Chip made a small cross out of two pieces of cedar wood and stuck it in the ground over the grave.
“There,” she said.
“We worried about you,” Paul told me much later. “That you would feel guilty, that you would feel responsible. And you were too young to speak to about it. No one really had the ability to check in with you or get at what really happened. So there was this very sketchy sense of whether or not you were there with Heidi. Seven is little, too little to deal with that, but it doesn’t change the fact that Heidi tipped into that water and drowned.”
The next time I followed Mama down to the spring to get water, she said, “What is that?”
“Pussy Tats’s grave,” I said. “We made a cross for him.”
“What? You buried that cat by the spring?” Her anger was refreshing in its strength. “This is not a graveyard!”
“Chip helped me,” I said.
“It will pollute the water,” she said. “Ask Chip to dig him up.”
Mama slipped out of the water yoke and walked over to the cross. She looked at the grave for a minute and then pulled the cross out of the ground and flung it into the forest. She stared into the woods for a few minutes, beady-eyed, before coming back for the yoke.
“I can’t bear to get water from this spring now,” she spit.
I didn’t remember Gerry telling me about Pussy Tats’s food sensitivities, but when she got back, she said of course she had. Perhaps she told Mama, but Mama didn’t care.
“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to kill him.”
Gerry asked to see where he was buried, and I took her down to the spring, but the ground was covered in snow by then and I couldn’t find the grave.
“There was a cross,” I said. I didn’t say Mama had torn it out.
Gerry was smileless about Pussy Tats for a long time. After that, I didn’t give her any more spankings.
Mama no longer brushed and braided my hair for school or made me new dresses, even though my clothes were all old and too small. Once when Mrs. Clifford called me up to the blackboard, I had on a jumper dress from last year with straps up the back that buttoned on my chest. When I reached up to write, I heard the kids sniggering behind me. The skirt part must have risen up to show my underwear—at least I think I was wearing underwear. I quickly finished writing and went back to my chair. No one met my eyes. They were laughing so hard Mrs. Clifford made everyone put their heads down. I loved to put my head down and watch the condensation of my breath on the Formica desktop—there I was safe.
When the bus pulled up to Jennifer’s trailer in the big field on Varnumville Road, she stood tall and proud, blond hair twitching in the breeze, as if she were just hanging out there, as if she couldn’t possibly live in a trailer. She got on the bus and looked right through me, heading back to sit with a new friend. They were the popular girls now.
During recess, I tried to grab Jennifer’s hand and make her walk with me around the edge of the playground, but she ran ahead like it was a game and she was running from me. I caught up with her and stood in front so she couldn’t run.
“Count my freckles,” I said, holding out my arms.
She didn’t take my arms and start counting; she just looked at me, her eyes flat and hair flipping like a cape around her shoulders.
“Hey, you have a freckle right there,” I said, lifting my pointer finger and pressing a vagrant freckle on her nose. She ducked away from my finger and made a pointer finger at my face. Her eyes got narrow.
“Well, you have a freckle right there,” she said. “And there, and there, and there, and there.” Her finger came forward onto my nose again and again, the sharp edge of her fingernail