When We Were Animals(79)

*



I didn’t wear the dragonfly to the prom. That was my statement. I wore a party dress that was a few years old but still fit decently, and I wore the Christmas locket my father had given me—the one with pictures of him and my mother in it. My father and I never exchanged words about it. I saw him glance once at my neck, and that was enough. He distracted himself by taking pictures of me in my dress in front of the living room bookshelves.

If Miss Simons noticed I wasn’t wearing the dragonfly, she didn’t let it show even a little bit. In fact she stood with me before the mirror in my bathroom and helped me hide with makeup, as much as possible, the sewn-up part of my face. When she was done, I looked like a different Lumen entirely—some future version of Lumen, maybe, the woman I might become.

We both looked at my reflection in the mirror. I thought she was going to tell me how pretty I looked, but instead what she said was, “You’re tough, Lumen. Tougher than anyone I know. Don’t let them tell you otherwise.”

After all, I realized, she wasn’t a bad woman. I wanted to give her something in return.

“Thank you,” I said.

“You’re welcome.”

“I mean,” I said, “for everything. For the necklace.”

She didn’t say anything, but she smiled at me in the mirror, a true smile, and she knew.

My father didn’t ask if someone was taking me to the dance, because he would not pry so far into my personal life—and the answer would only lead to discomfort whether it was yes or no. Instead he simply asked if I needed a ride to the school, and I told him yes.

When he pulled up in front of the school, I could tell there was something on his mind, so I didn’t get out of the car immediately. I waited, and together we watched people arrive, walking through the double doors of the big building, linked arm in arm in their finery.

“Margot and I are going to a dinner party tonight,” he said.

“Okay.”

“Friends of hers.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll be home by midnight. You’ll—you’ll be home by then?”

It occurred me that we were talking about a curfew. We hadn’t had a conversation about a curfew in years—there had been no need for one. Where was I going to go? I had been a good girl, impervious to trouble. But now things were different.

“I mean,” he went on, “there’s no moon tonight.”

I was embarrassed. We both were. I looked down at my hands.

“I’ll be home.”

“You’ll be home,” he said. He did not look at me but nodded to himself, as though confirming a truth that he was ashamed to have questioned in the first place.

“I promise.”

I lingered. Suddenly I didn’t want to be away from him. We waited and watched the others arrive. He shifted in his seat. I could smell his cologne. I can smell it still.

“Did I ever tell you,” he said, a thin smile forming in his beard, “how the coal hole got its name?”

What he referred to was a hollowed space in the wall of our house, under one of the eaves. When the house was originally built, a hidden panel was installed in the wall so that the space could be used for storage. When I was a little girl, I liked hiding myself away in there. I felt safe in that cramped triangle of space, which seemed like it fit me but no other human on earth. When my father saw I liked it, he cleared out the boxes of old photographs he had stored in there and set it up as a hiding place for me, with a light and a tiny bookshelf and an assortment of throw pillows I could arrange however I liked. I would stay in there for hours at a time, and he would bring me crackers and cheese. We called it the coal hole, and it had never occurred to me to wonder why.

“It’s from Silas Marner,” he said.

“I never read it,” I said.

“I know. It’s about a grumpy old man who has to raise a little girl all on his own. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. He doesn’t know the first thing about children. He’s all on his own.”

My father paused. He looked away from me and was quiet for a while. I wished I could see his eyes, but I was also afraid of what I’d find in them.

“Anyway,” he went on, taking a deep breath, “when she starts to act out, he doesn’t know what to do. So to punish her, he shuts her in the coal hole of his house all by herself. Except here’s the thing. This girl, she’s not like other children. She’s got a spirit in her—brilliant, mischievous. And it turns out she likes the coal hole. It’s no punishment at all to her. Once she discovers it, she climbs in there all the time.”

“So…” I said, though there was a catch in my throat. “So what does Silas Marner do?”

My father smiled.

“What else is there to do with a girl like that?” he said. “He lets her do what she wants. And he sits back and watches her grow up. And he is amazed.”

I leaned over and embraced him, my head against his chest, and I felt small and safe with him as I have never felt with anyone else in my life. He kissed the top of my head and stroked my hair.

“But sometimes a father worries,” he said.

“I know,” I said, and I did not like to think of what I was doing to him by becoming the person I was.

“I know,” I said again. “I’ll be there when you get home. I promise.”