Torey Hayden - The Sunflower Forest

‘Really, I don’t mind going, Dad. Somewhere warm. Mama’s back’s bothering her again. She was up last night with it. And I was thinking that if we were somewhere warmer, maybe she wouldn’t have so many problems with it.’

‘It’s March, Les. It’ll be plenty warm enough for anyone right here in no time at all.’

‘Well, I was just thinking maybe it’d be better.’

‘I thought you liked it here,’ he replied, looking over. He was wearing a red-plaid flannel shirt. I noticed that two buttons were missing, replaced by a safety pin. ‘You’ve got all your friends here. And Paul. I thought you and Paul were …’ He didn’t finish the sentence.

‘Yes, well, I just thought I’d tell you that it doesn’t matter at all to me. That you don’t have to stay here for my sake. I’d rather move, I think.’

He was searching my face. ‘Did something happen to cause this sudden change of heart? Did you and Paul have a falling out?’ There was a tenderness in his voice that I hadn’t anticipated.

‘No. No, no, nothing like that. I just thought there was no point hanging around here just because of me.’

‘I don’t think we are. I don’t think I ever heard anyone around here mentioning moving except you. Your mama never has.’

‘Well, I was just thinking it might not be such a bad idea.’

I could tell that Dad thought it was me. He thought I’d had some kind of disagreement with someone and was trying to get away. That hadn’t been what I’d intended but at least he didn’t think it was Mama.

Megan, however, was nobody’s fool. She was sitting out on the front sidewalk with her roller skates when I found her.

‘How’re you this morning?’ I asked.

She shrugged and continued to adjust her skates. They were an ancient pair that had belonged originally to one of Auntie Caroline’s children back in the fifties. Mastering the art of putting them on and making them work should have qualified Megan for an engineering diploma.

‘Do you feel OK? Is your stomach all right?’

She tightened the skates further. They pinched into the sides of her running shoes. ‘Nothing was wrong with my stomach,’ she said acidly. ‘You know that.’

I hitched my thumbs into the waistband of my jeans.

‘We got to ask her, Les.’

‘No, we don’t.’

‘Yes, we do. I heard you two up last night. I know she wasn’t asleep. And I can bet you a million dollars I know why. So don’t bother to lie to me.’ Carefully, she rose and put the skate key into her pocket. Taking a step backwards, she let herself roll down the sidewalk away from me. I followed her.

‘No, we don’t have to ask her, Megan. What Mama is thinking about is her own business.’

‘Lesley, are you deaf or something? Did you hear what I told you last night: Mama thought that little kid was one of us.’

‘No,’ I replied. ‘She didn’t. She thought he was her son.’

Megan’s eyes widened. ‘Well, that’s worse . She hasn’t got a son.’

Neither of us spoke after that. Megan was skating along very slowly and with deep absorption. In the same way, I focused all my attention on simply keeping up. To the rhythm of the skates against the cement, I counted out my steps.

We went down around the corner and up Bailey Street and over to Third without saying anything to one another. When we reached the park on Third and Elm, Megan stopped. She ran her skates off into the grass and paused, balancing on the toes. Taking the skate key from her pocket, she sat down on the grass.

‘What exactly happened to Mama?’ Megan asked. Her voice was very calm. She was adjusting the skates again and did not look up. ‘I mean, during the war. Just what really did happen then?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Have you ever asked?’

I shrugged. ‘She’s told us plenty of stuff, Megs.’

Megan rested her cheek against her knees. I sat down on the grass beside her. ‘I want to know what happened,’ she said. ‘Not just the funny stuff. Not just about old Jadwiga. I don’t want Mama to stick out her teeth and do old Jadwiga’s funny voice and make me laugh. I want to know the rest of it. I want to know how come Mama’s got scars on her butt and her legs. I want to know how come she was so sick in the war, how come she got starved. I’m not so stupid as you think, Lesley. I see all that stuff. And I need Mama to tell me what really happened. It matters to me, because I never can really forget about it. And I don’t think she does either. So I need her to tell me. It’s better than guessing all the time.’

‘Megan, don’t you dare ask her stuff like that.’

‘Why not?’

‘Just don’t. I mean it.’

Megan eyed me with annoyance. ‘I will, if I want to.’

‘You do and I’ll make you sorry.’

Silence between us. From her expression, I could see she wasn’t backing down.

‘You’re not old enough,’ I said. ‘That’s what they’ll say to you. I asked Dad once and that’s what he said to me. That I was too young to understand.’

‘When was that?’ Megan asked.

‘When I was about your age.’

‘So what about now? Are you old enough to find out now?’

I shrugged. ‘I’m not so sure I want to know now. I can see what it does to Mama. Besides, it’s old stuff, Megan. It’s over and done with. The war finished in 1945 and that’s years and years and years ago. There’s no point in knowing, really.’

Megan sighed and reached down to pull tight her shoelaces. Then wearily she rose and skated off.

Megan was sitting in the kitchen when I arrived home from school on Monday afternoon. She had her schoolbooks stacked on the corner of the table and her stockinged feet up on the chair across from her. One apple core lay beside her already. She was crunching her way noisily through a second apple while deeply absorbed in a book that lay open in her lap.

‘Hey Lessie, come here and look at this,’ she said when I appeared. I crossed over to the table.

It was a book on the Third Reich, an adult book, something for readers far older than Megan.

‘Where did you get that?’ I asked.

‘The library. I went in after school and asked the lady there where they had books about the Second World War. She gave me these. See?’ She indicated a couple of other books on the table too. ‘I’m going to read about it. I’m going to learn all there is to know.’

‘Those books are too old for you. You won’t even understand them.’

‘No, they’re not. I can read them. The lady at the library gave them to me.’

‘What did you do? Tell her you were a kid genius? Megan, those books are for adults.’

‘Not necessarily. Lookie. This one’s about kids. See?’ She pulled a thin paperback from the stack. ‘There are poems and stuff that these kids wrote while they were in a concentration camp for children. See what it says here in the back? The library lady showed it to me. Fifteen thousand children went into this camp. And only a hundred ever came back.’

There was a sudden, potent silence. Megan remained intent a moment longer over the book. ‘This could have been us,’ she said quietly without raising her eyes.

‘Megan, you shouldn’t be reading stuff like that. It’s macabre.’

‘It’s the truth though,’ she said. She looked up. ‘It happened, for real. And it could have happened to us. This here, in this book. If we’d been born, they could have taken us away just like these kids and put us in a camp.’

‘They couldn’t either. Those were Jewish children. They took them away because they were Jews.’

‘But we still could have been one of these children. If we’d been born then. They were kids just like us. See, look at the way this one kid writes. He makes his G’s just like I do.’