Free The Medium by Noëlle Sickels Page B

grandfather is there waiting for her. And she’ll feel so much better. You want her to feel better, don’t you?”
    To Helen’s shock, Mary started screaming. All the agony of her heart was in that scream. It filled the night. Helen expected neighbors to rush out of their houses any minute. And there she’d be, an obvious culprit, standing suspiciously close to the hysterical girl.
    Helen stuffed the grassy blanket over Mary’s face to muffle her scream. Instead of fighting back, Mary burrowed into the balled up blanket and started, quietly, to cry. Helen looked around at the lighted windows of the surrounding houses. No one was peering out. No doors were slamming open.
    Mary lifted her head and sniffled, stifling her tears. She pulled the blanket roughly out of Helen’s grasp.
    â€œYou’ve never liked me, Helen Schneider, so I guess you think it’s okay to be so mean,” she said. “But what you said is
much more than mean. It’s plain and truly crazy. Lucky for you I don’t want to upset my parents by telling them what you did. But when we get to school Monday, I’m going to tell everyone there how crazy you are. All the gang and Miss Thompson and everyone.”
    She spun around and beat a self-righteous retreat to her back door, leaving Helen, stunned and frightened, shivering in the cold.

CHAPTER 11
    NOVEMBER 1937
    All Thanksgiving morning, Helen was kept hopping. Dust the living room, polish the silver coffee urn, cut the last chrysanthemums from the garden and trim their dead leaves, iron the linen napkins. Emilie and Ursula were busy in the kitchen, where every surface was cluttered with bowls and spoons and chopping boards and food. The two women were not so much cooking as dancing the feast into being.
    During her chores, Helen struggled to hold at bay the alarm that had been thudding inside her since Mary’s terrible pronouncement. She’d been afraid to tell Rosie about it. Mightn’t even Rosie’s loyalty falter at the prospect of befriending an outcast? For that’s what Helen would be if Mary made good on her threat, and there was no reason to think she wouldn’t. Maybe it wouldn’t even come to a question of loyalty. Maybe Rosie, like any sensible person, would be staggered by Helen’s claims and would recoil from her in fear and abhorrence. It would be the natural reaction. It was she, Helen, who was unnatural.
    Helen dawdled over sweeping the porch, stopping periodically to stare across the street at Mary’s house. Would Mary really refrain from telling her parents what Helen had said, or would the urge to inform be too delicious to pass up?
    â€œHelen,” her father called from the driveway, where he was washing the Ford. “If you want to ride with me to the bus stop, you’d better stop wool-gathering and finish that sweeping.”

    His warning was without teeth. Helen always went with him to pick up her uncle and aunt and cousins from the bus stop on Thanksgiving, and she always rode along when he drove them back into Brooklyn that night. She loved the lights of the bridges, the looming up of the city as they went in, the dark silhouette of the Jersey palisades on the way home. Helen’s going on these rides was a tradition as firm as Nanny’s chestnut stuffing or Walter’s German blessing over the turkey. It couldn’t be jeopardized by lackadaisical sweeping. Nevertheless, Helen briskly resumed her work, pacing herself to her father’s whistling, and she didn’t look over to the Steltmans’ again.
    The meal was sumptuous, the diners festive. After dinner, the children were sent outside so that the grown-ups could enjoy a tranquil dessert. Helen and her cousins, Teresa and Terence, twins one year younger than she, were glad to escape their chairs after the long meal. They’d get dessert in the kitchen later and not have to keep their voices down while they ate it.
    There