Barrons, Vermont
October 1950
It was raining, a fine, cold mist descending over the hockey pitch, but still the girls played. At seven o’clock in the morning the sun was barely rising and the light was watery and gray, but the girls put on their thick uniforms and laced up their leather sneakers, then lined up beneath the eave outside the locker room with sticks in hand, waiting for the signal.
This was Roberta’s favorite time. The quiet, the chill of the leftover night air, the cold seeping into her legs and her feet, waking her up. The trees around the edges of the pitch were black against the sky, and from one of them three ravens took flight, rising stark and lonely against the clouds. Their calls echoed faintly back to the girls as they stood, their breaths puffing, one girl coughing into her hand the only answering sound.
Ginny Smith and Brenda Averton were the team captains, and they conferred quietly just outside the eave, the rain gathering in drops in Ginny’s frizzy hair. Roberta was good enough to be team captain—she was a better field hockey player than either Ginny or Brenda—but she had been at Idlewild for only a few months, and neither Ginny nor Brenda was budging. Roberta didn’t mind—all she wanted, really, was to play.
“Team Seven,” Ginny said, turning to the girls, waving an arm, and trotting to one end of the hockey pitch.
“Team Nine,” Brenda echoed, leading off the other half of the girls.
There weren’t nine field hockey teams at Idlewild; the numbers came from the archaic team schedule, written in a pencil schematic and pinned to the wall of the locker room by some long-ago team captain, the graphite fading after years of display. Roberta was Team Nine, and she trotted after the other girls, stick in hand, as Brenda, her thick legs making an audible chafing sound beneath her hockey skirt, shouted strategy at them.
Then, finally, she got to run.
These were the elite field hockey players at Idlewild—the girls who chose the game as their class elective, the one part of the curriculum that was not mandatory. Twenty-two girls, no alternates, each with a stick except for the goalies. Though they’d seemed half-asleep a minute ago, as soon as the game began, they ran with teenage vigor, following the play of the ball back and forth over the field, circling, hemming, cutting one another off. There was no real reward for the winning team, no league that Idlewild could play in, no other schools to beat. Idlewild was an island on its own, just as it was in everything else, so the girls only played one another. Yet they still did it with all the energy of a team aiming for a championship.
This was where Roberta’s mind stopped, where it all went away and she was just inside her body, every part of her moving in sync. There were no chattering girls on the hockey pitch, no cliques or alliances, no gossip or lies. The girls played in near silence in the gloom, their breath huffing, their expressions intent. She stopped feeling homesick, remembering her bedroom, its view out the window down their neat, tidy street, the quilt on her bed that her grandmother had sewn, the jewelry box on her dresser that her mother had given her as a thirteenth-birthday present. She hadn’t had the heart to bring the jewelry box with her to Idlewild, where it could get stolen by the other girls, strangers who could put their hands all over her private things in their shared room.
Pat Carriveaux passed her the ball, and Roberta quickly handled it down the field, dodging girls coming at her right and left, her shoes squeaking and squelching in the grass. Her hair in its braid was soaked, the rain running down her neck into her collar, but the cool felt good on her heated skin. She circled the goal, but Cindy Benshaw made a fast move, leaning in to steal the ball nearly from the end of her stick, and Roberta jerked back to avoid tangling with her. Cindy ran with the ball, and Roberta steadied herself and ran after her.
Now she was flying, her body fully warm, barely feeling her feet as they hit the ground, the breath raw and painful in her lungs. She was unstoppable. She no longer pictured the face of her uncle, Van, her father’s brother, who had come to live with them last year after his wife left him and he lost his job. Uncle Van, who had fought on the beaches of Normandy and now could not sleep or work, who carried a terrible scar down the side of his neck that he did not talk about, whose big, callused hands always seemed lethal, even when they were curled in his lap as he listened to the radio hour after hour. She did not think about how she had opened the door to the garage one day and found Uncle Van sitting there, alone, hunched over in his chair, how she had seen—
The birds called overhead, and a spray of water hit Roberta’s face, mixing with the sweat rolling down her temples. Her body was burning, the sensation pure pleasure. She never wanted to stop.
She had screamed that day, after she opened the garage door, and then she hadn’t spoken again. For days, and then weeks, and then months. She would open her mouth and her thoughts would shut down, a curious blankness overtaking her, wiping the words clean from her mind. Her concerned parents had taken her to a doctor at first, wondering if something was physically wrong. Then they’d taken her to another doctor, and finally—to their burning shame—to a psychiatrist. Roberta had sat through it all in numb silence. She knew that everyone wanted her to be her old self again, to do something, to say something, but all Roberta saw was the garage door opening, over and over again, and the blankness. She couldn’t explain to all of them that her words had left her and she had nothing to say.
And so she’d come to Idlewild. Her parents didn’t know what to do with a stubborn teenage girl who wouldn’t speak, except get her out of the house. Roberta was silent for her first week at Idlewild, too, and then one day a teacher asked her a question and she answered it, her voice as rusty as an old bucket in a well. Her first words in months, spoken at this horrible boarding school that every girl hated so much.
It had felt miraculous, saying those words, and yet it had felt natural, too. She had seen the garage door in her head less and less. And on the hockey field the garage door disappeared entirely and the quiet was the peaceful kind as her body took over.
Brenda whistled through her teeth and called a break when the first half of the game ended, and the girls began to leave the field. Roberta dropped her stick for a moment and leaned down, her hands on her knees, catching her breath as the other girls trotted past her. Something caught the corner of her eye, a swish of fabric, and she turned her head, expecting to see another girl holding back as she was, but there was nothing there. She turned back and stared at the ground, panting. Her roommates were probably getting up now, shuffling with the other girls down the hall to the communal bathroom, bumping into one another as they dressed for class.
Roberta could talk when she was with her roommates. She’d grown used to them, had come to depend on their constant closeness, their little annoyances. She could picture them clearly now: Katie’s sultry beauty and I don’t care attitude, CeCe’s softer physique and trusting kindness, bone-thin Sonia’s toughness, which hid something damaged underneath. She could talk to these girls, in this place, yet when her mother had come to visit—alone, without Dad—Roberta had been tongue-tied and awkward, forcing her words again. Now is not a good time to come home, her mother had said.
The movement came in the corner of her eye again, and now she straightened and turned. There was still nothing there. Roberta swiped at her forehead and temple, halfheartedly thinking that a strand of hair had gotten loose, though the movement had not looked like hair at all. It had looked like the swish of a skirt, moving as a girl walked past. She’d even thought she’d heard a footstep, though that wasn’t possible. The other players had all left the field.
She turned to look at the huddle of girls milling beneath the eave to get out of the rain. Ginny gave her a narrow-eyed look, but didn’t outright command Roberta to get moving. Roberta felt suddenly rooted in place, despite the rain soaking her, despite her wet feet through the leather shoes, despite the sweat cooling uncomfortably beneath her wool uniform. Something was moving on the field—something she couldn’t quite see. And Ginny, looking straight at her, didn’t see it.
There came a sound behind her, a quick, furtive footstep, and then an echo of a voice came from somewhere in the trees. Singing.
Oh, maybe tonight I’ll hold her tight, when the moonbeams shine . . .
The sweat on Roberta’s temples turned hot, and her arms jerked. She turned again, a full circle, but saw only the empty, rainy field. Ginny had turned away, and all the other girls stood quietly gossiping and catching their breath, their backs to her.
Oh, maybe tonight I’ll hold her tight . . .
Roberta made her legs move. They creaked and shuddered like rusty old machine parts now, but she took one step, and then another. She knew that song. It was one of the songs they played on KPLI, on the Starshine Soap GI Afternoon, the show Uncle Van had listened to every day that played music from the war. It was called “My Dreams Are Getting Better All the Time,” and it had been playing on the radio that day, its sound echoing off the bare walls and the concrete floor, when she had opened the garage door.
. . . when the moonbeams shine . . .
It wasn’t a radio, or a record playing. It was a voice, coming from the trees—no, from the other end of the pitch—a snippet of sound just barely heard before it blew off in the wind. Roberta began to jog toward the others, fear jolting down her spine. She kept her eyes on the line of sweater-clad backs, huddled out of the rain, as her pace picked up and her legs moved faster.
Uncle Van. Sitting on a chair in the garage, bent forward, the gun pressed to his sweating skin, that pretty song playing, Uncle Van weeping, weeping . . .
She felt her words disappear, the blankness rising.
Away. Just get away. Don’t think about it—just run . . .
Ginny turned and looked at her again as Roberta entered the damp, woolly crowd of girls, inhaling the miasma of rain and damp sweat. “What took you so long?” she snapped.
Roberta shook her head, numb. She remembered Mary Van Woorten’s story about Mary Hand haunting the hockey field, singing lullabies in the trees. Mary Van Woorten was standing a few feet away, unaware, her cheeks red with cold, her blond hair tied back in a neat ponytail, shifting from foot to foot like a racehorse waiting for a signal. Lullabies, she’d said, not popular songs.
But Mary had sung a popular song this time. One just for her.
Roberta clutched her stick, crossed her arms over the front of her sweater, and moved in closer to the rest of the girls, seeking warmth. She thought of her roommates again, their familiar faces, their voices, their bickering laughter. And then she made the words come out.
“It’s nothing,” she said to Ginny. “Nothing at all.”