I saw Rita toward the end of May. She was sixteen now, tall and lithe and womanly except for the downy adolescence of her complexion, her blue eyes set off like opals against the raven black of her hair. A new restraint had gradually taken shape between us over the previous years with the growing scarcity of my visits and with her own rapid maturing, her old childishness gone now like some possession cast out of her and little pretence remaining of a generational distance between us, with the strange decorum and licence that that had brought. Our new decorum was more adult and hence simpler and more oppressive, around me Rita seeming to close down some essential part of herself now, retreating into a dutifully cheerful sociability as if changing into proper clothes for a guest.
“Africa, that’s wild! Sort of like a missionary or something.”
“Not exactly. There’s no religion involved or anything.”
“Anyway that sounds great. I’d love to do something like that.”
But finally she seemed as incurious about my plans as my family had been. I felt a kind of revulsion at her forced agreeableness, the hint in it of Mrs. Amherst.
“So how are things with you?”
“Okay, I guess.”
It came out that she and Elena would be spending the summer in England with Mrs. Amherst and her family.
“It’s just to see family and stuff,” she said, downplaying the trip as if in deference to my own. “I guess it’ll be pretty boring.”
“I dunno, it sounds great.”
The visit left me with a familiar dejection. Away from Rita I would go days, weeks, without a thought of her, felt guilty then at how small a space I left for her in the daily unfolding of my emotions. Yet each time I saw her some nerve in me was touched, some old rawness, as if all along the shadow of her had lain at the back of my consciousness.
She was leaving in a matter of weeks; by the time she returned I’d be gone. I let a week pass without seeing her, vaguely imagining she’d eventually call, then feeling resentful when she didn’t, even though I realized how I must seem to her, merely this moody half-stranger who suddenly appeared in her life from time to time as out of nowhere. Finally I called and arranged to see her the following Sunday.
“I just thought we should have a chance to talk before you go.”
“Sure. That sounds nice.”
There was a wariness in her voice on the phone, but then when I arrived on Sunday she seemed genuinely pleased to see me.
“Hi, stranger, I thought you’d forgotten about us.”
She was dressed in a short, pleated skirt with legs bare beneath and a large pullover that puffed her upper body into formlessness, an odd mix of pale, exposed flesh and bundled warmth.
“I guess I’ve just been busy on the farm and everything,” I said.
I suggested we go for a drive. I wanted her alone for once, outside the roles we seemed consigned to in the Amhersts’ house.
“All ready for your trip?”
“I guess so. We went shopping in Windsor yesterday for clothes and stuff.”
“Maybe I’ll come to see you off at the airport.”
“That would be great.”
We drove a few minutes in silence. Rita seemed lost in her thoughts, unmindful of me, of the car’s intimacy, my silent awareness of her sitting there beside me.
“Where’re we going?”
“I thought maybe we could drive out to the Point or something.”
“That’s where people go to neck.”
“Is that where you go?”
“Haw haw. Anyway Mom won’t let us start dating till next year, what a drag.”
We talked a few minutes more, then lapsed again into silence.
“So is anything up?” Rita said finally.
“What makes you think that?”
“I dunno. It just sounded like something important when you said you wanted to see me, usually you just come over.”
“I just wanted to make sure you’d be home.” I felt uneasy suddenly at the claim I’d made to her attention. “Anyway we might not see each other again for two years, I thought we should have a chance to talk.”
Rita dropped her voice to a mock-portentousness.
“ ‘The time has come,’ the walrus said, ‘to talk of many things.’ ”
I was surprised by this sudden literateness in her.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I dunno, it’s just a line from some poem, it just came into my head.”
“Since when did you start quoting poetry?”
I hadn’t quite been able to phrase it as a compliment but still she flushed with awkward pleasure.
“Maybe you’re not the only one in the family with brains.”
We’d come to the tollbooth at the entrance to the park. I recognized the attendant from high school, one of the popular boys then, even now radiating the same sheen of blithe unthinking self-confidence. An instinctive shame pulsed through me, my mind doing a rapid inventory of the things that might compromise me; but he showed no sign of recognizing me.
“Have a good day, sir.”
We drove into the park in silence, the car engine echoing hollowly beneath the canopy the trees formed over the road and the air growing heavy with the smell of humus and lakewater. A dejection passed through me like a chill – the woods seemed to reduce us somehow, with their gloomy chaos of growth and rot, spindly sumachs and beeches and maples struggling up like abandoned things through the twilight of vines and fallen limbs. On a school field trip once we’d gone out to the very tip of the Point, the land tapering down into the lake there like the last draining away of a continent; and I’d thought then of the first explorers arriving at that tiny foothold centuries before, of the tangle of endless forest confronting them alien as another planet.
Rita was staring through her window into the trees; something in the angle I saw her at, half-turned in her seat, only her cheek visible and then the long sleek black of her hair, made her seem a stranger suddenly.
“I guess I should come out here more often, people make such a big deal about it,” she said. “Watch the birds or something.”
“You could come swimming.”
“Yeah, right. Mercury City.”
I turned off the main road onto the gravelled one that led to the West Beach. There was a couple sunbathing there in the early-June chill, then a family picnicking at one of the tables set along the beach’s length as at some lakeside café; I drove beyond them to the far end of the parking area and parked facing out toward the lake. To the left the shoreline curved gradually round to the Mersea boardwalk, distantly visible in the afternoon glare; but ahead of us there was only the lake, stretching out a steely northern blue as endless as the sea.
I took out a cigarette.
“Could you spare one?”
Rita had turned on the seat and bent a leg onto it.
“You shouldn’t be smoking,” I said, but held one out to her.
“I only smoke when I’m nervous.”
“Are you nervous now?”
“I dunno.” She looked away toward the beach and let out a thin line of smoke. There was a woman in baggy shorts and a bandana spreading a towel out there; as she bent to straighten it, her blouse sagged for an instant to reveal a patch of ruddy cleavage. “I guess when you called I figured you wanted to talk about our mother and all that.”
I was caught off guard. The suggestion seemed so unlikely I couldn’t think how to respond to it, pre-emptive somehow, premature. At some level I’d long imagined beginning this conversation with her, passing on to her this trust; but now the moment seemed lost even as it was offered, ruined by her having suddenly thrust it before us in all its awkwardness.
“What made you think that?”
“I dunno, I just figured that was it.”
“Do you know anything about her? I mean about what happened?”
“Yeah, I guess so. I mean, this and that, I guess you know a lot more than I do.”
But that she knew anything at all seemed somehow to worsen things, to make it impossible to speak now in anything but the vaguest terms.
“How did you find out?”
“I dunno, here and there, I guess it’s not such a big secret really. Mom told me some stuff, not very much, and Elena’s always asking kids at school, the Italian ones, I guess their parents say things sometimes. And then Aunt Teresa.”
“Aunt Teresa? What, when you were little?”
“No, I mean since she’s been coming to see me.”
“What are you talking about?”
She grew reticent, seeming afraid she’d given away a confidence.
“I thought you knew. She’s been coming sometimes, the last couple of years. Not much, I guess three or four times. She hasn’t come for a while now.”
For some reason it burned me like a betrayal that Aunt Teresa had been seeing Rita, that this had been going on without my knowing. It seemed just like her to meddle like that, to have to always bring things within her control.
“What, was she trying to convert you or something?”
“No, why? Convert me to what?”
“So what did she tell you exactly?”
“Just the story of what happened and stuff.”
“How did all this come up? Did you ask her about it?”
“I don’t think so. I mean I can’t remember really, I think she was the one that brought it up. I guess she didn’t want me to think she was a criminal or anything, from what other people said about her.”
We sat silent. Rita shifted and drew in her leg, instinctively tugging the hem of her skirt over her knee.
“You’re not angry or anything are you?”
“Why would I be angry?”
“I dunno, you just seem – I dunno.”
The discomfort between us was palpable now. I hadn’t imagined this moment like this, the insufficiency of it, the inarticulateness, yet somehow I couldn’t bring myself to compete with whatever version of things had already taken shape in her.
“So how do you feel about all this?”
“It’s sort of strange, I guess. At first it was like a kind of game to find out but now I don’t really feel anything about it, it’s like it has nothing to do with me. I mean it’s not as if I ever knew her or anything. Is that weird?”
“No, it’s not weird. It’s pretty normal, I guess.”
But there seemed a rift between us now.
“Anyway if you ever want to talk about it again –”
“Sure.”
But there was such a relief between us at dropping the matter, such a tangible drawing away, that it seemed unlikely we would speak of it again.
We took a walk along the beach. The detritus of spring had not yet been cleared away there, the driftwood and garbage that the storms had thrown up, giving the beach an air of abandonment, despite the picnickers and the sunbathers.
“It’s weird how things happen,” Rita said. In our silence I’d imagined her hopelessly lost to me, was surprised now at her note of timid intimacy. “I mean how I came to live with the Amhersts and all that, it all seems so unreal now.”
“Anyway it looks like everything worked out in the end.”
“Yeah, I guess so. It’s just, I dunno, I feel like I’ve been two people or something, it’s been so different.”
But I could feel myself withdrawing from her, resisting this intimacy though it was what I’d thought I wanted.
“Do you remember much? I mean, from when you were living with us?”
“I dunno, not really, I guess I was pretty young. I remember what’s-her-name, Tsia Taormina, she was nice, I guess I thought she was my mother or something. And Aunt Teresa, going into the greenhouses and when she used to read to me and stuff, though the first time she came to see me I didn’t even recognize her.”
But her memories seemed strangely uncontaminated – she might have been recalling some calm, pleasant childhood, light-filled and unremarkable.
“I guess I must have been a real brat,” she said.
“No. You were pretty quiet, really.”
“It’s funny, I don’t remember it that way. I always think of myself as being really noisy or something, I don’t know how to describe it.”
We’d come back to the car. I offered her a cigarette, and for a few minutes we sat silently smoking, Rita staring out, oddly composed, toward the lake.
“God,” she said finally, “remember that time we got called down to Pearson’s office, I thought for sure you were going to tell him I’d been lying. I guess everything would have been different then.” She wagged a finger in the air in imitation of Mr. Pearson. “ ‘No dawdling in the halls, now, girls!’ ”
I searched back through my memory of that day, could remember only the buzz in my head as from the sound of a fingernail scratching a blackboard.
“Lying about what?”
“About the bruises and stuff.”
I felt myself redden.
“I didn’t say anything about them. What did you expect me to say?”
But I’d misunderstood.
“I dunno, I guess I thought you’d tell him the truth, that I’d gotten them playing and stuff.”
“What do you mean?”
“You mean you didn’t know? All those bruises and stuff – not the first ones, that was just what started it. But after that, the ones I got playing, we used to tell the Amhersts I got them from your father. It was Elena’s idea, she thought I’d be able to stay with them then. I thought you knew.”
A small rage had taken shape in me.
“How would I know?”
“I guess I just thought you’d figure it out.”
She’d presented the story so innocently, like some harmless delinquency we could laugh at together, feel complicit in.
“You’re not angry are you? I was just a kid.”
“No I’m not angry, I just don’t like the idea of everyone thinking he was some kind of a monster.”
We sat a moment in charged, awkward silence. I’d ruined things now; whatever fragile understanding we’d established seemed broken.
“Look, I’m sorry,” I said finally. “Anyway I guess everything worked out for the best.”
We drove back to the Amhersts’ without speaking. My anger had vanished, had left now only the awkwardness of our silence, though each moment it stretched on seemed to make reconciliation more impossible. When I pulled up to the Amhersts’ it was Rita who was the first to speak.
“So I guess you’ll be gone when we get back.” Tentative, probing; she seemed to be inviting me to offer again to come out to the airport and yet somehow I pretended to myself to have understood the opposite, that she preferred me not to come.
“I hope you have a good trip and everything,” I said.
“You too. Maybe we can write or something.”
“That would be nice.”
She leaned forward awkwardly and brushed her lips against my cheek.
“Well, goodbye.”
And though a hundred times in the following days I ached to call her, still each passed until finally the day of her departure had come and gone.