The Body Farm, page 14
In the book, there is a photograph of a porcupine lolling on a leaf-strewn branch, its feet slung casually on either side of the limb, its eyes half shut, dozing in its airy cradle. Against all odds, these creatures are happiest high in the air. They climb trees for food, for shelter, even for fun. Over time, their bodies have adapted for this purpose. Their claws are long and curved, their paws soled with rubbery pads. Their stomachs are capable of digesting bark. And the quills—as the biologist hypothesized—have transformed too.
Lila closes the book and clicks off her penlight. She leans her head against the cool window. The paperback is a comforting presence, clutched in her palm like a talisman. She imagines the injured animal prone at the foot of a tree. She pictures it rolling to its feet. Whimpering, bleeding, limping away. Finding a safe place to curl into a ball. Licking its wounds. Porcupines have evolved to climb trees and to fall. They have evolved to suffer and to heal. The quills will do what they are designed to do: they will travel through the dark pulp of the body, slicing the flesh, rending the muscle, and leaving behind no lesions, no bruises, no pain, no scars.
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In ten years, Lila will return to the Adirondacks. In Simone’s company, she will come back to the mountains.
This will not be a spur-of-the-moment trip. The two of them will prepare months in advance, deciding to visit for just a weekend this time. They will rent a new cabin. A different view. A river instead of a lake. Autumn instead of spring. They will organize their schedule for recreation and beauty. They will travel at the crescendo of the fall foliage, when the trees flicker and glow like lit candles.
On a chilly evening, Lila will leave Simone snoring in an armchair, her reading glasses askew. The trees will surge overhead, messy jumbles of gold. The sky murky. The horizon darkening. Grabbing a flashlight, Lila will escape into the breeze. She will stride down the trail, leaving the cabin in her wake, pushing a sheaf of gray hair from her eyes.
She will be restless, eager to get away from the heat of the house, the fluorescent bulbs, and the garish paintings on the walls. Away from Simone, too, who will watch her with concern throughout the trip, speaking low and touching Lila tentatively, as though she is an unexploded bomb. Simone will even start counting her pills again—two yellow, with breakfast.
Lila will understand this concern while simultaneously resenting it. In her everyday life, she will no longer be a creature locked in darkness. Knitting, gardening, lunch dates with friends—she will have hobbies again, plans for each day. Sometimes the shadows will start to close in around her, but she can recognize them now for what they are. She can call Dr. Conroe, increase her medication, exercise self-care, and wait for the light to return.
But here in the Adirondacks, there will be echoes in the air. For the first time in years, Lila will be aware of her scars—faint tattoos on her wrists. She will not feel quite like herself: unsettled, unmoored. Not depression, but distraction. Not pain, but the memory of pain.
As the sky dims, Lila will click on her flashlight. A cold wind will wash down the slope, and flecks of red and yellow will whirl around her like rain. Somewhere nearby, Lila will hear the rush of the river. She will hear birds calling. She will hear a scuffle overhead—an incongruous sound. Her heart will give a startled jump.
A scratching. A snort. A crunch of twigs. Lila will take a deep breath, grip her flashlight, and point the beam upward.
A shape on a branch. Brown and white. Paws clutching the bark. A thicket of quills. Lila will laugh, a brash shout of joy. High in the tree, thirty feet in the air, will be her old friend, the porcupine. Despite the stiff breeze and the leaves coming loose in torrents, the animal’s pose will be casual. The tree will sway, and the porcupine will sway too. When the beam touches it, its pupils will contract. The quills will lift, indicating alarm, arching outward like a dandelion gone to seed.
Lila will step closer, peering through the haze of evening, still grinning. Above her head, the porcupine will shift position. She will watch its claws dig into the wood. Disturbed by the flashlight’s beam, the animal will grab hold of the trunk and begin to climb. It will ascend clumsily yet rapidly up a trellis of branches, the quills undulating and clattering. As falling leaves thicken the air, Lila will stand still, caught in a posture of helpless wonder. Before her eyes, the porcupine will scale the trunk, mounting into the upper branches, moving without fear or hesitation toward the stars.
Mother, Sister, Wife, Daughter
Our father gave each of us a different reason for his departure. He told Katherine that he was taking part in a worldwide sailing race. He told Emilia that he was looking for treasure so our family could become even richer. He told Gracie, the oldest, that a dear friend needed his help on the other side of the ocean.
We knew better than to believe anything he said. Our father was a storyteller, a wishful thinker, a chronic promiser who never followed through. He loved nothing more than spinning a tale with himself at the center, believing in the moment that he was what he pretended to be: a treasure hunter, a rescuer, a good man. He pulled each of us aside, all seven of his daughters, and we listened stone-faced and only nodded. No matter how he dressed it up, he was leaving us.
We were stair-step in age: Gracie nine years old, Rosalind only three, with Carla, Dolores, Leah, Katherine, and Emilia in the middle. We lived in a big house—a mansion, really, though Mother said that word was vulgar—on the California coast. A private stretch of beach. Our own pier. Father moored his yacht there during the summers. He used to take us on day trips to the deep water, all seven of us armored in bulky life jackets, screaming and laughing as the prow sliced boldly through the waves, casting up cold shocks of spray. He taught us to fish, even Katherine, who was a vegetarian. He called us his brave girls, his amazons, the apples of his eye. That was something else he loved: giving out lavish compliments, as bright and insubstantial as fool’s gold.
We watched him sail away. It was early morning, and a brisk, steady wind blew off the ocean. We stood together on the western terrace, high above the water, huddled close for warmth. Rosalind, the youngest, cried. The sun was rising behind the house, throwing shadows across the beach. Father’s yacht cut a sharp wake across the gauzy surface of the sea like a run in one of Mother’s silk stockings. We watched him until he melted into the fog along the horizon, swallowed up by gray.
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People said that there were so many of us daughters because our parents kept trying for a boy. Perhaps this was so. We did not know; we never could get a straight answer from our mother or father about anything. Father would smile and tell us whatever we wanted to hear: that every one of his girls was worth a hundred boys, that you couldn’t have too much of a good thing.
Mother was more difficult. She faltered and trailed off. Her mind did not move in straight lines. “Well, you see . . .” she would say, leaning languidly against the arm of the sofa. “There are many things in this world . . . I suppose . . . Let me say that between a husband and his wife, decisions are sometimes difficult . . .” She would go on this way for a quarter of an hour and communicate nothing.
All of us were built on the same template as our mother: strong and sturdy, with heavy black hair and round faces. Our father did not seem to have given us any of himself—not his slight frame, not his darting eyes, not his Cheshire cat grin. He was an impish figure, dwarfed by our tall, voluptuous mother. The only one who resembled him in any way was Emilia, and then only in manner—she was mischievous like him, a prankster. It was just like our father to withhold his genetic makeup. He was always doing that, keeping back what we most wanted.
After his yacht disappeared from sight, the seven of us gathered in our parents’ room. Mother had taken to her bed. She was a strange mix of opposites: a diaphanous, dithering personality inside the robust body of a farmhand or milkmaid. Hale and pink-cheeked, she languished beneath the covers with a hankie to her nose. The bed could hold all of us, a king-sized canopied behemoth that Father had ordered specially, each of its four posts carved to resemble a sword. We climbed up on the opulent quilt, surrounding our mother like a litter of kittens seeking warmth. Only Gracie, the oldest, elected to stand.
“When will Father be back?” Leah asked.
“Well, you see . . .” Mother began. “He and I have had many talks . . .”
“Will he come home soon?” Carla asked. “He wouldn’t tell us.”
“It isn’t always possible . . . What I mean is that it may be some time before . . .” Mother trailed off, dabbing her eyes with her handkerchief.
“He’s never coming back, is he?” Gracie asked, standing apart.
Rosalind began to cry again. Gracie gathered up her little body and carried her out of the room.
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Father had promised to write or call when he got where he was going. But Father promised lots of things. He once swore to Gracie she’d get a pony, that it was on its way, being shipped cross-country on a special train, coming soon. He said these things for months until she understood that it was never going to happen. He told Leah that he’d give her the moon, but it remained in the sky night after night, unclaimed. All Father really wanted was the generosity of the offering itself. Follow-through did not interest him. Still, it was hard not to believe him when he ignited the full arsenal of his charm. In spite of ourselves, we each craved the white-hot glow of his attention.
There was no way for us to contact him. He was out on the open ocean now, without an address or a phone number. Shortwave radio might have worked if he were near the shore, but he wasn’t; we’d watched him travel beyond such things.
Without Father, the house seemed bigger than ever. Twenty-one bedrooms, fewer than half of them occupied. Two grand, winding staircases at the front entrance and a third in back for the servants. The decor was lovely but lacking in personality. Matching upholstered chairs. Heavy damask curtains. Bland portraits of people we did not know. Ours was new money, and it showed, according to one of Gracie’s former friends who’d turned her nose up on her one and only visit to our house.
Now it was just ourselves and our mother rattling around that vast estate like beads in a rainstick. There were, of course, the butler and the gardener and the chauffeur and the maids and the cook too, but they rarely spoke to us or we to them. Dolores always tried to be friendly, asking after their children and remembering their birthdays, but it did no good. We were their bosses, more or less, and there’s nothing worse than making small talk with a little girl who could get you fired.
It was summer. Father abandoned us in the middle of June, when Gracie, Dolores, Katherine, and Leah were out of school. Carla, Emilia, and Rosalind were too young to have attended anyway. He abandoned us when we had nothing to do but wander the house and notice all the signs of his absence. No surreptitious wink at the dinner table. No quick step on the stairs. No outrageous stories before bedtime.
Leah believed he would come back soon. She spent hours on the western terrace, staring out at the shifting waves until her eyes ached. Carla brought her snacks and sat with her sometimes, less hopeful but unwilling to give up. Gracie said he was gone for good, and the sooner we accepted it, the better. Emilia refused to commit herself either way. She always kept an open mind about everything. She carried a coin in her pocket and tossed it every time someone brought up our father. Heads, he’d be back tomorrow. Tails, never.
Dolores and Katherine suffered nightmares about sea monsters and whirlpools. They often woke up screaming. Our bedrooms were all in the same section of the house, the eastern wing, overlooking the rose garden. Dolores and Katherine would run down the hallway after each bad dream and clamber into bed with Gracie.
Little Rosalind took it a step further—she flatly refused to sleep alone and began each night curled at the foot of Gracie’s bed among the stuffed animals. After a few days, we all followed suit. We dragged our sleeping bags out of a closet and took over Gracie’s floor en masse. We slumbered each night in a mesh of limbs and breath, slipping in and out of one another’s dreams.
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Clara had learned a skipping rhyme at school:
Mother, sister, wife, daughter,
Waiting there beside the water.
All the men set sail at dawn.
How many days will they be gone?
Clara, Katherine, and Emilia were skilled at double Dutch, and they would chant the rhyme in unison, then count each slap of the rope on the floor. Sometimes the numbers went into the hundreds before the skipper’s foot caught and they began again.
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A week after Father left, the chauffeur vanished too. Micky was his name, and the summers were always an idle time for him. Mother and Father kept him on year-round, living in the servants’ quarters, since he was necessary during the academic year, ferrying us to school and ballet and Mandarin and gymnastics and dressage.
We did not notice his absence. To us, he was as much a part of the vehicle that drove us where we needed to go as the steering wheel or the windshield wipers. Close-cropped hair. A thick neck, ropy with muscle. That was all we ever saw of him.
Then the butler informed Mother that Micky’s room was empty. One of Father’s best cars, a black Jaguar, had disappeared too.
The police came. Mother rose from her bed, swathed in a satin dressing gown, and received them in the living room—two men in middle age, both potbellied and slow-moving. Mother shooed us away, which was a useless endeavor in a house as big as ours. There was always somewhere else from which to eavesdrop. We tiptoed around through the drawing room and lined the wall in the corridor.
“A betrayal of this caliber . . .” Mother was saying. “And after everything . . . my husband, you know . . . the past few days have been . . .”
The policemen asked for the chauffeur’s employee records. Mother had no idea where any paperwork could be; Father always took care of such things. Here the butler intervened, and Mother swept down the hallway to her bedroom again.
It was exciting to watch the policemen pacing up and down in the rose garden and circling the fountain, looking for clues. But Emilia overheard them talking as they got back into their car. She reported to the rest of us that the officers did not expect to find Micky. They’d been alerted too late, they said. He and the stolen vehicle had probably left the state by now.
“There’s not much they can do at this point,” Emilia told us.
“But he’s a thief,” Gracie said, outraged. “He stole from us.”
“If Father were here . . .” Leah began. She trailed off, and in that moment she looked just like Mother, head tilted to the side, mouth open.
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Summer brought days of unbroken sunshine and powerful wind, billowing off the water in violent, unpredictable gusts. We spent the breeziest hours indoors, playing hide-and-seek or listening to Gracie read aloud. On calmer mornings, we walked the length of our private beach, gathering driftwood and sea glass for Katherine’s art projects. The surf was too wild for swimming, but we had our own Olympic-sized pool on the leeward side of the house, sheltered from the wind. Little Rosalind wore arm floaties. Gracie was sleek and lithe in the water. Clara and Katherine drifted on inflatable rafts, holding hands to stay close like sea otters slumbering among the kelp beds, paws entwined so they would not be separated.
Father had left us in the past—quite often, actually—but always provided a return date. He would roar off in one of his Jags or Lambos and be gone a week or two. He usually said he was traveling for work, but of course he didn’t work; he didn’t have to.
Even when home, he had been a rare commodity. The estate was large enough that Father could spend days in the office or the blue room or the gazebo without any of us happening upon him. Sometimes he would come charging into the playroom without warning and chase us around, pretending to be a monster as we screamed with glee. Then we wouldn’t see him for a while. He would take his meals in the library, and we caught only hints of his presence—a slammed door, a squeak of shoe on marble.
We hadn’t missed him during his previous trips or his perpetual distancing and cloistering at home. But we missed him now. He’d never sailed away before. The fact that he’d taken the yacht this time, rather than one of his fancy cars—the finality of his wake slicing across the sea to the horizon—left the seven of us bereft.
Dolores took to shadowing the gardener, asking how to deadhead roses and what sort of fertilizer they required. Hamish had been there for as long as we could remember, and we knew he did not like children, or maybe just girls. He had a way of squinting incredulously at us whenever we spoke to him. Dolores persisted, following him around until Gracie pulled her aside and said, “Hamish isn’t Father. You can’t just pick some other man to replace Father.”
Dolores cried in her room all that afternoon but joined us in the evening on the beach, where we each wrote a letter to Father, the little ones dictating theirs to the older ones. Then we lit a fire on the sand and burned our messages, watching them disintegrate and rise on the smoke in a whirl of ash and embers.
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Three weeks after Father left, we found Hamish dead. It was actually Rosalind who found him, but she did not know what she was looking at, a boot lying at a strange angle among the rosebushes. She was only three. She continued playing with her dolls until Katherine came to find her for lunch. Then there was screaming and running and calling the police, and Mother appeared in the living room once more, still in her dressing gown.
She dabbed her eyes with her hankie throughout the interview. This time the officers were a man and a woman. We’d never seen a policewoman before and were dazzled by her air of authority and the casual way she tapped her gun holster.
