“Leave the curtain open so I can see you,” she pleaded. She was lying on her side, facing my bed, the white sheet up to her shoulders.
“I’m going to have the light on so I can read,” I said, busying myself fluffing my pillows and turning down the covers. “It’ll keep you awake.” I wanted her to fall asleep quickly so I could go downstairs and play canasta with my mother and grandmother. During the school year, my evenings were filled with homework and television—The Andy Griffith Show or Wagon Train or Ed Sullivan. But in the summer, evenings were the time for card games and jigsaw puzzles.
“Please,” she wailed.
“You’ll be able to see my shadow,” I said, glad that I had made the bed closest to the curtain rather than the one against the wall. “Watch.” I walked over to the small table between the twin beds in my corner and lit the lamp. Then I pulled the curtain closed. It was tight against my bed, and once I’d climbed in, still dressed in my shorts and sleeveless top, I knew how I would look to Lucy. I’d been watching the silhouettes of my sister, my cousins, my aunts and uncles through those curtains for years. “See?” I said. “You can see me perfectly, right?”
“Okay,” Lucy said, her voice small.
I heard her settle down in the bed and pictured her lying there on her side, eyes wide-open, watching my shadow as I dove back into Nancy Drew.
I read one chapter and the beginning of another. Then I pulled back the edge of the curtain closest to the head of my bed. Lucy’s eyes were closed, her thumb stuck in her mouth as if she were a three-year-old. Her ratty old teddy bear was tucked beneath her arm. Quietly I slipped from my bed. Pulling the spread from the other bed, I bunched it up under my covers, propping the book up near the pillow, then walked into the central part of the attic to see how the shadows would look from Lucy’s perspective in case she woke up. Quite convincing.
It was impossible to descend the stairs without causing them to creak, but I did the best I could.
My mother smiled at me when I walked onto the porch. She had reached some sort of internal peace about Izzy being at a party, and her smile was a relief to me.
“She’s asleep?” She was sitting across the big table from my grandmother, smoking a cigarette and playing double solitaire on the vinyl, floral-patterned tablecloth. They both wore cotton housedresses, my mother’s a pale yellow stripe and my grandmother’s, baby-blue.
I nodded, plunking myself down into one of the rockers. Like the table, all the chairs on the long porch were painted red, the paint always a little sticky from the humidity and so thick you could dent it with a fingernail. There was also a bed at one end of the porch for anyone who wanted to sleep with the sounds of water lapping against the bulkhead and crickets singing in the wooded lot next door.
“We’ll end this game and then you can join us for canasta,” Grandma said, lifting her cup of instant coffee to her lips. When she shifted her legs beneath the table, I could see that her stockings were rolled down to just below her knees. Her English was perfect, but her Italian accent was still thick some sixty years after her arrival in the United States. I loved the music in her voice. I was ten before I realized that not everyone had a Grandma who spoke that way, turning her “th’s” into “t’s” and adding the hint of a vowel to every word that ended in a consonant.
I rocked for a while, the concrete floor smooth and cool beneath my feet. I could see the light of a boat moving slowly along the canal toward the bay, its engine a soft and steady hum, a backdrop for the slapping of cards against the table. Tomorrow, Grandpop would get our own boat in the water, and I couldn’t wait. I’d piloted that boat myself for the past two summers, although always with an adult or Isabel on board. This summer, Daddy promised me I could go out in it alone if I wore a life preserver and stayed in our end of the canal, between my house and the place where the canal opened into the bay. It was not much territory, but I was excited at having that freedom nevertheless.
Someone was in the Chapmans’ backyard. It was too dark to see who it was, but the person was fishing. I saw the burning tips of a couple of mosquito-repellant coils, and the faint moonlight glinted against the fisherman’s white shirt. I guessed it was Ethan, trying to catch something he could cut up. I watched the shirt move as he swung the pole behind him, then batted the air with it, the sound of the line sailing out into the canal unmistakable. I felt my own fingers itching to hold a fishing pole.
“Are you ready to beat us at canasta?” my grandmother asked me.
I walked over to the table and sat down as she began to deal. My mother stubbed out her cigarette in the clamshell ashtray and was pulling another one from her package of Kents when the most hideous scream suddenly cut through the air. She was out of her seat before I even realized the sounds were coming from the attic. The screams continued, Lucy barely stopping for breath between each one. I followed my mother up the stairs.
“Baby!” My mother flicked on the overhead light and raced to Lucy’s bed. Lucy was huddled against the iron headboard, her teddy clutched in her arms and her poodle hair matted on one side of her head. Our mother sat next to her. “What’s the matter?”
“There!” Lucy pointed toward the ceiling near the center of the attic.
I walked over to where she was pointing and looked up. “Where?” I said.
“There,” Lucy said again, this time a little sheepishness creeping into her voice. I looked up to see an old rag wedged against the ceiling beneath the elaborate network of wires used for the curtains. That rag had been there for as long as I could remember, probably to stop a leak before the new roof was put on the house.
“It’s a rag,” I said. Lucy was such a baby.
“It looked like a head,” Lucy said. “I thought it was a head and then I looked over and saw you weren’t in bed and I was up here alone!” She sounded indignant. I glanced at the curtain surrounding my little cubicle. The bunched-up bedspread seemed to have collapsed. It was obvious I was no longer there.
My mother stood and turned out the light and the three of us looked at the rag.
“See?” Lucy said.
“It looks like a rag,” I said.
Mom sat down next to her again. “All you had to do was turn on your light and you would have seen it was just a rag,” she said. “It’s not fair to Julie to have to stay up here with you, Lucy. You’re eight years old now. You have to learn there’s nothing to be afraid of up here. You know we’re all right downstairs if you need anything. Now lie down.” She reached for the sheet and drew it over her youngest daughter.
“Can we leave the light on?”
“You’ll never fall asleep that way.”
“Yes, I will,” she said, her gaze darting to the rag again.
“All right.” My mother got to her feet with a sigh, smoothing the skirt of her housedress and offering me a conspiratorial look of exasperation that made me feel very mature and brave. She hit the wall switch for the single bare bulb that hung from the ceiling. “Good night, dear.”
“Night, Luce,” I said, following my mother down the stairs.
I awakened at five-thirty the following morning to the crowing of a rooster. I lay in bed, smiling to myself. Early-morning pink sunshine flowed through the window in my little curtained