Free Flora by Gail Godwin Page B

you’re sure it won’t make you sad.”
    “I’m sad already, so I might as well be sad in there.”
    I COULD HARDLY wait to go to bed that night, but there were amenities to be gotten through first. Flora said I wasn’t getting enough exercise for a young person, so after supper while it was still quite light we pitched into the rutty driveway, giggling and steadying each other, and walked down to the hairpin curve on Sunset Drive where the thick woods sloped off to the right and my grandfather’s shortcut reproached us with its unsightly neglect. “Wouldn’t it be great if we could repair the path, somehow,” said Flora, “and surprise your father when he gets back. Only I wouldn’t know where to begin, would you?”
    “You’d have to cut down years of overgrowth,” I said. “It would take really serious tools. And the handrails are all rotted, they’re dangerous even to touch. And someone could fall into that crater and be badly hurt. It would have to be filled in and for that you’d need to get dirt from somewhere.” I was sounding like the adult, talking the child out of an impractical idea.
    Tuesday evening there was a mystery program Nonie and I liked, and Flora and I sat curled on the sofa with our shoes off,listening to the cabinet radio with the big speakers. We agreed not to turn on lamps so we could be more scared. This one was about a little girl who gets separated from her mother in a department store. They look and look for her, the store detective, the manager, the police, but she just isn’t anywhere to be found, and night comes and the store has to close, and the distraught mother lets herself be convinced that the girl wandered out of the store and the police will have to continue an all-night search through the town. But the little girl has fallen asleep behind some crates in a stockroom and when she wakes up she’s at first frightened because her mother is gone, but then all these nice, elegant, well-dressed people, even some well-dressed children, come out from the shadows of the department store and befriend her. By the time daylight comes, she has decided to accept their offer to become one of them because they have convinced her it’s a better world. In their world, they tell her, she can never get lost or feel abandoned again.
    “Oh, God,” cried Flora, wriggling and hugging herself in the gloom, “I knew that was going to happen! I just knew it.”
    In the final scene the mother comes back to the store with the police next morning. And in the children’s department, she sees a group of child mannequins and one of them resembles her daughter so much she goes into hysterics. But the police and the manager soothe her and assure her they will find her little girl before the day is over.
    “Look at my arms,” said Flora, rubbing them up and down. “They’ve got goose bumps. Oh, honey, I hope this won’t give you bad dreams.”
    The program made my heart long for Nonie. There were things about it to discuss that she would be so good at. But I would have to wait until bedtime to figure out what those things were.

X.
    The way my days registered seemed to change after I moved into Nonie’s room. Events stopped marching forward in a straight, unselective procession and began clustering themselves into bunches, according to mood and subject matter. There were the things Flora said and did that slowly compiled a picture of what I could expect from her. There were my retreats into the sanctuary of my new room, where I seemed to merge with Nonie and came out thinking and speaking more like her. Was this shift in perceptions something my memory has imposed? Well, what is anybody’s memory but another narrative form?
    The shift may have begun that morning, when I told Mrs. Jones I was growing up because I could now understand how her little Rosemary and my mother’s parents could have died in the same year.
    Lying in Nonie’s high, roomy bed, freshly made up for my occupancy, I felt