One day I heard Arden tell Billie that Vera was twelve. I stared at him, feeling very strange. He knew more about Vera than I did. “Did she tell you that?” I asked.
“Gosh, no,” he laughed. “Vera’s got nutty ideas about telling her age. But she is listed on the school register, and I happen to know she’s twelve.” He gave me a shy smile. “Are you trying to tell me you don’t know your own sister’s correct age?”
Quickly I covered. “Of course I do. She says people have long memories, so she’s going to pass around so many lies that no one will ever know years from now just what age she was this summer.”
Despite Vera, I did have fun that summer. It seemed to me that Billie gave me three times the warmth she gave Vera, and as shameful as it seemed, she seemed more concerned about my welfare than my own mother did. But Momma wasn’t feeling well, and I could forgive her. Dark circles appeared beneath her eyes. She walked with her hand supporting her back. She stopped playing the piano and even stopped reading her paperback romances. Every day she’d fall asleep on the purple chaise with the book on her swollen breasts. I loved her so much I’d stand and watch her sleeping, so afraid for her and the little baby that wasn’t a boy or a girl. Vera was telling me all the time it was going to be a “neutered” baby of no sex, like a doll. “Nothing between its legs,” she’d laugh. “That does happen sometimes. It’s a fact. One of the bizarre things that nature can do. It’s written about in medical books.”
Monthly cramps that kept Vera in bed gave me my best times to run to Arden and Billie. Arden and I ate picnic lunches under the trees, spread on red and white checkered gingham tablecloths. I never felt afraid of him. When finally he did touch me, it was to feel my hair. I didn’t mind that.
“When is your birthday?” he asked one day while I was sprawled on my back, staring up through the tree above, trying to see the clouds and make them into sailing ships. “September the ninth,” I answered unhappily. “I had an older sister who died exactly nine years before I was born. She had my very same name.”
Until I’d said this, Arden had been busy hammering a dent out of some tiny wheel he meant to use on something. He stopped hammering and stared at me in a strange way. “An older sister? With your same name?”
“Yes. She was found dead in the woods, under a golden raintree, and because of that, I’m never supposed to come here.”
“But you are here,” he said in a strange voice. “How do you dare to come?”
I smiled. “I’d dare anything to visit Billie.”
“To visit my mom? Why, that’s very sweet, but what about me?”
That’s when I turned on my side so he couldn’t see my face. “Oh, I guess I can put up with you.”
I turned to peek at him, and he was just sitting there cross-legged in his white shorts, his chest bare and glistening where sunlight hit it. “Well,” he said, picking up the hammer and beginning to beat on that little wheel again, “I guess that tells me you’ve got a lot of growing up to do—or else it tells me you’re quite a lot like your sister after all.”
“She’s not my sister, Arden, but my cousin. My parents only pretend she’s theirs to save my aunt from the shame. My aunt went away and came back almost two years later. Vera was only one year old. My aunt was so sure the father of Vera would take one look at his baby and fall in love with her. It didn’t happen that way. While my aunt was gone, he married someone else.”
Arden didn’t say one word. He just smiled to let me know he didn’t care who Vera was.
Arden loved his mother more than I thought boys ever could. When she called him, he’d jump up to fly into the house. He’d hang up her wash and take it down. He carried out the garbage cans, something my papa would never do. Arden had strong principles about honesty, loyalty, about helping those who needed it, about devotion and dedication to duty, and he had something else he didn’t talk about, but I
noticed it anyway. He had an aesthetic eye that seemed to appreciate beauty more than most people did. He’d stop in the woods and work for hours to dig up a bit of quartz that looked like a huge pink diamond. “I’m going to have this made into a pendant for the girl I marry someday. I just don’t know what form it ought to take. What do you think, Audrina?”
I felt envious of that girl he’d marry one day even as I took the quartz and turned it over. It had many strange convolutions, but in the center were colors so bright and clear it resembled a rose. “Why not a rose? Just the blossom full and open, not a bud.”
“A rose blossom it will be, then,” he said, tucking the quartz into his pocket. “Someday when I’m rich, I’m going to give the girl I love everything she’s ever dreamed of wanting, and I’m going to do that for my mom, too.” A shadow passed over his face. “The only thing is, money can’t buy what my mom wants most.”
“What’s that? If that’s not too personal to ask.”
“It’s personal, very personal.” He grew silent, but that was all right. We could go for hours without speaking and still we managed to feel comfortable with each other. I lay on the grass watching him repair his bicycle, glancing at his mother in the window as she blended some mixture for a cake, and I thought this was the way real families were supposed to live, without shouting, arguing, fighting all the time. Shadows in the house put shadows in the mind. Out here under the sky and trees the shadows were only temporary. Whitefern was permanently, densely shadowed.
“Audrina,” Arden said suddenly, still fiddling with the spokes of his bike, “what do you really think of me?”
I liked him more than I wanted to admit, but in no way did I want to tell him that. Why would a boy of twelve want to waste his time on a girl of seven? Surely Vera must appeal to him more. But I didn’t want to ask this, either. “You are my first friend, Arden, and I guess I am very grateful you bother with me at all.”
His eyes met mine briefly, and I saw something glistening in them like tears—why would he cry because I said that? “I’m going to have to tell you something one day, and you’re not going to like me after I do.”
“Don’t ever tell me if that’s what it will do. For I don’t want to stop liking you, Arden.”
He turned away then. What did he have to tell me that would make me dislike him? Did Arden too have a secret, just like everybody else?
One early morning I ran to meet Arden so he could teach me how to catch fish and bait the hook with live worms. Vera trailed along behind, though I’d tried to slip out unseen. I didn’t like spearing the worms on the hook, so soon Arden was pulling out his kit of fancy flies and trying to show me how to cast from shore. He stood on a riverbank higher than most to demonstrate the right technique. Seated beside me, Vera leaned to whisper about Arden in his red swimming trunks, giggling and pointing to where all the little babies would come from.
“I don’t believe one word of what you say,” I whispered back, turning red and knowing perfectly well that what she said was true. Why did she make everything about boys seem so vulgar and gross? As much as I disliked Vera, she did have a way of digging up all the facts no one else wanted to talk about. I figured her interest in medical books was teaching her more about life than I’d ever find out on my own.
“I’ll bet you and Arden have already played show and tell.”
Laughing more, she explained what she meant. I slapped at her for even thinking we’d do that. “I hate you sometimes, Vera!”