The Air We Breathe Read Free Page B

ferrying treats to the porches where they cured. What had been a weekend chore and a summer job had turned, since her high school graduation in June, into a full-time misery. Day after day, she was trapped in the house that still, after a decade, she refused to think of as home.
    Home, as she’d often told her friend Eudora, was the house where she’d been born: yellow-gray stone with two chimneys, a center door with a fanlight, and a front lawn cut in half by a flagstone walk. Tulip trees and holly had dotted the lawn, while peonies and iris thickened each year in the perennial beds. The town of Chester was small and quiet but Philadelphia was close enough for shopping and special trips. Everything ran smoothly; they’d had help. A man—George, she thought his name might have been—took care of the grounds, the carriage, and the horses; also they’d had a maid named Katie, and a cook. After the accident, when the help left, her mother took over the kitchen herself and learned to make meals from a book.
    What Naomi remembered of the accident was this: a spring day in 1903, when she was five and her brother Thomas was almost four months old. In the big tub, at the end of the day, in water that Katie had boiled in kettles on the stove, she’d been splashing happily. Outside, her mother was still dividing the irises. Inside, she made a mess and Katie dried her roughly and scolded her, then left to boil more water for Thomas’s bath. She went to her room and brushed her hair. Her mother came in—she called her “Mama” then—and took off her gardening gloves and came upstairs to bathe Thomas, which she liked to do herself, in his special china basin. Katie poured water into the basin and turned away to get more towels. And her mother, talking to Katie about the garden and thinking, perhaps, about her plants, dunked Thomas into the basin without checking the temperature first.
    Blue eyes, or brown? Brown hair, or black? After a while, she couldn’t remember. She remembered Thomas’s cries, and her mother’s screams, and Katie sobbing. Her father’s feet pounding up the stairs and the things he said to Katie and her mother. Katie, the next day, slamming out of the house after Naomi’s father dismissed her. She had an uncle who was a doctor and another who was a pharmacist and neither of them could do anything; she remembered their faces. Not the funeral, though, which she wasn’t allowed to attend. And not her father, after a while: or not the way he was before the accident. When she thought of him she saw him after, that year when he stopped going to the law office, started drinking all day, stopped telling her stories or talking to anyone else.
    The house began to fall apart, the lawn turned into a meadow, fruit rotted on the ground and weeds sprouted everywhere. One day her father ran away, and later, when someone found him in Texas, her mother divorced him. His brothers, Naomi’s uncles, took the house. Lawyers and bankers came and went, also the women who’d been her mother’s friends. Her mother went to Philadelphia again and again until the night she came home with her face set and made Naomi start packing. Later there was the train heading north and the gray-haired woman who met them at the station: Elizabeth Vigne, Eudora’s aunt. The cure cottage, a big wooden pile made of rooms added to other rooms, porches stacked on other porches, was theirs if they wanted it; Naomi’s mother accepted the job and they went to work.
    She’d been eight when they reached Tamarack Lake, with nothing but some clothes and the recipe book that would make her mother’s table famous. By now, prospective boarders in places as distant as Atlanta knew about “Mrs. Martin’s house,” and that had been, her mother said, their salvation. Naomi thought that almost anything would have been better. Live in the woods, live by the ocean, live in