Secret Summers. Glynda Shaw
I called after her departing back. The pants and shirt I had last night!
“This house,” she called back, “seems sometimes to have a mind of its own.”
Feeling pretty peculiar but at least covered up, I joined my aunt in the kitchen a few minutes later to find her pouring hot tea and beating eggs for the crackling frying pan ready for the scramble. ”Scrambled eggs and toast okay for your first breakfast in the great state of Oregon?” she inquired.
I nodded. ”Fine!”
“Tea?”
“Well, maybe,” I said. I loved tea but only got it on very special occasions and never for breakfast. Claire pressed a finger to her lips as if to say this too would be our secret and poured me a cup about two thirds rich black tea and a third cream. She turned then and gave me a hug. ”It’s so good to have you here,” she exclaimed, “after all this time.”
Hugging back, I became aware of a whup-whup-whup-whup sound from somewhere outside, I thought. It was something that had been at the back of my mind for some time perhaps, but I’d already encountered sufficient strangeness that I didn’t feel just then like another mystery.
Claire splatted a gob of eggs and an English muffin onto my plate, thunking butter, catsup, and marmalade down on the table. ”I flunked culinary school,” she remarked. ”Plenty more where that came from.”
Claire’s manner was so different from Mom’s at the table, so offhand and free of rules, that I had trouble imagining the two of them at the same meal.
“Let’s have the grand tour,” Claire suggested after we’d stacked the dishes and re-stowed the condiments in the fridge.
We went first to the kitchen window that peered out in the same direction as my bedroom. I saw that the house had been built lengthwise along the cliff overlooking the ocean and that my bedroom really was the top of a tower built up from the beach below, so while entering through either of the house doors, one was at ground level. My window was indeed five or six stories above the rocks and sand. ”Not much interest in real estate on top of a cliff,” Claire said again. ”We grew up here, your mom and me. When it was decided I’d inherit the place, I was still working in Salem and had additions done to the side of the house where your room is, and then we expanded in here.” She led me through the dining room, which adjoined the kitchen, past the round mahogany-topped table, toward the south-facing entranceway of the house with its slate tiling and glass door out of which were some pretty amazing gardens. We went through a couple of workrooms, and Claire pointed out her own bedroom at the exact opposite end of a diagonal from mine. ”I enjoy the morning sun,” she told me.
Now we progressed into the living room, which took up the northeast portion of the house. There was a frayed gray davenport, a matching rocking chair, a pair of straight-backed maple chairs, a somewhat scarred coffee table, two end tables. On one wall a wood-bordered oval mirror and on the wall a large framed photo portrait.
I stopped still in the middle of the room, riveted to the spot. ”Who’s that?!” They talk about people walking over your grave. That wasn’t quite right. Perhaps someone just then was walking over my cradle.
“Your mother and I,” Claire said.
Two little girls in flowered headscarves, dresses down past their knees: one in pink, one in blue. One was smiling, waving; one was almost frowning, her arms crossed in front of her. I studied the pair for a few moments, trying to guess. One of them looked exactly like me!
“Which one?” I asked, not sure I wanted the answer.
“You can’t tell,” Claire said it more like a statement. I shook my head. She pointed. ”Can you believe it?”
I felt a bit disloyal to Mom that she was the one I less resembled, but happy too that I looked more like the smiling one. ”What’s your mother’s name?” Claire demanded suddenly.
For a moment my mouth must have hung open like she’d asked me what year it was or what that bright thing up in the sky might be.
“Claudia,” I said.
“Is that what you think?” she asked, not challenging just like checking facts.
I nodded dumbly. ”Claudia,” I said again.
“Cloud-ia,” she pronounced. (So that was why it had always sounded a little strange when she said Mom’s name.) ”The family jest,” she told me. ”Claire Belle, Cloudia Skye. The child always had a gloomy cast to her even when she was a baby.” Claire touched me lightly on the shoulder. ”I’m glad though that she has a child as bright and pleasant looking as you.”
“Well, thanks,” I said.
“May I try something?” she asked. ”Would you mind?”
Not knowing what she intended, I, of course, had no way of deciding, but I’d grown up so far expecting adults to have substantially benign intentions when they asked questions like that, so I stood mute.
Aunt Claire moved to an end table, pulled out one of the little drawers in it, and took out a folded scarf, one with flower patterning similar to that on the scarf the girl in the picture wore. Folding it into a triangle, she smoothed it over my head tying it beneath my chin in a bow. ”There,” she said with a note of triumph in her voice. ”Look.”
Pointing to the wall mirror, she turned me in that direction, then back to the picture. Even I was amazed by how much I looked like my aunt when she was about my age. ”We could almost have been twins,” she said. While I was struggling for some way to respond to this, I caught a flash of color racing past the living room window. There was a knock on the door and a call of “Claire!” in a girlish treble.
The Secret Box
“Come in, Monique! It’s our little lighthouse girl,” my aunt confided. I was caught, so to speak, like a deer in the headlights and just stood there where I was as a small whirlwind in pink pedal pushers and blond ponytails came gusting through the door.
“This is Monique,” Claire said unnecessarily. ”Monique, this is Ninian. You know, the one I’ve been telling you about?”
“Well, hello!” Monique actually hugged me in excitement. ”I’ve been hearing all about you. We’ll have such fun!” In the same breath she asked, “Do you sleep in the tower room?”
I nodded.
“I’ve got to tell you a secret,” she whispered. ”Can she show me her room?” Monique asked. Of course I thought at first she was talking to me. Claire hadn’t offered to show me her room, and why would anyone be asking my permission? but my aunt responded, “You children just run along,” she said. ”We’ll finish the look-around later. Maybe I can find some refreshments.”
Without time to process what I’d just heard, what I’d just experienced, I led the way to my room. Monique pulled the door closed behind us. I’d not visited with that many girls in my home before or that many kids at all, come to think of it, so had no strictures about bedrooms and doors open or closed, and she obviously desired that what passed between us wouldn’t go farther. Monique pointed at my closet door.
“That’s where,” she said.
“Where what?” I asked.
“Where the ladder is,” she illumined. When I’d noticed the ladder that morning, I’d found it kind of creepy that I had a hole right from my room into the attic but had decided I was just being silly.
“I know,” I said.
“I’ve stayed here before,” Monique told me then. ”Lots of times. My mom and your aunt are—good friends.” She made an unh-hunh noise in her throat as if there should be more meaning to that than the words alone expressed, but I didn’t catch her meaning.
“I’ve been told to leave things alone in other people’s houses,” she went on, “but this is your house too, isn’t