Whitefern (Audrina 2)

Arden had turned to look at me, and when he did, he had my father’s face.

My father was looking at me, and he was angry that I was disturbing Sylvia in the rocking chair. His face had been full of such fury that I gasped.

“Papa?”

My legs had turned to water and floated away as I sank into the cool darkness beneath me.

But when I opened my eyes again, I was back in my bed. The morning light rushed in around me, and the bedroom exploded in a kaleidoscope of colors from the stained-glass windows, the same colors that had turned Momma’s and my hair into chameleon hair because it was sometimes flaxen blond with gold. There were strands of auburn, bright red, chestnut brown, and copper. And sometimes in a passing ray of sunshine, our hair looked white. Papa had loved the strange prism-like color of our hair. He loved the way the light played on everything in Whitefern. I was seeing it all this morning the way Papa would see it. It was as if time had not passed and I was a little girl again.

I turned onto my back and looked up at the ceiling. What exactly had happened last night? When did I pass out? Why did Arden leave me there? And the dream, the dream . . .

When I looked at the clock, I was shocked to see that it was nearly one in the afternoon. I had never slept this long.

“Sylvia?” I called. I listened but heard nothing. Of course, Arden would have gotten up, dressed, and been long gone.

I groaned as I got up again, scrubbed my cheeks with my palms, and went into the bathroom. The face I saw in the mirror looked like it belonged to Rip Van Winkle, the face of someone who had slept for years. There were spidery creases in my cheeks, and my hair was like a garden of weeds growing in all directions. My eyes were gray and lifeless.

There was no point in standing there and waiting for the memory of the night before to return. I threw off my nightgown and stepped into the shower, deliberating whether to turn on cold water to jerk every sleeping muscle in my body awake. When I got back out, I felt more like Lazarus, happy to have stepped out of a grave. I quickly dried myself off, then hurriedly dressed and started down the stairs.

“Sylvia,” I called. “Are you downstairs?”

At first, I heard nothing, and then I heard her answer me, but from above. She was in the cupola. I turned and went up to her. She was seated at her easel and leaning over her work. She sat back, and I saw the baby she had begun to draw now completed and painted in watercolors. Only she had painted his eyes a flaming red, so bright they looked like a fire was burning behind them. Every little detail of the baby’s face was just as vivid, from the twist in his mouth that gave him a ridiculing smile to the thinness of his slightly pointed nose and the gauntness in his cheeks. She had drawn a baby, but it looked like a man in a baby’s body.

“Why did you paint him like that?” I asked, my voice breathless.

“It’s how Papa told me to paint him.” She paused. “He’s coming.”

“That’s not a pretty baby, Sylvia. You told me you were going to draw a pretty baby.”

She looked up at me angrily. She hadn’t looked at me that way for a very long time, since when she was a little girl and I would tell her she couldn’t have something.

“It’s Papa’s pretty baby,” she insisted.

“All right. All right. Draw and paint what you want. Did you have your breakfast?”

“Yes. Arden and I had breakfast.”

“Arden and you? You got up yourself when he got up?”

She looked back at her picture. “I think the baby is beautiful.”

“Good. Look, I’m sorry I slept so late. I don’t know what happened. It was probably that pill I took,” I said. She had no idea what I was talking about, but I continued. “I shouldn’t have had anything alcoholic with it. I guess I just passed out. I’m surprised neither of you woke me. You left me downstairs.”

She continued to stare at her picture. I didn’t know if she even heard me or if she understood why I was upset. She slowly turned and looked up at me, her eyelids narrow as she focused on her thoughts. “Babies are grown first inside you. When it’s time for them to come out, God pushes them gently, and they flow out,” she recited. “They have to be delivered to you. That’s the man’s job. Afterward, you carry the baby around like a mailman carries a letter in his pouch, and then the letter has to be opened.”

“Who told you all that? Did Mr. Price tell you that? Well? Answer me. Did he?”

“Papa told me,” she said.

“When? When?”

“I don’t remember,” she said, and looked back at her picture. “Maybe he never told you, and that’s why you don’t have a baby yet.” She smiled. “But you will. There’s a baby coming . . . see?”

“Not that baby, I hope,” I said. “Did Mr. Price ever take off his clothes when he was with you, Sylvia?”

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“I don’t remember,” she said too quickly.