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Statues

Jim Aiken

Asimov’s Science Fiction

November, 1984

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All the way home from the bus station Aunt Edith chattered gaily about people Laura didn't know and places she had never been. It was too much trouble to pay attention, so Laura just sat and stared out the window. She wondered dully whether Aunt Edith was being so cheerful to make her feel welcome, or whether she made Aunt Edith nervous. There was some small pleasure in having the power to make somebody nervous, but it didn't last long. The car was hot and stuffy and full of Aunt Edith's perfume. Laura couldn't breathe, but there was no crank to open the window, only a confusing array of chrome buttons on the armrest. When Aunt Edith slackened momentarily to negotiate a left turn, Laura said, "Is there a—I'm not sure how you open the window."

"Oh, you don't want the window open, dear. It's freezing out. You wouldn't want to take a chance on catching a chill, not until you're better."

Laura frowned. Did Aunt Edith think she had had pneumonia? How much had Aunt Edith been told? At the thought that her aunt must already know everything, Laura cringed in shame. She shrank down in the seat and let Aunt Edith chatter on, interjecting only the occasional obligatory murmur. Even that took a great effort; she was tired, so tired. She hoped Aunt Edith already knew. That way Laura wouldn't have to try to explain. It was impossible to explain, impossible to do anything. The streets outside the window slid by in a meaningless blur.

She roused herself when Aunt Edith turned off onto a curving street posted with rural mailboxes and guided the car up a steep driveway. Laura knew that Aunt Edith and Uncle Henry had money. Ever since she was a little girl, she had looked forward to opening the box under the tree that came from them, because what was in it was always nicer than anything her parents could afford. But she had only imagined what their house must be like. The first thing she noticed was how unkempt the grounds were—certainly nothing like the grounds of a mansion in Illinois. The scraggly trees marching down the hillside looked like the remains of an orchard, and the gully off to the left was choked in brush. Maybe they weren't rich after all—maybe it had been a pretense to fool the relatives. Maybe they wouldn't be able to afford to have her stay, and she'd have to turn around and go home on the next bus.

But the house reassured her. At the top of the slope, it was a huge rambling place, white stucco and red tile roof in the Spanish style, with wrought-iron grills over the windows. They might do things differently in California, but a mansion was still a mansion.

Laura let out a sigh. She was really here. Maybe now she could make a fresh start. She remembered pulling up to another big white building a year ago in another car, and how she had looked forward to starting an exciting new grown-up life in college. The dorm looked so clean and pleasant, but later it became an evil place, where dreams turned sick and bloated, and suddenly Aunt Edith's house was full of slimy evil things too, dead things that wanted to crawl across her naked body and smother her and choke her, so she sat in the car trembling and didn't even try to figure out how to open the door while Aunt Edith went inside to fetch the maid to carry the suitcases, and when they came back they found that Laura had thrown up the bus-station breakfast all over her new winter coat.

* * * * *

The next morning when she awoke the room was quiet and cold and filled with silver light. After the vibration of the four-day bus ride, the stillness was as thick as cake frosting. She lay warm and cozy under the white blanket and looked around at the mirror on the dressing table, the lace curtains, the pale pastel wallpaper. Aunt Edith and Uncle Henry didn't have any children, so this wasn't a daughter's room where she was trespassing, only a guest room made to look like a daughter's room. Laura had always wanted to wake up in a room like this. This was the kind of room they gave you when you died and went to Heaven. For a while she had thought the hospital room was like a room in Heaven, but that was while she was still under sedation. The hospital room smelled of chemicals and pain and fear, and even after she was no longer quite so weak physically, she still felt drained and helpless there because nobody listened when she tried to tell them what she wanted. What she wanted was for them to go away and leave her alone, especially Mama. But Mama was always there, sitting at the side of the bed watching her with that dubious, wounded look, trapping Laura's hand between both of hers and scrunching her eyes shut while her lips moved in prayer. The praying was torture, because it kept Laura from forgetting why she was in the hospital. She screamed sometimes, and threw things, which only made Mama pray harder. This room was as cold and white as the hospital room, and there was the same sense that nobody had ever really lived here. But it smelled nice, and Aunt Edith hadn't tried to do any praying yet.

Prayer sickened her. She didn't want to pray, or be prayed for, ever again. Which was a bitterly shameful thing to feel. Mama loved her, and here she was being ungrateful. More important, she was shutting herself off from Jesus Christ. Or had she shut herself off from Jesus Christ a year ago, and been living in Hell ever since? To escape that oppressive thought, she jumped out of bed and padded on bare feet across the cold slick hardwood floor to look out the window.

A thin winter fog lay across the hills, shrouding the bare black trees in silver vagueness. The sun was only a smudged ball sailing in the mist; it gave no warmth, and as she watched it slid behind a gray curtain. Laura had never seen a California winter before. The absence of snow added to the gloom. It was as though this were some ancient season of heatlessness from before the dawn of time out of which the crystalline winter of Illinois had been born, a bad-tempered child—destined one day to be swallowed back into its eternal parent.

At the edge of the grove of trees behind the house, where the fog hung thickest, she thought for a moment that she saw four or five indistinct shapes, whiter blurs in the whiteness. She felt a sudden flush of self-consciousness, sure that the shapes were watching her. But when she blinked, they were gone. She shivered. She had only imagined it; there was nothing there, nobody.

* * * * *

"It's kind of you to let me come visit," she told Aunt Edith at breakfast. Uncle Henry had long since left for the office. Uncle Henry was in investment properties. Laura had no idea what investment properties were. She and Aunt Edith were sharing toast and coffee on the butcherblock table in the big shiny kitchen.

"I'm just pleased that you wanted to come," Aunt Edith replied. "It's been so long since we saw our little Laura. And you are looking well, dear. I was afraid the journey would tire you."

Laura chewed toast. She didn't look well, she knew, and the journey had nothing to do with it. But Aunt Edith seemed determined to sweep the whole thing under the rug. Some things, Laura saw, could never be swept under the rug, not really. They made lumps, lumps you stumbled over every time you turned around. But if Aunt Edith wanted to chart a course around the lumps, that was all right.

"I've been thinking," Aunt Edith went on. "I'm gone so much of the time, with my card club and various obligations, and I hate to think of you here all alone. I'm sure you'd like to meet some girls your own age. Wouldn't that be nice? There are several nice girls right here in Monte Sereno who are daughters of friends of mine."

"Please, Aunt Edith, you don't have to. I don't want to meet anybody." The toast turned to paper in Laura's mouth. She had trouble swallowing it.

"Nonsense. You can't possibly have any fun cooped up here all day. So I've arranged for you to attend a party next weekend. Now don't fuss, dear, just listen. Sally Lawrence is having a big bash next Friday night, and it just so happens that Sally's daughter Amy is right about your age. Amy is inviting some of her friends to the party, so I asked Sally straight out if you couldn't come, and of course she said they'd be delighted. So that's all settled."

The tiredness washed over Laura, turning the kitchen a wavering undersea green. "All right, Aunt Edith." Friday was too far away to argue about.

"Have you got something nice to wear? Or should we go shopping? I know some of the most darling little boutiques, and I'd love to help you pick something out."

"I can wear my wool skirt."

"I must say," Aunt Edith said, "you don't sound very enthusiastic for a girl who's going to a party."

* * * * *

Laura wondered why anybody would be enthusiastic about going to a party. There were two kinds of parties, she knew. One kind was where everybody wore nice clothes and was polite and well-behaved, and there was always a chaperon there to suggest playing games that nobody really wanted to play. That was the kind she and her little sisters had gone to when they were growing up. The other kind was where everybody was drinking liquor and laughing about things that weren't nice, and the boys were always putting their hands on the girls and trying to get them to dance. That was the kind they had at college. Her father had warned her about parties. The night before she left for college he sat her down in the living room and sent her sisters away and lectured her for two hours on morality. "I'm not sure but what it's a mistake," he declared, "to send you fifty miles away to a big city like Champaign-Urbana, where you'll be exposed to who knows what kind of indecent influences. But you're a big girl now, and that scholarship is a blessed opportunity for which we should be properly grateful, so we'll just have to pray to the Lord to keep you safe from temptation. I want you to promise me you'll go to church every Sunday, and not ever go to a party where they're serving liquor, and not ever let a boy come into your room. You don't know what might happen. The flesh is weak. The flesh is weak." He was gripping her shoulder so hard she was sure his fingers would leave bruises. The granite lines of his face were inches from her, and she couldn't meet his eyes, so she stared at the front of his shirt and tried not to fidget because if she fidgeted he would demand to know what impure thought she was hiding, and he would hound her until she confessed to something, anything, to escape the awful intensity of his wrath. "I'm going to write to the Dean of Girls," he said, "and ask her to look in on you and report back to me to let me know how you're doing. And I'd better not hear any stories about you keeping the wrong kind of company."

Nevertheless, it was only the third week of school when another girl at the dorm dragged her off to a party. Laura tried to resist, but she didn't try very hard. She was curious to see what kind of vice and depravity her father had been talking about, and quite sure she could resist temptation. After all, she belonged to Jesus. Jesus would watch after her, wouldn't He?

And really, the party was nearly as tame as one of her little sisters' birthday parties. It wasn't even one of those notorious fraternity parties; it was in the basement of another dorm. But when she saw them emptying a bottle of something into the punch, she put down her cup without taking another sip and went to find the Coke machine. That was how she met Stan. The Coke machine took her money and jammed, and she was standing there wondering what to do when a voice behind her said, "That thing busted again? Here, let me." He was a big pale blond boy with snowy wisps of eyebrows, a pouting mouth, and baby fat rounding out his cheeks. He was nicely dressed in dark slacks and shined shoes, but his shirt was rumpled, especially where it bulged out over his belt. She stood back gratefully, and he hauled off and hit the machine as hard as he could with the flat of his hand. Laura's ears stung; the whole room seemed to jump. He slammed into it again. Somewhere inside there was a clunk, and a can of Coke slid through the little door into the tray.

"Thank you." Popping the top, she sipped.

"There's punch too, if you want any."

"I saw them putting something in it."

He nodded knowledgeably. "Vodka. You ever been drunk?"

She shook her head. "No, I'm a Christian."

"You are?" The boy's eyes glowed. "So am I. My name's Stan. Stan Marshall. Sometimes they call me Marshall Stan." He hitched his thumbs in his belt and swaggered.

She giggled. His face clouded. "All right, make fun of me if you want."

"Oh, no," she said hastily. "I wasn't making fun of you. I didn't mean anything. My name's Laura." His touchiness intimidated her a little, but he was a Christian, and that made it all right. They stood together in the dank cement room with the Coke machine, neither of them sure what to say next.

"Were you raised a Christian?" he asked. "I'm Born Again."

"My father is a minister. Methodist."

"Oh." He seemed faintly disappointed. "My mom was a Congregationalism but she hardly ever went to church. It's only been six months since I accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Savior, but He's made my whole life over. I just can't stop praising His name."

"Would you like to come to church next Sunday?" Laura spoke without thinking, and then blushed furiously at her own boldness.

"Would it be all right? Could I?"

So that was how it started. You never knew what a party would lead to, which was an excellent reason for staying away from parties. Still, Aunt Edith was trying to be helpful. Laura didn't want to seem ungrateful.

Aunt Edith paused with a knifeload of jam poised above a slice of toast. "Are you feeling all right, dear? Did you hear a word I said?"

"About what?"

"About Amy Lawrence and the girls who will be there Friday."

"I'm sorry, Aunt Edith. I think I'd like to go lie down."

* * * * *

She went to her room and lay down, but now that she had started thinking about Stan it was hard to stop. After a minute she got up again. Aunt Edith was still in the kitchen, chattering to the telephone, or else to the maid. Laura put on a sweater and a windbreaker and went out the glass-paneled door that let directly from her bedroom onto the patio.

A silver haze lay along the land, leaching away color, leaving only browns and grays. Beyond the first low hill the second was a ghostly silhouette. The lawn was sodden with freezing dew. Laura's cheeks burned in the chill, and she zipped up the windbreaker. Except for the distant whoosh of traffic, she might have stepped back in time two thousand years. The houses in this prosperous suburb were tucked away behind tall hedges. Except for a roofline or two, the scene seemed unpeopled, remote, though in fact it would be hard to walk a hundred yards in a line without coming out by somebody's carport. Laura crossed the lawn light-footed and found a path among the taller wild growth, a low jungle luxuriantly green in California's paradoxical December spring.

Under the trees there was less vegetation. Low crumbling brickwork suggested that this might once have been a formal garden, but the flower beds had long since gone to ruin in dry scrub and drifts of leaves. She walked slowly, hands jammed deep in her pockets. A squirrel eyed her cautiously from around the trunk of a tree. Here and there among the fallen leaves were white-brown bursts of mushrooms. Somewhere nearby, she realized, was where she had seen, or imagined that she saw, the pale shapes in the fog, that morning from her window. There was nothing here now. She strolled deeper into the grove, turning aside when she saw the fender of a Mercedes gleaming behind a bush and heading down a gentle slope toward the sound of an invisible creek. There was no more brick underfoot now, only gravel and straggling vines.

Walking with her head down, watching her toes scuff up leaves, she nearly collided with the first statue before she saw it. She gasped and backed up, heart thudding. But the pale figure failed to leap at her, and after a moment she saw what it was and laughed. Standing before her, staring solemnly at her, was the figure of a man. He was a little more than six feet tall, broad-shouldered and muscular, dressed in a short tunic that left one shoulder and part of his chest bare. One arm was raised nearly horizontal and held out from the body, palm open in a gesture of welcome, or of demonstration, as one who says, "See; you may." From his tightly curled hair and strong clean-shaven chin to his sandaled feet, he was a dirty white, the whiteness of plaster or stone.

She stepped to one side, and the statue stayed gazing blankly at the spot where she had been. She had half-expected its eyes to follow her. Now what was it doing here? Or, to put the question another way, where had her wandering brought her to? She looked around, and her mouth fell open. The statue was not alone. The grove was peopled with silent white figures, motionless, standing here and there in no particular order. She had walked into the middle of the group without noticing. Back along the path where she had come, off to one side and facing inward toward her, stood a middle-aged woman wearing a long flowing robe, her arms open with the palms out in a posture that might have been the beginning of an embrace. On the other side of the path, near the thick bole of an oak tree, an old man with a full beard and mane of hair was leaning on a staff. The hair and beard would be white, of course, but so were the face and robe and staff.

Beyond the man she had seen first was another woman, this one younger, down on one knee, leaning forward as though to examine her reflection in a pool—though there was no pool, only leaves and dirt. Her robe, like the curly-haired man's, fell away from one shoulder, revealing a bare breast. Near her stood a boy of six or seven frozen in the act of drawing a small recurved bow. Unlike the adults, the boy was naked. Opposite these two in the clearing was a heavyset man sitting on a stone bench. Evidently he was an artisan, for his tools were arrayed beside him. And at the far side of the grove, half-hidden behind a bush, was a satyr playing on a set of reed pipes. The nubs of horns peeped from his brow, and when Laura tiptoed closer she saw that his legs were hairy goat's legs that ended in hooves. Since the satyr wasn't on a pedestal—none of them were—it seemed impossible that he could be balanced on two small hooves without falling over. His center of gravity wasn't even over the hooves, or so it seemed; his bunched muscles showed that he was dancing, and it was obvious that he would have to move one leg forward at any moment to catch his weight. The figures were all like that, Laura saw, not clamped in static poses but held lightly by unseen fingers in a moment of arrested motion, as though time had separated itself from them and flowed on, leaving them to wait with effortless patience for it to return and breathe life into them again. Standing in the center of the grove, turning around slowly to take it all in, she felt that she was no longer in the world she knew but in another place entirely, a place that had always existed and had no name. The fog dripped softly from the branches. Her breath steamed on the air. Somewhere a dog barked once, and was still.

When she went up to the statues, moving timidly, she saw that they had not been well cared for. There were no chipped noses or missing fingers, but the surfaces, especially the finely incised lines of detail, were dark with forest grime. The artisan had rings of evaporated rain water in the hollow of his lap, and in the angles of the child's bow were clots of spider web festooned with leaves and twigs. The satyr was especially filthy; he looked as though he had been buried and dug up. The sense that the statues might suddenly spring to life was eroded somewhat by the air of neglect and decay, and this saddened Laura. It was better not to look at them too closely. It was better to sit with her back against a tree and let her eyelids droop so the grove slurred and starred with light, and pretend that this was a magic place where nothing could ever be soiled.

* * * * *

"Who owns the statues?" she asked Uncle Henry that night at dinner.

"I do, I guess." He spooned onion soup into his big square face. "They were here when we bought the property. Previous owner must of picked them up in one of those antique stores in Saratoga. I keep meaning to have them appraised. Can't be worth much, not the condition they must be in. How'd you happen to stumble onto them?"

"I was out taking a walk."

"Now, dear," Aunt Edith scolded, "I do hope you bundled up and stayed close to the house. I promised your mother I'd take good care of you."

The next morning when Aunt Edith had gone off to have her hair done, Laura went looking for the maid. Victoria was in the living room, dusting. She was a tall, thin Negro girl only a year or two older than Laura, with the flawless features and carriage of a fashion model. But there was no vivacity in her. She spoke and moved with the flatness of a closed door. She was standing in front of the open display case that held Aunt Edith's collection of china dolls, picking up the dolls one by one, polishing each one with a flick of a rag and wiping the area where it stood before she replaced it. The dolls—mostly shepherds and shepherdesses and ballerinas and huntsmen and clowns—were far too cute, with the smug, coy, painted faces of children whose lives are devoted to convincing adults how adorably nice they are.

"Excuse me," Laura said. Victoria stopped, holding a doll—a milkmaid with a brace of pails balanced on a yoke. Both maids looked at Laura. "Could you tell me where I could find a bucket and some detergent and a scrub brush?"

"In the garage," Victoria said. Flick, flick went the rag across the doll's shoulders. "On the shelf beside the washing machine,'" she added.

"Thanks."

"You got somethin' you need cleaned?"

"No," Laura said—and then felt foolish, remembering how she had vomited the day she arrived. Victoria must think she was in the habit of making messes, and now was trying to clean the latest one up without letting anybody know. "It's not—it's nothing. I'll take care of it myself."

Victoria accepted this information gravely. "You change your mind, you let me know."

* * * * *

The sudsy water steamed in the cold morning. Today the fog had retreated a few hundred feet into the air, where it hung, a gray blanket threatening rain. The handle dug into Laura's fingers, and she had to change hands three times before she reached the grove. Now—where to start? With seven statues and only one of her, the task was formidable, but for some reason that she could not have articulated, it was vitally important. After wandering from one to another, peering into their faces and touching them lightly, lingeringly, she set the bucket down beside the boy with the bow, dug the brush out of her pocket, and went to work.

When she wiped away the first suds, his shoulder was hard and smooth and white. The surface lacked the grain of marble, and not being an expert in stone, she had no idea what it might be. It was hard enough that the bristles left no mark, that was the important thing, so she worked onward patch by patch, dipping the brush again and again into the bucket. The suds weakened and her shoulder began to throb, but she paid no attention. The rhythm of scrubbing filled her, and the pleasure of watching the shining area grow. Briefly the sun poked through the clouds and shone down golden on the boy's torso. Laura stood back to admire her work, wiped a lock of hair away from her eyes with the back of a hand, and bent to pick up the bucket. It was time for more hot water.

* * * * *

"Did you have a nice day, dear?" Again the dinner table, the long white cloth and asymmetrical Scandinavian candelabra.

"It was all right."

"What did you do?"

"Oh, nothing much." She wasn't about to share the statues with anyone, especially not Aunt Edith, who would be either uninterested or far too interested.

* * * * *

The next day it rained, so Laura stayed indoors, but the day after she went back to work, getting thoroughly muddy kneeling on the ground. Alone with the statues, she had started talking to them—or to herself, which was the same thing. "There, that's better," she declared when she finished an eye and a nose. "Isn't that better?" Or, scraping away the loose dirt covering a foot, "Look at that mess. It's a shame you can't take better care of yourselves. What would you have done if I hadn't come along?" The statues listened placidly, never interrupting her, never correcting her or criticizing her or telling her what to think. The silence was a balm that seeped up out of the Earth. "My mother used to spank me," she murmured, "when I didn't clean behind my ears."

The hardest part, since he was naked, was cleaning below the boy's waist. She didn't want to do it, but she could see it would look funny if she didn't. "Why couldn't they have put some clothes on you?" she asked him. She tried scrubbing with her eyes closed, but then she had to work by feel, which was even more embarrassing. She didn't think the boy's genitals looked quite right; she didn't know it was because he wasn't circumcised. She had never seen a penis until she saw Stan's, and Stan's didn't look anything like this one. The memories rose up as she scrubbed. She shuddered, and swallowed back the bitter taste in her throat. But in this place, somehow, remembering lost a little of its sting.

During those first weeks after they started going to church together, she seemed to run into Stan everywhere, in the halls outside the classrooms, in the cafeteria, in the rec room at the dorm. He was always friendly, in that nervous way she never quite got used to, laughing a little too loud and then suddenly turning apprehensive, as though afraid she was a snake about to strike him. In the evenings they went to the coffee shop together to study. Walking back to the dorm afterward, he was unfailingly polite. He never tried to hold her hand or kiss her, though sometimes he breathed hard through his nose and clenched and unclenched his fists as though he wanted to. "I really did start to think he was nice," she said to the statue.

Until the weekend in January when her roommate had gone away for the weekend and Stan, who by now had taken to dropping by whenever he felt like it, came by on Saturday night with an armload of books but instead of reading or suggesting that they go to the coffee shop paced and fidgeted and alternately babbled and turned morose in the little room for three hours until she wanted to scream at him, when suddenly he leaped at her and grabbed her and hugged her so tight she couldn't breathe and bruised her lips against her teeth kissing her. She was too bewildered to struggle, so she only stood limp, waiting to be released. But the kiss went on and on, and he began easing her backward toward the bed. She did struggle then, but her arms were feeble weightless things. They thrashed against his sides and did no good. He got her down on the bed on her back, still gripping her tightly. Except for a few discreet pecks on the front porch, Laura had never been kissed, but Stan's technique seemed wrong. His whole face was tensed with the effort of keeping his lips pressed together and pressed tight against hers. She rolled her face away, but his head followed, his mouth pushing against whatever part of her face he could reach. He was snorting through his nose like a steam engine. Freeing one arm from the embrace, he reached down and began tugging at her skirt, pulling the folds of cloth up around her waist to expose her underwear. Then he began tugging at his own belt.

"Stan, no, please Stan, don't, please, you mustn't, no, stop, I don't want you to, please don't, you're hurting me, let me up, Stan, don't do that, no, please, don't." Strangely, it didn't occur to her to scream. The situation was so far beyond anything she had ever envisioned that a part of her went numb. The room and the two figures on the bed were something that was happening to somebody else, very far away. She could only plead in a scared little voice and squirm as he pulled her panties down. There was more fumbling; she couldn't see what he was doing, because she had her eyes squeezed shut. The dry, tearing pain took her by surprise, and she did yell then, and Stan clamped a hand over her mouth. She opened her eyes to see his face hovering over her, brow furrowed with intensity. The burning pain deepened, but she was pinned beneath him and there was no way to get away.

It was over quickly. He made a noise in his throat, part gasp and part moan, and an unfamiliar wetness was spreading inside her. His breathing slowed. After a minute he let his hand up from her mouth. They lay together, not moving, not looking at one another. The room seemed emptier than it had been a minute before. Somewhere down the hall a stereo was blaring. Belatedly it came to her that the door wasn't locked.

Stan rolled off the bed, pulled his trousers up, fastened them. She lay on her side staring at the wall. He was the one who leaned over and pulled her skirt down to hide her shame. Say something, Stan, she pled silently. Say anything. Tell me you love me so I can scream. She could hear him moving around the room, the scrape of a chair, the thump of a book against the desk. Then the door opened and closed and she was by herself.

It hurt a lot, but she never touched herself down there if she could help it, and it didn't occur to her to examine herself to see how badly she was injured. The pain was the price you paid for sin, that was all. She wondered whether she had led Stan on, encouraged him somehow without knowing it. She wondered whether he would be ashamed and not want to see her again (which didn't seem such a bad thing), whether he would boast about it to his friends (if he had any friends), whether her life was ruined. She didn't feel ruined; she didn't feel much of anything.

The next morning as she was putting on her good shoes there was a shy, tentative tapping at the door. Not even wondering who it might be, she answered it, and Stan was standing there in his slightly rumpled suit, looking somewhat more ill-at-ease than usual, watching her furtively from under his feathery brows. "Are you ready for church?" he asked.

He had forced the night before back into nonexistence by an effort of will. Almost grateful for the deceit, she said, "I'll be ready in a minute."

So their relationship entered a new phase. They never spoke of it. Outwardly they went on as before, studying together, carrying their trays to the same table in the cafeteria, going to church every Sunday. He never tried to take her hand or put his arm around her. But nearly every weekend, in her room or his, he did what he had to do, and she lay still and let him. After the first time it didn't hurt quite so badly. There was always a little bleeding, but she had no reason to assume that wasn't normal. She couldn't have explained why she let him keep doing it. It was easier than resisting. If he had apologized, if he had tried to be affectionate, her anger and fear and shame might have broken through. But in the vacuum of diffidence and outward respect, there was no catalyst for resistance to crystallize around. There was only Stan, moonfaced omnipresent Stan, Stan with his nervous swings from violent activity to moody withdrawal, Stan whom she gradually, as the weeks turned to months, began to loathe and dread. He was an intrusion like a cancer, impossible to eject, and as they smiled and nodded to the people at church she wondered whether any of them might suspect, whether it would show, but nobody gave any sign. The timid girl and her large rumpled boyfriend were good Christians.

* * * * *

"And we were," she said to the statue of the boy, dipping the brush in the bucket to apply suds to his backside. "I was, anyway. I used to pray, 'Dear sweet Jesus, please make Stanley stop. Make him leave me alone.' Only praying didn't do any good, so then I thought it must be that the Lord wasn't listening because I was a sinner. He had cast me out of His heart. I wasn't worthy of Him. But I kept on praying anyhow. I didn't know what else to do." The statues accepted her confidences placidly.

By Friday afternoon she had finished cleaning the boy and the kneeling woman and was working on the old man with the staff when the gathering darkness forced her to stop. Trudging up the lawn with the bucket, she saw Aunt Edith standing on the patio waiting. "There you are! I've been looking all over for you. It's time to get ready for Amy's party."

Laura had forgotten about the party. Her heart sank. "Aunt Edith, I wonder if—would it be all right if I stayed home? I really don't feel like—"

"Nonsense, dear. I won't hear of it. They're expecting you, and I'm sure you'll have a wonderful time. Now come inside and get cleaned up."

"All right. Just let me put away the bucket."

* * * * *

But in spite of her aunt's assurances, she didn't have a wonderful time. There were nearly a hundred people at the party, a dozen or so Laura's age and the rest older. Laura was barely introduced to Amy Lawrence and her mother before they were whisked away to meet somebody else, so she sat on the couch and drank tepid pink punch and watched the Christmas lights strung around the windows blink on and off. Wherever she went, she felt, she would be this alone. The things that were important in your life were things you couldn't share with anybody, it was too painful, but compared to the important things anything else you might talk about was oppressively trivial, so you might as well say nothing.

Two women sat down next to her and started talking about pregnancies and abortions. Horrified, Laura wanted to jump up and run from the room, but she didn't want to be impolite or attract attention, so she sat quite still for several minutes and then, trying to pick up her cup from the coffee table, she knocked it over and spilled punch on the rug. Somebody ran to fetch the maid, who came with a roll of paper toweling, and Laura tried to help the maid but only succeeded in getting in the way and embarrassing herself further. When calm was restored she retreated to the gleaming yellow-tiled kitchen and sat and ate almonds and felt miserable.

"Hello."

Laura looked up. The woman was thirty or a little older. She stood with the poise of a dancer, and there was a kindly twinkle in her eye.

"Mind if I join you?"

"No. Go right ahead." Laura gestured vaguely at the vacant chairs.

"You don't look like you're in a party mood."

"I don't know anybody here. I just came to please my aunt. I'm out here visiting, and she thought I should meet some people my own age."

"How old are you?"

"Twenty."

"You remind me of myself when I was twenty," the woman said.

"Really?" Laura had been admiring the strong planes of the woman's face, the air of confidence, the elegant earrings. That's what I'd like to be like, she was thinking.

"Really. I was convinced that I didn't have a friend in the world. A couple of very nasty things had happened to me, and I thought my life was over. Really, it was just beginning." She smiled at Laura.

Laura was curious what the nasty things were; they couldn't possibly be as nasty as her nasty things. But it wouldn't be polite to ask. Instead she said, "What do you do? I mean, do you have a job, or are you married?"

"You make it sound like an either-or question. Lots of married women work. But no, I'm not married."

"Oh, I'm sorry."

"Sorry?" the woman said. "Don't be. I like living my own life."

"Do you work in an office?"

"I used to, but not any more. I'm a sculptor."

"A sculptor?"

"Here, I'll show you." The woman dug into her purse, which was large enough to hold a full complement of mallets and chisels, and fished up an object wrapped in soft cloth. Unwrapping it, she revealed a figurine about eight inches tall, carved of dark wood and polished till it glowed. "I'm doing a series of these. I just finished this one yesterday. Go ahead, you can hold it. It's all right."

Laura had reached out and then drawn her hand back. Her face burned. The figurine was carved in the likeness of a very pregnant, and very naked, woman. The features were stylized, exaggerated, but there was no doubt what they represented. Laura flushed. "It—she doesn't have any clothes on."

"So? Neither do I. Neither do you."

"What?" Laura's gaze dropped in alarm from the woman's stylish satin blouse to her own sensible wool skirt.

"Underneath our clothes, silly. We're naked all the time. They used to make these in the Stone Age, ten, fifteen thousand years ago. They made them of clay sometimes, or stone, not just wood. Probably they made them by tying dried grass together too, but those are gone now."

"What did they make them for?"

"Nobody knows, but we can guess. They might have been dolls for the children to play with. But more likely they were religious objects. This is the Great Mother—the Mother Goddess, the Earth Goddess. Some people call her the White Goddess, but obviously this one isn't white. Not that that matters. Anyway, I'm reviving a lost art form."

Laura picked the figurine up from the table and held it gingerly by the ankles and the top of the head. "It's very pretty," she said. It disturbed her, but it was pretty, the smooth, nearly invisible grain of the dark wood highlighting the curves of the belly and breasts and buttocks, the inscrutable heavy-lidded face, the large peasant hands, the sturdy flat feet. "You must be very talented," she went on, "to be able to make something like this."

"Oh, I don't make them. I find them."

A chill teased the back of Laura's neck. "You find them? I thought you said you carved them."

"I do. What I mean is, I find them inside the wood." The woman took the figurine back and cradled it in her palm. "It's—how can I explain it? Every piece of wood is different, because every tree is different. You can't just sit down and carve something according to a blueprint. It doesn't work that way. What you do is, you live with a piece of wood. You sit and look at it, and you keep turning it over and over, and pretty soon you start to get inside of it yourself, you kind of scrunch down in there," swaying her shoulders gently from side to side, "and after a while you start to see what shape it is inside. And from that you start to see what kind of figure is in it. It might be an animal. I don't just make Earth Goddesses.

"And when you start to see what's inside it, that's when you have to get very slow and move very lightly. If you jump—if you say, 'Ah-ha! That's what it is, it's a seal, and I know how to carve a seal, so here goes!'—if you do that, you lose it. What you get may look like a seal, but it won't be the seal that was in the wood to start with. That seal you won't ever be able to get back. So you have to be quiet, and wait, until that particular seal comes to you and lets you touch it and hold it and feed it and play with it. When you really know that seal, when you're already holding it in your hand; then you pick up your tools and carve away the part of the wood that isn't the seal. That's what I mean when I say I find them. The important things in life, you don't make them by forcing them—and most of all nobody hands them to you and tells you to put them together in such-and-such a way. You find them. If you're lucky. Or sometimes, they find you. They come to you in the night, and if you have the courage you follow them, over the hills and down the valleys," tracing the contours of the carving with a fingertip, "and you never know where they'll lead, you only know you want to go with them and stay there forever."

Laura shivered, and hugged herself. "It sounds nice," she admitted, "but it's scary. I mean, if you don't know where you're going, or what's going to happen…"

"Life is scary sometimes," the woman agreed. "Don't let anybody tell you it isn't. And don't let anybody tell you how to live it, either. You know, everybody has their own ideas on how you ought to live your life. They'll tell you they know what's best for you, and they'll keep after you to try to make you believe them. When times are good, it's easy enough to do what you're told. But when things get scary, there's only one thing you can afford to listen to. You have to listen to your heart. Your heart knows what's right for you. The trouble is, sometimes your heart doesn't talk very loud, and everybody else is shouting at you, and you get confused. The thing to do when you get confused about what to do is get real quiet and just listen until you hear your heart."

"But what if your heart is mistaken?" Laura said. "What if your heart wants things that are wicked?"

"Words like 'wicked' are words other people use to try to run your life for you. They're not heart words." The woman held the figurine out to Laura. "Would you like to have this? It's yours, if you want it."

"Oh, I couldn't. It must be worth loads of money. I couldn't possibly afford—"

"Did I say anything about money?"

"I can't, honestly. I wouldn't know what to do with it. Anyway, I don't know what Aunt Edith would say. I mean, because it's naked. She wouldn't think it was nice."

"Well, are you going to listen to your heart, or are you going to listen to your aunt?" The woman lowered her eyes. "I'm sorry. I don't want to pressure you into anything. I'll tell you what. I'll keep it for you. It's yours, and it'll be there if you change your mind. When you decide you'd like to have it, let me know. Okay?"

"All right. I guess. Yes. Thank you."

The woman swaddled the figurine again in its cloth and tucked it back into her bag. She stood up. "One more thing," she said. "Smile a little bit. It's good for your face muscles."

Laura managed a wan smile.

The things the woman had said spun in her brain. She didn't understand them, exactly, but they left a feeling like wind blowing through an open window. It was only later, when she was back home undressing for bed, that she realized she hadn't found out the woman's name. She might never be able to claim the figurine.

* * * * *

During the next few days Laura finished washing the old man and the standing woman and started to work on the artisan. The peacefulness of the grove drew her back again and again. It was a palpable quality, quite different from the peacefulness of Aunt Edith's house, which was merely silent and empty. Laura always brought her bucket and scrub brush, but sometimes instead of working she simply sat, on a fallen log or on the cold damp ground, watching the play of light across the statues' faces.

Beneath the peacefulness, however, or along the edges of it, was something faintly disturbing, an elusive something that slid away from her when she tried to think about it, the way smoke slides between fingers. But gradually she figured out what the source of the disturbance must be. It had to do with the poses and positions of the statues. At first she assumed she was only imagining things, but day by day this idea became harder to maintain. What she found, comparing mental notes with herself about yesterday and the day before, was that the statues were moving.

Not, she hastened to assure herself, actually moving—no matter how long she sat staring, they remained perfectly motionless. But between one day and the next there were small changes, like grains of sand shifting as a dune crawls inland from the sea. She hadn't consciously noted anything at first, only felt that the grove was somehow mysteriously different every time she came into it, even though outwardly it was the same as before. But as she grew quieter and more watchful, she began to notice the changes, not as they occurred but having occurred. The standing man's outstretched arm was at a different angle today than yesterday. She walked around him very slowly, measuring the angle with her eyes. The change was so small it was hard to be sure. Still, it felt as though the arm had moved. A chill that had nothing to do with the winter air prickled her shoulders. Statues didn't move—that was impossible.

But it wasn't just the arm. It was the spot on the ground that the kneeling woman was looking at, which sometimes shifted as much as six inches, as well as Laura could judge by the pattern in the roots and pebbles. One morning the woman was staring directly at a single blue wildflower, which had sprung up overnight in defiance of the season. But the next morning she was staring at bare dirt, and Laura looked everywhere for the flower without finding it. The satyr, too. On some days, sitting on the log, she could see him clearly from the waist up where he stood behind the occulting moon of a fat bush. On other days he was entirely hidden but for his face, the sensual curves of lips, cheeks, eyebrows teasing her bodilessly. And the old man with the staff. When she had first seen him, he had been looking out of the grove at a distant hill. But during the following days his body turned slowly so that he was looking into the grove, nearly toward where Laura sat.

She puzzled all this out bit by bit, not really believing any of it. Somebody must be sneaking into the grove at night and moving the statues. But why? To make her believe she was going crazy? Neither Aunt Edith nor Uncle Henry would do any such thing, they had no reason to. And certainly it couldn't be the maid. In the end, the very peacefulness of the grove drew the blood from the hypothesis. Nobody ever came here but Laura. Slowly she let herself begin to suspect that the statues might indeed be moving.

"But they only move at night," she said to herself. "If I want to catch them at it, I've got to stay all night and watch." Aunt Edith would never approve, of course. Which was an excellent reason for not telling her. The best thing would be to slip out the outside door of the bedroom onto the patio, and go back in the same way at dawn.

* * * * *

She fortified herself with a Thermos of hot coffee, which she made stealthily in the kitchen after Victoria had finished the dishes and Uncle Henry had vanished into his study and Aunt Edith had left for a canasta game. Laura put a sweater on under her coat and added a second pair of socks. California winters might be mild compared to Illinois winters, but that didn't mean you couldn't catch cold.

It would be safer to wait for everybody to go to bed. If Aunt Edith looked in on her, there would be trouble. But if she waited too long, whatever happened in the grove might already have happened by the time she got there. So she wrote two notes. The one in the kitchen read, "Aunt Edith—I'm tired and I've gone to bed early. Please don't wake me when you come in." The one pinned to her pillow read, "Aunt Edith—I couldn't sleep, so I went out for a walk. Please don't worry. I'll be back soon." These preparations completed, she slipped out the door onto the patio.

The sky had been scoured by an arctic breeze, and the stars glinted like flecks of glass in the blackness. In the East a nearly full moon hung, blotchy and lopsided. It watched over Laura's shoulder as she walked down the lawn, so that her shadow walked beside her.

Under the trees it was so dark she nearly lost her way. She stumbled over rocks and roots, and once a bush scratched at her face. But in the grove the statues seem to glimmer faintly with their own light. She chose a spot off at one side, where she could see all of them without turning her head too far, and sat down to wait. There was no wind, and the muffled mutter of distant traffic had thinned. Except for the occasional rustle of a small animal along the ground, the night was silent.

Laura's gaze shifted from one pale shape to another, seeking to capture the first flicker of animation. But the light was so poor that after a few minutes her eyes rebelled. The whole grove seemed to melt and flow like wax. She rubbed her eyes, and the scene settled down briefly, but before long it was bathed again in milky haze. Annoyed at her own frailty, she poured a cup of coffee. The sting of heat on her lips and the rich aroma restored her. Eyestrain was a problem she hadn't counted on. She wished she had thought to bring a flashlight, but she couldn't very well go back to the house for one now, especially since she didn't know where it was kept. There was nothing to do but close her eyes occasionally to rest them, and hope that the false impressions of movement wouldn't mask the real movement when (if) it came.

The wait became a head-spinning struggle. In spite of the coffee, Laura kept nodding off. Dream images of satyrs dancing, of naked boy archers flying through the sky, of pale, noble men and women strolling among the trees, surged up, but when she jerked awake the grove was just as it had been before. She heard voices too, murmurings out of which strange fragments leaped: an old man saying, "She must rest now," a woman saying, "She could be beautiful," a child, "Come on! Come fly!" It felt so good to lie down; she could see nearly as well lying down. All she had to do was keep her eyes open. Before long she was fast asleep.

* * * * *

She woke to gray dawn, feeling not cold and stiff but curiously warm and refreshed. She lay, head on her curled arm, examining in detail the mysterious knots and turnings in a fallen twig close by her face. With only a little more effort, it seemed, she would understand what mysterious forces had shaped its growth. Confused scraps of the night's dreams came back to her. None of it made sense, really, any more than dreams usually did, but certainly it had all been dreams. She hadn't actually seen the statues move. The experiment was a failure.

But when she moved to sit up, she discovered that she was blanketed by a mound of fallen leaves. They poured away from her in a dozen small avalanches, and the dust made her sneeze. She ran a hand through them, puzzled. How had they gotten there? She hadn't buried herself; somebody had come along and covered her during the night. The leaves on the forest floor were damp and mouldering, but those she had been covered with were dry and whole, as though they had been selected by hand. Fear gripped her, and she scrambled to her feet and looked around wildly. Invisible forces were awake here, forces that came to life when nobody was watching. Somehow the fact that the forces were hiding from her made them more sinister than if she had been able to see them clearly. The mound of leaves frightened her precisely because there was no way she could confront whoever had done it. Grabbing the Thermos, she set off at a trot toward the house, looking over her shoulder again and again, unable to shake the feeling that something was following her. When the statues were out of sight the woods seemed to close in even more, and she ran faster, gasping for breath.

The bedroom door opened on silent hinges. She stepped inside, locked it, and leaned against it while her heart slowed. Of course there must be a rational explanation for how the leaves had come to be there. The wind. A passing stranger. Squirrels and raccoons. Not the statues. No, please, not the statues, because if the statues had done it, she saw suddenly, then they weren't statues at all. And if they weren't statues, what were they? What had she awakened, and what did it mean to do to her? Or could this be her imagination—could she be having a breakdown? Why had she been so foolish? If the statues were moving, that was their business. She didn't want to know about it.

The clock on the dresser said 7:20. Time to get the Thermos back to the kitchen, if she hurried. Then she could get in bed and "wake up" when Aunt Edith called her. She wanted very much not to have to explain where she had spent the night. She was too confused.

She unscrewed the top and tipped the Thermos into the sink, expecting cold coffee. But the liquid that ran out was thick and golden. She righted the Thermos with a jerk and stared into the mute silvery circle of its mouth. The aroma wasn't coffee, either. It was fragrant with spice. She had a panicky urge to pour the rest down the drain, but curiosity stopped her. She poured a little into the cap, sniffed again, and very slowly brought it to her mouth to touch the liquid with the tip of her tongue.

The flavor blossomed like a flower unfolding. There were apples, and honey, and cinnamon, and something else—blackberry? Mint? She put out her tongue again, but stopped rigid when she realized what she was doing. Whoever had piled the leaves had filled her Thermos with this stuff, hoping she would drink it. Why? What would it do to her? She upended both cap and Thermos over the sink, turned the tap on full, and rinsed them savagely. Wiping with a dish towel, she suppressed a pang of regret. Everybody knew you mustn't eat or drink anything you found in the woods. The flavor of the drop she had drunk still tickled her tongue, so she rinsed her mouth with clean water. Going back to her room, she felt much more tired than when she awoke.

* * * * *

It was closing on Christmas, and during the next few days Aunt Edith, her conscience presumably stung by her earlier neglect, found a great many things that Laura simply had to help with. Presents and wrapping paper had to be bought, and since nothing was ever quite what Aunt Edith was looking for Laura was dragged from shop to shop like a duck on a string behind a three-year-old. Then there were cookies and candy to be made and packed in baskets with bows on top for a long list of people, all of whose likes and dislikes Aunt Edith had catalogued in detail. Laura had no chance to go back to the grove.

She was grateful; her earlier fascination with the statues had turned to terror. But as she avoided going back to see them standing reassuringly motionless, her fright fed on her imaginings and grew huge. At night she lay awake for fear they would come to plague her dreams. She knotted the blankets tossing, and woke drenched in sweat. In one dream she had been in a huge schoolroom with hundreds of other students at tiny desks. The old man with the staff was lecturing at the front, but Laura found she couldn't understand anything he said, and the words on the blackboard writhed, alien and incomprehensible. Then without transition she was following him along a narrow mountain ledge on a night full of wind and rain, and he was far ahead carrying a lantern. As she watched he vanished around a corner, leaving her alone in the dark. She ran after him stumbling and scraping her knees and crawling on and finally slipping off the edge and falling and falling and falling forever. That was bad enough, but the dreams of the satyr were worse. She was on a farm she had visited once, watching them feed the pigs, and the satyr crawled up out of the mud at the bottom of the pig pen, covered from head to toe with slime, and clambered over the fence toward her, leering and slavering, his long red tongue licking out obscenely.

In spite of her revulsion, she saw that there was something familiar about the satyr's face. She was sure she had known somebody who looked like him. If only she could remember, she frowned at the chocolate chip cookies, maybe the face would lose some of its terrible power.

Somewhere between the coconut clusters and the candy canes, she remembered. She had been at the coffee shop with Stan; he was hunched over a chemistry textbook, chewing his pencil, and she was trying without much success to memorize irregular French verbs. The air was greasy with the smell of burgers. At the next table a discussion was in progress, one of those terribly earnest debates that only undergraduates seem to have, because everybody else is either too cynical or too over-specialized. The young man holding forth was taller and thinner than the satyr, and he didn't have horns—at least none that were visible—but his black beard was trimmed the same way, and his eyes snapped. What caught her attention was when he declared, "Christianity stinks. It's not just worthless, it's actively bad for you. Don't mess with it."

Laura's heart lurched. How dare he speak that way!

"Oh, come on," another boy objected. "Who are you to say that? You're talking about one of the world's great religions."

"Religion has nothing to do with it," the satyr replied. "Christianity hasn't been a religion since 300 A.D. It's a Fascist political and social organization whose primary purpose is to keep people scared so they'll obey orders."

Stan slammed his chemistry book shut. "Come on," he said to Laura. "We're getting out of here." He avoided looking at the next table, but his face was blotched an ugly red. Laura gathered her papers, fumbling at them clumsily because she was busy listening. What she was hearing horrified her, but almost against her will she wanted to hear more.

"What about the teachings of Christ, hunh?" the second boy persisted. "How can you say that isn't a religion?"

"Sugar coating. You know as well as I do that Christians only follow the teachings of Christ when it suits them. But I'm not complaining about hypocrisy. That isn't a Christian failing, it's a human failing. The reason Christianity isn't a religion is that it doesn't do what a religion is supposed to do. It doesn't enrich people's lives; it tramples on them."

Stan was tapping his foot impatiently. Laura got her arms into her coat, scooped up her homework, and followed as he wove a route among the tables. She wanted to hear the rest of this scandalous conversation, but not badly enough to defy Stan. That night, lying in bed, she tried to imagine what the boy's objections to Christianity might be—not, she assured herself, because of any merit they might have, but so she could exercise her faith by refuting them. But she found that she was staring at a wall.

* * * * *

The second time she saw the undergraduate satyr was a month or so later. Needing desperately to get away from her room before Stan dropped by, she accepted an invitation from one of the girls to go to an off-campus party. Going up the narrow, well-worn stairs to the apartment, hearing the music thundering down, she felt a brief tingle of excitement. The apartment was a dim grotto under red and blue bulbs, and there was no furniture except pillows on the floor and beaded curtains in the doorways. But she knew nobody, so she stood against a wall, getting a headache and wondering whether she should leave. The satyr, clad in a sheepskin vest, materialized in front of her and held out a stubby, lumpy cigarette that was smoldering unevenly and smelled sweetly unlike tobacco. "Want a toke?" he asked.

"Is that—" she said. "I don't know what to do."

"Just suck it into your lungs and hold it there."

Gingerly she took the cigarette from him, trying not to touch his fingers with hers. The smoke raked her throat, but she held her breath as long as she could, until the tickle made her cough. The boy had already disappeared back into the crowd, taking the joint with him. Belatedly she remembered the conversation in the coffee shop, and wondered whether she should search for him to ask what he had meant. But she didn't see him anywhere, and anyway it wasn't important. The marijuana had no effect on her that she could see; when being alone got too depressing, she went back to the dorm. She never saw the bearded boy again.

* * * * *

"Oh, there you are." Laura was in the living room, wearing her candy-making apron, staring at the china dolls in their glass case. Their droll little painted faces made her queasy, but at least they were a distraction from dreams and memories. She had been trying to fathom why anybody would keep such trinkets. "I've been looking all over for you," Aunt Edith went on. "I do hope I haven't been working you too hard. You were beginning to perk up, but for the last few days you haven't been the same. If there's anything bothering you, all you have to do is let me know."

"I'm all right," Laura said. "I was just looking at these."

"Do you like them?" Aunt Edith said gaily. "I think they're so lovely. I'm always pleased when I find a new one. They're quite valuable, too. You'd be surprised." Her eyes lit up. "I know—would you like to take a couple of them to keep in your room? To cheer you up?"

"Oh, no, that's all right. I wouldn't want—"

"Nonsense, it's perfectly all right. I know you'll be careful with them. Here, let me see. This one, I think, and this one. Yes, that's perfect. Aren't they precious?" She held them out for Laura to admire.

Laura's hands hung at her sides. "They're very nice," she said colorlessly.

"Well, come on, let's go see how they look on your dresser." Aunt Edith led the way, and Laura, a knot pinching her throat, followed. After Aunt Edith had found the perfect spot on the dresser for the little figures, chirped happily, and departed, Laura sat on the bed staring at them, wondering what to do. A plump boy in short pants and a pink-cheeked girl twirling a parasol. They were loathsome. They were obnoxious. She considered sneaking them back into the case in the living room, but Aunt Edith would notice, and she would have to try to explain. In the end she left them where they were.

* * * * *

That evening Uncle Henry arrived home with the tree, a magnificent specimen whose tip reached within inches of the living room's ten-foot ceiling. The next afternoon Aunt Edith enlisted Laura and Victoria to help bring the ornaments in from the garage. Victoria, being the maid, was allotted the more hazardous task of standing on a stepladder and handing boxes down, while Laura and Aunt Edith ferried them into the house. Laura set the first box down on the couch in the living room, but Aunt Edith said, "No, dear, let's put them in Henry's study, where they'll be out of the way, and bring the ornaments in from there."

"It seems like a lot of extra work," Laura said.

"But the clutter is so distracting," her aunt explained. "I can't think properly about where to hang things when I'm surrounded by clutter."

Laura had only glanced into the study before. It was decorated in a self-consciously male style, with dark wood paneling, a deer's head mounted over the fireplace, bookcases copiously stocked with leather-bound, gold-embossed volumes, and, standing in one corner, a genuine head-to-toe suit of armor, complete with louvered visor and spikes at the elbows. Though it was thoroughly polished, ineradicable spots of tarnish left little doubt about its age. It reminded Laura of her father. He was as stern-looking as that, and he might be as hollow, because if there was anything inside you could never touch it. He had never complimented her that she could recall, seldom even smiled. It didn't matter what she did; if it was good it wasn't good enough, and if it was bad she was punished. To her father, raising children was a problem in engineering. You applied the necessary leverage to keep them from leaning in the wrong direction. If they persisted, you increased the pressure. Setting the boxes down one by one at the foot of the suit of armor, she found herself whispering, "Yes, Daddy. Yes, Daddy." It was crucial that the boxes be set in a neat array, and not too close to the feet. When she came back from the garage and found that Aunt Edith had put a box in the wrong place, she hurried to set it right…Good girls keep their rooms neat, and never speak unless spoken to. Yes, Daddy.

Of course, her care went for nothing, because when they started unpacking there was tissue paper around the armor's feet like a snowdrift. Laura rushed back and forth carrying strings of lights and delicate glass balls and angels flocked with flecks of silver. Holding an ornament, she would search for just the right spot on the tree, but when she had hung it Aunt Edith, who was standing halfway across the room observing the esthetic effect, would shake her head and say, "Oh, dear. Oh, no, that's not quite right, is it?", and come and snatch the ornament off and hang it somewhere else. Eventually Laura wearied of this routine and brought an ornament directly to Aunt Edith. Aunt Edith said, "No, dear, you go ahead and hang it. I don't want to have all the fun."

Laura was used to stringing popcorn and cranberries with her mother and sisters for a smaller, scruffier tree. She wondered how they were. She hoped they were all right. She supposed she ought to phone them, but her father might answer—and anyway, what could she say that wouldn't embarrass them all?

The last box held the figures for the manger scene. At first she wasn't sure what they were. They were crudely and amateurishly carved of wood, and gaudily painted in thick reds and greens and blues. Several of them actually seemed misshapen. But yes, here were the three wise men, who had always been Laura's favorites, and here was a cow—or was it a donkey? "Aren't they quaint," Aunt Edith said, leaning over her. "We got them on vacation in Acapulco. Genuine hand-crafted artifacts. The natives down there aren't so sophisticated as we are, but they're quite devout. I feel sure these have a real spiritual aura. Don't you agree?"

"I've never seen anything like them," Laura said truthfully. She unwrapped the objects one by one. This one was a shepherd with his staff, so these had to be sheep, even though they looked like pigs. Here was Joseph, or at any rate somebody with a beard. This must be Mary. And here was the matchbox manger. Now where was the Baby Jesus? The carton was still half full of crinkled tissue, evidently padding, although the figures certainly didn't look fragile. Laura pawed through it looking for the Baby, at first in annoyance and then with mounting panic. She was sitting on the floor surrounded by empty boxes and piles of loose tissue, with the suit of armor watching sternly over her, and she couldn't find the Baby Jesus anywhere. She started rooting among the paper, throwing it in the air. Where was He? The empty manger stared up at her accusingly. Still tossing paper, she began to whimper. How could the Baby be gone? How could a thing like that happen? Somebody must have done something. They must have hidden it. She looked up at the armor. "You saw," she said. "You were looking. What happened? What happened?" The visor remained closed. "I keep losing babies," she said. Somewhere inside her a giggle started. She tried to hold it down, but it came bubbling to the surface. "I keep losing the damn baby," she repeated, gasping.

* * * * *

It was spring when she first began to suspect, spring with its obscene profusion of flowers, butterflies, and couples shamelessly nuzzling by the bike racks. She said nothing to anybody. Who would she tell? Anyway, her period had always been irregular. Any day now it would come, and she could relax. Mid-terms were looming, too, and she had more important things like French and history to worry about. So a month went by, and then another. By now she was sure. When anybody looked at her her face burned, and her leg muscles twitched when she walked. She was on a tightrope. She was certain that everybody could see the soft swelling beginning. Her roommate did notice how ill she was in the mornings, dragging herself out of bed and down the hall to the bathroom, and, eyes narrowed shrewdly, finally did ask, "Hey, you aren't pregnant, are you?" Laura pressed her lips together and shook her head savagely. "Because if you are, a friend of mine said she knows this doctor, I could find out—"

"No! There's nothing the matter. I'm fine."

"Suit yourself." The girl shrugged and turned away.

An impulse stirred in her to tell Stan, one night when they were sitting in the coffee shop and he was droning on about the chain of shoe stores he was going to open someday, a wicked impulse to see how his mouth would fall open, how his upper lip would start to perspire. But she couldn't do it. She was terrified that he would abandon her and leave her to raise the baby by herself, and even more terrified that he would insist on doing the right thing and marrying her. The prospect of being subjected to Stan's attentions every night was more than she could face. But at the same time, she needed somebody to cling to, and however unpleasant he might be, Stan was indubitably there. So she pretended everything was as usual, and said nothing. The weeks ticked by. At night, shivering in bed, she prayed as fervently as she knew how that this be only a delayed period, but her prayer went unanswered.

Somehow (afterward it was only a blur) she made it through finals, chewing her fingers bloody, drinking endless Cokes and eating a mountain of potato chips. She was constantly sick to her stomach, and her head wouldn't stop aching. When her parents arrived, she had barely started to pack. Her father scowled at the disorder and went to sit in the car while her mother bustled around helping. On the way home they wanted her to sit between them, but she crawled into the back seat and made herself small in a corner and pretended to take a nap, which turned into a real nap, which left her feeling not rested but muzzy and confused.

She knew she would have to tell them, but the right moment never seemed to arrive. Sitting at the kitchen table drinking a glass of milk while her mother stood at the stove, she drew in a breath and opened her mouth and the phone rang. Or the neighbors were due over any minute. Or Tracy or Ann was underfoot. Or her mother was too busy talking to listen, going on about gardening and the church fair and what a good girl Laura was, how proud they were of her, how they knew she could never disappoint them. And what could you say after that?

* * * * *

"Mama?"

"Yes, dear?" It was after supper. They were alone in the living room. Her mother was knitting.

"Mama, I've got to talk to you."

"Yes, dear. What is it?"

"Mama, I'm—" Pregnant. But she couldn't shape the word with her lips. "I'm—" She swallowed with a great effort and sat dumb, her fists clenched.

"You're a wonderful girl, Laura," her mother said, trying to be helpful. "Your father and I have always been very proud of you."

Laura shut her eyes. "Baby," she said. "Baby."

"Why, no, dear, you're not a baby. You're practically grown up."

"I'm—going—to—have—a—baby." Her eyes flooded.

The knitting needles stopped. Laura sat looking at the rug. In the silence the refrigerator kicked on.

"What did you say?"

"A baby. I'm going to have."

"I—I don't understand. You're not married. Are you?"

Laura shook her head.

"Who's the boy? Is he going to marry you? Do we know him?"

"No, he's—a boy at school. I couldn't stop him."

"How often did this happen? More than once?"

She swallowed again. "Maybe ten or twenty times."

Her mother took in a sharp breath and let it out. "How could you?" she asked. "How could you?"

"I don't know," Laura sobbed. "It just happened. After the first time it didn't seem to matter so much."

"Nothing 'just happens,' " her mother said. "If you're weak, you may be tempted, but the Lord always gives you the strength to resist. When you persist in evil, it's no good trying to excuse yourself by saying it 'just happened.' " She set her knitting on the lamp table. "Your father will have to be told. I think you'd better tell him yourself."

"Couldn't you tell him? Please? I don't—"

"Laura. You know the rule."

Of course. When she was little and she broke the cookie jar, Mama made her sweep up the mess and then made her march into her father's study and tell him what she had done. Her father made her go get the belt. The next Sunday he preached a sermon on obedience. She was startled now to see how old he looked, sitting stiffly in the stuffy little room. A vein stood out blue on his temple. She entered on leaden feet and stopped just inside the door.

"Go on," her mother said, and when she hesitated said again, "Go on."

"Daddy, I'm—I'm in some trouble."

His eyes flashed like a hawk's eyes when it sees a rodent. "What kind of trouble?"

"I'm—I know you don't—I just—oh, please! Please!" She fell to her knees in front of his chair and buried her face in the cool plastic chair arm and groped for his hand, but he had withdrawn it. "It was horrible, and it was a sin, and I'm sorry! Please, please say you forgive me! I didn't mean it, it'll never happen again, never, only please tell me it's all right, I didn't mean to but he made me, and afterwards I couldn't stop it, and now I'm going to have a b-b-baby!"

"Stand up, young lady." His voice was a lash with barbs in it. "Stand up this instant. You may have no respect for yourself, but you shall show some respect for your elders. Stand up straight, and stop blubbering, and explain the meaning of this outburst."

She managed to get to her feet, and snuffled and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. "It was a boy I met at school. I didn't want to do it, but he made me. I didn't know how to stop him. I prayed, Daddy, please believe me—"

"She says she did it twenty or thirty times," her mother interjected.

"Is this true?"

"I was afraid to tell him no. I was afraid of what he'd do. I didn't want to let him, but he kept coming around—"

"Slut," her father said. "Whore. You make me ashamed to be a father. Engaging in indecent, lascivious acts and then blaming the boy for it. The Devil has had an easy time with you, that's plain to see. Lust and fornication, and now lying to your parents."

"I'm not lying!" Laura wailed. "I tried to stop him, but he was too strong! He made me—"

"Liar. Filthy. Did he make you take drugs, too? Answer me!"

"I—I smoked some marijuana. Just once."

Her father's face was twitching with rage. "I believe I've heard enough. I had hoped, when we sent you away to school, that you had learned to be a responsible Christian girl. Plainly I was wrong. Go and get the belt."

"Daddy, please! I didn't—"

"The belt. Now. You know the rule. Every second you delay means an additional stroke. One. Two. Three. Four."

"Daddy, please, you can't mean it! How can you possibly—"

"Seven. Eight. Nine."

Her eyes were streaming. She looked to her mother for support, but her mother only stared grimly at the wall and said nothing. Laura wheeled and sprinted from the room—but not toward her parents' bedroom, where the belt was hanging in the closet. She raced to the bathroom, slammed the door, and locked herself in. Her hands were shaking so badly she barely got the lock fastened before her father was rattling and pounding and shouting, "Laura! Come out of there! Come out this instant! You know that won't do you any good. You cannot escape punishment, and I will brook no disobedience! Do you hear me?" Laura cowered back against the wash basin, trembling. After a moment she heard her mother's voice: "Here, I've got the key." She lunged forward and threw her weight against the door, but it swung open anyway, forcing her back. Her father grappled with her, trying to seize her wrists, and she writhed sideways and slipped on the bath mat and fell and he fell on top of her knocking the breath out of her and she grabbed the side of the tub to try to stand up and he grabbed her from behind and she fell again and struck the edge of the tub hard across her abdomen and he hauled her to her feet and she lurched into him so he bumped against something and they both fell down again and he pinned her arms and her mother was holding out the belt and her father was forcing her across the floor so she was kneeling in front of the toilet, and he said, "Now, now you'll learn, now I'll teach you," and he was pulling her skirt up and pulling her underwear down and suddenly she barely felt the sting of the belt a cramp started inside her and grew and grew till she was screaming gasping and he was still whipping her thinking she was screaming because of the belt he was yelling telling her to say she was a filthy whore say it or he'd keep on till she said it only the cramp was so bad she couldn't say anything she was being torn in half all she could do was scream and feel the sweat pouring out on her face and smell the disinfectant smell of the toilet the cramp had hold of her belly it was crushing her squeezing burning and then there was wetness between her legs and she was shuddering in spasms and her mother was yelling, "Stop, you're hurting her, can't you see you're hurting her," and her father was grunting, "She's hurting herself, I'm only doing the Lord's will," and the wetness was running down her leg and the cramp was squeezing again and the belt had stopped falling she was shivering and she could hear her father breathing hard and her mother said, "My God in Heaven, look what you've done," and the wetness was pooling on the floor around her knees the cramp was a fist and when at last she twisted sideways on the toilet and looked down she already knew what it was, the blood all streaked milky yellow and the transparent pink thing no bigger than her thumb the tiny dark veins like hairs lying there curled in its jelly sac floating in the mess on the floor. She still hurt—there was a lump of hot metal swelling inside her. But in a kind of weird underwater clarity she saw that somebody had slammed into the medicine cabinet during the struggle, because there were aspirin scattered on the floor and an open packet of her father's single-edge razor blades. Rolling off the toilet, she was hit by a cramp that brought fresh tears to her eyes, but through the tears a loose razor blade swam up and she grabbed it and hid it in her palm and levered herself to her feet and stood bent over tugging at her panties. Her mother was in the hall outside the door, face averted. Her father stood in the doorway, still holding the belt, the rage in his eyes smoldering. "The Lord's judgment—" he began.

Laura swung the razor at him. The first slash cut diagonally from his shoulder down across his chest, shearing the fabric open. He looked down at it stupidly, and she swung again, at his face, drawing a line from cheekbone to chin that spread wide like a dark flower opening. The third cut went down his arm, and she felt resistance as the blade sank into cloth and muscle. He made a noise in his throat and jumped or toppled backward out the door. She slammed it and locked it again. Then, suddenly dizzy, she slid down the door until she was sitting on the floor. The little cabinet under the sink was standing open, and she could see a blue-and-white plastic jug of Clorox bleach. After staring at it for a minute—it was very far away—she crawled toward it, ignoring the sticky mess her knees slid in, and unscrewed the cap and tipped the bottle up and drank.

* * * * *

"Are you all right, dear?" Aunt Edith asked.

Laura looked up from the mound of tissue and empty boxes. "What?"

"I asked if you were all right. You seemed awfully quiet."

"I'm okay. I was just—I lost the baby. The Baby Jesus."

"Oh, is that all? Well, He's got to be here somewhere, doesn't He? Yes, here He is."

Aunt Edith bent and retrieved the tiny carved figure and held it out in her palm. It was no larger than her thumb, and the bulbous forehead, tucked-in chin, and black dots for eyes rang the horrid bell of memory. She pushed Aunt Edith's hand away. "Take it away," she said. "Get it out of here. I don't want to see it."

After a moment of shocked silence, Aunt Edith said, "Very well, dear. Perhaps you'd better go lie down. You'll feel better when you've taken a nap."

Laura got to her feet and waded through the strewn wrappings to the door. But she wasn't sleepy, and she couldn't relax in her room because of the two repellant little china dolls on the dresser, whose grotesque innocence was a mocking accusation. She picked up a hairbrush, intending to smash them—but she was a guest here. Instead she jerked her arms into her coat and went out the door onto the patio. The fog had come in again. The day was gray and silver and wet and cold.

Down at the edge of the lawn, under a tree, stood the old man with the staff, and beside him the older woman with her arms open.

Laura gasped. Her heart hammered wildly. They were still white, and still motionless. They were still statues. But they had come up from the grove somehow, and they were standing looking directly at her. With a little cry, she turned and stumbled back into the bedroom and locked the door.

When she peeked out the window a moment later, the statues were gone.

She blinked, and rubbed her eyes. Had it been a hallucination? No, they had been there. They had come up to the edge of the lawn specifically for her benefit. They had come for her. She whimpered and tugged at her hair. What was happening to her? And why?

After that there was no question of going back to the grove. She stayed in the house, watching television, playing solitaire, trying to read and losing interest. At night when she went to her room she turned off the light and, after bracing herself, looked out at the yard. It would be worse not to look, because then she would imagine things. Always, when she looked, there was a statue or two standing just under the shelter of the trees, watching, waiting for her. Sometimes it was the old man. Sometimes it was the young man, or one of the women, or the child with the bow. "Go away," she would whisper, her words fogging the glass. "Leave me alone." They gave no sign that they had heard. And in the morning they were always gone.

* * * * *

Christmas came. Aunt Edith gave her a fluffy pink sweater. Uncle Henry gave her a Japanese doll in a display case, with lacquered hair and a red kimono embroidered with gold thread. Using money provided by Aunt Edith, Laura bought Uncle Henry a bathrobe and Aunt Edith a cut glass serving dish. On Christmas morning her mother called from Illinois, and after Aunt Edith had chatted for twenty minutes she came and hunted up Laura, who was hiding in one of the other guest bedrooms pretending to be absorbed in a magazine.

She picked up the receiver and held it to her ear, but for a minute she didn't say anything. The line hissed and crackled in a slow rising and falling rhythm, like something old and huge and feeble lying in its cave up by the North Pole and breathing on the world.

"Hello, Mama."

"Laura, is that you?" A pause. "Are you all right?"

"I'm fine, Mama."

"I hope you're all right. I hope you're feeling better."

"I'm fine. How's Ann? How's Tracy? Are they all right?"

"They're fine, dear. So is your father. He sends his—he said to tell you—well, he's worried about you. He's concerned. We all are."

"I don't think I want to talk any more, Mama. Goodbye." No, he hadn't sent his love. He probably hadn't said to tell her anything at all. He just sat there in his chair—she imagined it, not having been home since that night—brooding, his face ashen around the fresh scar.

"Laura," her mother said quickly, "we miss you, honey. When are you going to come home?"

"I don't know." She handed the receiver back to Aunt Edith.

Wandering back to her room, she asked herself, "When am I going to go home?" She couldn't impose on Aunt Edith forever. But she couldn't go home either, not and face her father.

Also, as long as she stayed in California she had to contend with the menacing presence of the statues. Every night they came a little closer to the house, standing plainly visible on the lawn, holding their silent vigil, vanishing back into the woods before dawn. Nobody else ever saw them—or if they did, they said nothing, and Laura was afraid to ask. She knew they would think she was crazy. All the same, she wasn't imagining things. Aunt Edith and Uncle Henry's bedroom was on the other side of the house, that was all.

And the statues went on invading her dreams. She dreamed she was walking in the grove when it was dappled with summer sun, her hand in the old man's as he strode along marking the path with his staff. He led her on past the familiar clearing, down a slope she had never noticed before, and now the boy with the bow was holding her other hand and skipping beside them. They came out from under the trees into a valley that sparkled green and gold. People in strange robes standing in the fields waved at them. Laura waved back, feeling that she had known them for a long time. Solemnly the old man presented her with a sturdy wooden goblet, and when she lifted it to drink she saw it was the same golden nectar that had been in the Thermos. But suddenly it stung her throat with the vile burning of Clorox. She gagged and dropped the goblet and spilled the nectar on the ground. She woke filled with a great sorrow, an ache of emptiness and loss, as if the sea itself had drained away during the night and left her staring out at its rocky desolate bottom.

* * * * *

When the wheel turned again, carrying them into January, Aunt Edith said, "You know, dear, if you're planning to stay much longer, you really ought to consider what you're going to do. The junior college is only five minutes away, and I think perhaps it would be best if you went down and registered. I'm sure there won't be any problem about your not being a California resident. Henry will see to that. But you mustn't stay cooped up in the house all the time, that's the main thing. It's not healthy. Ever since Christmas you've been getting more and more withdrawn. Isn't that so, Victoria?"

"Yes'm," Victoria said, not looking up from the ironing.

"I'm only thinking of what's best for you, dear. Your mother entrusted you to my care, and she'd be so disappointed if you didn't get better."

"All right, Aunt Edith. I'll see about getting into school." She didn't want to face the other students. A gulf separated her from them, a gulf that they wouldn't know existed and that she could never explain. But she was trapped. The only alternative was to go back to Illinois.

That night, lying in bed, she heard an eerie flutelike melody leaping and cavorting outside on the lawn. She knew instantly what it was—the satyr, piping on his pipes. Lively, lascivious, the piping crawled under the covers with her and made her sweat. She got up and made sure the outside door was locked and the window latched. For good measure she propped a chair against the hall door. Even so, she slept feverishly, the piping insinuating itself into her dreams.

In the morning when she woke, the piping was gone. The room was as still and silver as on the first morning after she arrived. But on the pillow beside her lay a single freshly picked blue wildflower.

She moaned aloud in fear. The bedroom wasn't safe any more—not content to watch from the lawn, they were coming inside while she slept. She looked around the room very slowly, breathing through her mouth, expecting to see a statue standing in the corner. But she was alone. And when she checked the doors and windows, there was no sign of forced entry.

Standing at the window in her nightgown, she looked down at the woods. The golden flood of morning sun slanted down into the trees. "What do you want from me?" she said. "Why won't you leave me alone?" There was no answer, only a single dark bird that took wing and flew east toward the sun. "Whatever you're trying to do, it won't work. I'm going home now. I'm going back to Illinois. You can't stop me, so please don't try."

* * * * *

"Aunt Edith," she said at breakfast, "I've decided I can't impose on you any longer. You've been very nice, and I appreciate everything you've done. But it's time for me to go home."

"Well, I think perhaps that's best, dear," Aunt Edith said, placidly buttering toast. "Not that your Uncle Henry and I don't enjoy having you here. We do. But now that you've had a chance to get your strength back, you'll be able to face your problems squarely. In the long run it's no good hiding from things. They always catch up with you sooner or later."

Out in the woods there were things that Laura didn't want to catch up with her, not ever. But that wasn't what Aunt Edith was talking about. Laura said, "You know what I did?"

"I'm not so sure it's any of my business, dear. That's between you and your conscience. I'm sure at heart you're a good Christian girl. Whatever trouble you've had was out of inexperience and confusion, not willful perversity. My goodness, how could somebody like your father raise a child who was willfully perverse? Now that you've had a chance to rest and think things over, I'm sure you'll agree that your parents do know what's best. After all, they're so much older—well, perhaps not so very much older, but they've seen a great deal more of the world than you, and their faith has assured them of living happy, fulfilling lives, the kind of life you'll want to have for yourself someday. Don't you agree?"

Laura stared at the crumbs scattered in the egg yolk on her plate, trying to read an answer in them that wasn't there. "I guess so," she said.

* * * * *

Two thousand miles away, the phone was ringing. Laura held the receiver to her cheek and said silently, "Please nobody answer, please nobody be home, please…"

"Hello?"

"Mama? Mama, is that you?"

"Laura! It's so good to hear your voice, dear. How are you?"

"I'm fine, Mama. How are you?"

"Oh, I can't complain. We had more snow last night. I've just been out shoveling the walk, and you know how hard that is, with my back."

"Why can't—" Why can't Daddy do it? But you weren't to criticize your parents. Instead she said, "How are Tracy and Ann?"

"Just fine, dear."

"Mama, I'm—I want to come home. If I can. If it's all right."

"All right?" Her mother's voice vibrated like a taut string. "Oh, darling, of course it's all right. That's wonderful! Your father will be—oh, there's something I have to tell you. Honey, we've got a surprise for you. Just wait till you hear. You know that boy you got to know at school? The one you were—you know, that you were friends with? Stanley. Well, when the Christmas vacation started at college, Stanley came down here to Mattoon to find you. He was worried because you hadn't been at college this fall. So we made him welcome, because at first we didn't know who he was, you hadn't told us his name, and it turned out that he didn't know anything about—about the trouble you had, because you hadn't written to let him know. Well, he explained how guilty he'd been feeling, and he said that now that he knew, he felt ten times worse, and the only thing that would make it right was for him to marry you. Isn't that wonderful? He was so noble about it. And at first your father wouldn't hear of it, because he was pretty angry when he found out who Stanley was, but by and by they got to talking, and it turned out they have a great deal in common. Did you know Stanley is thinking of becoming a minister? Isn't that wonderful? So your father saw the light, and he's given his blessing. You can be married just as soon as you'd like. It's all settled. I knew you'd be thrilled when you heard, but we didn't want to rush you, we thought it would be best to wait until you called of your own accord, and now you have, and everything is going to be all right again. Isn't it wonderful? Praise the Lord!"

Laura's body had gone numb. In the pause at the other end of the line she found she had nothing to say. So she said nothing.

"Laura? Did you hear me? Are you there?"

Yes, I heard you. But the words didn't have enough force to become speech. They hung inside her, suspended from the roof of a great dark cavern, swaying slightly.

"Laura? Laura?"

Very gently she hung up the phone. Somehow her feet guided themselves out of the kitchen and down the hall. Behind her the phone rang, and Aunt Edith answered it. Laura kept walking.

"I don't know. She was here a minute ago. You were? Hold on a minute. Laura. Laura! Where are you?"

She turned and went into Uncle Henry's study. It was as good a place as any. She sat down on the floor beside the suit of armor. The metal was cool against her cheek. She considered how nice it would be to live inside a suit of armor. The armor would be stiff, so you couldn't move around much, but that wouldn't matter. People would attach ropes to your arms and legs, and they could move you wherever they wanted and you'd just stand there until they moved you again. Some of the positions they put you in might be unpleasant, but you could never be hurt, because you'd be inside the armor. You wouldn't have to worry, you wouldn't have to think at all, you wouldn't have to do anything or try to escape from anything. It would be cool and dark and quiet.

She became aware that Aunt Edith was shaking her shoulder. "Laura—Laura, are you all right? Your mother's on the phone. She says you were cut off. You didn't hang up on her, did you?"

Laura looked warily at Aunt Edith's face. It was still impossible to say anything.

"I'll tell her you'll call her back later," Aunt Edith said firmly. Her face went away.

Moving mechanically, Laura got to her feet and went down the hall to her bedroom and got her suitcase out of the closet and set it on the bed and opened it and started putting things in. I'll go away to San Francisco, she said to herself. But where she would stay and how she would get money were questions without answers, so after a while she sat down in the chair, leaving the suitcase open on the bed with clothes strewn around it, and stared at the wall and didn't think about anything at all. Blue wildflowers and the music of pipes chased each other across her mind, and she barely noticed.

Aunt Edith came in, frowned worriedly, and perched on the edge of the bed. "Your mother told me the good news," she said. "I think it's wonderful that you and this boy are going to be married. He sounds like a fine young man, and I'm sure you'll be very happy. I'm afraid I don't understand why you're reacting this way. Naturally when you've been single it takes some getting used to the idea of being married. There are compensations, believe me. Security, for one thing. I understand this Stanley is a fine upstanding Christian boy with big plans for the future. I'd hate to see you pass up an opportunity like that, dear. There's no telling when another boy like that will come along. I was lucky to catch your Uncle Henry, believe me. And I had sense enough to know it. Why, I remember when he first…"

Laura let the words flow together into a gurgle. After a while she noticed that Aunt Edith had gone.

She might have sat without moving forever, but eventually she had to go to the bathroom. Sitting on the toilet with her jeans around her ankles, she looked down at her naked body, seeing it for the first time. Experimentally she touched herself, felt the firm flesh of her thighs, the wiry luxuriant hair where they met. She remembered the pain, but when she probed with her fingers it was entirely gone. She traced the soft folds lingeringly, a thing she had never done before. She was a mystery to herself. She rubbed—and gasped at the strange sensation and jerked her hand away. Suddenly the air was cold on her legs. She reached down and pulled her pants up. But before she fastened them she touched herself once more, leaving a bookmark.

* * * * *

Uncle Henry came home from work and the three of them sat down to dinner. Aunt Edith told him all about how Laura was going to marry the nice boy from college, and Laura found that she could say, "Mmmhmm," and even form short sentences without the slightest trouble. They were talking about somebody else. After dinner she watched television for a while before she went to her room. The suitcase was still sitting open. Outside the window a three-quarter moon was high, casting brilliant shadows, haloed by a circle of stratospheric ice. She looked out across the lawn, her breath flickering on the glass. Gradually the sounds of the house and the city beyond submerged in stillness. At the edge of the woods, then, she saw pale figures—three, four, five, six. Without seeming to move, they shifted up the lawn toward the house, shimmering shapes that swam in and out behind the moonlight.

The piping started. It trilled. It trickled. It curled into her ears and slid in loops along her limbs. Somewhere in her a small leaping spark answered it.

Turning her back on the window, she crossed the room to switch out the light and put on her coat. In front of the dresser she paused. The two ludicrous little china dolls were standing there, smirking cutely in the reflected moonlight. She picked them up, one in each hand, and dropped them on the rug. Carefully but firmly, she brought her heel down on one and then the other, crushing them to powder. Then, not looking back, she went to the door and unbolted and opened it and stepped outside.

---

MNQ/2009.12.20

17,888 Words