“All moping about in black clothes and zany black hair, like creepy old Austrians from some haunted castle. And their music . . .” She laughed and then pulled her hand from his to grind the tears into her cheeks with her palms. “Oh! What the Devil is this all about, David? I don’t understand any of it. And why me?”
He did not turn away, but he did look her over anew from head to toe with a tenderness that one brings to a wounded pet. “What was the music like?”
She tried to smile at him. “Awful. Like it was written and performed by people with the stomach flu. Like listening to a huge grandfather clock flying apart while some maniac wallops it with a cello. And fires. God! They lit fires all the time. Everything was trampled. Everything ruined. Everything broken. Everything burned.”
He looked down at the water. “All this came to you at the dinner table? You were quiet for just a minute or two.”
She didn’t want to lie to him. “I don’t know what more to say, David. I feel fantastic most of the time. But how are we supposed to know how we ought to feel when I don’t get to feel like anybody else but me ever?”
“Deep.” He smirked at her. “Jezz Ooo Wet School.”
“Hick,” she spit. She leapt on him with both fists clenched. But after two solid licks to the side of his hard head, she stopped herself while laughing, then breathed deeply twice. His smile also faded. He was flat on his back. She straddled his waist, arm poised for the next blow. But he raised an open palm to her. With a terrific thrill, she thought that he was going to reach for her breasts, which ached, though they were no bigger than walnuts. She shook as she would at a bluff over the lake, ready to rush free, teeth bared for the plunge into frigid water. How wonderful—this was not acting a part.
“We may be,” he said, “may be too old, Hettienne, to wrassle like we did when we were kiddos.” He did not touch her.
She planted both of her palms alongside his head on the grit of the jetty and let her long hair trail down until it covered his stilled face in a yellow canopy. His eyes changed like coals catching wind in a slumbering fire. Though she did not know what it meant, the look firing those common, toffee-brown Ormond eyes and focused upon her face made a single chord of G ring from the top of her scalp down her spine to her tailbone. “I never,” she had to gather herself, the sky whirling, “I never, ever wanted to hear you say we were too old for anything.”
“Get off me before I throw you in the lake, Cuz.”
- 5 -
James felt alarm as he followed Hettienne back to the house, a hand on her shoulder. Fireworks and rockets still lit the trail from the stone jetty in staccato storms of light, detonations thumping the small of his back. Hettienne was shaking, teeth chattering, and yet the night was muggy. Smoke from the fireworks hung like tentacles, blue-gray in the air, probing the house and at last gathering at the Sac River. Transported by two Morgans and a wagon amid much fanfare that afternoon, the tower was fastened to its raft and bedecked with fireworks. At nightfall, David and John in canoes had towed it to the middle of the lake and waited for the signal to light it. When it succumbed at last to flames in all the whirling of pinwheels and spitting of Roman candles, Hettienne began to scream. And not a childish scream of delight but of the mind out of its body and wild with fear.
James scooped her up and clamped a hand over her mouth. Staggering under her weight, he carried her toward the house until, abruptly, she stopped screaming. Though her eyes were wide, she went limp in his arms.
Mortars thumped behind them, nudging the back of his shirt, but she did not flinch. He set her feet on the earth. “I can walk,” she said in that unnerving, mesmerized voice from yesterday’s dinner.
James had tried to catch her in time to shield the family from upset. Even so, her mother followed. He heard the door to the back ell slam and then Charlotte’s small feet scrabbling like no one else’s in the clan. James caught Charlotte’s arms. Hettienne disappeared upstairs—a door shutting in the vast house. James released one of Charlotte’s wrists and pointed to the parlor. Outside, a rocket boomed and its aftermath crackled, a sound like corn violently, expertly husked. He lit a kitchen match and brought a lamp up to steady the light. Charlotte sat rocking herself, a hand buried in her curly hair hiding her face.
“Sss. Sss. Sss,” he whispered.
“Oh, James. Jesus, Mary, Mother of God!”
Charlotte’s face was streaming. While James had witnessed rare upsets from his sisters, this was quite a lot from a grown woman. But he understood it. “Let her get a rest.”
Charlotte snuffled. “What’s gotten into her? She’s seen a thousand times more fireworks on VJ Day over Lake Michigan.”
“I don’t know for sure,” James said. “But when that tower went up, she cut it all loose there and then. Let’s let her sleep.”
Charlotte glanced around as if the parlor were filling with prying Ormonds and disapproving Sheehys, though the bombardment outside continued full force. “Did her father see? Did John follow you?”
James shrugged and watched her for a bit. “Worry about the child. The rest is dross.”
Charlotte sat up straight and eyed him as if she had just received a good slap.
“Wait with me a few more minutes,” James said. “Then go listen at her door. Make sure she has made it into the bed.”
Charlotte nodded. Her eyes pinched. “You are a lovely man and a good uncle. Do you know that?”
He snorted and handed Charlotte a handkerchief. “I’ll be watching out for her.”
She squeezed it and took three deep breaths. “Has this happened to any of you others? John won’t say a thing about his life here or growing up. It’s like he was raised on a moon of Saturn by spacemen from Little Nemo.”
“Simon sleepwalks,” he said, “but only in the winter, when there are fires in the fireplaces and the moon is waxing.”
In a flurry of curiosity, James had once read several articles from Good Housekeeping and other periodicals when Simon had exhibited this behavior. But James didn’t share that information with her, thinking that all those magazines, with their lists and warm and fuzzy paintings and reassurances, seemed a bit saccharine. Especially in that the magazine pieces insisted that sleepwalkers merely did in autonomic fashion many of the same things they did in waking life: cooking, driving tractors and motorcars, setting tables, waiting for streetcars, nothing like screaming bloody murder. “Ten Tips for Waking Sleepwalkers” he recalled in Home Chat, which in the same issue also carried a drawing of a sanguine suburbanite piloting a saucer home. “Flying Saucers for Everybody!” was the sage prediction.
Charlotte worked on her cheeks and nose with the handkerchief. “She sleepwalks,” Charlotte said. “But this zany talking and the rhymes. And that look! Like she’s been hit in the head with a stick of firewood. Any of that, James?” She finished and folded the hankie. “Wait, Helen rhymes for no good reason.” When he did not react to this, she snorted. “Helen is nuts.”
He took the hankie from her as if to protect it from any more rough abuse. “Despite what Simon and your John may think of this noble family . . . strangely and wonderfully made is in fact common to all humanity.” He watched her absorb this. “You and I need to steady up and help her through. And if it keeps on, talk with one of them fine doctors in
