THREE

IT ALL HAPPENED SO FAST, I WENT COMPLETELY NUMB. One minute, it seemed, I was brushing Peaches in the warm, sweet-smelling air of a stable and the next I was imprisoned in a damp tower. In reality it was the stoop-shouldered attic room of a narrow brick townhouse that gasped between dozens of other identical brick townhouses along a cobblestone street in Boston. Father had taken a job as managing editor of a small newspaper there. A shroud of sea fog pressed against the room’s one tiny window. The wallpaper curled away from the seams, and odors of stale smoke and wet potatoes clung so heavily to the walls that my throat clamped shut. Just one day after moving there I could no longer smell Peaches on my clothes. I could barely breathe.

I’d thrown a fit when Peaches was sold and led away—childish, I admit, because it was a pure, raving-berserker fit. That had only added to what appeared to be Father’s growing disdain for me. Stonily peering through the gold rims of his spectacles, he’d said, “You’ve none but yourself to blame. Time’s overdue for some changes.” And then, with his judgment passed and, I suppose, while waiting for me to make those changes, he’d stopped speaking to me. Other than the necessary civilities of “Pardon me” and “Please pass the salt,” our wordless battle had marched across the country.

All during the packing, all during the wagon ride to the station and the long train ride and the carriage ride at the opposite end, I sat motionless and numb. Mother petted my shoulder. “When God closes a door, he opens a window,” she said, and I wanted to scream, Is that what you’re calling Father now? James threw his arm around me and tried to point out scenes of interest. Grandmother was the only one who didn’t try to console me. She sat clutching her Bible and staring at the receding horizon, lost in her own misery.

For two whole days after we arrived I lay in my attic bedroom and watched the colorless ceiling shift from morning’s gloom to evening’s shadows. I watched a spider take hours to spin an intricate web and then cling to its outer edge, hungry and alone, waiting for something to happen. I lay so still that a mouse ran across my foot, pausing to sample a button on my shoe with his sharp teeth before lifting his head to sniff in my direction, whiskers atwitch, and scampering on.

For two whole days I stayed like that. Thinking and wondering. Remembering and wanting. On the third day I rose.

It was terribly early; the sky was black as pitch. The house, this strange house in a strange city, where we were all crammed together, was still. Yet I knew something was about to happen. I could sense it. Sitting upright and wadding the coverlet between my fingers, I held my breath and listened. Down the street came the heavy clop-clop of a tired horse pulling a delivery wagon. A wash of silence spilled in behind him. I waited. The mouse and what sounded like thirty of his friends thumped between the walls. Somewhere out in the harbor, a ship moaned. Then more silence. Under the eaves outside my window, the pigeons began chittering uneasily. Stiff tail feathers scraped along the bricks as the birds shuffled nervously back and forth. My leg twitched once, then again. The hairs on my arms rose to attention. Something was definitely going to happen.

That’s one of my secrets. Ever since I was a little girl, my legs have gotten a strange, twitchy feeling right before something important happens. The feeling isn’t frequent. And Father would call it girlish nonsense, especially when nothing at all happens afterward. But, often enough to raise the gooseflesh on my arms, when my legs begin twitching my life is about to take a sudden turn.

Two floors below me, the mantel clock began chiming the hour and I counted along with it. Before I could whisper “four,” I was jolted right out of my bed by the raucous jangling of a fire alarm. Dogs barked, men shouted. And even though our house was around the corner and down the street from the neighborhood fire station, the noisy clatter of hooves seemed to charge right through my room. My heart banged wildly. Swept up in the frenzy, I leaped back onto my bed. I twisted the sheets until they were near to ropy reins and hung on every sound. The choppy hoofbeats turned rhythmic: The firehorses were coming together under harness. There was a shrill whinny from one and an answering call from another. The men shouted orders. My breath came faster. The staccato quickened as the horses leaned into their work, then built to a seamless thunder as they turned the corner and raced past our house toward the fire. Like a summer storm, they were here and gone, leaving me panting.

It’s a powerful tonic, listening to horses gallop. Clutching the pillow to my chest, I played the hoofbeats over and over in my head, until the silence subdued them. In the emptiness of the ordinary, and as my breathing eased, I began to wonder about the twitching. What did it mean?

The alarm must have awakened Grandmother, too, because in the room directly below me, I heard her talking to herself. Cocking an ear, I could tell she was quoting Scripture. It’s funny how you can hear something and instantly smell something, when the two don’t seem at all related. At that moment, in the darkness of my room, I smelled bacon. And I remembered a Sunday back in Wesleydale, after church, when Grandmother and I had been working in the kitchen together. I’d promised her to secrecy, then haltingly sought her opinion of my twitching legs.

Grandmother, a woman who was dependably unperturbed, didn’t so much as bat an eye. “God has given you a gift,” she replied brightly. She tapped my nose with a finger that still smelled of breakfast: butter and flour and bacon grease.

We were rolling out biscuit dough, and I’d been cogitating on the sermon that morning, which had been about Adam and Eve in the Garden and how it was a sin to try to know too much. “Do you think Reverend Wyeth would call it a gift?” I asked.

Grandmother snorted, dismissing my question as easily as a horse swishes away a bothersome fly. “No, I don’t expect that he would. That’s because he’s a man, and men don’t like what they don’t understand.” She slammed the biscuit cutter hard into the dough and twisted it sharply. “And I expect that’s why God gave this gift to you, a girl, or young woman, I should say, since you’re taller than me now. At any rate, Rachel dear, don’t you ignore those twitchy feelings. They’re heaven-sent, I’m sure of it. Use them as your compass to the world around you.” She deftly twisted a few more circles out of the dough, plopping them onto the baking sheet, then looked at me. There was a twinkle in her eyes. “And let me know if you get a feeling for which horse is going to win the mile at this year’s fair. I’ll place a large bet with that know-it-all Mr. Schmidt.”

She’d laughed back then and popped a pinch of dough into my mouth. But that laugh, like that scene, had taken place half a nation away from here. She didn’t laugh much anymore, ever since Father insisted she move with us to Boston. She’d left her husband buried there; she’d left her beloved garden; and, it seemed, she’d left her laughter.

There was a time when she quoted the Psalms, the verses of joy and praise. But now she was stuck in the last book of the Bible, the Revelation of St. John. It seemed she was just waiting to die. “Fear God, and give glory to him,” she recited now, “for the hour of his judgment is come….”