The song came from above, a tuneless air that rode the vocal register in erratic fits. Margaret had heard such improvised singing years earlier, and she crept up the stairs, paw-soft on each step to prevent the telltale squeak, and then she carefully placed her ear against the bathroom door to hear Norah in the tub, happily composing the events of her day in syncopated rhythm. The discordant music filled Margaret with unexpected joy, remembering how Erica sang in the bathroom. And how, as little girls, Margaret and her sister used to harmonize in a cloud of soap bubbles, or late at night in the stillness of their darkened bedroom, or traipsing through the fairy-filled woods, or out on the sand with the roaring surf nearly drowning all human sound. Carefree summer songs at the shore.
A long line of pelicans played follow-the-leader nearly skimming the waves, one after the other diving into the chop not thirty yards from shore. Her father pointed excitedly each time they buzzed the surf, hunting for fish. And later that evening over dinner, face red with wine and sun, he scraped back his chair on the wooden deck of their rented house and recited:
“A wonderful bird is the pelican,
His bill will hold more than his belican.
He can take in his beak
Food enough for a week,
But I'm damned if I see how the helican.”
“Oh, John,” her mother chided him, and he gave her a look that begged an indulgence, and Diane and Margaret watched the unspoken signals seesaw between them until the tension was broken by their mother's mischievous laugh that signaled all was well and permitted the children to clamor for more. Listening to the girl sing through the bathroom door, Margaret felt complete satisfaction of the moment. What must they have been like, not as parents, but as a grown man and woman with two daughters sunbrown as nuts, a bottle of wine, the dying of another summer? Her father would have loved the singing nymph in the bathtub and understood, and her mother would have silently acknowledged the need to lie on Norahs behalf even when the child could not be believed.
The singing stopped, and she could hear the girl dripping in the tub as she reached for the towel. Margaret hurried away, cantered downstairs on stiff legs, and took up her book under the lamplight. She scanned for her place in the story, read again the page abandoned, and had just remembered the passage when Norah arrived bedraggled as a storm-drenched kitten, her ragged hair plastered against her skull, yet new again and clean and fresh, wrapped in Erica's thick robe. Margaret wished the girl would sing again. She longed to pull her close but feared the bone-ache of an embrace. “Norah, sit down beside me.” The child wiggled round the coffee table, hopped onto the cushion, and squeezed into the corner between the woman's body and the arm of the sofa. She pressed against Margaret's side, all heartbeat and wet heat. “I had another phone call today from your principal, Mr. Taylor. I thought that was all over last week. He said your teacher had reports from some of the other children that you were pretending again in the lunchroom.”
“Oh, that? Just a cheap trick.”
Margaret sighed. “That's three times in two weeks, Norah. I can't have all this trouble from the school.”
“I'm sorry. It won't happen again.”
“People will talk, are talking. Parents fussing. I do not like to be the subject of so much gossip, so many questions.”
Norah snuggled closer. “It won't happen again.”
Hearing the sincerity of the child's apology, Margaret regretted the tone of voice she had taken with her, wishing instead that she could affect her father's disposition at the times when his wit disarmed ill feelings or burst like an explosion to cause them all to laugh when the situation called for sobriety. She longed for a way to bring about a consolation, and finally wrenched free her pinned arm and laid her hand upon the girl's shoulder. “So you're ready for bed now? Brushed your teeth?”
Close enough to kiss, Norah lifted her face. “Here, smell.”
Margaret turned her head and nearly caught her ear in the girl's open mouth. Like listening to a seashell, she could hear the roar of waves and, more disturbingly, the wind blow across the sand, the laughing cry of gulls, as though the girl had swallowed the sea. The sound lasted no longer than the time it took Margaret to recover and position her nose to catch the scent of peppermint, but in that fraction, her mind reeled. Perhaps her senses had conflated the memory with the moment. But she was not certain, as she sent Norah to bed, not certain of any distinction between what she had heard and what she had chosen to believe.
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