That afternoon after Sherwood left, I was in my bower of hay, demanding that the two kittens keep their doll bonnets on properly while William worked on his pulley system. We were both talking to ourselves, William explaining his threading process, and I suppose to the cats I was deploring the king for depriving me of food and water.
How long had Stephen been watching us from just inside the granary door? Practicing his spy craft. I went on chattering about my plight even after William had straightened up, staring at the tall man in the shadows. The man with a telephoto lens. When at last I understood that we were being observed I, too, stood still, a scream lodged in my throat. Did Stephen call out to assure us as an average citizen would have? No. He said nothing. For the first time I felt not just embarrassed to be a child, but ashamed. It didn’t seem possible to return to our private world after he went out through the granary door, although we did eventually gather ourselves back into the story. Stephen was nothing like Sherwood coming to have a swing. Stephen was not a yipper, for one, and for another, he had not called out Hallo.
Fast-forward a few years, to the summer of Gloria. At dinner one night our mother, having drunk perhaps more than her usual one or two glasses of wine, said so merrily, “We all think you’re a spy, Stephen.”
William poked me under the table. I nodded, Yes, yes, Stephen is a spy. Remember the time in the barn? He was slippery in his loyalties and he was probably a practiced liar, we alone understanding the extent of his capacity to infiltrate.
My father laughed at his ridiculous wife. “Not true,” he said to his cousin.
Stephen was in the middle of putting a spoonful of bright green pesto in the center of his glossy noodles. He raised only his eyes, giving my mother a long, keen look, his spoon in midair. He said, “Nellie.” The word chilled us, her name. No one would want to be interrogated by him. “I…am…not…a spy.”
“Okay, okay!” She laughed nervously, her hands up, as if to say, Don’t shoot.
To his noodles Stephen said, “If I could find another job that had the same benefits and vacation schedule, a job that offers a sabbatical every ten years, I’d do it.” He suddenly sounded tired.
“I wish you would,” my father said. “It would be good to have you home, really home again.”
We didn’t know what he meant by home. Was home for Stephen the entire United States or was it our town or the manor house or maybe—was it our house? His most particular home at the moment didn’t seem to be on the outskirts of the orchard with Gloria, although he’d taken his big duffel bag over to her cottage. Even after he’d moved he sometimes sat in our kitchen for hours after dinner, the last to leave for bed. He was not domesticatable, so said my mother, a word that had something to do with sleeping, eating, folding laundry nicely, picking wildflowers as a present. I’d come downstairs to find the two of them, my mother and Stephen, in quiet conversation at the table. Gloria and my father were long gone, talked out and sound asleep. My mother had once mentioned that Stephen was the kind of person who opened up to you when you least expected it, no knowing when he might reward you with a confidence. Seeing them there at first always gave me a shock: What if—what if time had wavered, backward, forward—what if everything was now the same except that Stephen, Stephen was our father?