Gail Godwin - Flora

I crossed the carpeted dining room and was about to enter the kitchen when a muffled sound made me stealthy. Flora and Finn were locked in an embrace by the sink. This was no movie kiss. Their mouths mashed together as though each was trying desperately to disappear down the other’s throat. I fled, stopping briefly by the coffee table long enough to pour the glass of milk over the two portraits of Flora and the unguilty sofa cushion that happened to be lying beneath.

How was it that I was magically skimming our treacherous driveway in the almost-dark without a single stumble? And in my leather-soled loafers, not my rubber-gripping Keds. (Was I doomed for the rest of my life to think of Mrs. Huff every time I thought of Keds?)

I felt weightless and glowing with the power of revenge. Was it the cognac or was it the hilarious replay of myself dumping the milk—or was it both? Just beneath the hilarious replay crept a curdling flow of loss and shame. I needed to outrun this flow until it had hardened solid and could no longer suck me into it.

Sunset Drive was already in darkness, but the tops of the trees, raucous with insect life, made black cutout designs against a greenish metallic sky. What color would Finn give it, or did his “special names” apply only to dresses?

The last time I had walked down Sunset Drive by myself had been at midday in early summer. Flora’s clothes had just arrived and I was fleeing her Alabama talk and her insulting notion that I had undergone “a strange childhood.” On this midday walk I had hoped to get some of myself back only to find it slipping away with every step I took. At this first bend in the road, I had looked through a veil and seen Sunset Drive going on just the same without me. And then had come the awful draining away and the loss of words to account for what was happening to me. That’s when Nonie’s voice had told me to sit down on the ground in the shade and let everything go.

“Don’t children have little imaginary friends?” Flora had wanted to know, ironing her Alabama clothes and telling that story I would rather not have heard about a certain skirt. When I said I was going for a walk, she asked should she come, and I said no, I was going out to look for an imaginary friend.

And then someone’s boots creaked and someone’s armpits smelled and I was brought back from nothingness by someone saying, “Hello, hello? Is anyone there?”

Together we scuffed downhill so I could show him my grandfather’s shortcut. I pointed out the streetlight at the hairpin curve that “ruffians came all the way across town to shoot out,” and he delighted me by falling into the same trap I had fallen in when Nonie explained about the ruffians. “Why didn’t they shoot out the streetlights on their own side of town?” he wanted to know. “Because,” I crowed triumphantly, “they already have .”

The ruffians had been here again—no streetlight illuminated the hairpin curve tonight. But my eyes had grown 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?