My throat closed and I scrambled across the floor to kneel at Mrs. Mank’s small feet in their handmade shoes.
“Please don’t kill Mama!” I cried.
Mrs. Mank looked down at me, her small mouth twitching derisively.
“I am not responsible for your mother’s life. Neither are you. She is.”
My eyes were hot with unshed tears, barely held back out of some instinct that I must not reveal weakness.
“If you ever hurt her,” I blurted, and started to blubber and sob.
“You’ll do what?” Mrs. Mank said in a bored voice. “Calley Dakin, I don’t give a damn whether your mama lives, dies, is raptured up to Heaven or reborn as a gnat.”
The words by themselves should not have been reassuring but they were. Mrs. Mank had no plan to harm Mama. The hovering horror of the two mad women who had torn Daddy limb from limb vanished. About this, I did believe Mrs. Mank.
I knuckled the tears into my eye sockets. A handkerchief appeared in front of my face, at the tips of Mrs. Mank’s fingers.
“Snot and red-eyed tears are unbecoming, especially with as little as you have for looks. You had better learn to stifle them.”
I wiped my face dry and blew my nose. I did not offer to return the handkerchief, which in any case was not monogrammed or of any fine fabric but simply an everyday handkerchief. I did not believe that it was Mrs. Mank’s at all.
“However,” Mrs. Mank said slowly, “if you wish to keep your mother alive, you must keep her here. Elsewhere, her enemies—your father’s enemies—will find her. Shall I tell you a secret, Calliope Carroll Dakin?”
A bolt of terror left me weak. I did not want to know a secret. Already I knew too many.
Frantic to divert the unwelcome knowledge, I choked out, “I know the secret.”
“You do?” Mrs. Mank seemed amused. “Well, then, I guess I don’t need to tell you.”
Was I let down? Worse. It was like diving down the laundry chute: an instant of wild exultation at my own derring-do, wiped away by sheer unmitigated terror of the consequences so foolishly ignored. The certainty that I was mistaken, that I should have listened, seized me as surely as Mrs. Mank had at the door to Miz Verlow’s office.
I found myself, still dazed, outside the office door closing on Mrs. Mank. She had put me out as unceremoniously as she had hoisted me into the office.
I was quite certain that Mrs. Mank had wanted me to duck the secret. Manipulation was a second language to me, learned at Mama’s knee. It seemed more natural to me than straightforward behavior. Mrs. Mank was another manipulator, the greatest I had yet encountered, and I feared her, without knowing why her string-pulling was so much more dangerous than Mama’s or Mamadee’s.
It wasn’t just physical fear that sent me racing to the beach. I was driven by the instinct that the beach was where I would be able to breathe.
I ran without the joy that normally possessed me in my beach races. Between my bare toes, the sand was almost cold. The feel of it spritzing away from my toes digging into it made me feel real again. Outside. Outside was itself, and never pretended to be anything else. It didn’t care how I took it.
A black gleam in the water caught my eye. When I slowed to a trot to look at the Gulf, the gleam sank into the water but another rose nearby: dolphins at play. I clutched my knees and watched the dolphins. The sight of their permanent grins calmed me; the racket of my heartbeat faded and slowed.
Throwing myself down, I stared up at the sky: it was half of everything, roofless, and even with birds in it, mostly a vast emptiness.
I rolled over to study the sand: pearly grit in uncountable quantity, full of itself as the sky was empty of itself. The sand was marble, Miz Verlow had told me, washed out of Alabama and Georgia over thousands of years before anybody called those places Alabama and Georgia, slow ground to infinite particles in the rivers that carried it. Marble like a rich dead person’s headstone. The image of the one my daddy should have came to me: Joe Cane Dakin, RIP. Are-Eye-Pee spelled rip.
I let the din of the restless sand and the rootless sea bear me down. A draft of wind, a sweep of shadow, a crack of vast wings overhead, and I could bear it no longer. I scuttled up the face of the dune into the tall grasses—sea oats and panic grass some of them were—I had found them in my field guides. Panic grass. My head was all apanic, so I must be in the right place, I thought. Sea oats. No oats to see on them. They were the tallest grasses, with raggedy tops where the seeds had been earlier. Other grasses as yet nameless to me. The beach grass did not grow in carpets as lawn grass grows. It sprouted in hanks and billows on the dune face, and clumped along the crest and down the back dune. Thick, tripping vines snaked among the grasses. On the back of the dune sweet-smelling shrubs grew in oases of green and grey-green and blue-green. The sand showed between them like grout between tiles. Despite the natural undulation of the sand in hills and hollows, its grains were not blown about by the wind as the beach sand’s were, nor did they roll underfoot as loosely.
At the crest of the dune, in among the grasses, I dropped to my knees and dug with my hands in the hard-edged crystalline grains, hollowing out a place in the shade. The grasses whispered to me, touching me with the most fleeting, creepy caresses. Sand slipped under my nails, and into my mouth and dried my spit. The shade dappled my arms and hands, the sun striped warmth upon my back. I rolled up into the hollow that I had made.
The waves surged upon the shore below and just yards away. I breathed in the salted air. My heart and my lungs found the rhythm of the water. Wet voices surged amid out and in, rollick and curl up, retreat and advance. The voices drowned.
Thirty-six
“CALLEY Dakin! Calley Dakin!”
The echo of my name condensed out of my oblivion: Miz Verlow, calling me. My eyes opened to a darkened day: Twilight had come on, cooler and quieter and more desolate. Yet even in the thickening shade of the tall grasses I saw as well as if it were noon. Better, without the glare.
A mouse crouched very close, right next to my face against the sand. It licked the side of my mouth with its very tiny tongue. Its eyes were brilliant in their blackness, and the beat of its heart a tiny paradiddle.
“Calley Dakin!”
For fear of frightening the mouse, I did not move.
The mouse gave the corner of my mouth a final lick and sat back for a second. It looked almost satisfied.
Miz Verlow advanced upon me from the back of the dune as surely as if she had a map of where I was. The swishing of the tall grasses announced her approach.
The mouse jumped. It seemed to unzip the sand with its tiny paws. The dimple filled at once behind it, and the sand became as seamless as sand can’t help but be.
Miz Verlow looked down at me. “I won’t ask if you heard me calling.”
My mouth was dry. I could manage no more than a mumble. “I was asleep.”
“Evidently.”
I scrambled to my feet. “I saw a mouse! It was white!”
“Of course it was. That’s the color of the beach mice here. You are late for supper.”
She spun right around and set off toward the house. I lunged after her, then paused to glance back at where I had been, in my nest in the grass. The sea oats, the panic grass, the grasses whose names I did not yet know, thousands of them, scratched against beach and sky, were all the same, like the grains of sand heaped up to make the dunes and washed down to make the beach, like the drops of water poured together to make the Gulf. My heart sank; I would never find it again. With a catch in my throat, I scrambled after Miz Verlow.