Anything Is Possible(51)
“Jesus,” said Dr. Small, who was backing away from her. “You’re a whackjob.” He bumped into a chair, and seemed almost ready to fall. He straightened himself and said, pointing a finger, shaking it at her, “You shouldn’t be dealing with the public, good Christ.” He walked into the living room, then headed up the stairs. “I’m surprised no one’s reported you, though I suspect they have. I’ll go online myself, by God.”
Dottie cleared the dishes. Calmness had come to her quickly and quietly. No one had ever lodged a complaint against her. Nor would Dr. Small, who most likely could barely use the Internet; his materials, she remembered, had been in a binder his first morning at the breakfast table.
Dottie waited until she heard the Smalls descending the stairs. Then she went and held the front door open for them; she did not say “Fly safely,” because she did not care if they flew right into the sea, but when she saw Shelly’s red nose, the drop of fluid hanging from its tip, Dottie felt momentarily sad. But Dr. Small said, as he pushed past Dottie with his suitcase, “What a goddamn whackjob, Jesus Christ,” and then Dottie felt the wonderful calmness come to her again. She said politely, “Goodbye now,” and closed the door behind them.
Then she went and sat behind her desk. The house was absolutely silent. In a few minutes she saw the Smalls’ rental car drive from the driveway, and then she took from the far back of her top drawer the slip of paper with the lovely man’s name on it: Charlie Macauley. Charlie Macauley of the Unspeakable Pain. Dottie kissed two fingers and pressed them to his signature.
Snow-Blind
Back then the road they lived on was a dirt road and they lived at the end of it, about a mile from Route 4. This was in the north, in potato country, and back when the Appleby children were small, the winters were icy and snow-filled and there were months when the road seemed impassably narrow. Weather was different then, like a family member you couldn’t avoid. You took it without thinking much. Elgin Appleby attached a sturdy snowplow to his sturdiest tractor, and he was usually able to clear the way enough to get the kids to school. Elgin had grown up in farm country and he knew about weather and he knew about potatoes and he knew who in the county sold their bags with hidden rocks for weight. He was a closed book of a man, he inhabited himself with economy, but his family understood that he loathed dishonesty in any form. He did have surprising and sudden moments of liveliness. For example, he could imitate perfectly old Miss Lurvy, who ran the Historical Society’s tiny museum—“The first flush toilet in Aroostook County,” he would say, heaving back his narrow shoulders as though he had a large bosom, “belonged to a judge who was known to beat his wife quite regularly.” Or he might pretend to be a tramp looking for food, holding out his hand, his blue eyes beseeching, and his children would laugh themselves sick, until his wife, Sylvia, got them calmed down. On winter mornings he let the car warm up in the driveway as he scraped the ice from its windows, exhaust billowing about him until the kids tumbled down the salt-dappled snow on the steps. There were three other kids on the road, the two boys in the Daigle family and their sister, Charlene, who was close to the age of the youngest Appleby child, a strange little girl named Annie.
Annie was skinny and lively and so prone to talkativeness that her mother was not altogether sorry when the child spent hours by herself in the woods playing with sticks or making angels in the snow. Annie was the only Appleby child to inherit the Acadian olive skin tone and dark hair from her mother and grandmother, and the sight of her red hat and dark head coming across the snowfields was as common as seeing a nuthatch at the birdfeeder. One morning when Annie was five and going to kindergarten she told the car full of children—her brother and sister and the Daigle boys and Charlene—that God spoke to her when she was outside in the woods. Her sister said, “You’re so stupid, why don’t you shut up.” Annie bounced on the seat beside her father and she said, “He does, though! God talks to me.” Her sister asked how did he do that, and Annie answered, “He puts thoughts in my head.” Annie looked up at her father then, and saw something in his eyes as he turned to look at her that stayed with her always, something that did not seem like her father, not yet, something that seemed not good. “You all get out,” he said when he pulled up in front of the school. “I have to speak to Annie.” When the car doors had slammed shut he said to his daughter, “What is it you saw in the woods?”
She thought about this. “I saw the trees and chickadees.”
Her father stayed silent a long time, gazing over the top of the steering wheel. Annie had never been scared of her father the way Charlene was scared of hers. And Annie wasn’t scared of her mother, who was the cozier parent but not the more important one. “Go on now.” Her father nodded at her, and she pushed herself across the seat, her snow pants squeaking, and he leaned and got the door, saying “Watch your fingers” before he pulled it shut.
That was the year Jamie did not like his teacher. “He makes me sick,” Jamie said, throwing his boots into the mudroom. Like his father, Jamie was not a talker, and Sylvia, watching this, had a quick flush come to her face.
“Is Mr. Potter mean to you?”
“No.”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know.”
Jamie was in the fourth grade, and Sylvia loved him more than she loved her daughters; it was that he caused an almost unbearable sweetness to spread through her. That he should suffer anything was intolerable. She loved Annie gently because the child was so strange and harmless. The middle child, Cindy, Sylvia loved with a mild generosity. Cindy was the dullest of the three and probably the most like her mother.