The Excellent Lombards(39)

Had I been looking at those precious things for a long time? It didn’t seem like it, but when the footsteps sounded on the back stairs I snapped to attention. Where was I? May Hill’s bedroom, that’s where. I instantly curled up by the radiator, very tightly, behind a box column, listening to the flat quick footfall coming closer, closer. It could be none other than May Hill herself. The person, she, stopped. The door had been left open, how stupid could I have been! She must have been thinking about that unusual fact before she took the simple action of closing it. There, it was shut. She then went farther down the hall to the living room. She was possibly looking for something and maybe she found it or maybe she didn’t. I thought I might throw up. After a while she went down the front stairs and from what I could hear she was out the door to her work again.

My inner ears seemed to have taken up my entire head—that’s how hard I’d been listening. Time to reverse my steps and get out of the manor house, steam away home. I went to the door. I turned the knob this way and I turned it that way. It didn’t, it wouldn’t open. I rattled it, I looked through the keyhole, and I pulled at it with all my strength. No, I kept telling myself. I’m not locked in. I hurried back to the window to see if my father was still driving the tractor along the rows. He was gone, no hope of holding up a flag, or making a sign that said SAVE ME.

Amanda had finished her horn practicing; all was quiet downstairs. I went into May Hill’s private bathroom, the sink with a crusted rust stain from faucet to drain, and the small tub also rusty, where she had to fold up her tall thick self to get clean although a person didn’t imagine her removing her clothes. I was trapped in that bathroom and in the bedroom, too, the boxes closing in, the bed probably booby-trapped in some way. The water from the faucet poisoned. I knew I mustn’t cry and I mustn’t be sick. May Hill had smiled at the story of Elizabeth Morrow Lombard and the scalping of the Indian because she, herself, was a scalper—I had to buckle over. No, but think, think! If I could jump up and down to rouse Amanda and Adam below. If the storm windows weren’t sealing in the regular windows I could thrust them open and climb out on the roof or at least call and call. Or I could leap to the ground, risking life and limb.

In the end all I could do was stick my fingers under the doorjamb, like a cat when he’s playing, his paws blindly fishing for whatever he thinks is on the other side. Then I did start to cry, wishing so hard that Mrs. Kraselnik would come and get me, and being furious all over again that William was spending so much of his vacation with Bert Plumly. My predicament was his fault. It soon would grow dark and May Hill would enter and get into bed. That thought alone was passing strange. Or else she knew I was in the room and she would leave me to my punishment, she’d lock me up, day after day, choosing another chamber for herself, plenty of other beds for rest.

I curled up by the radiator again and I couldn’t help it, I whimpered. I lay there drawing circles in the dust. And some squares. Maybe after a long time for just a minute despite my fear I fell asleep because when I woke up my worry had come true and it was getting dark. Down the hall I heard the clatter of dishes. My head hurt. I was stiff and sore and maybe bruised. Someone was preparing supper. I was coming to understand that probably, and finally, there was nothing to do but give myself up. Even if I didn’t want to, even if facing that prospect scared me half to death. And so, in order to do that, I went to the door and I began to knock, softly at first but steadily. May Hill was moving pots around and probably chopping vegetables, or sharpening her knife—sharpening her knife. And yet I must knock. I knocked harder. I knocked for what felt like an hour, changing knuckles every so often.

When she opened up I was still knocking, knocking at the air without the door. I stopped the little song I was bravely singing. It’s probably a fact that she was stunned by the appearance of Mary Frances Lombard in her bedroom, that she’d been expecting a bat to be flying around or a rodent on the prowl. That’s probably why she didn’t say anything. She’d been cooking dinner for Philip, a boy about to come in after a long day’s work for his good supper. From the heap of ages she’d dug up an apron with rickrack, which under different circumstances would have been humorous on her manly frame. She looked at me. I looked at her and then I ducked. I ran past her down the hall, yanked open the gate, practically tumbled down the back stairs into Dolly’s kitchen, and another tumble down the basement stairs, bumping into Philip at the bottom—“Whoa, girl,” he said, as if I were a horse. He held me, thinking he was doing yet another rescue.

I slapped at him, slap, slap and ran away out the door, and I didn’t stop until I was inside our door in Velta, in our kitchen.

“Where were you?” William said.

My mother was at the sink washing lettuce that she herself had grown in a cold frame, her pride. My father was sitting on a bench taking off his work boots. William had Butterhead, the cat who loved him best, in his arms. I was home. Somehow I had gone far away and somehow I’d returned.

“Marlene,” my father said.

“Did you have a nice time?” my mother wondered.

William narrowed his eyes in that expert way of his. “Are you wearing lipstick?”

I slapped at my mouth.

“Marlene?” my father asked. “Are you all right?”

“What happened to you?” my mother said, coming from the sink.