March went to the window, but she couldn’t see a thing. Alan came up behind her, eating a piece of buttered toast and flicking the crumbs from his chest.
“He’s right there,” Alan said, pointing toward the orchard.
And true enough, there he was, just beyond the gate. He was thirteen and skinny, with long, dark hair that hadn’t been washed for weeks.
“What a prize,” Alan said, with his usual disdain.
The boy must have felt himself being watched, because he suddenly turned and glared at the window. The clouds were thin and wispy that day, blown about by the wind.
When March waved, the boy was so surprised that he just stood there, blinking. March would have laughed at his discomfort if she hadn’t realized, all at once, that she did not want to stop looking at him.
“Do we get to keep him forever?” March could sense, deep inside, that it was better to whisper.
“God, I hope not,” Alan said.
Out in the orchard, the boy continued to stare at her. The grass hadn’t yet been mowed that season and all the daffodils were closed up tight, to protect themselves from unpredictable weather.
“I’ll take him,” March volunteered.
“Get serious,” Alan had said, but when he walked away March stayed precisely where she was.
“I am serious.” she said out loud, although there was no longer anyone who could hear her. Nearly thirty years later she can still recall the way those words felt in her mouth, how delicious they were, how absolutely sweet. “From now on, he’s mine.”
Everything she knew about him, she learned from Judith Dale. He’d been an orphan in Boston, so poor he’d eaten nothing but crackers and whatever else he could steal. Few people would give him the time of day, let alone a dollar for his supper, but March’s kindhearted father had brought him home.
“And that’s all we know?” They were sitting out on the porch on a fine, blue day, filling up the bird feeders Judith liked to hang from the chestnut tree. “What about his parents? His religion? Does he have brothers and sisters? Are we sure he’s thirteen?”
“You are so nosy,” Judith said. “His name is Hollis and he’s here to stay. That’s all you need to know.”
At first, the new boy wouldn’t eat dinner-not even when there were lamb chops and asparagus, then strawberries for dessert. He wouldn’t look anyone in the eye, including Henry Murray, whom he obviously respected, for Mr. Murray was the one person to whom Hollis didn’t talk back. He was certainly fresh enough to most people, but in an edgy, self-contained fashion. It was the way he looked at you that could make you nervous. It was everything he didn’t say.
After three months, Hollis was still avoiding them all. The less he revealed, the more interesting March found him. She kept wishing she’d run into him, but when she did-once when he was throwing rocks at some invisible target beyond the orchard, and again when they all but crashed into each other in the hall one night en route to the bathroom-she was completely mute in his presence. Since March had always been a great one for talking, this behavior was particularly puzzling.
“Speak up,” Judith Dale would have to tell March whenever Hollis was near, but March couldn’t oblige. She even took to drinking rainwater, which she had overheard Mrs. Hartwig, a matron who worked in the school cafeteria, vow was a sure cure for a tongue-tied child.
Still, Hollis and March hadn’t spoken, not even to ask the other for bread and butter at suppertime. And then one day in the summer, she got her wish. It was July, March believes, or maybe the first week of August. At any rate, it was brutally hot and had been for ages. March had been going bare-foot and the soles of her feet were black. She was pouring a glass of Judith’s mint iced tea for herself when she saw the dragonfly pass by overhead. It was larger than the ones you usually saw skimming over the flat surface of Olive Tree Lake, and so blue March had to blink. She followed the dragonfly into the living room, where it perched on the drapes, and there was Hollis, in her father’s chair, reading one of Henry Murray’s textbooks, a complicated treatise which concerned homicide.
“I want to catch that dragonfly,” March said.
Hollis stared at her. His eyes were absolutely black. “Well, good for you,” he finally answered.
The dragonfly was beating its iridescent wings against the fabric of the drapes.
“You have to help me.” March was amazed at how sure of herself she sounded, and maybe Hollis was as well, because he put his book down and came over to help.
In a panic, the dragonfly tried to get away; it banged into the window glass, and then, truly desperate, twisted itself into the long strands of March’s hair. March could feel the dragonfly, almost weightless; she could still feel it after Hollis had plucked it from her tangled hair. Hollis shoved the window open and let the dragonfly outside, where it disappeared immediately, as if swallowed by the sky.
“Now are you happy?” Hollis asked March.
He smelled quite strongly of soap, since Mrs. Dale had insisted he take a shower each day, but also of some other scorching scent, which March would later come to believe was anger.
“No. But I will be soon,” March told him. She took him into the kitchen and got out two tubs of pistachio ice cream. They consumed a pint apiece, and by the time they were done they were shivering, even though the heat was as sweltering as ever. March can still remember how cold her tongue felt, from all that ice cream.
“You’d better stay away from him,” Alan warned March. He relayed some ugly rumors: That Hollis had murdered someone and had then been released into their father’s custody. That his mother was a prostitute who’d been murdered herself. That March had better lock away what few valuables she had-a silver comb left to her by her mother, and a gold-plated charm bracelet-since Hollis was most definitely a thief.
March knew it was jealousy that drove her brother. When Henry Murray introduced Hollis as his son, Alan always turned pale. Alan had never gotten along with his father, and had disappointed him in every way, and now he’d been replaced by someone who hadn’t known what shampoo was and still didn’t have the faintest idea of how to behave in company. At dinner parties or on holidays, Hollis would sit there reading from one of those miserable law texts, and he wouldn’t answer when spoken to; the only people he paid any attention to were Henry Murray and March.
“Why don’t you go someplace where you’re wanted?” Alan asked Hollis.
“Why don’t you shut up?” Hollis said right back, and he didn’t even bother to look at Alan, who was eight years older and a full-grown man, despite his foolish ways.
Alan took every opportunity to humiliate Hollis. In public, he treated Hollis as though he were a servant; at home he made certain the boy knew he was an outcast. Often, Alan would sneak into Hollis’s room, where he’d do as much damage as possible. He poured calves’ blood into Hollis’s bureau drawers, ruining Hollis’s limited wardrobe, knowing full well Hollis would rather wear the same clothes every day than admit defeat. He left a pile of cow manure in the closet, and by the time Hollis figured out where the stench was coming from, everything Henry Murray had given him, the books and the lamps and the blankets, had been contaminated by the smell.
The kinder Henry Murray was to Hollis, the more bitter Alan grew. During that first winter when Hollis was with them, Henry Murray came home from a conference in New York with gifts for all. He presented March with a thin gold necklace and both boys with beautiful pocketknives, made of steel and mother-of-pearl. Alan had botched his classes at the law school, and now the fact that he and this creature he’d had foisted upon him were being treated equally, like brothers in fact, sent him sulking. By the time they sat down for dinner that night, Alan was steaming with rage.
“He’s too young for a knife,” Alan told his father. “You’d never let me have one at his age. He can’t be trusted with it.”
“You’ll be fine,” Henry Murray said warmly, ignoring Alan in order to address Hollis, who sat to his left.
“God, you are blind,” Alan proclaimed. It was Judith Dale’s day off, but she had left them their dinner. They were having roast chicken and potatoes and green beans, but now Alan pushed his plate away, upsetting his water glass. “No one in his right mind would give him a weapon. You have to be crazy.”
If there was one thing Henry Murray couldn’t stand, it was a man who was not fair, and that was what his son seemed to be. Hollis said nothing in his own defense, and that’s what March couldn’t bear to see: The way he wouldn’t meet anyone’s eyes. The way he seemed to fold up inside himself, going farther and farther inside, until the part of him having dinner at their table was only the smallest comer of his soul.
“Shut up, Alan,” March said. “You’re the one who’s crazy.”
March was sitting to her father’s right, and he now put his hand on her arm. “I don’t want you to talk like
