The Little Giant of Aberdeen County Read online

  Hissing with pain, I went to the dispensary, to see if the doctor had any old cream or balm. Away from the fire, my cheeks cooled and tingled, even though the air was moist. The center of my hand throbbed and beat—a rhythm my temples picked up and began to copy. With my good hand, I groped along the top of the doorjamb for the hidden key, then shoved open the screen door and unlocked the doctor’s office. It was the one place I had avoided since his death, and even though it had been only about a week, the air inside was as thick and stale as old rubber. I groped my way to the light switch and flicked it on.

  I opened the door to the medicine cabinet and found a sample tube of antibiotic cream and a roll of gauze. Winding the white fabric around my hand, I continued to inspect the room. The doctor and Amelia had pretty well cleaned it out at the beginning of his illness. His desk was bare of his usual files and folders, and he’d either destroyed all his old patient records or sent them on to the clinic in Hansen. I idly pulled open one of the metal drawers and was surprised to see a few files remaining. One of them was Priscilla Sparrow’s, and one of them was mine.

  Mine was so thick that I had trouble holding the whole thing in one hand. I flipped it open and right away saw a decade’s worth of blood test results, measurements, and other numbers. I scanned through this information quickly, not daring to let myself put an actual number to my weight and height after all these years. I still didn’t want to know. The back of the folder held his notes, and I read these more thoroughly. Subject recalcitrant, one sentence read. Refuses to follow dietary advice. I turned the page. Subject’s bone structure more in keeping with a male’s. Subject shows increased musculature. Subject’s heart shows evidence of gross enlargement. Prognosis poor. I sighed and shoved the papers back into the folder, then set the folder on top of the filing cabinet. The doctor’s history of me was like a faulty, oversized shadow. One more thing to be burned.

  On the wall above the doctor’s desk, his books still held all their old posts on the shelf. Anatomy texts, drug indexes—there were enough words, I thought, to write the human body into existence ten times over, a hundred different ways. I ran my fingers down the spines of the books then back again. Each time, my fingers kept hooking on the last book in the row. It was slightly out of kilter with the other volumes, as if someone had recently taken it off the shelf. I peered at it more closely. Someone had taken it down. I scowled. Who could it have been? The doctor? But he hadn’t left his bed before his death. Bobbie had keys to the house, but as far as I knew, he hadn’t been back. That left only Amelia. But she hadn’t been in the doctor’s office since he’d died, I didn’t think, and it would have been totally unlike her to move only one item in a room and then not clean it up properly.

  Curious, I fanned the pages open in my hand. Pen-and-ink drawings—precise and delicate as spiderwebs—wavered, depicting all the mysteries of the body. The beefy heart. Clusters of cauliflower buds on the lungs. Blood vessels that narrowed into fronds of capillaries, looking more like ferns than part of the flesh. But then something stuck in between the pages caught my eye. A small bit of paper—the corner of an envelope. I plucked it out and held it up, and then gasped. It was a return address, and the name I was reading, in very familiar handwriting, was my sister’s.

  What was a letter from my sister doing in Robert Morgan’s bookcase, I wondered, and when would she have had the occasion to send him a letter? As far as I could remember, they’d never been apart after their marriage until she’d left him. I took down the next book and flipped through it, but there was nothing—just pages of ink. I did the same with all the other books, until the desk behind me was full, but there was no other sign of any correspondence from my sister. Bewildered, I stared down at the scrap of paper again and saw what I hadn’t before. The envelope had been torn so that half the address was missing, but there was enough left for me to make out some of the words—11 Palm something—and the state that the letter had been sent from. California.

  All the air left my body, and I slumped against the desk. I remembered what the doctor had said the night he died. Had he really been talking about Serena Jane? It didn’t make any sense, though. My sister lay in the Aberdeen cemetery, boxed, buried, and weighted down right next to all the other Morgans. I could go there anytime I wanted and touch the heavy block of stone with her name on it. But the grieving mind is an irrational thing. It tricks us, overlooks details, stops paying attention halfway through the story, and thus ignores all other potential endings.

  Seized with curiosity, I yanked open the center drawer of the doctor’s desk and dug around. Except for a few yellowed receipts, it was empty. Same with all the other drawers, except the last one. There, underneath a copy of his will, which I’d already gone over, was something I never even knew existed—the deed to the Dyerson farm. I pulled it out and examined it. What I was holding was a copy, I surmised, and it had been amended several times. At one point, the doctor had possessed the farm, I saw with surprise, but now, under Owner, there was a new name, one I never really expected to see scrawled on a Morgan document. Amelia Ann Dyerson.

  Like a frame stilled from a moving picture, an image of Amelia frozen halfway up the stepladder in the doctor’s office with a bundle of papers in her hand suddenly stuck in the reel of my mind. I remembered all her recent stop-and-start, partial confessions, her paleness when I’d brought up the topic of California at the doctor’s graveside, and instead of the anger I expected, I felt the blood run as cool and calculating through my veins as Robert Morgan’s had done in his life. Amelia had had something to do with the disappearance of my sister’s letters and the secret of her existence—the only thing I didn’t know was why, and I wasn’t sure I cared to, either. Some betrayals are so huge, nothing can ever whittle them down.

  Locking up the doctor’s office and sliding the key back into its hiding place, the mysterious scrap of paper tucked safely in my pocket, I began racing through a mental slew of wild possibilities. What if my sister was still alive? What if I could find her again? What if Bobbie could have his mother back? Was there such a thing as redemption?

  Outside, evening had begun to come on. The first bats were tickling the pale sky, and the fireflies were getting ready to light themselves up and dance. It was still hot, though. Across the yard, my fire had mellowed but gave out an occasional crackle, like something alive. The burn on my palm throbbed, keeping time with the blood pounding in my temples, my ears, and I knew for certainty that my heart was shrinking and that I would take Amelia down with it.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Some people, when confronted with a mystery, will go forth immediately and scour the earth for answers, overturning furniture, comparing the angles of doors and windows, checking under flower pots, certain they’re on the right path. Maybe they’re impatient, or maybe they’ve read too many detective stories. They’ve gotten so accustomed to getting the solution that they think it’s their natural-born right. It never occurs to them there might not be one—not a good one, at least. Not one that makes any sense. Me, I’ve never been a big reader. I figure that if a secret has an answer, it’ll out on its own if it’s meant to, and if it doesn’t, then maybe providence has a better reason for keeping it hidden than you think. But some mysteries are too big for one person to hold on to for long, and some are too tantalizing to let lie fallow, and those are the worst kind of all, for they end up being the real heartbreakers. They are the ones where once you know the story, you wish you didn’t.

  I didn’t go chasing after the truth right away—it was like the burn on my hand. Too recent, too raw, still oozing and sore. It needed time to set and heal before I went digging in the coals again. I needed to grow a second skin. To compensate, to keep my mind tethered to the present, I continued my efforts of cleaning out the doctor’s house. I ventured into the attic and dug through all the boxes and trunks, setting aside any treasures I thought might be valuable. I polished the banister and the mahogany dining table and chairs. I even got out a toolb
ox and tightened up the washers on all the sinks.

  The burned spot on my palm gradually turned into a congealed, red lump of a scar, but it itched like the dickens. Nothing I put on it—the doctor’s cream, petroleum jelly—helped. So one afternoon, I threw whatever calming herbs I could think of—chamomile, mint, comfrey—into a pot and brewed out the oils, catching them with one of the doctor’s glass beakers. Then I mixed all of that into some softened beeswax, and spread it on my hand. Immediately, my skin settled down and felt cool and regular, and in a week, the scar was beginning to fade. I’d promised myself that I was done with the quilt, but this wasn’t technically going back on my word, I figured. I had made up this mixture on my own. Still, it was close enough to Tabby’s cures for me to fold up the quilt and put it away in the back of the linen closet. You’ve been enough trouble, I said to it. History’s done with you now.

  Who knows if I would have left it there, but Vi Vickers dropped by with a case of hives the next day, wanting to see if the doctor had anything left over in his office she could use. “Please,” she howled, her eyelids crusted and swollen. “I can’t drive all the way out to Hansen like this, and Art’s out golfing for the afternoon. Besides, it’s Sunday. Everything’s closed.”

  She was right. She did look awful. So what I did next, I did without thinking—grabbed the tin of balm I’d made and held it out like an offering. “Here—” I pried off the lid. “Try this. Maybe it will work.” Vi smeared some on her cheeks and tried to give back the container, but I shook my head. “Keep it.” I closed the door, smiling, understanding that where I had hidden the quilt didn’t really matter because it was already mapped in my mind. It was up to me, I realized, to decide how I would navigate it. History didn’t just happen. It was made.

  The next day, I decided that if I was finally going to bring everything on the quilt out into the light, I was going to do it whole hog, in front of God, the town, and everyone. I went upstairs to fetch Tabby’s handiwork out of the closet. It could use some more sunlight, I decided—an entire day hung on the line. As I stepped out onto the porch, I found a potted geranium propped on the boards with a note attached: Thanks for the balm, Truly. It also cures circles under the eyes! Love, Vi. I smiled and nudged the container with my foot, happy to see something growing after all the weeks I’d just spent staring at ash.

  Vi must have a big mouth, because word got around, and soon I had people dropping in for all manner of minor aches and pains, asking if I could do something about indigestion or if I knew any way to get rid of three-week cough. “I’m not a doctor,” I protested. “I really don’t even know the first thing about this stuff.”

  “I know,” Sal insisted, seeking to cure a patch of eczema on the back of her hand, “but you worked wonders on everyone else. Couldn’t you just give it a try?”

  I studied the quilt and made up another balm—the same as Vi’s but with more comfrey—and dropped it off at her house, which was really my old house. “Why don’t you come in?” she asked, swinging the front door open wide to reveal glossy floorboards and the rich smell of something with cinnamon in it baking. I peeked around her and saw gingham-checked chairs in the living room and a porcelain umbrella stand next to a chest of drawers. I remembered the dingy wallpaper we’d had when I lived there with my father and the way a week’s worth of letters used to cover the floor, and I shook my head. Time had gone by, it was true, just not nearly enough.

  “Maybe another day.” I waved. “I have to go.”

  “Well, thanks again,” Sal called after me. “And you look good, Truly. Are you losing weight?”

  “Nah.” I grinned. “You’re just getting used to me big.”

  Sal shrugged and closed her door. But I went home and looked in the mirror again, not daring to believe what I saw. I hadn’t had any medication for days, but I could tell I hadn’t grown. I certainly wasn’t any taller, and my hands hadn’t become the size of baseball mitts. In fact, I was cinching my belt one hole tighter and then one more, and none of my buttons ever busted open anymore.

  That was all guesswork, though. To definitively test my mass, I knew there was only one way. I would have to step on the scale in the doctor’s office, and so I did, moving the bar for myself for the first time ever, astonished when the weights didn’t slide all the way to the end. I peeked at the number, then compared it with the ones I remembered from the doctor’s chart and found a small difference. Don’t get me wrong. I was still the same old me, but what the doctor had predicted—my bones getting so big that I’d just sink my way into the earth—not only wasn’t happening, it was all going the other way. How would Robert Morgan have explained what was happening to me? I wondered. He no doubt would have had some fancy medical theory for my shrinking, but as far as I was concerned, the lightening of my body came as much from being free of him as anything else. At last, with no one measuring me or sizing me up, I was finally free to be whatever size I wanted.

  During this time, I saw Amelia. Of course I did. In a town the size of Aberdeen, people are as like to stick in your craw as not, even when you don’t want them there. Even Marcus couldn’t keep from running into me from time to time, though when he did he would just tip his hat and move to the other side of the street. I accepted his coolness, understanding the reason for it, but with Amelia I was more calculating, drawing her in closer and closer while I considered how and when I would confront her.

  She began visiting me more and more regularly, amused by all the concoctions I was making and impressed by the gifts folks left on the back porch. Baskets of peaches. A loaf of fresh bread. A hand-knit scarf with a note that said it would match my eyes. In the house, jewel-colored bottles of tinctures lined the windowsills, and the air continually smelled like wet grass and peppermint.

  She seemed amazed by the quilt. Now that my secret was out, I always had it on display. She paused in her dusting now to regard Tabby’s handiwork, draped over the back of a kitchen chair, then she drifted into the pantry and began tipping bottles up to the light. I glanced over to see what she was holding. “That’s for headache.”

  Her fingers roamed to another bottle.

  “I’m not sure yet about that tonic. Maybe for sore muscles.”

  She reached up to the top shelf and hefted one of the emerald jars of Tabby’s potion in her hand. The liquid was dusty now, dulled down but no less potent for all that.

  “Put that one back,” I snapped. “It’s for no one.” It was like the scrap of letter that I’d put in my bedside drawer upstairs, I thought. It was merely a relic, a fragment of something I didn’t want to think about. Amelia looked hurt but set the jar back in its place. Good, I thought. Now we both have our secrets.

  “Did you hear about Bobbie?” I finally asked, keeping my voice matter-of-fact. “He got some write-up in the local paper about his cooking. Apparently, he’s got a real gift.”

  Amelia’s eyes swelled with pride, and she nodded.

  “I think he’s going to be okay,” I continued. “Why, I bet Marcus puts on five pounds having Bobbie live with him.” At Marcus’s name, I frowned and shut up, and Amelia, sensing my ire, closed the door to the pantry and resumed her dusting.

  We spent the rest of the afternoon more or less in silence, nursing lemonade on the front porch. I was tempted that afternoon to confront her, to lay the whole puzzling mess of Serena Jane in her lap and see what she had to say for herself, but I wasn’t done punishing her yet. The longer I stayed sullen and sulky, the more uncomfortable she grew, and it pleasured me to watch her nervous fingers tug on her braid. I relished the times she knocked and knocked at the front door, then finally slunk away like a banished dog when I refused to answer, or the awkward silences between us whenever she brought up Marcus. And that’s another thing, I thought, the unfamiliar sensation of rage swilling through me, making me feel all-powerful. Marcus belongs with me. That garden should have been mine. Even if I’m dead and gone, they shouldn’t be together.

  No matter how I imagined
it, it peeved me to picture Marcus kneeling in the dirt in back of Amelia’s house, just as it galled me to think that somewhere out there, my sister might be trailing her bare feet through the sand and rough water of a California beach, wondering about the cracked sidewalks and crooked fences that she’d left behind in Aberdeen and wondering about Bobbie, too. What if she hears about the doctor’s death? I wondered. What if she comes strolling back into town?

  The days of summer continued to heat up, and the scrap of envelope in my drawer curled and dried until I thought it might float away, but it didn’t. Instead, the notion of it billowed and swelled like a thunderhead until I finally couldn’t take it anymore. If I kept all the questions I had inside of me, I knew, they would multiply and multiply, until I really did come apart at the seams. And I didn’t want that. Quite the opposite. No, I decided, the time had come. I needed to let the clouds inside me burst.

  At the end of August, on the last real dog day of the year, Amelia came knocking as sure as the sun, two paper sacks full of vegetables clutched in her skinny arms. She had her on usual black-and-white attire, and there were little stray hairs curling at her temples. But whenever I picture Amelia, it is her mouth I always think of—lips as crooked and thin as her father’s, but at the same time as resolute and hard as her mother’s, for they gave nothing away very easily, especially a confession.