She heard the heavy steps of one of the city doctors lumbering toward her, wrestling through a thicket. One hundred steps away, then only fifty, twenty-five. Her ankle throbbed. There was nothing else to do. Now! Lucy squeezed her eyes shut, and held very still.
The doctor walked past her.
She could smell the whiskey on him, feel the ripple of his body in the air. His overcoat snagged. He swore, turned in place. And as he wandered back in the direction of the house, cursing a wasted evening, Lucy opened her eyes on an entirely different wood. Trees seemed taller. The breeze she felt was warm. Even the birdsong had changed keys into a sharper legato. Lucy raised her arms skyward, letting out a yelp of joy—and found six women, watching her.
2
For a time, my father, my books, and Mrs. Blott were my only companions. I supposed that other children existed in situations much like mine, and assumed that at a certain age, once we’d all been sufficiently tested and deemed ready, I would meet them. I imagined a kind of cotillion, prepubescents in taffeta dresses and miniature tuxedos parading about the ballroom of a castle, attempting awkward pas de deux. We might discuss the weather, how regal and foolish we felt in our costumes, how thrilling it was to take another child’s hand, as the children in the fairy tales we read did so easily. Their hands, I thought, would feel soft, like my bed sheets, the fingernails cold and smooth as metal. Or else we would burn one another with blistering early touches, before our skin cooled to a more comfortable temperature. Perhaps we’d fuse together momentarily, flesh melding into flesh, and come away with peeled pink palms. Then, sufficiently welcomed into the tactile adult world, I believed we’d return to our homes, where the boys would grow up to be Peters, the girls Mrs. Blotts. And so on, forever, as new children blossomed with springtime, as old Mrs. Blotts and Peters returned to the earth with the fall.
The logistics of such ritual did not trouble me. I was eager to be grown, too young to understand much of the world—and by the time I was six the fantasy had shattered. I realized that I was to wear no ball gown; that there would be no ball.
IT HAPPENED LIKE this: I was wandering Urizon’s front lawn, dressed in long pants and sleeves, an old pair of gardening gloves fastened at the wrists with twine and a large sun hat tied under my chin. I would have been a sight to anyone unfamiliar with my affliction, and in the mid-May heat I was sweating terribly. Mrs. Blott’s initial treatment of my condition involved much what you would expect for someone with extreme sun sensitivity: she’d make me lather myself in lotion and shade all visible parts. Peter would laugh when he saw me done up for the outdoors, but I paid him little mind. I liked to be outside. I enjoyed the vast, untraveled landscape and the lushness of our grasses and the sky’s strange sometimes-blue. The sun’s caress was warmer than my father’s, more direct. The wind was a truer companion than the girls I met in books, who I loved dearly but I knew would never know me. I felt larger out of doors, where my life seemed wider and more meaningful, as if any minute I’d be called upon to fulfill some great destiny, if only I was patient and could learn to bide my time.
On this particular day I had decided to take action against a worrisome patch of ivy that was smothering two great oaks at the front of our property. I was not sure if ivy choking really could kill oak trees, but it troubled me to watch the plant devouring the trunks. I felt that I could not stand idly by and watch them suffer, and thus attempted to remove the climbing vines by attacking each singular root. The work was frustratingly slow. A family of rats had nested in the ground cover, and as I struggled to yank ivy down off one of the oak’s branches, I could hear them twittering.
“Quiet, you,” I muttered.
The gloves I wore were bulky and prohibitive. I longed to take them off; Mrs. Blott had told me I mustn’t.
As I paused to lick a bit of sweat from my upper lip, the squeak of the rats was overwhelmed by a different sort of chatter: high-pitched voices like my own, giggling and singing and calling. I straightened my shoulders, shook a string of ivy off me, and went across the yard to peer around a hedge that hid the main road from my view. We did not have many travelers in our parts, just cars speeding by on their way to the city (a full day’s drive away), or the university and its accompanying town (approximately thirty minutes), and the occasional wayward tourist drawn in by the local fables.
It was unusual, then, to see a group I later learned to be the village schoolchildren walk by me, fifteen of them, a teacher as their lead. Peter would not like it. I was about to run back to the house to alert him when I noticed a small, troubling detail: though barely older than I was, the children were all holding hands.
They walked in a line, bodies not quite facing straight, for their arms were stretched forward and back, like elephant’s tails clasped by trunks. Little freckly hands touching pale ones, dirtied hands touching clean. I shook off my hat so as to get a better view, and my forehead hit topiary, killing a clump of leaves.
The group was passing so close that were I to reach out, I might touch them. I saw patent leather shoes replaced by sandals, a yellow dress become a tartan skirt, a plain earlobe follow a pierced one. I watched as the owner of the last lobe, the final child in the caravan, let go of his classmate’s hand. He turned and looked right at me, gray eyes meeting mine through the shrubbery. He blinked. He was taller than me, and towheaded, his hair curling up around his ears.
“Hello,” he said solemnly.
A girl’s voice called out, “Mattie!” The little boy was wanted. He nodded at me and ran off to join the rest of his class. I watched him disappear down the road. I bit the twine off my gardening gloves and let them fall from my hands. Returning to the ivy that had given me such trouble, I touched it with a finger and watched dead gray eat its way across the green.
THAT WAS THE last time I wore the gardening gloves. I told Mrs. Blott and Peter that they hurt me, itched my fingers, and made me feel odd. Unsure of how I felt, unable to predict their reactions, I said nothing of the children in the road. Peter took each change in my condition as data, and because I did not generally complain, he and Mrs. Blott let me dispense with the gloves and the hat, sometimes even with the pants, if I preferred tights and was careful. I was still forbidden to fuss with the plant life, but Peter turned a patch of garden at the side of the house into a simple plot of sand where I could sit, barehanded or barefooted, and play without obvious effect.
This act was little consolation. To be given a glimpse of a youth that was not mine had unmoored me; a crack had formed in my formerly smooth world. I grew moody, picked at my food, refused to smile. Having seen myself as one of many, temporarily alone, I’d been excited by my body. That my father was impressed by me—enough to engage in an intense, longitudinal study that mapped my relationship to everything from wooden toys to blueberries—that others were impressed enough to read of what he found, had always been a point of pride. I thought it meant that I was special, better somehow than the other children, who might only be able to sap a flower of its color or curtail a dead tree branch’s decay. Now I saw that I was judged not for having risen above the usual mediocre crowd but for having fallen so magnificently short of them. My guardians hid me away not because I was so very clever but because I was tainted, my existence inherently wrong.