The people across the alley were spending their Saturday morning sitting in the bed of their pickup truck. The man, the woman, the three children—it was difficult to think of them as a family—had emerged from their squat little house and climbed into the truck more than an hour ago. And there they had stayed, as if this were a new amusement, the truck itself a destination. Their backyard was scattered with toys, with tricycles, wagons, and plastic items in ugly, cartoon colors: a playhouse, an oversized baseball bat, a basketball hoop on a stand, different broken-looking odds and ends of games. But these had been abandoned in place when the children lost interest in them. Beate thought that the truck was probably a better idea, if only because it was more durable. From time to time the two youngest children stood up and stamped on the truck bed, making satisfying metal noises, or ran from side to side, trailing their hands along the rails. She couldn’t hear anything they were saying from her second-floor window. What did such people say among themselves? She had no power to imagine them.
As if it was any of her business! Such a snoopy, idle old woman she was becoming.
Downstairs, her husband made his racket. Wood ripped and groaned. A saw started up, then stopped in mid-whine. Every so often something heavy collided, or dropped, and Beate waited for the noise to begin again so as to reassure
herself he had not had a heart attack. He was rebuilding the front door and entryway, installing new molding and etched-glass side panels. He had been remodeling the house in one way or another for the last five years. She had lived through the dismantled staircase, the floors stripped down to their joists, ceilings peeled away to the rafters, drywall dust, dishes washed in the bathtub, rooms navigated by flashlight, ladders tangling her feet when she went down to do the laundry. Always there were heaps of debris and supplies, his scattered tools. Someday, he said, they would want to sell the house and move on. The upgrades would make a huge difference in the asking price, and who could argue with that?
But this room was hers, her sewing room, and he was not allowed to interfere with it. Here was her cutting table, the big Bernina sewing machine, her quilting frame, the thread caddy, the cupboard set aside for knitting, the dressmaker form her children had long ago nicknamed Miss Swanky. Here she had good light and a comfortable chair, some framed prints on the walls, a radio for company. Here she spent her time, aside from house chores, and the eating and sleeping that too often felt like chores. She could close the door on the infernal noise and destruction her husband was intent on making, and if that was what the two of them had come to, each of them retreating into their separate spheres, well, they were used to each other, they didn’t fuss or argue, they were able to talk about normal things. There were worse marriages. You heard about them all the time.
She was working on a quilt of special complexity and magnificence, twelve appliqué blocks, each with a different pattern, pieced together, then bordered and bound and quilted. Three of the blocks remained to be completed. The finished blocks were pinned onto the flannel sheet that served as her design wall, where she could study them and decide their final arrangement. Intricate wreaths and vases of flowers and leaves, perching birds and twining vines. Pretty cascades of weaving waving blossom, more lush and artful than anything found in nature.
Beate smoothed the fabric of the tenth block. Tracing and cutting and pressing the fabric pieces had been the difficult part. Now she was ready to place and stitch them onto the background fabric. It was slow, meticulous work of the kind she liked best. She moved between the pattern diagram and the fabric square, comparing the two. Little Brown Bird, the blocks were called. They had a prim, somewhat antique look. So in places she had changed the pattern, added free-form elements, and there was some anxiety about how these might turn out.
Her husband’s noise rose and fell, rose and fell. She was used to it, it did not distract her. But the sound of a car horn honking in a cheery, shave-and-a-haircut rhythm made her put down her fabric and go to the window.
The children had climbed down from the truck bed and were playing a new game, tearing around the backyard in some giddy version of tag. The man sat behind the wheel and honked whenever one of them approached the truck, sending them shrieking and fleeing. The children’s mother must have gone inside, though Beate wasn’t certain. Her view allowed her to look straight down into their yard, although a portion of it was blocked by the fence line. She saw the smallest child, a girl of four or five, wearing her usual costume of grubby pink shirt and a pink tutu. There was a sturdy little boy who might have been a year older, and a long-legged girl who Beate guessed to be seven or eight. They ran and screamed and the truck’s horn blared, egging them on.
All the commotion had roused Beate’s ancient collie, Franklin; he stood at the fence, his plumy tail batting from side to side, adding his hoarse barking to the mix. She would have to go down and see to him. It was almost time to fix her husband’s lunch anyway. She was glad the children seemed to be having one of their good days, since children like these, through no fault of their own, began life with two strikes against them.
She called Franklin inside from the back door and he came reluctantly, hoisting himself up the steps and settling into his bed in the corner of the kitchen. “Bad dog,” Beate said, not meaning it. She cut bread from the bakery loaf, toasted it, layered on cheese, tomatoes, lettuce, the ham from their dinner two nights ago. For her own lunch she ate some of the ham and cheese without sitting down.
She went out to the front hallway, where her husband was rubbing sandpaper over a section of wood molding. The walls in the entryway were taken down to their studs and the floor was covered with a tarp. “Your lunch is ready,” she said. “I’ll leave it on the counter, unless you think you won’t get to it for awhile.”
“I’ll eat in just a bit.” He put the sandpaper down and looked around him for something he couldn’t find.
“You look like you’re making progress.”
“Ah, it’s slower than I’d like . . .”
Beate watched him lean the molding carefully upright, then search the floor for whatever it was he needed. She went back to the kitchen, covered the sandwich with a clean dishtowel, and climbed the stairs again. There was never any point in interrupting him when he was in the middle of something, although she had always put her own work aside when someone needed her attention. She did not really resent it; it was just the difference between men and women.
She was pleased with the way the quilt was turning out. Leaf and vine, blossom and bud. The finished, splendid quilt already existed in her mind’s eye. She would probably enter it in a quilter’s show, but after that she was unsure what to do with it, beyond storing it away with so much else she’d made. The house was already full of her quilts and coverlets and fancy work. Beate supposed that her daughter would eventually inherit much of it. Her resolutely unmarried daughter who did her best not to live the kind of life that made space for heirloom quilts. But neither would her son and his family welcome it. Beate imagined the unpleasant daughter-in-law looking askance at the quilt and declaring it hopelessly old-fashioned, unsuitable, and what in the world were they supposed to do with it? Beate tried to be nice to the daughter-in-law for her grandsons’ sake. They lived far enough away that Beate and her husband only saw the children on long-planned and exhausting holidays. That was not really the daughter-in-law’s fault, even if other things might be.
The next day, Sunday, her husband was still busy making his virtuous and necessary mess. Beate took Franklin for a walk. He was not yet such an old dog that he didn’t enjoy a walk. It was a fine summer’s day, with a blue sky and sailing white clouds. She should take walks for her own health more often, just as she should watch her blood pressure, remember her vitamins, and so on. Had age always required such vigilance, such scolding self-reminders? Were you ever allowed to simply let yourself be?
Several of her neighbors were out doing yard chores, mowing and weeding and sweeping their walks clean of grass clippings. She and Franklin stopped to chat with them and to allow Franklin to flirt and have his ears scratched. At the end of the block she intended to double back, but it was so pleasant to be out—really, she could make more of an effort to exercise—that she decided to walk a little farther and cut through the alley to her back door.
The alley was a clear line of demarcation. If Beate and her husband went out of their front door, their neighborhood was handsome and prosperous, lined with houses much like their own: older, well-kept, some with remnants of Victorian fretwork or gables set off by careful paint jobs. The plantings in the yards, hydrangeas, lilacs, rose hedges, grew leggy over the years and were pruned back with the same sternness that maintained porch stairs and railings, roofs, window frames, foundations. Without this shared vigilance (her husband surely did his part!), the street might lapse into shabby decline.
The view from their back door was less encouraging. The district on the far side of the alley had once held small workingmen’s cottages, built at the same time as their own house, although they had not fared as well. Here and there it was possible to make out one of the original structures beneath the added-on porches and carports and bedrooms. But most of them had given way to the cheaper kinds of rental property, duplexes and apartment “villages” and stand-alone houses, all of which had begun to fall apart as soon as they were occupied. Rust dripped from the gutters, siding buckled, front doors were kicked open until they sagged on their hinges. Beate supposed she was a snob. She was wary of her less fortunate neighbors, of their shoutings and honkings and slammings, their lives so unnecessarily on public display, the occasional police cruiser moving slowly along their streets.
The alley held refuse cans and prowling cats. Older children sometimes gathered there to smoke and set off firecrackers and get into other semicriminal mischief. But this was Sunday morning and no one else was about. Birds piped. Tree branches hung over the back fences, and the fences themselves were thickly covered with honeysuckle and orange trumpet vine. Sections of pavement gave way in places to gravel and the gravel to dirt. If you blurred your eyes, you could pretend it was a country lane. She thought about nursery rhymes, their landscape of milkmaids and stiles and shepherd boys. Then she tried to follow the thought back to its origin, why it had come to her. Things that were not what you wanted them to be. Something about what it must have really been like, country life all those centuries ago, the smells, the mud, the pestilence, not some jolly rhyme.
She was almost at her own house when a man stepped out from the gate opposite hers, and Franklin, startled, began to bark and tangle himself in his leash. She recognized the man as the tenant, the owner of the pickup truck, who presided over the household of children. She had never spoken to him but she knew him by sight. He was tall and thin and hunched, with a wedge of slick blond hair and a sharp-edged moustache. He did some sort of shift work, and Beate saw him most often in the late afternoon, arriving home and climbing out of the truck in his dark blue workshirt, the fabric sweated through along his back.
Since it was the weekend, he wore other clothes, a white T-shirt and jeans. Whatever he had come out into the alley for, he stopped and waited while Beate tried to quiet Franklin. He was still barking and turning in circles, binding the leash around her knees. “Sorry,” she said. “He just gets carried away.”
“Here now,” the man said to Franklin. His voice was oddly high and nasal. “You quit that.”
“He’s actually very friendly,” Beate said. Franklin, excited by his own noise, was caught in an endless loop of ecstatic barking.
“He doesn’t listen good, does he? You give him to me for a week and I’ll teach him to mind.”
“He’s an old dog,” Beate said, unsure whether she meant it as an explanation or an apology or a reproof. She got herself free of the leash, unlocked her own gate and pushed Franklin inside. She felt the man staring after her.
By the time she got Franklin into the house and settled, and went back upstairs, she couldn’t see him from the window. The brief, unpleasant encounter stayed with her. How she disliked such men, who believed that the firm hand was the answer to everything, who regarded all forms of womanish coaxing or reassuring or soothing with contempt. There had been times in years past when she was forced to intervene with her own husband, who was not by nature at all angry or intemperate, persuade him that the crying, misbehaving child needed comfort rather than punishment.
She had to wonder about the children in the neighbor’s house and how they fared in his surly company. But then, who else but he would have bought them all those toys?
For some months the man had been the only one living in the house, and Beate had paid him no particular attention. Then the woman had become an occasional presence, her old brown sedan parked next to the truck some nights, the two of them walking out together in the mornings and driving their separate ways. The woman was tiny, with the kind of narrow, childish figure that made it hard to believe she had borne children herself. She had long, heavy black hair that she usually piled on top of her head and covered with a scarf, making a peculiar stovepipe shape.
She did not like to think of herself as nosy, but it had been difficult not to notice.
At some point the two youngest children had begun spending time at the house, mostly on weekends. Their mother would arrive with them midmorning and drive them back after supper. Who minded them when she spent nights away from them? A grandmother, or maybe the children’s father? Families these days were so distressed, so fragmented and badly rearranged, there was no telling. Then the woman and children had moved in, for all intents and purposes, and about that time the older girl began to make an appearance. A different car dropped her off and picked her up. School had still been in session then: it was likely that she had some living situation that was organized around school. Now that it was summer she had joined the others in the house across the alley, which scarcely seemed large enough for all of them.
“The mother almost never goes outside,” Beate told her husband that night at supper. He didn’t know who she meant, and she had to explain. “Don’t you think that’s odd? Sometimes she sits in her car and talks on her phone. Talks and talks. And sometimes it’s just the two little ones out there by themselves, and they’re simply too young to be without supervision.”
Her husband took another bite of his beef with horseradish sauce, chewed and swallowed it down before he answered. “Sounds as if you’re doing a pretty good job of supervising them.”
“Oh, thank you.” She only pretended to be offended. “I just wonder what she does in that house all day. Watches television, most likely.”
“Maybe she sews,” her husband said, another joke at her expense, but still nothing she had to take seriously. He was in a good mood because his work was going well.
Whatever misgivings Beate had about the man, it was true that he was the one who spent more time with the children, at least, in organized outdoor play. He’d come home from work, go inside briefly, then come back out to start tricycle races in the driveway, or pitch a foam baseball for the children to swing at. Whenever they connected and the ball went airborne, he led the cheering as the child ran imaginary bases. She really was a terrible snob. Why couldn’t she give the man some credit? People did the best they could.
Her husband still went to his office during the week. Someday soon he would retire for good, and there would be no peace or quiet under her roof. But for now she could enjoy having the freedom of the house. She lingered in the kitchen after the breakfast dishes were done, reading a magazine.
Once again it was the dog’s barking that interrupted her. She rose and went to the back door. He was standing on his hind legs, his front paws against the fence. It was a six-foot board fence but there were cracks in it, and someone in the alley was manipulating a long twig through one of them, wiggling it back and forth.
Beate went out to him, shushed him, unlocked the gate and opened it wide enough to see out. It was the girl from across the alley, the older child, her face pressed up to the boards while she poked at Franklin with the twig.
“Honey,” Beate said, and the girl stopped and gazed up at her, open-mouthed. “Don’t tease the dog. It’s not good for him.”
“I was just playing.” She had a small, snub-nosed face, freckles, two wings of lank brown hair. She wore a cotton shirt and shorts, and her bare legs had a couple of scabs that looked like scratched mosquito bites.
“That may be, but it gets him upset, and he’s too old to stand up like that.”
The girl let the twig drop, as if pretending it had never really interested her, then scooped up a small white teddy bear from the ground beside her. “Want to buy my bear?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Two dollars.” She wiggled it invitingly.
“No, I don’t need a bear. Why are you trying to sell it?”
The girl didn’t answer. She didn’t seem shy, only disinclined to speak. She picked up the twig again and put it to work tracing lines in the dirt. “What’s your name?” Beate asked.
“Kyra.” She spoke without looking up.
“Well Kyra, it’s nice to meet you. My name is Beate.”
She did look up then. “That’s not a name.”
“Yes it is. You see, I was born in Germany and I came to this country when I was just a little girl.”
The child looked dubious, as if Germany too might be something Beate had invented.
“How old are you?” Beate asked.
“Eight.”
She looked small for eight. Thin little legs and arms. “I was only five when I came here. I had to learn a whole new language.” She sensed Kyra wavering, reluctant to show any real enthusiasm but still loitering. “My dog is named Franklin. Would you like to pet him?”
Kyra said that she would, and Beate took hold of Franklin’s collar and let him stick his long nose through the gate. Kyra touched his nose, then pulled her hand back. “See, he’s a nice dog, you can play with him if you’re gentle.”
“Roger used to have a dog,” Kyra informed her. “It was black. His name was Tweaker.”
“Oh? Who’s Roger?”
“My mom’s boyfriend.”
“I see. Is your mother home now?” Because surely the child should not be out in the alley by herself.
“Shelly’s not my mom.”
Beate paused a moment to process this. “Then where is your mother?”
“In Tennessee with Roger.”
She was beginning to lose track of the names, but persevered. “Does Shelly live over there?”
“Yeah. She stays with my dad.”
So the surly man was Kyra’s father. “Who else stays in your dad’s house?”
“Petey and Michelle.”
Beate thought she might have sorted it out, finally, except for the possibly vexed question of Pete’s and Michelle’s paternity. “Well Kyra, it was very nice to meet you. Why don’t you go back in your own yard now, so Shelly doesn’t worry about you.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t forget your bear,” Beate reminded her, and Kyra turned to pick it up before she opened the gate to her own yard, squeezed through and let it bang shut behind her.
Funny little creature. Not so much unmannerly—though eight was not too young for manners—just unwilling to put much effort into a conversation. But she was being unfair. Children that age were very much in their own worlds. And this little girl seemed to live pillar to post as it was, shifting between parents and whoever the parents’ cotenants happened to be at any given moment. What could you expect?
That evening Beate’s daughter called. She lived in a city that was nearly as far away as her son’s but in the opposite direction. Her daughter was, as always, vague about how she spent her time, and with whom, and anything else that might allow for personal knowledge. But she was full of prodding questions about Beate. Was her mother still drinking coffee even after she had been advised not to? Was she still having trouble sleeping? Well no wonder. Was she getting out and doing things, seeing people, not just shutting herself inside with her sewing?
Beate asked what was wrong with sewing. “Nothing,” her daughter said. “You just can’t make it your whole life.”
“It’s not my whole life.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I’m sure I don’t,” said Beate, beginning to be sorry she’d answered the phone. There was a point when one’s children began to bully and manage you for your own good, but surely she had not yet come to such a pass. What would her daughter know about her life these days, either in its entirety or its parts? What would anyone?
“You could do volunteer work,” her relentless daughter went on. “You could take a class at the community college or somewhere.”
“What sort of class?”
“Whatever interests you. Music. Art. The Y here has a course in memoir writing. A lot of older people do that, write down their reminiscences. Even get them published.”
“Since nobody ever wants to hear about them, I doubt anyone would read them.”
“Never mind,” her daughter said. “I think it would be nice if you had some kind of more social hobby, but never mind. Is Daddy there?”
Beate called her husband to the phone and hung up. She heard him talking for some time, although she couldn’t make out what he said. Every so often he laughed. If she asked him later what they were talking about, he would say nothing, nothing in particular. Let them have their jokes and secrets. She would settle for being left out, as long as they didn’t fuss over her.
She had been a good mother. She’d taught them Christmas carols, made pancakes in the shape of bunnies, checked their homework, taken them for vaccinations and eyeglasses and braces. Love measured out by the teaspoon, built up over years and years, a reservoir. Why did so little of it flow back her way?
Kyra returned the next day. This was not surprising. Beate figured she was a novelty, or perhaps Franklin was the real draw. When he started pawing and whining at the fence, Beate went outside, knowing what she’d find. “Hello?”
“Can I play with your dog?”
Beate opened the gate. Kyra had a red popsicle in one hand and was sucking on it. Her mouth and tongue were stained a startling cherry red. Not the sort of thing Beate would have given a child at nine-thirty in the morning. “Why don’t you finish your popsicle and go ask Shelly if it’s all right with her. And wash your face,” she added.
She waited while the girl scooted across to her own yard, emerging a little while later without the popsicle, her mouth a rubbed-looking pink. “Did Shelly tell you it was all right to play here?” Kyra nodded. “Good, because you know you shouldn’t go visit people you don’t know without permission.”
Beate stepped aside and Kyra entered. Franklin rushed to cover her with sloppy dog kisses. Kyra giggled. Beate found a couple of his old toys, a ball and a squeaky man. She sat on the stairs and watched them play, Kyra giving him detailed instructions, Franklin, uncomprehending, following along as best he could. After a while Beate got up and went into the kitchen, poured out orange juice into plastic glasses, and set out some cheese and crackers and apple slices on a plate. She called Kyra over the picnic table (Franklin needed a break by then), and the two of them ate their snack in the shade of the old linden tree. Kyra, once talking, chattered on in hectic fashion. She liked dogs and she liked horses. She was going to be in the second grade. Her teacher last year was Mrs. Singer and she was “all right.” Petey and Michelle didn’t go to school yet. She liked Petey but she didn’t like Michelle but she wouldn’t say why. Her mom sent her a postcard from Tennessee. It had a picture of a horse on it.
“Sometimes Petey hits me and I hit him back,” she volunteered.
“Well that’s not very nice. You shouldn’t hit him.”
“He hit me so I hit him and then I tied him to a chair.”
This seemed unlikely, but Beate let it pass. “When is your mother coming back from Tennessee?”
“I don’t know. Roger has a motorcycle. And two rodeo horses. And a million dollars.”
“You like to make up stories, don’t you? Will you live with your mother or your father when school starts?”
Again Kyra said she didn’t know, and Beate didn’t ask any more questions. After an hour, Beate sent her back across the alley. No one had called or come looking for her, but it was best to pretend that someone might be.
She returned the next morning. Beate was ready for her and had a note prepared: Would it be all right if Kyra visited at my house? I enjoy her company but would not wish to worry you.
At the bottom she signed her name and included her address and phone number. Beate sent her home with it and almost immediately Kyra was back. “OK” was written in scratchy blue ink at the bottom of the page.
This was probably the best you could hope for. Beate sat and watched Kyra and Franklin play, as before, and once that ran its course she told Kyra she had work to do, but that she could come inside and watch if she wished.
She did, and Beate led her upstairs to the sewing room. Kyra was transfixed by the dressmaker form. “What’s that for?”
“If you’re making clothes, you can fit them on her.”
“What kind of clothes?”
“Anything you like. Pants, shirts, dresses.”
Kyra looked uncomprehending. Beate realized that this was a new idea for her, that ordinary people made clothes, they didn’t just come from a store. “Her name is Miss Swanky.”
“What does swanky mean?”
“Fancy, like showing-off fancy.”
Beate gave her a tour of the room and all its features, let her touch the skeins of yarn in their basket, run her hands over the rainbow spools of thread. She showed Kyra a picture of the appliqué border she had selected for the quilt, a pink and green pattern of stylized, trailing roses. “Do you see the little brown bird?”
Kyra shook her head. “Try again,” Beate told her, and when Kyra spotted it, tucked into a green curlicue, she smiled her first full, unguarded smile. She might well grow up to be pretty. Up until now it had been difficult to say. “You see,” Beate told her, “the bird was right there the whole time. You just had to look carefully. Would you like me to show you how to embroider? First let’s go wash your hands.”
Beate provided an embroidery hoop and a square of white muslin, showed her how to thread the embroidery floss and roll a fat knot at the end of it. She taught her how to make a cross-stitch in yellow, then they picked red, Kyra’s favorite, for blanket stitches, then blue for stem stitch, and pink for French knots. “You practice those for a while. When you are good enough, if you like, we will find a project for you.”
She started in on her own work, one eye on Kyra in case she grew bored or frustrated. The light from the window lit her silky hair as she bent over the hoop, quiet for once, absorbed in pushing the needle in and out. Her thin, summer-brown legs were planted wide apart, her feet in their old plaid tennis shoes flat and splayed out. Still, she made a nice picture. A little girl learning to sew; what was more charming than that? “Let me see,” Beate said after a while. “Very good job,” she pronounced. “You can take it home with you and show everyone.” If nothing else, she thought, the girl had learned how to thread a needle.
Beate fixed their lunch—chicken salad, bread and butter, milk—and again they ate it at the picnic table in the backyard. Children’s high, indistinct voices reached them from beyond the fence. The two younger ones must have been playing outside. Beate closed her eyes. Her childhood in Germany existed only as scraps of much-handled memories. There had been a cherry tree outside the front door and her father had lifted her up on his shoulders so that she was surrounded by the glowing fruit. There was a song they sang when they went to feed the ducks in the park: Alle meine Entchen schwimmen auf dem See, schwimmen auf dem See, Köpfchen in das Wasser. She had tipped over the blue bowl of sugar and her mother had been cross. How much was remembered, how much was lost? Who had she been, that long-ago girl child? Now that it was almost too late, she reached back, trying to reclaim her. Perhaps childhood was always a foreign country.
From across the alley one of the children, probably the little girl, raised her voice in a sudden, piercing shriek. Beate opened her eyes. It was time to send Kyra home.
She came again, not the next day, but the day after. And she did not appear on the weekends when her father was home and presumably keeping better track of her. But she visited often enough for the two of them to fall into a routine: the simple sewing tasks Beate set for her, Kyra’s mile-a-minute observations on the people in her world (“Shelly has a rash between her toes”), the lunch eaten at the picnic table. She was a flighty little thing, Beate decided, but also inquisitive and anxious to please. She might have interests and aptitudes that would reveal themselves over time. All any child really needed was encouragement.
Beate told herself not to make the girl into a pet. There were not very many weeks left in the summer, and once school began, she might be reclaimed by the mother and the legendary Roger.
But say she stayed here, with her father. It might be possible for Beate to assume some place in her life. She would introduce herself to the adults in the house, make arrangements. Provide her with some of the supervision and attention she seemed to lack. Help with her schoolwork. And what a pleasure it would be to have a little girl in the house, teach her how to knit, how to bake cookies . . .
Here Beate stopped herself, since she was surely getting too far ahead of herself. And she had to wonder what Kyra herself wanted.
Beate began by asking her if she liked school, if she was looking forward to school starting up again. “Uh huh,” Kyra said, unconvincingly.
Beate persisted. “And what do you like about school? Do you like reading stories? Spelling? Arithmetic?”
“Roger lets me ride his motorcycle.”
“That sounds like fun.” Giving up her attempts to steer the conversation.
“Yeah, and I got to put the gas in it.”
Beate said that was a good thing to do. She couldn’t help noticing that Kyra’s own father was never mentioned with any similar enthusiasm. Then again, it would be hard to compete with a motorcycle.
She made a surprise for Kyra, a little sundress she stitched up out of red bandana fabric, red being Kyra’s favorite color. She had to guess at the measurements if it was to be a surprise, but she put smocking across the front and made straps with adjustable buttons to allow for anything off in the sizing. It turned out well and was certainly more attractive than her stretched and faded play clothes.
“I have something for you,” she told Kyra, the next time she came over. “Here you are.”
She held it out but Kyra wouldn’t take it from her. Something blank and dull settled over her face. “Would you like to see how you look in it?” Beate prompted.
“No.”
“Kyra, if someone gives you a present, you should thank them.”
Almost inaudible: “Thank you.”
“Why don’t you go into the bathroom and try it on?”
“I don’t want to.”
“All right, but why don’t you want to?” Her feelings were rather hurt, although she was not really entitled to such feelings.
“I don’t want to! You can’t make me!”
“Kyra, I would not make you do anything you don’t want to. I’ll wrap the dress up and you can take it home with you.” Quickly retreating, since what choice did she have? Maybe the girl didn’t like wearing dresses. She wondered if it would ever be worn, or if it would end up shoved into the corner of a closet. Kyra left that day with the dress in a brown paper bag, the bag drooping from one hand. It had clearly been a mistake, but she had no idea why.
That night after dinner, she asked her husband if he thought there was an age when children became self-conscious about their appearance.
He looked up from the computer where he was researching his next grandiose project, a complete replacement of the house’s heating system. The front entrance was still a bare and dispiriting mess, but he liked to think ahead. He seemed surprised that she would ask him such a question, as well he might, but who else did she have to talk to?
“I guess so. I couldn’t say what age. Probably when some other little kid starts making fun of you.”
“That starts young.” It was how she had come to think of Kyra’s near-tantrum about the dress: she had interpreted the gift as criticism. And she had hardly been wrong to do so. Was that why she didn’t seem excited about school, because she was teased there? “Or maybe there’s a phase when they aren’t sure what they want to be, girls or boys, you know, pulled both ways . . .” Ride a motorcycle? Thread a needle? Her son when young had played with dolls. Her daughter, well, she had never had any use for normal girlhood.
“Who are you talking about, your little orphan friend?”
“She’s hardly an orphan.”
“All the more reason not to get involved in her affairs.”
“There are parents and then there are parents,” Beate said, but their conversation was at an end. How little comfort they were to each other. How many more years life might go on in this way, until one of them died and the other fell entirely silent.
She might have worried about Kyra staying away, but she reappeared the next morning just as before. Beate welcomed her inside. The new appliqué square was now finished and she pinned it to the design wall and asked Kyra to help her decide how to arrange them. “This one on top of this one on top of this one,” Kyra declared. “Then this one and this one.” Beate laughed and said that then it wouldn’t be a quilt, only a long piece of cloth.
Their lunch that day was peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and vanilla pudding. Franklin sat at their feet in the shade, panting. The weather had turned hazy hot. “You know, Kyra, I like your idea of making a long embroidered panel. A kind of tapestry. That could be my next project, you could help me.” It wasn’t even the skills themselves she wanted to teach the girl, but the principles of craftsmanship, the ethic of excellence, how doing a thing well could absorb and sustain you.
“My daddy sleeps in Michelle’s bed.”
Kyra held the last peanut butter and jelly square in one hand, though she seemed uninterested in eating it, and was intent on squeezing the filling out through the flattened edges of the bread.
“What did you say, Kyra?”
“Sometimes he does.”
“Does what?”
Kyra drummed her heels against the bench. “Sleeps in her bed,” she repeated, patiently. There was no sense that she felt she was communicating anything remarkable.
Beate felt her insides revolving. “Do you mean, when Michelle is sick or has nightmares?” Please God that there would be some such an explanation.
Kyra shrugged. “I guess so.”
“And what does Shelly say about this?”
Another shrug. “I don’t know.”
“Finish your milk,” Beate said automatically. She made herself sort through the different possibilities. Kyra was mistaken. Kyra was being untruthful, or exaggerating. Children often did, and certainly Kyra’s statements did not always seem reliable. It was something ordinary and innocent. Bedtime stories. A child afraid of the dark.
She remembered something she’d once seen from her window, some time back, in the spring, before Kyra had come to live in the house across the alley. The man’s truck had pulled into the driveway and he’d gotten out and lifted up the little girl in her soiled pink ballerina outfit. He’d carried her inside and they had not come out again. The woman’s car had not been there.
None of this was evidence of anything. But once the thought entered your mind, it pulled other thoughts and suspicions along behind it. And all the toys, the backyard games the man arranged for them. What if he did it not to court and appease the woman, or because he genuinely liked children, what if the woman was just the excuse for him to gain access to the child?
Such things happened. She had no doubt. The close heat of the day bore down on her and she lifted her glass of ice water to her forehead. “Why did you want to tell me about your daddy sleeping in Michelle’s bed?”
“I don’t know.”
“‘I don’t know’ is not a good answer.”
The girl said nothing, just picked at the piece of sandwich that was now so smeared and flattened as to be inedible.
“What does he do to Michelle?”
“Tickles her.”
“And does Michelle like being tickled?”
“I have to go home now,” Kyra announced. She put the sandwich back on the plate and hopped down from the bench.
What to think? What to do? She stood at the gate a long time after Kyra had disappeared across the alley. If it was an invention, a falsehood, a misunderstanding, it would be a catastrophe to set the ponderous machinery of the state in motion, police, social workers, the child welfare agency. Nor might they intervene on such a scant account. They would look at her and think her a meddler, a troublemaker, wonder why she didn’t keep her nose on her own face.
Yet how easy it was to ignore or disbelieve a child, simply because it was the habit of adults to ignore and disbelieve children.
It was the weekend again. The man’s pickup truck stayed in their driveway, and Kyra did not visit. Beate’s husband returned to his attack on the front door and enveloped himself in sawdust and noise. Beate, frankly spying by now, kept watch from her window on the neighbor’s backyard. But the weather had turned rainy, the children did not come out to play, and there was nothing to see.
Only this: there had been occasions when Kyra’s father and the children’s mother stood outside by themselves, talking. Beate could never hear them, or even see their faces clearly, but she knew the look of a couple who had serious things to say to each other, things best said away from the children. Now here they were again, out in the driveway in the mild drizzle. As always, the woman, Shelly, had her hair wrapped up in that peculiar unflattering way, as if she were hiding a length of pipe beneath her headscarf. They stayed there a long time. Should she even hope that it had to do with the little girl? What if Kyra had said something to someone else, what if the mother really had not known or noticed until now? It was possible, anything was possible, though God knows there were enough other reasons for any couple to have their difficulties.
On Monday morning the truck was gone by the time Beate woke and looked out her window. None of the children came out into the backyard, although the rain had cleared and the day was fresh and cool. Kyra did not visit. The woman’s brown car left at some point, although when Beate looked again it had returned.
Things happened quickly after that. The truck stayed absent that day and the next day and the next. A car Beate had not seen before pulled into the driveway. A man got out and began loading cardboard boxes, laundry baskets, clothes on hangers into his trunk. The children’s mother filled her own car also, with blankets, backpacks, children’s jackets, paper sacks. Clearly some major dislocation was in progress.
As she watched, the two younger children were led and carried out to the brown car, the little girl clinging, the little boy dawdling, there was another driveway conference with the strange man, then both cars started up, backed out into the street, and were gone. The whole process had taken less than an hour.
At night she kept watch, and in the daylight hours she went from window to window, as if she might see Kyra in some unexpected place, the next street over or the far end of the alley. What would her father do to her if he suspected her of telling tales? Such men were unpredictable, possibly violent. The child might be in real danger. How high would you have to climb to see the whole city laid out beneath you, find the one small moving piece that was dear to you? How horrible people were, what an ugly blotched patchwork life made. What a lie a pretty picture in thread was when your own life was just as sad, as torn, as
misshapen as anyone else’s. . . . “What’s the matter with you?”
her husband asked, and she said, Nothing. Nothing was the
matter.Turning her back to him in bed. She felt him hesitate, wondering whether to say more, then he settled into sleep.
On the third day, the pickup truck was back. Around midmorning the man emerged from the back door, hauling out pieces of furniture and wrestling them into the truck bed. Nightstands, mattresses, bed frames, chairs, a dismantled exercise machine of some sort. He squared the load and roped it in and drove off.
She made up her mind to go speak to him, ask him where Kyra was. Demand information, some way to get in touch with her. Surely he would be back, the house would hardly be empty. Perhaps this evening, when her husband could go with her. She would make him, he didn’t have to be happy about it. There would be an advantage in having a man on hand.
But when the truck returned in the middle of the afternoon, she couldn’t bring herself to wait. He might leave again for good, and then how she would reproach herself. What was she afraid of, anyway? So he was rude, unpleasant, perhaps worse, a creep, as her children used to say. Her children, anybody’s child. She had a mother’s heart. She would face him down.
It would have been easiest just to cross the alley—she was certain their gate was left unlocked—but walking through the yard might aggravate him, and why begin that way? She went the long way around, down to the end of her own block, then past the alley to the unfamiliar street with its line of battered mailboxes on posts, its feral-looking cats skulking under fences, its sagging front porches. She’d never seen Kyra’s house from the front, and it took her a moment to recognize it. The driveway was unpaved. Grass had grown up in the center path between the tire tracks, then scorched and dried to yellow weeds. The house looked as if something heavy had once settled on it and knocked its every right angle askew. A ceramic wind chime was nailed to one of the porch supports. The front windows were covered over with blowsy curtains, or perhaps they were bed sheets serving as curtains.
Beate walked a little ways up the drive. The truck was pulled up to the back door. The man came out, dragging one end of a sofa. He guided it up a ramp to the truck bed, then shoved it into place from behind. He turned and stared at Beate. His face was dark red from exertion and his hair was damp.
She couldn’t tell if he remembered her or not. “Hello,” she said. “I saw that you were moving and I came to ask about Kyra.”
“What about her?” Flat, belligerent. None of her business.
She had not rehearsed what to say. “I haven’t seen her in awhile. I wanted to . . . I wondered if she was all right.”
“She’s fine.”
He wasn’t going to give her anything. Beate said, “Oh, is she with her mother?”
He made a barking sound, a laugh. “Not likely.”
“And why’s that?”
“There’s a word that fits her mother. Her and them like her. But I won’t say it. It’s not for delicate ears.”
It was his longest speech yet. It seemed to animate him to recall his grievances. Beate said, “I wanted to tell her good-bye.”
“How about I tell her for you.”
“No. That’s not good enough.”
“And why’s that?”
“Because I don’t trust you.”
He seemed to find this funny. “Well it’s a good thing you don’t have to.” He stepped to the back door. “Kyra! Get on out here!”
She came out slowly and loitered on the porch step. She wore a blue party dress made out of some stiff, glossy fabric, the cheapest kind of fancy garment. The skirt stood out unevenly, already draggled. Her old plaid sneakers had been replaced by new pink ones, the laces printed with red hearts.
“Hello, Kyra,” Beate said, once she found her voice. Kyra gave no sign of recognition. She was absorbed in scratching some substance off the screen door.
“Come here,” her father said, and she hopped down to stand next to him. He held out his hand and she took it. “Whose girl are you?”
“Daddy’s.”
“That’s right.”
“Where are you moving?” Beate asked. The sun beat down on the center of her head, a beam of pure heat.
“Someplace where the neighborhood watch ain’t so busy.”
“Kyra?” Beate bent down, trying to meet the girl’s eye. “You remember where I live. You can always come visit me.”
Her father picked her up and set her on the sofa in the truck bed. The horrible dress twisted around her, too tight beneath the arms. He said, “I guess it’ll be awhile before that happens.”
He was waiting for her to leave. She walked past them through the backyard and its broken, discarded toys, opened the gate and crossed the alley to her own house.
She sat in the kitchen until she heard the truck’s doors slamming, its engine starting up. Then she climbed the stairs to her sewing room. She had two more blocks of her quilt to finish. After that there was the border to piece, with its roses and curving stems, the little brown bird that was there all along if only you knew to look for it.