… Mrs., Ms.? Wilkes was there. So Abigail was stuck. She wondered whether Cynthia would hear if she dropped the mailbox lid, and even if she didn’t, would Abigail’s footsteps on old wooden porch slats give her away? She knew she should not be there and was now a little frightened and unsure about what to do next. She also felt exhilarated and did not want to waste a golden opportunity to observe this woman up close, only ever having been able to look at her from the back window of her parents’ car.
The woman had grown to be an almost mythic legend in young Abigail’s mind, a person who was hardly mentioned and never discussed without an awkward, careful tone creeping into all voices. Cynthia Wilkes was a secret that Abigail had uncovered one day when she stumbled across the old photos her father kept out of sight of her mother in faded cloth-covered albums stored on the bottom shelves of his office bookcase. She was a voice Abigail would listen to from time to time, her ear buds jammed in tightly, the volume almost inaudibly low and the thrill of doing something dangerous and covert running through her body, even though she was unsure of why it should be so.
Abigail waited another minute, watching Cynthia stare out the window, before her arm began to protest. Then, murmuring something that might have been “Carpe diem,” which she’d heard in a movie once and been suitably impressed, she dropped the lid with a thud and began knocking sharply on the door.
Cynthia jumped, sloshing coffee onto the table, first startled, then annoyed at being disturbed so early in the day, as well as by a latent Catholic guilt that equated staying home to some kind of sin. Through the glass she saw a little girl in a bright red rain slicker and matching hat and noted that it wasn’t raining. But she was still too tired and dazed by all the not thinking she’d been doing to look much closer. She opened the door with the assumption that today she’d be trading a breakfast of donuts for that of Girl Guide mint chocolate wafers.
So it came as quite a shock to find that she was staring at her daughter. To be more precise, she was looking at the wide blue eyes, pointed chin, and dark Irish curls of her daughter. But it was not Julia. She was already at school and was not a ten-year old Girl Guide but an angst-ridden seventeen-year-old. As the little girl shyly smiled Julia’s smile, a sight Cynthia didn’t see nearly often enough and very much missed, the cogs in her brain creaked into action and she recognized this child as her daughter’s sister, her ex-husband’s child. Abigail Wilkes. The little bundle whose unexpected arrival had led to the hasty dissolution of what had, up to that point been, for both parties, a pretty satisfying marriage.
Cynthia suddenly felt very much older than forty-five, and her arthritic hand ached as she reached to slam the door shut before another synapse fired and she remembered herself to be the kind of woman who didn’t slam the door in faces of smiling young girls in red rain slickers.
Abigail’s eyes grew wide and she remained silent as Cynthia slowly swayed in the doorway, her mouth hanging open and her hand still on the door. Cynthia craned her neck left and right, looking for traces of Tom and his new wife — not so new now, Cynthia supposed, but it was how she had thought of Jennifer ever since Tom had decided to make their little affair legit and married her. After that it seemed inappropriate to call her children’s stepmother “That Whore.” If ever they decided to make an impromptu visit, they would of course choose to do so when Cynthia was wearing a bathrobe and playing hooky from the picket line, but it seemed the little girl was alone.
Cynthia heard the girl swallow nervously before abruptly sticking out her hand and almost shouting: “I am Abigail Wilkes. How do you do? You have a lovely home. May I come in?”
Smiling in spite of herself at the voluminous introduction, Cynthia couldn’t think of anything else to do but and accept the tiny hand, shaking it gently up and down.
“And I am Cynthia Wilkes. I know who you are….” Then, making the most logical assumption at the reason for this unlikely morning guest, she added, “Are you here to see Julia or Ben? They’ve gone to school.”
Abigail shook her head. She wasn’t here to see her siblings. She was standing on her father’s first wife’s front porch because she wanted to be a writer. Along with taking the prize for penmanship, she was the best storyteller in her class, and she thought she’d be a really great writer too. Her brothers and sister were good at it. People told them so all the time — even Ben, who didn’t care about anything but sports. “They’re naturals, it’s in the genes,” she’d heard her father say, though never when her mother was around.
But was not in Abigail’s genes. She didn’t think she could have inherited a lick of talent for it from either of her parents, one a boring lawyer the other an even more boring administrative assistant. No, what came naturally to Matthew, Julia, and Ben came from Cynthia, and Abigail hadn’t gotten any of it. And it wasn’t fair, because writing was what Abigail wanted to do more than anything else in the whole wide world. Way more than she wanted to be in those stupid dance classes her mother was always signing her up for.
So she had decided that if she hadn’t been born with the writer’s touch, she’d earn it — in fact, she’d learn it. And she couldn’t think of anybody better to teach her than Cynthia, who told stories all the time on the radio, whose name Abigail had seen in real magazines, who had even written a book, a copy of which sat amongst the collection of worn and highly abused books that lined the walls of Matthew’s recently vacated bedroom. Abigail was hanging all her ten-year-old hopes that Cynthia would be able to offer her the tools she’d need to spin some stories of her own. Ones that were good enough to make people want to read them. And she told her so.
Cynthia took this all in with arms crossed, leaning against the frame for support. She examined the child carefully, looking for hints of mockery or mental health concerns around the edges of the request, but couldn’t find any. The girl looked so sincere, and so much like Julia, like Tom, that she couldn’t stop staring. There had been a short time, still vivid in Cynthia’s mind, when she had hated this little person more than anybody on earth, with the exception of the girl’s mother. Hated her very existence and what it meant for her and for her little girl and her sons, all so young at the time. It seemed ridiculous now, shameful that she could have ever felt this way about a child. Abigail was only a child, a sweet little thing too, it seemed, so guileless, earnest, and hopeful. Just a little girl. Then Cynthia’s parenting instincts suddenly kicked in, and she looked up and down the street again for a sign of either of Abigail’s talentless parents.
“How did you get here?”
“I took a cab.”
“Your parents put you in a cab … alone? To my house?”
Cynthia was incredulous until she thought a little bit about Tom, something she almost never did any more, and suddenly didn’t completely rule it out. She shook her head, trying to coax her brain into keeping up with the conversation she was, still unbelievably, having. It felt like trying to get directions in a foreign language.
“Oh, no. They think I am at school. My mom wouldn’t ever let me come here on account of the way you think you are soooo much better than everybody else,” Abigail said, stretching out the syllables in imitation before she paused at the sight of Cynthia’s raised eyebrows and blushed deeply. “Oh. No offence,” she said, charging ahead. “I googled your address and came by myself.”
Cynthia found that she was smiling through the insult, at this odd little kid and the outrageous request. Coming back to herself, she also remembered how young the girl was.
“So no grown-ups know where you are right now?”
“You do,” Abby countered. She was Tom’s daughter all right.
“Yes. Fair enough. I’ll rephrase … you are telling me you snuck out of school to come here, even though you think your mother will disapprove?”
“For sure she will.
“Don’t you think that’s a little dangerous? That you might get into some trouble doing things like that?”
“I know that people need to suffer for their art.”
“I’ve heard that.”
“Writing