Flora

used to the darkness, and I could make out the entrance to my grandfather’s overgrown path that followed the broken-down railing until it dipped out of sight into the crater. (“Ah, I know what you’re capable of… I’ve seen you jump into the unknown.… I know, I know. It’s our secret.”)

Branches slapped and brambles clawed as I felt my way through the indistinct undergrowth, no yipping Flora following close behind at noontime, no fast-moving paratrooper crashing ahead in daylight. I hoped, vaguely, to be hurt. Not killed, or crippled like Brian, or even to have my face scarred for life with slashes, but just damaged in some way that would make people sorry I’d had to go through this night and equally amazed that I had come out of it as well as I had.

I tripped and went down. Reaching out with my hands, I groped emptiness just ahead of where I had fallen. I was at the edge of the crater! I had almost gone over! But no, it was just a deep rut, like the bad one on our driveway the garbageman and the towing man had covered with a piece of board. Nevertheless, I decided to crawl the rest of the way to the crater on my hands and knees. My plan was to let myself carefully down its side, holding on to the sassafras tree the way I had been taught. And then what? To be found curled at the bottom, exposed to the night? But it would be harder to freeze to death in August than in November, when he had done it, and I had no intention of taking off my clothes and being found naked.

I scraped my knee badly while edging backward down the slope, and paused to reassess my strategy when I finally gained hold of the sassafras tree. Crouching at its base, I indulgently dabbled in the blood running down my leg. When it kept coming, I wiped some of it on my face and licked its metallic flavor off my fingertips.

Had they discovered the damage back at the house yet? (Flora: “Oh! What happened here?” “Well, I think some milk was spilled,” Finn would say matter-of-factly, noting the empty glass. “But—oh dear, the sketch pads! Both of them ruined. Maybe we can save them. Not my portraits, what do those matter, but maybe the pads aren’t completely soaked through. What do you think happened?” “I think someone was angry.” “But why would she—? Oh, no! You don’t think she saw—Oh dear, look at the sofa! Her father is going to kill me.” “Leave it, love. Why don’t you go and check on her?”)

How long would it take for them to figure out what to do? (“She’s not in her room, and the door is wide open.” “Where would she most likely go?” “Well, maybe the garage. She often sits in the Oldsmobile when she’s moping.”)

Not in the garage. Not in the Oldsmobile, “moping.” What next? Search the rooms of the house? (“Would she have run away?” “She never has before. Oh, dear, I’m sure she must have seen us in the kitchen, but how? She had gone to her room, she had said good night.”

“People,” Finn would reason patiently, “have been known to come out of their rooms after they have said good night and gone into them.”)

If she wasn’t in the car and wasn’t in the house, where would she have gone? The gift of tears would surely have kicked in by now, and Finn would have to perform some manly comforting while organizing what to do next. “I want you to stay here at the house, in case she shows up. I’ll do a bit of reconnaissance work outside.” “Will you take the motorcycle? Or since it’s an emergency I’m sure her father wouldn’t mind if you took the car—” “No, reconnaissance is best done on foot. Now, I want you to stay here, is that agreed?”)

I slouched down at the base of the sassafras tree and rested my feet on the bumpy root below. If someone were to come after me soon, they wouldn’t have to descend all the way into the crater. Or, if I thought it best, I could always scramble down at the last minute, though it wouldn’t be so easy in the dark and with no one to catch me. But for now I would wait here and count how many nature noises I could identify. Cicadas, tree frogs, rustlings of larger bodies on the ground that I didn’t want to think about right now. Mrs. Jones said when you heard your first cicadas it was just six weeks till the first frost, and they had been going strong for days now. Starling Peake had kept a tree frog in his room for a whole winter; it lived in a fern pot and liked to come out in the daytime and cling to the top of an upholstered chair with its little sucker feet. (“There was something adorably boyish about Starling, even though he let us down badly.”) I had been planning to tell this anecdote to the next inhabitant of Starling’s room, after I had finished with the more important stories of the house.

Distant gunfire exploded from below. Then I realized they were shooting off fireworks in town. To celebrate the bomb, of course. Would my father be a local hero? “There goes Harry Anstruther, he helped make the secret bomb that finally ended the war.” I wasn’t clear whether Oak Ridge would be someplace people would keep working at, now that its purpose had been accomplished. Just as well if it closed down. I loved my father, but he had sounded tempted by the prospect of staying on there, and I knew without ever seeing it that I would hate living there in a little house and going to school like a child on a reservation. Maybe they would send him home with a bonus: big enough so we could fix up Old One Thousand. If he came tomorrow for my birthday he would be surprised by the repaired gutters and our reopening of the circular driveway around the house. If only things hadn’t turned out the way they had tonight. But whose fault was that? I was the one who had been ambushed by the unimaginable. How could people be so double-dealing?

Officially, my birthday wasn’t until late tomorrow. I had “finally decided to make my entrance” at six fifteen in the evening, according to Nonie. The time was recorded by her in blue ink in my baby book.

“Was she very tired when I finally came out?” I always wanted to know.

“You are always tired when you finish having a baby,” Nonie said, “but I would say she was more relieved than anything else.”

“Why?”

“She had been working hard to make you come out for eighteen hours. That’s a long time. But between her contractions she could be quite droll. ‘Honora, I’ve just had an awful thought,’ she said. ‘What if he decides he’d rather not come out?’ ‘Then,’ I said, ‘we’ll have to think of something really special to bribe him with.’ This made her laugh.”

“But where was my father?”

“He was waiting at a proper distance to be informed. I was the one who saw her through. Early on, the nurse came in and said, ‘Mrs. Anstruther, what, pray tell, are you doing in the bed with Mrs. Anstruther?’ ‘Isn’t it obvious?’ I said. ‘I am lying beside her, sharing her labor pains.’”

I liked this story except for one thing. “Why did she have to call me a he?”

“Oh, darling, that’s nothing. It’s just gender shorthand for babies who haven’t been born yet. It’s the same as when people refer to ‘the history of man,’ or ‘mankind.’ She knew you were you, all along.”

The fireworks had stopped. Had they run out or gone to get some more? I thought of Mrs. Jones waiting for the pretty fireworks Rosemary liked best and then saying “Stella Reeve, you are not forgotten,” even though people looked at her funny.

What if nobody came after me? Would I have to stay here until my father started searching tomorrow? And if nobody was going to come, what was the point in spending the night with my bottom getting damp from the ground and goose bumps on my arms and tree bark digging into my shoulders? Maybe I should drag myself back through the undergrowth and walk down Sunset Drive to the village. I would be just as hard to find if I spent the night in the church, which Father McFall was leaving open for people who wanted to thank God or be sorry about the bomb.

Something horrible with a huge wingspan passed directly over my head and I was back in the nightmare where Nonie flew through the air and shrieked before breaking apart at the bottom of the crater, one dismembered leg twisted sideways in its old-lady shoe. Only this time I was the one who shrieked. Why was life so treacherous and unfair? It was enough to make you want to stop being in it.

A circle of light jittered back and forth across the treetops. “Helen? Is that you?”

Don’t answer. Give the false-hearted more time to imagine the world without you in it.

Louder: “Helen!”

The tree frogs abruptly ceased their night chorus. The bouncing circles of light grew larger. “Are ye in there? I’m sure I heard you.”

Now my own mind was double-dealing me: Had I known all along he was going to come, like the soldier who finally wins the princess out of the coffin before she can destroy any more men? Or had he come too late for it to count?

The light played back and forth over the floor of the crater. “Will I find you down there?” he called. “Or are you wanting me to jump so you’ll have time to hide somewhere else?”

“I’m not hiding, stupid,” I said in my normal voice. “I hurt my leg climbing down.”