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He drew back and stared at me bleakly, making my heart ache as I saw him again as a boy, when I’d loved him so much. I thought of Billie, who’d told me once everybody made mistakes, and even her son wasn’t perfect. Still, I headed for the attic, for the spiraling iron stairs that would take me into the cupola where even now I could hear the wind chimes tinkling, tinkling, trying as they’d always tried to fill the empty holes in my memory bank.
The Secret of the Wind Chimes
Laboriously I managed to climb the iron stairs that had led me away from Vera so many times. The sun was shining brightly through all the stained-glass windows, and on the patterned Turkey rug they threw myriad confusing patterns, turning this room as the sunlight did into a living kaleidoscope. And I was the center of all the colors, making everything happen, as the colors caught in my chameleon-colored hair and made it a rainbow, too. My arms were tattooed with light, and in my eyes I felt the colors that patterned my face as well. I looked around at the scenes my childish eyes had loved so well and saw high above the long slender rectangles of painted glass suspended on their faded scarlet silken cords.
I looked around, trembling as I did, expecting childhood memories to rise up like specters and scare me off, but only soft memories came, of me all alone, wishing, always wishing to go to school, to have playmates, to be allowed the freedom other children my age had.
Had I made so much effort to gain no new knowledge? “What is it?” I screamed at the wind chimes high above. “Always I hear you blowing and trying to tell me something—tell me now that I’m here and willing to listen! I wasn’t willing before, I know that now! Tell me now!”
“Audrina,” Papa’s voice came from behind me, “you sound hysterical. That’s not good for you in your weakened condition.”
“Did Arden send you up here?” I yelled. “Am I never to know anything? Must I go into my grave with my mind full of holes? Papa—tell me the secret of this room!”
/> He didn’t want to tell me. His dark, fugitive eyes quickly dodged away, and he started talking about how weak I was, how I needed to lie down and rest. I ran to him to batter his chest. Easily he caught both my fists and held them in one hand as broodingly he stared down into my eyes.
“All right. Perhaps the time has come. Ask me what you will.”
“Tell me, Papa, everything I need to know. I feel like I’m losing my mind by not knowing.”
“Okay,” he said, looking around for something to sit on, but there was nothing but the floor. He sat down and leaned back against a window frame and managed to pull me down with him. Holding me in his arms, he began to speak in a heavy voice.
“This is not going to be easy to say, nor is it going to be pleasant for you to hear, but you’re right. You do need to know. Your aunt told me from the beginning you should know the truth about your older sister.”
With bated breath I waited.
“The vision you had when first you went into the rocking chair, where the boys jumped out of the bushes—I’m sure now you realize that those three boys raped my Audrina. But she didn’t die as I told you.”
“She’s not dead? Papa … where is she?”
“Listen and hear, and don’t ask more questions until I’m finished. I told all those lies only to protect you from knowing about the ugliness that could have spoiled your life. That day when Audrina was nine, after the rape, she staggered home clutching the remnants of her clothes together, trying to hide her nudity. They had humiliated her so, she had no pride left. Muddy, soaking wet, bruised and scratched and bleeding, she was filled with shame, and in the house twenty children were waiting for the birthday party to begin. She came in the back door and tried to steal upstairs without anyone seeing her, but your mother was in the kitchen, saw Audrina’s shocking state and raced to follow her up the stairs. Audrina was able to say only one word, and that was ‘boys.’ That was enough for your mother to realize what had happened. So your mother took her in her arms and told her it would be all right, that those awful things did happen sometimes, but she was still the same wonderful girl we both loved. ‘Your papa doesn’t have to know,’ she told Audrina … and what a mistake that was. Those words clearly told Audrina that I would be ashamed of her, and that what those boys had done had ruined her value for me. She started screaming that she wished the boys had killed her and left her dead under the golden raintree, for she deserved to die now that God had deserted her and failed her when she had prayed for Him to help.”
“Oh, Papa,” I whispered, “I know how she must have felt.”
“Yes, I’m sure you do. Then your mother made her second mistake, an even worse one. She took Audrina into the bathroom and filled the tub with scalding hot water, then forced my girl into that hot water. With a hard brush she began to scrub off the contamination of those boys. Already she was sore and cut and bruised, and her body had endured shock enough, but Lucietta went wild with rage and wielded that harsh brush with no mercy, as if she was ridding the world of all filth, all boys, never realizing what she was doing to her own daughter. It was degradation your mother was trying to remove, and if that brush took off a great deal of Audrina’s skin, she didn’t seem to notice.
“Downstairs, the kids who had come for the party were clamoring for ice cream and cake, and Ellsbeth dished it out, and told the guests that Audrina had come down with an awful cold and she wouldn’t be attending her own party. Naturally this didn’t go over very well, and soon the guests departed. Some left their gifts, others took theirs back, as if they thought Audrina was slighting them.
“Ellsbeth called me at my office and told me briefly what she thought had happened. My rage was so huge I felt I might have a heart attack as I ran to my car and drove home so fast it’s a wonder the police didn’t stop me. I reached home just in time to see your mother pulling a white cotton nightgown down over Audrina’s head. I glimpsed that small raw body, so red it seemed to be bleeding all over. I could have killed those boys and beaten your mother for being so cruel as to use that damned brush on that tender skin that had already endured enough. I never forgave her for doing that. I had little mean ways of throwing it back in her face later on. When she scrubbed Audrina down with that brush, she implanted the idea in her head that the filth would never come off, that she was forevermore ruined in my eyes, in everybody’s eyes. Then your mother went to the medicine cabinet and came back with iodine… not the kind we use nowadays, but that old-fashioned kind that stung like fire.
“I screamed at Lucietta, ‘No more!’ and she dropped the iodine, and Audrina broke away from her mother. She seemed terrified to see me, the father she’d always loved so much, and on bare feet she went flying up to the attic. I chased behind her and so did your mother. Audrina screamed all the way, no doubt from pain as well as from shock. She ran up these spiraling stairs to this room we’re in right now. She was young and fast, and when I came into the cupola she was standing on a chair and had managed to open one of those high windows.”
He pointed to the one. “That’s where she was, and the wind was howling in, and the rain, and the thunder was cracking, the lightning was flashing, and the colors in here were mind-boggling with the brightness the lightning caused. The wind chimes were beating frantically. It was pandemonium up here. And Audrina on that chair had one leg outside the window and was preparing to jump when I raced up and seized hold of her and pulled her back inside. She fought me, clawed at my face, screaming as if I represented to her all that was evil in every male, and if she harmed me, she’d succeed in harming them … the ones who’d stolen her pride when they ravished her body.”
I twisted about to stare up at the wind chimes that hung so still on their silken cords, yet I thought I could hear them faintly tinkling.
“There’s more, darling, much more. Do you want to wait for another day when you feel stronger?”
No, I’d waited too long already. It was now, or it was never. “Go on, Papa, tell it all.”
“I told your mother time and again she shouldn’t have given Audrina a bath. She should have comforted her, and later we could have gone to the police. But your mother didn’t want her shamed and humiliated by more men who would have asked her all sorts of intimate questions a child shouldn’t have to answer. I was so enraged that I could have killed those boys with my bare hands, wrung their necks, castrated them, done something so terrible no doubt they would have put me in prison for life … but my Audrina wouldn’t name them … or else she couldn’t name them for fear of their reprisal. Maybe they threatened her, I don’t know.”
And Arden had been there, too. Arden had been there and she had pleaded to him for help—and he’d run away.
“Where is she, Papa?”
He hesitated, turning me so he could look into my eyes, and up above the wind chimes began to clamor more, and I knew instinctively they’d keep on doing that until I knew the secret.
I stood in the circle of Papa’s powerful arms in the middle of the Turkey rug, where he’d pulled me so I wouldn’t stand too near the glass. “Why did you pull me from the windows just now, Papa?”
