Whitefern (Audrina 2)

What a dirty trick nature had played on her, to give her this much beauty but not enough mentally to have a wonderful life. She could easily attract a handsome, young, wealthy man who would devote himself to her, build her a bigger home than Whitefern and all the jewelry and clothes she could want. Every man like that would turn to look at her now, but a moment later, when he tried to speak to her, he would surely lose his enthusiasm quickly and look for a fast exit.

And she wouldn’t even understand why.

“Let’s go down,” I said.

She put her hand on mine on her shoulder and smiled.

“What, Sylvia?” I asked, smiling back at her.

“Audrina,” she said. “Baby. Coming.”

A Tree of Secrets

Right after Sylvia and I finished breakfast, there was an early but quick brushing of snowflakes. The rain that had begun falling at daybreak suddenly was captured by a breath of winter. I had intended to go shopping for food but hesitated when I saw the snow. I hoped that it would soon turn back to only cold rain. It did, and the roads didn’t freeze over.

Weather of all sorts fascinated Sylvia, especially snowflakes. When she was little, she loved holding up her palms and letting the flakes fall into them and melt. Papa had once told her that rain and melting snowflakes were like the sky crying. That fascinate

d her. Actually, she loved the surprises of all seasons and the wonder of spring flowers, rich green leaves, and the birds returning after winter. I never appreciated the abundance of nature that surrounded us as much as she did.

Aunt Ellsbeth used to say, “That girl will be a child until her dying day.” When it came to her appreciation of Mother Nature, I didn’t think that was such a terrible prediction. The rest of us seemed to ignore how beautiful the outside world could be, perhaps because we were so shut up inside our own. Our world was lit with the lights we cast over ourselves with our petty jealousies. Who had time to look at the stars?

Sylvia never paid much attention to what month we were in, and if told, she wouldn’t remember when asked later. The poor girl couldn’t even remember her own birthday. Whenever I told her it was her birthday tomorrow, she would look astonished. I knew that if I was going to help her develop, I had to work on her memory, get her to associate things. She was improving, but lately I had begun to suspect that the problem was more a question of what she thought was important enough to remember rather than the failure of memory itself.

Anyone who heard this would immediately say, “Well, my birthday is important. How could I ever be expected to forget that?”

But that memory wasn’t so simple for Sylvia.

Before she died, Vera was fond of reminding Sylvia that my and Sylvia’s mother had died giving birth to her. I caught her saying things like “If you hadn’t made it so difficult to be born, your mother would have lived,” or “You were so afraid of being born, you tried to stop it, and that killed your mother.” Of course, she was right there on every one of Sylvia’s birthdays, between the time Sylvia understood what a birthday was and Vera’s accidental death, to ask, “How could you be happy it’s your birthday? Your mother died on this day. You should spend the whole day kneeling at her grave and asking her to forgive you.”

No wonder Sylvia was not looking forward to it enough to remember it, or if she did remember, she would pretend not to, I was sure. I constantly told her that our mother’s dying was not her fault. “A baby can’t purposely do that,” I told her, after I had shouted at Vera, and Papa told her the same thing in his way, too, although I knew now that he wasn’t eager to bring Sylvia home from the hospital quickly. He made all sorts of excuses about her weight, illness, anything he could think of to keep her from being released to our care. It took him quite a while to accept that he would have such a daughter and to look at her and not think about my mother. Nevertheless, to this day, Arden insisted that Sylvia had no concept of what had happened, no matter what terrible things Vera had told her.

“To tell you the truth, I don’t think she even understands the concept of death. It wasn’t too long ago that I saw her beating a dead bird with a stick to try to get it up and flying again. You’ve seen her do things like that, too.”

I couldn’t help wondering if he was right, but the death of your mother was such a deep loss, even a mother you saw only in photographs. How could you not be affected by it, think about it often, and blame yourself?

“I wouldn’t worry about it. You have to be an adult to feel guilty,” Arden once said as a response to my fears for Sylvia. “You have to develop a conscience, and that takes a little more intelligence than she possesses.”

I didn’t come right out and ask him the question about him that always haunted me, but I thought it, especially then: Was that why it took you so long to confess about witnessing what had happened to me and not stopping it or telling anyone else about it so the bad boys could be punished? Is that your excuse, that you were still a child and you didn’t have a fully developed conscience yet?

I did think there was some truth to what he was saying, however. Adults were always warning us not to be in a hurry to grow up. Maybe this was a big part of why. Growing up meant responsibility, and responsibility brought guilt as well as satisfaction. In the end, conscience would always be king.

In any case, I wasn’t going to stop trying to help Sylvia grow more mature in any way I could. Educating her was a big part of it. Whether I liked it or not, I had to be as good as any special education teacher in a public school. Papa put the responsibility on me when I was young, and I naturally continued it all after his death. I was motivated by that one big fear Papa had put into my head: if something happened to me, Sylvia would find herself in some institution where she was sure to be abused. I would have let Papa down in a very big way just by dying. I wanted so much for Sylvia to be able to survive on her own, to learn enough of the basics to get by.

Ever since she was fourteen, when I looked at her and realized she had developed a woman’s figure almost overnight, I knew she would need special care and protection. I realized she had a beautiful face and a shapely young body. It was then that a girl really became vulnerable and needed to know how to protect herself and what to look for in a man’s face that would tell her he was lusting after her only for his own selfish pleasure. I didn’t think it was possible to get her to recognize that. She had a child’s trusting nature. The warnings and alarm bells simply were not hooked up inside her the way they were for most girls and women.

Of course, she knew nothing about what had happened to me. Even if Arden or Papa had made some reference to it in her presence, it was as if they had spoken a foreign language. For a moment, she might listen, but then it would pass right through her and be gone like a breeze.

Occasionally, when she was younger, Papa would warn her about being alone, especially going too far away from the house by herself. But the smile on her face would tell anyone that she had no idea what terrible things he was afraid would befall her. She would nod and go on with whatever she was doing. He would look at me with frustration but also with a warning that I’d better protect her. I should be her shadow, the way she was his.

I spent almost all my free time with her. I worked on Sylvia’s writing, spelling, and math and still did even today. One of the exercises was my dictating our shopping list for the supermarket. She sat at the table and painstakingly copied down the items, sometimes looking at the boxes or bottles to get the spelling right. I was amused at how important that was to her. Lately, she had become much better at it. She had good handwriting, probably because of her artistic talent. If a cashier saw our list, he or she usually had a compliment for whoever had printed it.

“My sister does that,” I would say proudly.

Nothing brought Sylvia’s shyness out more than when she was given a compliment. She would always look down to hide her smile, and her face would flush with embarrassment. I would tell her to say thank you, and sometimes she did, but usually with her head lowered, afraid to look strangers in the eye.

At the supermarket today, though, she behaved differently. I didn’t have to tell her to say thank you, and when she did, she looked at the person to whom she was speaking. She was also more energetic and eager to find the items on the shelves. I stood back for most of the shopping and watched her go down the list, filling our cart without my telling her where to go.

If Arden could see her today, I thought, he wouldn’t ridicule her so much or belittle the work I had been doing with her all these years.