The winged child, p.4
The Winged Child, page 4
Her first husband was a logger, who died young and by accident, as forest workers were prone to do in those unregulated times. In her middle age, Millicent Robbins married Benjamin Drum, whom she loved longer if not more. Drum was a mildly famous local photographer, perhaps better known for the quality of his friends than for his published images, which appeared in widely circulated nature magazines for a generation. A number of his photographs still adorned the walls of halls and guestrooms at Hillhaven.
It was rare for Millicent McTeer’s parents to take time away from their inn, especially in the spring, when tourists and day-trippers generated traffic jams in Asheton’s winding and tilted streets. But when they asked Millicent what she wanted for a birthday present, she said, “A weekend at the cabin—just us and no more.”
They made it a long weekend, not coming home until Monday, though it meant their daughter would miss a day of school. Millicent was weary of school, where she’d been consistently at odds with her teachers of late, to the point that Amelia and Joshua were discussing in low voices when they thought their daughter beyond earshot, the possibility of hiring a tutor to home-school her. Millicent, of course managed to overhear, and relished the notion, provided she might be granted approval of her mentor. Millicent, one way or another, contrived to become aware of most plots and plans of well-intentioned adults regarding her situation present and future. She also usually, through subtle maneuver and counter-logic, evaded any directive not her own without appearing to offer outright resistance. Early on, Millicent evidenced an adult’s negotiating skills. As Amelia would say of her in a later life, “My daughter never was a child.”
All through breakfast on the morning she saw the dragon, Millicent observed fleeting touch and glance between her parents, concluded that they might have some transaction begun between them during the night that required further resolution. As she anticipated, when she asked if she could walk on her own to the waterfall a quarter-mile down the ridge below the cabin, they assented with slightly less than their customary reservation, and she was free and away, duly permissioned and cautioned, with instruction not to wander farther than her declared destination.
“I’ll be down in a little while,” Joshua said to her back as she went through the door. “Maybe I’ll bring our gear and we can try to rescue a pan-full of trout from the pool below the fall.”
“Great, Dad,” Millicent called, glanced behind her on her way out to see Amelia standing with both hands on Joshua’s shoulders. She suspected they would be into each other’s clothes by the time she was across the yard.
Ten minutes into the woods, the steady, throaty rumble of the waterfall swallowed the breathy conversation between breeze and leaves. The torrent roared with a hundred liquid voices, spoke against every stone and ledge in its path, calling, inviting, commanding her in chorus with the unmovable mountain, water and stone shaping her name in the bright air, the sound sliding and dropping like the plummeting stream, in a cascade of descending syllables, the final t terminating in a stuttering crackle like an electrical spark.
Millicent ran the last hundred yards to the falls and arrived breathless at its bouldered glen. She collapsed on a large flat-topped rock to gather herself. A thick carpet of moss gentled their meeting. The easy green felt slightly damp in the faint mist from the waterfall, and cool under her palms and her tanned calves. She lay on her back, feet dangling over the churning eddy below, and swallowed as much true-blue sky as she could hold. While she tried to identify the large bird circling high above, smalled by the distance between them, Millicent McTeer was asleep.
From her dream, she looked down at herself out of the eyes of the hawk as it rose on the thermal currents ascending the ridge from the valley northward. She watched herself, sprawled on her rock, slowly turning and receding. The wee human female, just a pale and not particularly important cypher in the pooled shadow of the glen. Too large to be prey and too small and earth-bound to be predator. Hawk was not afraid of her and for less than a second, barely curious.
A sound called her back to her own mind, if only half awake. A word, spoken with the liquid ease and slide of water and the arresting click of stone. She lay there in her blood-tinged dark, still as the stone under her, not daring to open her eyes, waiting, listening until she heard her name again. Milliccenttt…
It wasn’t just the water, then. She sat up so quickly it dizzied her, stared at the tumbled rocks and turgid rapids, until in the dappled, flickering light admitted by the wind-tossed trees, several adjoining crags arranged themselves into a face, vaguely reptilian and grotesquely human, with burning slanting eyes above a long nose and dark fanged mouth that would have been at home on a wolf. The mouth morphed to form her attenuated name again, accented and modulated as the stream itself might have spoken, Milliccenttt MccTteerrr.
She opened her own mouth to answer when a shadow fell across her mossy throne, and Millicent looked up to see her father’s face smiling down at her. Beyond him, grim clouds roiled and rolled, obliterating the blazing blue that had homed the hawk. Millicent blinked, looked back at the waterfall and saw only transient water tumbling down immutable stone.
“Storm coming,” said the comfort of her lovelit days and the assurance of her darksome nights. A familiar and beloved hand reached down. Millicent took it and let it haul her to her feet. Then, as the first drops of rain rattled the leaves over their heads and glistened the rocks at their feet, Joshua McTeer and his daughter, hand in hand, made a dash for home and shelter.
Millicent didn’t think about the dragon again until after the storm and supper and her bath, as she lay gazing out her window, the waxing moon bathing her face. No dragons lurked in the shadowed forest surrounding their cabin. She listened to the calls and stirrings of all the creatures inhabiting the familiar night but none of them spoke her name. Finally, Millicent released her world to sleep, certain of two things—a dragon had spoken her name, and she would see him again.
The next morning, as soon as they finished breakfast, Millicent helped her parents neat the little cabin and pack up to go home. Amelia drove. Millicent and her father gazed wistfully out the window at the trees sliding by as their old crew cab pickup crunched up their gravel track toward the paved county road. Though neither of them ever said it aloud to anyone, they felt more themselves, more akin to their world, when free on the mountain than encumbered with their city lives. Millicent knew her mother was attuned to a more orderly and controlled existence and felt no less loved for that. She also knew that Amelia Montfort had her own dark wildness that she kept hidden deep, even from herself.
They rode in silence down between the mountains, twisting and turning toward the interstate that lay in the valley like a lazy snake, shining under the sun, trucks and cars flickering along it’s back toward destinations that might have seemed important to the humans riding in them, necessary, at least, if not desired. Up the access ramp and they were in the peopled world again, streaming live toward acknowledged routine. As she drove, Amelia began humming to herself a scrap of tune that had caught in her head. Millicent guessed she would be hearing some refined iteration of it one night soon in the dining room at Hillhaven Inn. Joshua, frowning in concentration, scribbled something in his notebook. Millicent listened to the roar and drone of traffic and the rush of wind past the window. Eyes closed. Concentrating on the song the tires were singing to the asphalt. Waiting to hear something whisper her name.
When they reached the high bridge over the Long Broad, the song shifted key and tempo, transitioned abruptly to a rhythmic click, click, click on the hot concrete. Millicent opened her eyes, saw the water flashing eighty feet below, saw the city of Asheton crowding the far shore.
“It looks different,” she said, not aware she shared her thought aloud.
Her father looked up from his notebook, closed it, and dropped his pen into his shirt pocket. “It is,” he said.
“But it is still Asheton,” Millicent said.
Joshua nodded. “Still Asheton, but not quite the same as we left her. Some souls have died, some have been born while we were on the mountain. People have arrived, folk have departed for some other place. Strangers have met and become friends. Friends have become lovers and lovers have fallen out. Fortunes have likely been made and lost in Asheton over the past three days. Some have become rich for the last time, and some become poor for the first time. Asheton is the same only in that she still changes.”
“Nothing is lost, though, even if everything is changed,” Millicent said quietly, repeating something her great-grandmother’s ghost had told her on the stair at Hillhaven.
“That’s a good one,” observed Joshua. “May I steal that for my next book?”
Amelia had quit her humming, listening to her beloveds. She shook her head as she pulled off the freeway onto McTeer Street. “Philosophers,” she said, laughing. “I hope you’ll suspend your inquiry into the nature of things long enough to help me unload our stuff.”
When she looked back years afterward, Millicent would say the summer of her first dragon sighting was the last summer of her childhood. Until then, she had believed in magic the way children do. Not entirely fantasy but not quite real, either. A practice that might change the way one saw things, but not necessarily change the things one saw. Before she survived her teen years, the deep world behind the broken and beautiful world she lived in would become frighteningly real and powers and forces she had consigned to her imagination would intrude into her ordinary life with startling consequence. In the process, Millicent would discover powers within herself that weighed her with more adult responsibility than adolescent thrill.
The summer began innocently enough, promising to be a variation on a seasonal theme that played out every year Millicent could remember. Hillhaven once again overflowed with eager visitors lugging expensive electronic gadgets to record the mountains and waterfalls encircling Asheton and to facilitate real-time sharing with their circles of social media contacts.
Millicent, like all her peers at school, had a smart phone. Everybody did. But unlike her friends, Millicent had never taken a selfie. She agreed with Ted Mura, a long-dead photographer whose sharp-focus photograph of Myrtle Mountain hung in the Hillhaven dining room. One day Joshua was explaining to her the antique process whereby captured images were fixed on chemically treated film. She was entranced that the sepia-tinted monochrome would seem so immediate and present.
“But it looks so real, Dad,” she said. “I can smell the trees.” Then Joshua told her that Mura claimed the purpose of a photograph was not to inform the viewers that the photographer had been in a place, but to convince them that they were there.
“It’s a good one then,” she said.
Hillhaven was full of photographs, on every wall in every room or hallway. No paintings or contrived images among all these frozen glimpses stolen from their moment, become now windows into the close and far past, all looking out into the same familiar place. The architecture almost as constant as the landscape that homed it. Only the faces changed, the styles of their accoutrement reflecting succeeding seasons and years and generations. Among all the images sequestered in the inn, Millicent loved best the small sepia-tinted double portrait in a plain black frame that hung over the desk just inside the front door where arriving guests wrote their names in a big book, and departing ones left their room keys in a large celadon ceramic bowl. In the photo, two women stood on the hotel veranda, close as lovers, smiling their welcome. Millicent couldn’t remember who had told her the taller one was her great-grandmother, Alice McTeer. The other, shorter, not so thin, maybe a bit older, remained a mystery to Millicent until one day she asked her mother, “Who’s the other woman with Alice?”
Amelia informed her, “That’s Millicent Robbins. She owned Hillhaven before your great-grandmother. You’re named for her.”
Millicent was curious. “Why wasn’t I named after dad’s grandmother?”
“That was our first thought,” Amelia said, paused a moment, as if searching for some alternative fact, then proceeded to tell the truth. “But my parents divorced when I was a teenager. Dad re-married to a woman named Alice. We would never have convinced Mother that we weren’t currying favor with Dad. Then, I had that dream.”
Millicent picked up the scent of a genuine adventure. “A dream?”
“It had to be a dream. I thought I was awake at the time, and I don’t believe in ghosts, so it had to be a dream.”
“Tell me, oh, tell,” piped Millicent, shrill athrill with curiosity and anticipation.
Amelia drew a deep breath, assembled her thoughts, and made her confession. “I was sitting on the veranda reading. I could feel you kicking inside me. I was tired and must have fallen asleep. I thought I saw a woman standing just by the door. I recognized her from the photo over the reception desk. It was your great-grandmother Alice McTeer, dressed just as she was in the picture. What’s troubling you, child, she said to me, or at least, I dreamed she said it. I told her, we wanted to name this one… I remember I patted my tummy as I said it, we wanted to name our girl for you, but my mother will have a fit if we do. Then in the dream Alice laughed the strangest laugh, not a sound, but little splatters of silence. Then, name her after my dear Millicent Robbins. Nothing would please me more. I must have been sleeping, because I didn’t think it at all strange to be talking to a dead woman in broad daylight. Why Millicent? I asked her. Alice flickered like a leaf in the wind and said, Because I loved her and because she was a wild and winged soul. The life growing inside you now carries all her gifts. I would have asked her more then but she was gone and I was awake again.”
Mother and daughter sat silent for a time, weighing the dream in their minds. Finally, Millicent asked, “Did I bring you any gifts?”
Amelia laughed, pulled her child close and kissed her head. “You are the gift, my angel. The light in our day. Joshua and I couldn’t ask or hope for more than you.”
Millicent McTeer had never met her maternal grandmother. She’d seen her skyped, of course, a smartly garbed woman who endured costly and sometimes painful maintenance in an ultimately failing campaign to keep herself looking younger than her daughter. Calista Montford communicated with the family on birthdays and holidays. On these occasions a forced benevolence thinly veiled a vague air of disapproval that filtered through the world-wide web all the way from California. Millicent’s mother, Amelia, didn’t appear cheered at all by these conversations.
Millicent, always trying to get at the thorny heart of appearances, asked her father once, “Why doesn’t Grandmother ever come to visit?”
Joshua glanced at his wife across the room to be certain she wasn’t listening, then leaned toward his daughter and whispered, “Happiness is a loving close-knit family who live at the other end of the country.” Millicent figured that saying it aloud practically guaranteed that her father’s definition might soon be tested. And very soon, it was.
On a Monday evening, when there were fewer guests and Hillhaven Inn didn’t serve dinner, a short day for most of the staff, a welcome respite from the summer tourist invasions, Millicent’s family sprawled in varying postures around their personal upstairs veranda. With her current book-of-the-day, she lay on the floor, propped on her elbows while her bare heels made circles in the air. Joshua was scribbling in his notebook as usual, ensconced in a yellow-painted rocker that revealed, season by season, more of its previous green. Joshua called it his bleached blond. Amelia was communing with her laptop on an aging sofa camouflaged with a bright, intricately patterned blanket sent back by an elder relative from a small country in South America while he was negotiating contracts with their state-owned oil company. None in present company could recall exactly which country.
Asheton traffic raised just a low murmur behind the calls of wrens and robins and the conversation between poplar leaves and the warm wind. The three humans were each lost in themselves, silent and intent, until Amelia softly demolished their peace. In a voice full of surprise and tinged with alarm, she said, barely above a whisper, “Hell’s bells.”
“What’s up?” Joshua breathed, not looking up from his notes. Millicent, without giving any sign she heard, suddenly all vigilant.
“Mother’s coming,” said Amelia, emitting a sound that might have been either a laugh or a moan.
Millicent came to her feet in a flash, almost airborne in her glee, “When?” she shrieked.
Joshua, his notebook closed now, queried quietly, “How long?”
Calista Montford descended upon Hillhaven with all her accustomed style and flair, a calculated extravagance that, had she been only slightly less tasteful, would have been counted as ostentation. She had been born into a moneyed family who taught her growing up that everyone had a price and she should sell herself dearly. The only person who had successfully dented her illusion of privilege and entitlement was her ex-husband, Amelia’s father. Calista’s lawyers insured that he still paid regularly for his transgression.
Time, experience, and expensive cosmetic procedures had transmuted the beauty of her youth into a steely sheen, impermeable, not quite human. Women half her age felt at an undefined disadvantage in the same room with her. Calista’s doesn’t everybody reaction to any perceived criticism, veiled or otherwise, was intended to maintain that effect.
Millicent, though fascinated with the grandmother she had never seen except on some screen or other, had always been cautious in their interactions. When she saw Calista pull into Hillhaven’s yard, purple scarf trailing in the rush of her rented sportscar, the girl determined to maintain her stance. Calista Montford, she thought, was indeed a force, though not entirely of nature.
