Child of My Heart by Alice McDermott

Author:Alice McDermott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2003-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Flora was back out on the porch again the next morning, another bottle of red juice tucked tightly between her teeth, and no sign of Ana anywhere, although the door to the master bedroom was closed. Both lights were on in his studio, but I didn’t go in again. I wasn’t exactly certain that I’d find him there. I told the girls I’d had enough of the beach and thought we might instead take a nature walk through the woods and look for salamanders and wildflowers, and then maybe, after lunch, walk to the shore.

Daisy said that would be fine, and Flora told me, pulling the bottle from her mouth, that her mommy was coming home tomorrow. “Tomorrow,” she repeated. She said it with great firmness, frowning as she spoke, and I recognized the word as something she had been told emphatically by someone, sternly perhaps. Mommy will be home tomorrow. Even hearing the word secondhand from a toddler, I had a sense it was a lie.

“Tomorrow,” I repeated. “Tomorrow is tomorrow.” I touched her nose to erase that furrow between her brows. I wondered which of them had told her the lie, which of them had spoken to my Flora so harshly. Ana, I suspected. “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,” I said, and kissed her head.

“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day …” I unhooked the strap from around Flora’s waist and helped her out of the stroller, pulling her up by her one free hand. Then I held my other hand out for Daisy and we walked down the steps together. “And all our yesterdays,” I went on, Flora pulling at the bottle as she walked, her head thrown back and her elbow raised, like a trumpeter in some New Orleans funeral parade. Daisy kicking up the gravel with her pink shoes. “And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.” We passed the door of his studio. I could tell by the sharp smell of the paint that he was indeed inside and “working.” “Out, out, brief candle!” I called as we passed (and congratulated myself on my timing—he might have at least told Ana not to let me see Flora with a bottle). “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.”

“What’s ‘struts’?” Daisy asked, and I showed her. And we strutted together, all three of us across the grass and onto the path through the woods. We wandered a bit, picking up sticks and rocks and trying unsuccessfully to catch the darting shadows of salamanders. When we got to the caretaker’s gate, I tried giving them both a ride, but the hinges were too old and the grass beneath the gate too high to make it much fun. We stopped for a while in the grass beside the road to make clover chains, and as we did I tried telling them the story of Macbeth.

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