"Afraid?" I nearly laughed. "Your father?

Afraid of what?"

"Of losing another one of us." Cary marched on, his lips tight, his eyes so focused on the street ahead he barely glanced at me the remainder of the way to school. Despite what Cary said, I think he was ashamed at how his father sometimes behaved.

Since it was Friday, at the end of the school day, Betty, Lorraine, and Janet reminded me about their beach party Saturday night. I said I would try to go, but I reminded them I couldn't go without permission.

"Then you won't be there," Betty predicted.

"You'll miss a great time."

"I can't help it. I have to ask my uncle and aunt first. My mother left them in charge of me."

"Just do what Janet told you to do: tell them you're going over to her house to study," Lorraine instructed. "A little white lie is no big deal. We all do it."

"It sounds like more than a little white lie. If my uncle found out I lied --."

"He won't find out," Betty assured me. "We don't tell on each other."

"Of course, if you tell Grandpa, he'll turn you in," Janet said.

"Stop calling him Grandpa," I snapped. "He's not anything like an old man."

"Oh? Why do you say that? Do you know something we don't?" she asked quickly. The girls all smiled, waiting with expectation for my reply.

"No," I said.

"Did you get him to smoke the joint?"

"He didn't see it and tell your uncle, did he?"

Lorraine asked quickly.

"If my uncle even thought I had something like that--"

"He'd turn you over to the police," she suggested.

"He'd turn his own mother over to the police,"

Betty added. "Do you still have it or did you smoke it yourself last night?" Betty asked.

"No, I didn't smoke it." I didn't want to tell them I had simply thrown it out.

"You can smoke it at the beach party," Janet said. "Let's go, girls," Betty said.

"Be at Janet's house at eight. You won't be sorry. Adam Jackson will be at the beach party,"

Lorraine sang back at me as they all walked off.

I watched them go down the hallway and then I hurried out to meet Cary and walk home. I wanted to tell him about the party and ask his opinion, but I was afraid even to mention it. I knew how much he didn't like these girls, but I wanted to go. I had never been to a beach party and I had to admit, Adam Jackson's eyes had been in my dreams last night.

I decided to wait until after dinner when I was helping Aunt Sara with the dishes. She had done all the windows herself, even the upstairs ones. "I would have helped you," I told her.

"I know, dear, but don't fret about it. Work gets me through the day. Jacob always says idle hands make for mischief."

I shook my head. What sort of mischief could she ever commit? And why did she permit her husband to treat her as if she were another one of his children and not his wife, his equal in this house? She did everything he asked her to do and as far as I could see, she never uttered a single complaint. He should worship the ground she trod upon and he should have been the one to have done the hard manual labor. My daddy would have done it for my mother, I thought.

The more I learned about this family, the more it was a mystery to me.

"Aunt Sara; I was invited to a party Saturday night."

"Oh? A party? Already? What sort of party?

Birthday? School party?"

"No. Some of the girls in my class are having a hot dog roast on the beach," I said. "It starts about eight o'clock."

"What girls?"

I gave her the names. She thought a moment.

"Those are girls from good families, but you'll have to ask your uncle," she said.

"Why can't you give me permission?"

"You'll have to ask your uncle for something like that," she replied. I could see that the very idea of her solely giving me permission terrified her. She busied herself with the dishware. If I wanted to go to the beach party, I would have to talk to Uncle Jacob about it. There was no avoiding it.

He was in the living room reading his paper after dinner as usual. I approached him with my request. "Excuse me, Uncle Jacob," I said from the doorway.

He slowly lowered the paper, his eyebrows tilting and the skin folding along his forehead. I couldn't recall speaking to Daddy without seeing a smile in his eyes or on his lips.

"Yes?"

"Some of the girls in my class at school are having a party on the beach tomorrow night and they have invited me. Aunt Sara said I should ask your permission. I would like to go. It's the fastest way to get to know people," I offered as a practical reason.

He nodded.

"It don't surprise me you'd like to go to a party where they'll be no adults supervising."

"What do you mean?"

He leaned forward with a wry smile. "Don't you think I know what goes on at those beach parties: how they drink and smoke dope and debauch themselves?"

"De. . . what?"

"Perversions," he declared, that irritating forefinger raised like a flag of righteousness again.

"Young girls parade around with their revealing clothing and then roll around on blankets with young men to lose their innocence. It's pagan. While you are under my roof, you will live decent, look decent, and act decent, even if it flies in the face of your instincts." He snapped his paper like a whip. "Now, I don't want to hear another word on it."

"What instincts?" I asked. He ignored me. "I am decent. I've never done anything to shame my parents."

He peered over the paper at me.

"It would take something to shame them, I suppose, but I know what's in the blood, what's raging. If you give it free rein, it will take you straight to hell and damnation."

"I don't understand. What's raging in my blood?"

"No more talk!" he screamed. I flinched and stepped back as if slapped. My heart began to pound.

A white line had etched itself about his tightened lips as the rest of him flamed with bright red fury. I had never seen rage inflamed by so small a spark. All I had asked was to go to a party.

I turned away and marched up the stairs. The girls were right, I fumed. I should have just lied and said I was going to Janet's to study. Lying to such a man wasn't wrong. He didn't deserve honesty.

Cary was at the foot of the attic stairway, waiting for me to reach the landing.

"What was all the yelling about?"

I told him and he snorted.

"You should have asked me. I would have spared you his reaction to such a request."

"Why is he so mean?"

"I told you. He's not mean, he's just . . afraid."

"I don't understand. Why should he be so afraid?"

Cary stared at me a moment and then blurted, "Because he believes it was his fault and that he was being punished." He turned away to go up his ladder.

"What was his fault?" I drew closer as he moved up the rungs. "Laura's death? I don't understand. How could that have been his fault? Was it because he gave her permission to go sailing that day?"

"No," Cary said, not turning, still climbing.

"Then I don't understand. Explain it!" I demanded. My tone of voice turned him around. He gazed down at me with a mixture of anger and pain in his face.

"My father doesn't believe in accidents. He believes we are punished on earth for the evil we do on earth, and we are rewarded here for the good we do as well. It's what he was brought up to believe and it's what he has taught us."

"Do you believe that, too?"

"Yes," he said, but not convincingly.

"My daddy was a good man, a kind man. Why was he killed in an accident?"

"You don't know what his sins were," he said and turned away to continue up the stairs.

"He had no sins, nothing so great that he should have died for it! Did you hear me, Cary Logan?" I rushed to the ladder and seized it, shaking it. "Cary!"

He paused at the top and gazed down at me before pulling up his ladder.

"None of us knows the darkness that lingers in another's heart." He sounded just like his father.

"That's stupid. That's another stupid, religious idea," I retorted, but he ignored me and continued to lift the ladder. I seized the bottom rung and held it down. He looked down, surprised at my surge of strength.

"Let go."

"I'll let go, but don't think I don't know what you're doing up there every night," I said. His face turned so red I could see the crimson in his cheeks even in the dim hallway light. "You're running away from tragedy, only you can't run away from something that's part of you."

He tugged with all his strength, nearly lifting me from the floor with the ladder. I had to let go and the ladder went up. He slammed the trapdoor shut.

"Good riddance!" I screamed.

May, locked in her world of silence, emerged from her room with a smile on her face. In my mind, she was the luckiest one in this damnable home.

She signed to me, asking if I would let her come into my room. I told her yes. She followed me in and watched me angrily poke the needle and thread into the picture her sister Laura had drawn just before she died. As I worked I glared up at the ceiling and then down at the floor, below which my coldhearted uncle sat reading his paper. After a while the mechanical work was calming and meditating. I began to understand why Laura might have been entranced with doing so much of it. Everyone in this house was searching for a doorway.

May remained with me until her bedtime, practicing communicative skills, asking me questions about myself, my family, and our lives back in West Virginia. She was full of curiosity and sweetness, somehow unscathed by the turmoil that raged in every family member's heart.

Perhaps her world wasn't so silent after all.

Perhaps she heard different music, different sounds, all of it from her free and innocent imagination. When her eyelids began drifting downward, I told her she should go to bed. I was tired myself. I felt as if I had been spun around in an emotional washing machine, then left in a dryer until my last tear evaporated.

Cary lingered in his attic hideaway almost all night. I was woken just before morning to the sound of his footsteps on the ladder. He paused at my doorway for a moment before going to his own room.

He was up with the sunlight a little over an hour later and had gone out with Uncle Jacob by the time I went down for breakfast. Aunt Sara said they were going to be out lobstering all day. I walked to town with May and we spent most of the afternoon looking at the quaint shops on Commercial Street, then we watched the fishermen down at the wharf. It wasn't quite tourist season yet, but the warm spring weather still brought a crowd up from Boston and the outlying areas. There was a lot of traffic.

Aunt Sara had given us some spending money so we could buy hamburgers for lunch. She didn't mind my taking May along with me. She saw how much May wanted to be with me, and I was growing more confident with sign language.

Aunt Sara remarked at how quickly and how well I had been learning it. "Laura was the best at it,"

she told me. "Even better than Cary."

"What about Uncle Jacob?" I asked her.

"Doesn't he know it?"

"A little. He's always too busy to practice," she said, but I thought it was a weak excuse. If my daddy had to learn sign language to communicate with me, nothing would be more important, I thought.

About midday, I counted the change I had left and went to a pay phone. It wasn't enough for a call to Sewell, but I took a chance and made it collect to Alice. Luckily, she was home and accepted the charges.

"I'm sorry," I told her. "I don't have enough money."

"That's okay. Where are you?"

"I'm in Provincetown, on Cape Cod, living with my uncle and my aunt."

"Living with them? Why?"

"Mommy's gone to New York to get an opportunity as a model or an actress," I said. "If she doesn't get a job there, she's going on to Chicago or Los Angeles, so I had to stay here and enroll in the school."