The Unforgettable Guinevere St. Clair Read online

  I sighed loudly.

  “Annabelle is your nurse,” my father said smoothly.

  “Lolly is my nurse. She’s my best friend, like totally best friends forever,” Vienna said.

  “But now Annabelle is your nurse.”

  “Where’s Lolly?”

  “She’s not here. You live back home in Crow now, remember? You had a brain injury and you live at this care center now.”

  Vienna looked up at him carefully. “Baloney.” Except she didn’t say “baloney.” She said a bad word, and Nana tried to cover Bitty’s and my ears, but ended up just knocking our heads together.

  “Look at these beautiful flowers, Vienna,” Nana said, changing the subject.

  “Gaysie!” Vienna said, clapping. “Where’s Gaysie?”

  “She’s not here,” Nana said.

  “Oh . . . Gaysie,” Vienna said slowly. Her hands fluttered, her speech slurred into panic, and she began to sob. “It was an accident. Bad. Bad. I didn’t mean . . . Where’s Myron?”

  “It’s okay, honey,” my father said, wiping her tears with his hand. “What are you remembering?”

  “This is not the right time to ask, Jed,” Nana said briskly. “You know it’s an upsetting subject.”

  Vienna’s outburst and Nana’s reaction snapped me to attention. A bad, bad accident? An upsetting subject? My favorite! I leaned forward and touched Vienna’s hands. “What do you mean?”

  She snatched her hands away and threw a cold French toast stick at my face. It bounced off my nose and fell on the floor. I picked it up without changing my expression.

  “Thanks,” I said, taking a bite.

  Vienna swiped her entire plate of food onto the floor.

  “I think it’s time to go,” my father said.

  Nana gathered us quickly and herded us to the door as Annabelle whispered, “Don’t take it personally, honey.”

  “Easy for her to say,” I said as Nana walked us quickly down the hallway.

  I knew better than to get upset by Vienna, but I could still feel my face burning.

  “Nana, what did Vienna mean?” I asked. “An accident? Who’s Myron? Why would Gaysie bring Vienna flowers? How does she even know Vienna?” I took another bite of the cold French toast before Nana could confiscate it.

  “Old friends,” Nana said darkly. “And your mother doesn’t know what she’s talking about half of the time.” She plucked the French toast stick out of my hand and deposited it in a garbage can.

  The sound of Nana’s small heels click-clicking echoed down the hospital corridor as I hurried to keep up with her.

  “Why’s it an upsetting subject?”

  “For heaven’s sake, Gwyn! She’s rambling about a past that is best left there.”

  “Oh no, Nana! Don’t you remember? We’re here to uncover her deep, dark secrets.” I meant it as a joke, but Nana’s face turned pale, sending my curiosity into overdrive. “Was there a lot of blood?”

  Nana stopped in her tracks. “No, there was not a lot of blood! Banish those”—she made a swirling motion over my head with her hands—“those thoughts right out of your head!”

  My nana obviously did not know me very well.

  Nana grabbed Bitty’s hand and marched us back down Main Street and onto the dirt road toward home. We had walked everywhere in New York, but never on dirt roads with tractors. The one passing us had a man on top who looked older than dirt.

  “Hello, Wilbur!” Nana called after him, back to her composed and well-postured self.

  The man turned to look at us, a shy smile on his face.

  “Howdy,” he called. He wore a real cowboy hat and raised his hand to wave. I realized he was the same man from Gaysie Cutter’s fields. “Real nice day we’re having.”

  “Kinda hot!” I yelled after him.

  “Guinevere, be polite,” Nana said. “You’ll find that the Midwest is a friendly place. We try to be kind to one another.”

  “Gaysie wasn’t nice to me.”

  I was expecting a scolding for back-talking, but Nana seemed to actually consider my statement and pursed her lips together.

  We followed behind the tractor until Wilbur passed Nana’s house and headed down Lanark Lane. I stared after it, knowing that I had vowed to never go back to that horrid woman’s house. Except now there was upsetting information, an accident, and somehow Gaysie and Vienna were involved—and Nana wouldn’t talk!

  “Gwyn!”

  I skipped inside, giving one last look down the dirt road that led to an orange house. Life in Crow was looking up.

  CHAPTER 5

  DESPITE MY CURIOSITY, WE DIDN’T see Micah or Jimmy for days, not until Bitty and I discovered the river. In New York we never swam, only played in water shooting out from hydrants on hot concrete during the summer months. But now we played in the stretch of river right behind Nana’s house, where the water was warm and slow and shallow. I tried not to be frightened of all the small fish and slugs and bugs floating up from the squishy mud bottom. One afternoon our father read Huckleberry Finn to us on the banks of the Crow.

  “The Crow River leads all the way to Tom and Huck’s Mississippi.” He looked down the graceful river that snaked endlessly between cornfields.

  My face must have lit up a little too much.

  “It’s five hundred miles,” he said, eyeing me. “That’s a long way.”

  This only led me to the conclusion that Bitty and I needed our own Tom and Huck.

  We knew two boys.

  I avoided face-to-face contact with Gaysie Cutter by writing a letter of invitation. When the boys wrote back the very next day, I just knew, from Micah’s typewritten note on turquoise paper, that we were destined to be the best of friends. And that is what happened. They were forgiven for their early offense and Micah and Jimmy accepted us into their friendship like we’d always been a part of it.

  As July slipped into August, our lives took on a sort of structure and routine, every morning starting at the breakfast table, where Nana warned of the river and those boys and that woman.

  “The water barely covers our ankles, Nana! And I watch Bitty every second.” Which was kind of true.

  “The river is fine,” my father said, looking up at me from the brain journal he was reading. “As long as you stay right behind the house, where it’s shallow. You only get into trouble farther up, when it gets deep and the current picks up.” I nodded encouragingly at Nana, who sputtered like a tea kettle at my father’s rare contradiction.

  “Today, I’m going to bring Willowdale with us,” I said.

  “To see your mother?” Nana asked.

  “No! To pick up Micah and Jimmy.”

  “Vienna hates cows,” Bitty added.

  Just days earlier, my father had surprised me with my very own registered cow.

  Most cows are mutts, named something like Sadie, Bessy, or Freckles, but my cow came with an ancestral pedigree, recorded physical assets, and fat statistics. Instantly smitten with my golden-haired pet and her large chocolate-drippy eyes, I named her Willowdale Princess Deon Dawn. Never in my life had I given anything the name of “Princess,” but that’s what my cow was.

  “First you won’t go near the Cutter house and now you spend all your time there.” I could hear the disapproval in Nana’s voice, especially as she had introduced me to several perfectly nice but perfectly boring girls the week before. When I mentioned Micah and Jimmy to them, I got the sense that nobody, and I mean nobody, was calling up Gaysie Cutter to arrange a playdate.

  “I don’t talk to Gaysie,” I said.

  “How are you going to get Willowdale there?”

  “I’m going to ride her.” I smiled, pleased with myself.

  “Well, I have heard it all now!” Nana dropped her cleaning rag right onto the floor. “Jed, do you hear this? Cows are not horses.”

  My father raised an eyebrow.

  “It’s really not funny, Jed. You’re encouraging her.”

  “Guinevere, I’m afraid
, is the type of child who will have to learn many hard lessons from personal experience. Who does that remind you of?”

  Nana shook her head and began to intently scrub the floor.

  “Who?” I said.

  “Your mother had a penchant for mischief,” Nana said. “Thankfully, she grew out of it and became a lady.”

  I went outside, mulling over this new information, trying to picture Vienna running wild around Crow. Sniffing the air, I also wondered when manure would start to smell appealing.

  Despite Nana’s strong words against it, Bitty and I awkwardly rode on golden-haired Willowdale Princess down Lanark Lane, to Micah’s house. I would never admit it in a thousand years, but Nana’s disapproval was well-founded. It was terrifying and terribly slow riding atop a large moving animal. Willowdale Princess Deon Dawn had a very large mouth and giant teeth that were always dripping with saliva as she meandered here and there, chewed on grass for long stretches, and stared at nothing for even longer stretches. Just when I’d get comfortable, she’d lurch forward, nearly making me topple right off.

  I finally ended up pulling her by the rope tied around her neck while enduring a thoroughly slow and scenic tour down Lanark Lane. By the time we arrived at Micah’s, I was drenched with sweat, and fuming.

  I tied Willowdale’s rope to an orange porch slat.

  “Be good,” I instructed before Bitty and I ran through the plowed corn path, hearing the honking of the goose, and arriving just in time to see Jimmy swing across the river on a rope swing and drop himself in.

  “Hey!” Micah called to us. He stood on a rock, wearing green swim trunks and a glorious homemade purple cape.

  “What took so long?” Jimmy yelled, coming up from the water and flicking his black hair out of his eyes.

  “I brought a surprise!” I yelled.

  Though I wasn’t an expert swimmer, I stripped down to my bathing suit and jumped in. It was a deliciously cold and wonderful feeling, unlike anything I’d ever experienced in New York. The current was slow, and I shut my eyes, letting myself get carried down a moment, the sweat and grime washing off my body. I resurfaced and walked against the current, thigh deep, back to Bitty, who tentatively put her feet in the water as it slowly swirled around her legs like a curl of hair.

  While Bitty played, I climbed onto a large, warm rock where Micah sat.

  “Where’s the surprise?” Micah asked.

  “At your house—but let’s swim first.”

  Micah looked down at the water.

  “Come on, scaredy cat,” Jimmy said, wading toward us.

  “Jimmy, stop.” Micah frowned, pulling his bony knees to his chest.

  “Ah, come on,” Jimmy said, climbing up next to us in sopping-wet cutoff blue jeans, and lying down on the warm rock. “It’s like two feet deep.”

  “Maybe if I had an inner tube to float on,” Micah said doubtfully.

  I lay on my stomach, watching the dark water swirl in currents.

  The water was shrouded by trees and forest, but every so often scattered light escaped through, shooting out yellow and white shades all over the leaves, rocks, and speckled water.

  “If we had an inner tube we could sail down the river to the Mississippi,” I said.

  “We’re not allowed,” Micah said. “It gets real deep. Ma’s predicting a real wet spring and it’s gonna rise even higher.”

  “She says that every year,” Jimmy said.

  “And if it floods, all the corn will die,” Micah said. “Once the river flooded the whole town, and everyone had to evacuate and all the corn was drowned—that’s a true story.” He shivered and exchanged a look with Jimmy.

  “What?” I asked.

  Jimmy shrugged. “He don’t like the word ‘drowned.’ ”

  “You mean he doesn’t?”

  “Whatever. There was a bad sledding accident a long time ago right on this river. Gaysie crashed right through the ice.”

  I perked up.

  “That’s why Gaysie’s all messed up,” Jimmy continued, tracing an imaginary scar down his face. “And no one likes her, and it’s why Micah is scared to have fun.”

  “Am not!”

  “But why doesn’t Micah like the word ‘drowned’?” Bitty asked fearfully.

  “ ‘Cause of Myron,” Jimmy said.

  “Myron,” I whispered. Vienna had said his name. “Who’s Myron?”

  Jimmy and Micah glanced at each other.

  “Tell me!”

  “He’s the one who didn’t make it,” Micah said sorrowfully.

  The hair on my arms stood straight up as I was brought back to my near-burial, with Gaysie hovering over me.

  I had a million questions, but seeing the terrified look on Bitty’s face, I swallowed them and lightened my voice. “Jimmy is right, Micah. Look how shallow the water is here. No one’s going to drown.”

  I knelt down to touch the water. I wanted to see the soul of a boy named Myron, but instead I saw my reflection wobbling all over the place, brown hair that never lay flat and my father’s deep, dark, thinking eyes that blended right into the river rocks. Bitty’s hair was curly and wild too, but blond like Vienna’s. It gave her a cute, impish style, whereas mine looked only like I forgot to brush.

  “Well, I’d still ride to the Mississippi,” Jimmy said, throwing a rock at my reflection, scattering it farther in the water. “I’m not afraid. And when I get to wherever I’m going, I’m gonna be a barber and have a tattoo and never come back.”

  “I’ve never known anyone who wanted to be a barber,” I said.

  “He’s going to call his shop Lucky’s and give me free haircuts,” Micah said, rubbing his head.

  “You’ll come back. You’d miss your family.”

  “Nope,” Jimmy interrupted me. “No, I would not.”

  I could see why he wouldn’t miss Gaysie, though I didn’t know if he had any other family, considering he seemed to always be at Micah’s house. “Well, you’d miss Micah, then.”

  Jimmy considered this. I wanted him to say he’d miss Bitty and me, but he didn’t.

  “My father came back to Crow,” I said, swatting at a mosquito.

  “He even likes the smell of cow poop,” Bitty added.

  We were interrupted by a black blur flashing through the trees on the other side of the river.

  I leaped up, and the blur disappeared with a thrashing noise through the trees.

  “What was that?”

  “Maybe a giraffe?” Bitty asked.

  “Ah, it’s just the Creepers,” Jimmy said, standing. “Let’s go get a Popsicle.” He made his way down the bank and began to walk across the river.

  “Who are the Creepers?”

  “Why do you ask so many questions?”

  “She’s practicing to be a lawyer,” Bitty answered for me. I scrutinized the woods. All was quiet again, like nothing had been there at all. I shivered. Sometimes quiet Iowa was way scarier than crazy, loud New York ever was.

  “I wish it had been a giraffe,” Bitty said.

  “Race ya!” Jimmy yelled, taking off ahead of me.

  “Cheater!”

  The creek was only a couple hundred feet from Gaysie’s house, and I was fast, but Jimmy gave me fierce competition, making it out of the cornfield just ahead of me. I was gaining when he stopped so abruptly we both crashed to the ground.

  Before I could yell at Jimmy, I froze in horror.

  Gaysie’s yard was a disaster. The goose was flapping its wings, honking in distress. Flowers of every color were strewn about, stems broken off, begonias trampled. And there was Willowdale, satisfied with the meal she had inhaled, right on top of the baby pool, now squashed flat. Her golden tail swished back and forth as she stared at me. Around her neck was the rope and a broken orange slat pulled from Gaysie’s wraparound porch.

  I heard the sound of Gaysie’s raised voice before seeing her emerge from the side of the house, stomping, hands flailing wildly about her. I wanted to sink into the earth and nev
er come out again. Following behind Gaysie was a very confused-looking Wilbur.

  “There!” Gaysie boomed, her eyes blazing hot with anger as she pointed at the mess. “There!”

  I trembled, a squeak coming out of my throat. Micah looked at me, distressed.

  “Was that your surprise?” Jimmy asked.

  Gaysie continued to rail.

  “Well, now, Gaysie,” we could barely hear Wilbur stammer. “I don’t know what . . .”

  “You don’t know—of course you don’t, because you’re an imbecile!”

  Honk!

  “Shut up!” Gaysie roared at the goose. It waddled away toward the little white house next door and honked, but from a safer distance.

  “I just . . . ,” Wilbur began, taking off his cowboy hat to fan himself.

  “What kind of man brings a brainless blockheaded animal of the bovine variety into this backyard knowing,” Gaysie said, her voice rising as she gestured in big, wide circles, “the bestial behavior cattle are prone to. It’s ruined! Look around you—it’s ruined. It. Is. All. Ruined. And it’s not just my work—it’s all of your work too!”

  “She was going to enter the Crow flower bazaar,” Micah said. “And win first place over Dottie and Lavinia.”

  “They don’t like Gaysie,” Jimmy added. “Say she’s crazy and prone to flying off the handle. Can’t imagine why.”

  “I’m so dead,” I whispered, beginning to chew my nails.

  “Yep,” Jimmy said cheerfully. Gosh, sometimes I just wanted to hit him.

  Gaysie wiped her hand across her nose.

  “The mess you have made is just beyond me. The stupidity of your actions! Days—months—years of work! I honestly cannot believe a grown man with even half a brain would fail to foresee the consequences of his actions. I’m not speaking to you ever again. Go away and sit in your little house out of my sight,” Gaysie cried, gesturing to the small cottage that sat away from the main house, where I had recently learned Wilbur lived. Though why he’d want to live near such an awful woman was beyond me. She turned and cried out again, “My sunflowers!”

  Watching Wilbur not saying anything, not even trying to defend himself, was too hard to bear. I took a small step forward, gripping the back of my small neck with my hands. The curtain moved from inside the house next door. The goose honked. Gaysie’s voice grew louder and louder.