The Marsh King's Daughter(55)

Outside on the porch my mother stomped the snow from her boots. I started to snatch the magazine off the table, then stopped. It didn’t matter if my mother saw me looking at it. I wasn’t doing anything wrong.

“What are you doing?” she cried as she shut the door behind her and shook the snow out of her hair. “You know better than to light the lamp before Jacob gets home.” She hung her coat on the hook by the door and hurried across the room to turn off the lamp, then stopped when she saw the magazine. “Where did you get that? What are you doing with it? That’s mine. Give it to me.”

She reached for the magazine. I slapped her hand away and jumped to my feet and put my hand on my knife. That this magazine belonged to my mother was absurd. My mother had no possessions.

She took a step back and held up her hands. “Please, Helena. Give it to me. If you do, I’ll let you look at it whenever you like.”

As if she could stop me. I waved my knife toward her chair. “Sit.”

My mother sat. I sat down across from her. I laid my knife on the table and put the magazine between us. “What is this? Where did it come from?”

“Can I touch it?”

I nodded. She pulled the magazine toward her and slowly turned the pages. She stopped at a picture of a dark-haired, dark-eyed boy. “Neil Patrick Harris.” She sighed. “I had such a crush on him when I was your age. You have no idea. I still think he’s handsome. Doogie Howser was my favorite TV show. I also loved Full House and Saved by the Bell.”

I didn’t like that my mother knew things I didn’t. I had no idea what she was talking about, who these people were, why my mother acted like she knew them. Why she seemed to care about the boys and girls in this magazine as much as I cared about Cousteau and Calypso.

“Please don’t tell Jacob,” she said. “You know what he’ll do if he finds this.”

I knew exactly what my father would do with this magazine if he knew about it—especially if he thought the magazine was important to her. There was a reason I kept my favorite Geographics under my bed. I promised—not because I wanted to protect my mother from my father, but because I wasn’t done looking at the magazine yet.

My mother flipped through the pages a second time, then turned the magazine around and pushed it toward me. “Look. See this pink sweater? I used to have a sweater just like this. I wore it so much, my mother used to say I would have slept in it if she’d let me. And this one.” She turned back to the cover. “My mother was going to buy a sweater like this one for me when we went shopping for school clothes.”

It was hard to imagine my mother as a girl like the ones in this magazine, wearing these clothes, going shopping, going to school. “Where did you get this?” I asked again, because my mother still hadn’t answered my question.

“It’s . . . a long story.” She pressed her lips together like she did when my father asked her a question she didn’t want to answer, like why she let the fire go out, or why his favorite shirt was still dirty even though she claimed she’d washed it, or why she hadn’t fixed the holes in his socks or brought in more water or firewood, or when was she going to learn how to make a decent biscuit.

“Then you’d better get started.” I locked eyes with her the way my father did, letting her know I wasn’t going to take silence for an answer. This was going to be interesting. My mother never told stories.

She looked away and bit her lip. At last she sighed. “I was sixteen when your father told me I was going to have a baby,” she began. “Your father wanted me to make the diapers and baby clothes you’d need out of the curtains and blankets we had at the cabin. But I didn’t know how to sew.” She smiled to herself like her not knowing how to sew was funny. Or like she was making this story up.

“I managed to cut a blanket into diapers using one of his knives, but there was no way I could make clothes for you without scissors or sewing needles or thread. And we still needed diaper pins to get the diapers to stay on you. Your father stormed off when I told him—you know how he gets. He was gone a long time. When he came back, he said we were going shopping. This was the first time I’d left the marsh since . . . since he’d brought me here, so I was very excited. We went to a big store called Kmart and got everything you’d need. While we were in the checkout line, I saw this magazine. I knew your father would never let me have it, so when he wasn’t looking, I rolled it up and hid it under my shirt. When we got back to the cabin, I hid it in the closet while he was unloading the things we bought. It’s been there ever since.”

My mother shook her head like she couldn’t believe she was ever that brave. If it wasn’t for the magazine on the table between us, I wouldn’t have believed it, either. I pictured her going to the closet whenever my father and I were away, taking the magazine from its hiding place, carrying it to the kitchen table or outside to the back porch if it was a sunny day, reading the stories and looking at the pictures when she was supposed to be cooking and cleaning. It was hard to believe she had been doing this since before I was born and my father had never caught her. That this magazine was the same age as me.

An idea began to form. I looked at the date on the magazine’s cover. If my mother took this magazine when she was pregnant with me and I was almost twelve, then this magazine was also almost twelve. This meant that the girl on the cover wasn’t a girl at all—she was a grown woman like my mother. So were the rest of the children.