Whitefern (Audrina 2)

Slowly, I inched up behind her and looked at her picture.

I immediately felt a cold chill.

She had made a reasonably realistic likeness of the woods between the cemetery and Whitefern, and she had done a good job of creating an overlay of fog, but coming out of it was the ghostlike figure of Papa.

And the way she had drawn his face made him look like he was desperate either to get away from something or to get to something, get back to Whitefern . . . perhaps to save us all.

A Flood of Emotions

There were many times before this when I thought I could drown in my own sorrow. Often after my mother’s death, I had felt lost and alone in our big house. Shadows grew darker and drowned out the kaleidoscope of color our stained-glass windows would normally cast over the patterned rugs and furniture. My chameleon-colored hair, which Papa called a hat of rainbows, was dull and lifeless.

When I was younger, Whitefern was a house echoing with wishes. I wished I could go to school. I wished I had friends and could go to sleepovers. I envied the freedom other girls my age enjoyed. I read about them in books. I even wished the first Audrina was alive and well, an older sister with whom I could spend hours and hours talking, taking walks, and learning how to flirt with boys.

After Momma died, clocks were haunting with their eternal ticking, amplified by the silence around the piano Momma had once played so beautifully. Papa drifted in and out of sadness, anger, and guilt. He went from room to room mumbling to himself. Sometimes, when he stepped out of a shadow, it looked like it had stuck to his face no matter how bright the light.

Aunt Ellsbeth wasn’t a great help to my father or me. Later, as talk about Sylvia increased, Aunt Ellsbeth constantly warned me about my father, telling me that now that my mother was gone, despite his permitting me to go to school, he would find ways to chain me to him and Whitefern forever. The most important way he would do that, she explained, was to make me Sylvia’s caretaker for the rest of Sylvia’s life.

“When she’s brought home, that’s what you’ll be,” she whispered, her eyes on fire with warning. “She’ll be the chain that binds you forever to Whitefern and your selfish father.”

Her warnings tempered my excitement over having a little sister finally coming home after almost two years of special care. In time, I realized her warnings about Papa came from her disappointment at his choosing my mother over her. There was still bitterness in her, a bitterness her daughter, Vera, would inherit, although many times I thought Vera didn’t need to inherit bitterness from anyone. She was capable of being vicious and mean all by herself, first to me and then especially when it involved little Sylvia.

Both my aunt and Vera mocked her when she was first brought home to us. They seemed to take joy in pointing out her disadvantages and slow development. I vowed to myself and to Sylvia that I would work with her and make her as normal as I could. It was a promise I made to my dead mother, too, so that instead of feeling put upon as Aunt Ellsbeth predicted I’d be, I felt responsibility and love. Maybe Aunt Ellsbeth was right to tell me Papa took advantage of that, but I wasn’t about to stop caring for my little sister, either to spite Papa or to satisfy Aunt Ellsbeth.

I suppose I should have realized earlier that Sylvia would be attracted to art. When she was just three, I gave her my prisms, and she loved toying with the colors she could create. No one thought she could feel deeply about anything, but I began to realize that there was a real person in that troubled body struggling to have its mind keep up with it as it grew. Now I understood that she wasn’t interested in art just because of her fascination with colors and shapes. Art was far more to her than a way to pass the time and amuse herself. She needed it. It was her way of talking to others, of expressing the deeper feelings inside her. Deaf mutes had sign language; Sylvia had art.

I wasn’t any sort of an expert about it, but I knew that an art teacher would help her technically and show her how to explore more with the brushes and colors. He or she wouldn’t change or add to what Sylvia wanted to say. That came from a place inside her, words and feelings bottled up, trapped by her shyness and inability to say outright what she felt. But if her art teacher improved her techniques, it would help those who looked at her pictures to realize what she was saying, what she was depicting and expressing, and of course, that would make her happier. She would be able to speak to more people and, in a small and different way, leave the confines of Whitefern.

Perhaps most important, art was her way of escaping from herself, because in a real sense, her undeveloped mind had become her prison. All these thoughts crossed my mind as I studied her new picture. Without instruction, she had somehow achieved more, used her colors more effectively, and drawn her outlines of people and animals more clearly. I supposed there was something to the idea that people could develop their talent naturally. Perhaps she could do much more with formal instruction, I concluded.

“Is that Papa?” I asked, studying the picture and pointing to the image of him. “Coming home?”

She turned slowly and looked at me like someone emerging from the darkness. It was as if she had been in a trance while she had worked. “Papa? Papa is home,” she said, nodding.

It didn’t surprise me to see her come up with this idea. Whitefern certainly had its ghosts. Relatives like Aunt Mercy Marie were referred to so often it was easy to feel they had just passed through a room. Sometimes, when I came upon Papa sitting in his favorite chair and looking like he was dreaming with his eyes open, he would glance at me and say, “You never leave Whitefern. Whitefern is part of you. Even after you die, you will be here.”

I was sure he had said similar things to Sylvia, who might not understand

what they meant at first, but with repetition, the idea might have taken hold. Even though these past days she looked like she was waiting for Papa or imagining him still alive, I didn’t realize how deeply she believed it. Maybe Papa had specifically assured her that he would always be with her. Whatever he had told her privately he made seem like a secret. I was sure of that. So it didn’t surprise me at all that the picture she was doing represented her hope. Papa would not be lost to us, to her. As long as she talked about him, painted him, and looked for him, he would never be gone.

Why discourage that? I thought. What harm did it really do to anyone, even to her? It reminded me of the play Harvey, the story of a man who imagined he saw a giant rabbit that was his companion and kept him happy. His sister had come to realize that taking away his imaginary friend would only make him miserable.

Besides, maybe Harvey was really there. What harm was there in believing in magic, believing in something beyond the often dull reality that our monotonous daily lives could cast over us like a net to keep us from the joy of our imaginations?

Yes, maybe Papa really was watching over us, watching over Sylvia especially. His soul, so stained with guilt for many reasons, had to cleanse itself or God would send him to hell. He had to help us in order to save himself. I could believe this. I wouldn’t tell Arden my idea, of course, but I could believe it.

“It’s time to go to sleep, Sylvia. You can finish working on your picture in the morning, after breakfast.”

She nodded, stared at her work for a few moments as if she was looking through a window to be sure Papa was still there and wouldn’t be gone in the morning, and then put away her pencils, brushes, and paints neatly in the cabinet Papa had bought for them. She followed me to her room. I watched her prepare for bed. She was quieter than usual. I sensed something different about her. She washed her face and brushed her teeth and then fixed her hair the way I had taught her, but every once in a while, I caught her glancing at herself in the mirror and smiling like someone who knew an important secret.

“Do you think you will be able to sleep alone tonight, Sylvia?”

“Yes, Audrina.”

“Will you cry out in the middle of the night or go walking around the house?”

“No,” she said.

“You won’t go outside without me, will you?”