in a white cup. Except for the places where the new pimples were, that is. They stood out a bright red, like burn-marks.
Then she saw it was me. The terror went away, but no smile come in its place. It was like a shutter dropped over her face . . . or like she was inside a castle and had just pulled up the drawbridge. Yes, like that. Do you see what I'm tryin to say?
'Mamma!' she says. 'What are you doin here?'
I thought of sayin, 'I've come to take you home on the ferry and get some answers out of you, my little sweetheart,' but somethin told me it would have been wrong in that room - that empty room where I could smell the thing that was wrong with her just as clear as I could smell the chalk and the red sawdust. I could smell it, and I meant to find out what it was. From the look of her, I'd waited far too long already. I didn't think it was dope anymore, but whatever it was, it was hungry. It was eatin her alive.
I told her I'd decided to toss my afternoon's work out the door and come over and window-shop a little, but I couldn't find anything I liked. 'So I thought maybe you and I could ride back on the ferry together.' I said. 'Do you mind, Selena?'
She finally smiled. I would have paid a thousand dollars for that smile, I can tell you. . . a smile that was just for me. 'Oh no, Mommy,' she said. 'It would be nice, having company.
So we walked back down the hill to the ferrylandin together, and when I asked her about some of her classes, she told me more than she had in weeks. After that first look she gave me - like a cornered rabbit lookin at a tomcat - she seemed more like her old self than she had in months, and I began to hope.
Well, Nancy here may not know how empty that four-forty-five to Little Tall and the Outer Islands is, but I guess you n Frank do, Andy. Most of the workin folk who live off the mainland go home on the five-thirty, and what comes on the four-forty-five is mostly parcel post, UFS, shop-goods, and groceries bound for the market. So even though it was a lovely autumn afternoon, nowhere near as cold and damp as I'd thought it was gonna be, we had the aft deck mostly to ourselves.
We stood there awhile, watchin the wake spread back toward the mainland. The sun was on the wester by then, beatin a track across the water, and the wake broke it up and made it look like pieces of gold. When I was a little girl, my Dad used to tell me it was gold, and that sometimes the mermaids came up and got it. He said they used those broken pieces of late-afternoon sunlight as shingles on their magic castles under the sea. When I saw that kind of broken golden track on the water, I always watched it for mermaids, and until I was almost Selena's age I never doubted there were such things, because my Dad had told me there were.
The water that day was the deep shade of blue you only seem to see on calm days in October, and the sound of the diesels was soothin. Selena untied the kerchief she was wearin over her. head and raised her arms and laughed. 'Isn't it beautiful, Mom?' she asked me.
'Yes,' I said, 'it is. And you used to be beautiful, too, Selena. Why ain't you anymore?'
She looked at me, and it was like she had two faces on. The top one was puzzled and still kinda laughin. . . but underneath there was a careful, distrustin sort of look. What I saw in that underneath face was everythin Joe had told her that spring and summer, before she had begun to pull away from him, too. I don't have no friends, is what that underneath face said to me. Certainly not you, nor him, either. And the longer we looked at each other, the more that face came to the top.
She stopped laughin and turned away from me to look out over the water. That made me feel bad, Andy, but I couldn't let it stop me any more than I could let Vera get away with her bitchery later on, no matter how sad it