Flora

“Ah, the Sphinx speaks. Is it bad, the leg?”

“It’s stopped bleeding, but I’m resting it awhile.”

“Good idea. Where are you resting?”

“At that sassafras tree.”

The light skittered about until it found my face. “Ah.” The voice could not conceal its relief. “Will I come down?”

“Suit yourself.”

The light shut off. There were no footsteps, just the rustling dark, and then he swung down and was sitting beside me.

“How did you do that?” I said. “I didn’t hear you coming.”

“Didn’t I spend two years training to outsmart my enemy in the dark?”

“Am I your enemy now?”

“Let’s have a look at the injury.” He played the flashlight, which I recognized from our hardware drawer, on my legs. “Which one is it?”

“The one with the blood on it.” I stopped myself from adding “silly.”

“Hmm. Can you walk on it, or will I have to carry you home?” I caught something less than playful in his tone.

“It’s more of a cut than anything else. I’d prefer to walk.”

“Up you go, then. And no, you’re not my enemy, but just imagine yourself handcuffed to me as my prisoner of war till I get you home.”

He lugged me up the side of the crater and then towed me ungallantly along behind him. What a disaster this place was after dark. It was hardly possible to imagine my father and Willow Fanning running away at night, even though it hadn’t been such an obstacle course back then. How naive of Flora to have thought we could “repair” such a jungle as a “surprise” for my father at the end of the summer.

“Do you have to go so fast?” I cried. “You’re hurting my wrist.”

“Sorry,” he said, stopping to let me catch my breath but not letting go of my wrist. “It’s only that I want to get you home. The poor girl is beside herself with worry. She takes it mortally seriously, you know, being left in charge of you, and now she’s terrified she’s let your father down. I had a feeling you might come here, but she thought you could have gone back to that place you walked to. That land on top of the hill that old Mr. Quarles wants to buy.”

“Why on earth would I want to go back there? The loggers have ruined it. That’s why he wants to buy it, he loves making a profit on other people’s losses.”

“Well, you weren’t there to tell us that, were you? She said you seemed to have enjoyed the walk, so we tried that first.”

“Enjoyed! How stupid can you get?”

“A pity, isn’t it, how stupid we all are.”

“I didn’t mean you. But Flora’s simpleminded, you must have realized that by now.”

“I must be simpleminded myself because no, I hadn’t. I think you are confusing simpleminded with simple- hearted.”

“I’m not sure I know what ‘simple-hearted’ means,” I said haughtily.

“When there’s no deceit or malice in your heart. Most of us have some; it protects us. People without it are rare. My friend Barney came close, but he’d built up a layer of sludge to protect his heart against his mother. That’s why Flora is so rare, it’s just her heart she offers, with none of the sludge to wade through.”

“You sound like you love her,” I remarked scornfully, but his answer, if he gave one, was drowned out by a shriek of braking tires, headlamps dancing crazily toward us, as though someone thought it might be fun to drive into the woods and run us down, then veering off wildly at the last minute to hit something else up ahead with a crack and crush of metal.

“God in Heaven,” said Finn, letting go of my hand.

“It’s because they shot out the streetlight again,” I said, feeling a surge of excitement accompanied by shameful relief. An accident would surely wipe my misconduct from Finn’s memory of this night. “Will we go and help out?” I was starting to talk like him.

“From the sound of things, we need to get an ambulance. You’re going to run up that hill as fast as you can and tell Flora to phone. She’s waiting at the house in case you come back. Tell them exactly where, on Sunset Drive.”

“But I want to help you.”

“Who’ll go and call for the ambulance, then? Who is being simpleminded now?”

“But shouldn’t we go and look first? We don’t even know how badly—”

“Christ almighty, Helen, is it your morbid curiosity we must satisfy before we get help?”

“I need to see!” I screamed. “It might be my father. He’s coming for my birthday! What if he decided to come tonight? You can’t keep me from my father.”

I was already running ahead of him toward the trees broken by the crash. Finn had hurt and insulted me, and I had screamed what I did in order to punish him and win my point, but when I got closer to the wreck it seemed that I had wreaked a hideous magic. The crumpled, steaming car, whose innocent headlights still beamed reliably ahead into the woods, was my father’s Chevy coupe and the numbers on the license plate were the ones I knew by heart.

XXVIII.

Annie Rickets’s claim that her parents were privy to secret information because they worked for the telephone company was not a total fabrication.

My grandfather had installed one of the earliest phone lines in town for Anstruther’s Lodge, and our three- digit number had remained the same, though most people had five-digit numbers by this time. In 1945, you still took the receiver off the hook and an operator, often one whose voice you’d heard before, said, “Number, please.” You said the number—Annie’s was 34598—and the operator said, “Thank you” or “I’ll connect you” (and sometimes both) and she would plug you into the right hole on her switchboard and the number you wanted would ring. If someone didn’t pick up after a certain number of rings, the operator would say, “I’m sorry, but your party doesn’t answer, will you try again later?” Annie’s family was on a party line, and sometimes when we were talking a petulant woman’s voice would break in with “Are you little chatterboxes ever going to get off?” “Oh, dry up, you old bag,” Annie once shot back, and the party complained to the operator, who told Annie’s parents. They made her phone the old bag and apologize. Until the dial system came in, the voice of the operator was an integral part of all telephone intercourse. Talking to callers, the operator could learn about things that were happening and make further calls on her own and thus contribute to the outcome of events.

In an emergency, it was enough to tell the operator what it was and she would plug you into the proper service, or you could just tell her what was the matter and she would contact the service and relay your message.

I had been preparing my message as I ran uphill, a stitch in my side: Operator, you’ve got to help me, my father’s had a bad wreck on Sunset Drive and we need an ambulance quick. She connected me and stayed on the line while the hospital took down the information. Hairpin curve, near the top. Thrown through the windshield. The person with him said a severed artery in the neck.

The ambulance was on its way, but the operator kept talking to me until I told her I really had to go. How old was I? Was there anyone with me? I told her I was eleven and that my father had been one of the people at Oak Ridge helping make the bomb, only we hadn’t known what he was doing, he himself hadn’t known, it was so secret. He had been driving home to be with me on my birthday tomorrow.

Where was Flora? I had yelled for her as I ran into the house. She must have gone out looking for me some more. I was glad she hadn’t been there to make the phone call. She would have included who knew what unnecessary digressions.

(“For God’s sake—run!” croaked a bare-chested Finn, spotlit by the faithful headlights that hadn’t seemed to