What They Wanted by Donna Morrissey Page A

thought: that my carelessly flung words had hurt Mother, a hurt I couldn’t fathom, given how foolish and of little meaning I felt the words to be. For sure I had yelled worse than those before, cussed even, and gotten scarcely a backhanded glance.
    I pulled the blankets over me, but then hearing Gran’s voice rising in the kitchen, I snuck off the bed and eased open the door, listening.
    “Start ignoring her, maid,” Gran was saying, “long as you keeps it in your head, she’ll keep doing it, she’ll keep carrying it out.”
    “Carrying it out—carrying what out?” asked Mother, but then kept on talking, scarcely able to keep her voice down as she rattled on about the ridiculousness of my words, the silly things I was getting on with, my foolishness. “For goodness sakes, you seen her, Gran, how you suppose to ignore someone traipsing like a ghost through the house?”
    Gran’s voice fell, and straining to hear, I leaned harder against the door, creaking it. Both voices stopped for a second, and then carried on in normal tones about Father working too hard in the woods. I threw myself back across the bed, balling up the pillow and winging it at the wall. Even Gran was blaming me for Mother’s bad nerves. To show them I didn’t care, I bounced off the bed, opened the door with a quick soundless movement, and glided down the hallway more quietly than a swan crossing a summer’s pond. Snatching up the catalogue that I’d thrown on the sofa and looking to neither of them, I glided back to my room, closing the door in the same quick, soundless motion.
    For the rest of that week and the following I glided through the house. I glided about the wharf, too, as silent in my rubber boots as I was in stocking feet, taking no apparent notice of anyone, most especially Mother and Gran. Neither did they seem to notice me, except in the usual way of a parent—how’s school, got your homework done, are you hungry. Always I shook or nodded my head, as silent with words as I was with my footstep, spending most of the days in my room, needing nothing from nobody. I did notice, however, that Mother was no longer gasping out loud those times I appeared unexpectedly before her. Not that she wasn’t startled, for I saw in the way she pursed her mouth or whipped her hand to her heart that she was. But nothing was ever said, and after a short while it all faded into nothing, Mother’s frights, my emanations. The rowing might’ve stopped too, if not for a comment I overheard Mother making to Gran a few months later, on Christmas morning.
    I had ripped the wrapping paper off a pair of shiny black shoes that had rhinestones across the toes and soles that clicked loudly against the vinyl floors as I excitedly pulled them on and tap-danced down the hall.
    “Could’ve saved myself a few grey hairs,” Mother said to Gran, and vexed by the quiet laugh they shared, I threw Mother a dark look and tapped extra loud coming back up the hall.
    Another series of rows started, this time over my noisy step. But now Mother kept a smile on her face and paid me no more attention than she did Chris and Kyle roughhousing about the sofa. Within a short time I gave up—or forgot—my tap-dancing routine, and found other things to bicker over with Mother.
    That was one thing that never changed, me and Mother bickering—much to the anguish of everyone else, most especially Father. Times when I’d fling out through the door and hunch beside him on the wharf, taking up his sullen stare out the bay, and he’d ply me with soft talk, trying to get at the reason for my apparent anger with Mother. But I could never say, for I never knew, beyond the trivialities of the moment. Going beyond that took me back into the graveyard, the house of haunts, or some look in Mother’s eye—conscious moments that capped some deeper thing I was never able to properly see or give expression to. Yet, for all its elusiveness, it bubbled along just below the surface in my