Killer, Come Back to Me

That was the day I started to hate him.

Parasols have come and gone in a thousand summer colors, whole flights of butterfly fans have blown away on August winds, the pavilion has burned and been built again in the selfsame size and shape, the lake has dried like a plum in its basin, and my hatred, like these things, came and went, grew very large, stopped still for love, returned, then diminished with the years.

I remember when he was seven, them driving by in their horse carriage, his hair long, brushing his poutish, shrugging shoulders. They were holding hands and she was saying, “If you’re very good this summer, next year we’ll go to London. Or the year after that, at the latest.”

And my watching their faces, comparing their eyes, their ears, their mouths, so when he came in for a soda pop one noon that summer I walked straight up to him and cried, “She’s not your mother!”

“What!” He looked around in panic, as if she might be near.

“She’s not your aunt or your grandma, either!” I cried. “She’s a witch that stole you when you were a baby. You don’t know who your mama is or your pa. You don’t look anything like her. She’s holding you for a million ransom which comes due when you’re twenty-one from some duke or king!”

“Don’t say that!” he shouted, jumping up.

“Why not?” I said angrily. “Why do you come around here? You can’t play this, can’t play that, can’t do nothing, what good are you? She says, she does. I know her! She hangs upside down from the ceiling in her black clothes in her bedroom at midnight!”

“Don’t say that!” His face was frightened and pale.

“Why not say it?”

“Because,” he bleated, “it’s true.”

And he was out the door and running.

I didn’t see him again until the next summer. And then only once, briefly, when I took some clean linen down to their cottage.

The summer when we were both twelve was the summer that for a time I didn’t hate him.

He called my name outside the pavilion screen door and when I looked out he said, very quietly, “Anna Marie, when I am twenty and you are twenty, I’m going to marry you.”

“Who’s going to let you?” I asked.

“I’m going to let you,” he said. “You just remember, Anna Marie. You wait for me. Promise?”

I could only nod. “But what about—”

“She’ll be dead by then,” he said, very gravely. “She’s old. She’s old.”

And then he turned and went away.

The next summer they did not come to the resort at all. I heard she was sick. I prayed every night that she would die.

But two years later they were back, and the year after the year after that until Roger was nineteen and I was nineteen, and then at last we had reached and touched twenty, and for one of the few times in all the years, they came into the pavilion together, she in her wheelchair now, deeper in her furs than ever before, her face a gathering of white dust and folded parchment.

She eyed me as I set her ice cream sundae down before her, and eyed Roger as he said, “Mother, I want you to meet—”

“I do not meet girls who wait on public tables,” she said. “I acknowledge they exist, work, and are paid. But I immediately forget their names.”

She touched and nibbled her ice cream, touched and nibbled her ice cream, while Roger sat not touching his at all.

They left a day earlier than usual that year. I saw Roger as he paid the bill, in the hotel lobby. He shook my hand to say goodbye and I could not help but say, “You’ve forgotten.”

He took a half step back, then turned around, patting his coat pockets.

“Luggage, bills paid, wallet, no, I seem to have everything,” he said.

“A long time ago,” I said, “you made a promise.”

He was silent.