Waiting Spirits by Bruce Coville

Dr. Miles reached out and began to stroke the gray cat. For a moment there was no sound but Smoky’s rumbling purr.
    Finally, Dr. Miles began to speak. Her voice was small and tired sounding, and Lisa had to strain to hear her.
    â€œIt happened in 1935, when I was twelve years old. We had summered here from the time I was about two. My mother, my father, myself—and my little sister, Carrie. Times were different then. We had managed to escape the Depression, and in fact were better off than you and your parents. We had servants to take care of things—a maid and a cook who came during the day. And a nurse who lived in, taking care of Carrie and me.
    â€œMy mother was a sick woman. I didn’t recognize it at the time. Oh, I did, I suppose. But it’s not something you admit to yourself easily. Even less so in those days. She was physically sick, frail and quickly exhausted. But her sickness was deeper than that, really. She was afraid—of almost everything. Afraid of dying. Afraid of living. God knows what went on in her own childhood to make her that way. But that’s the way she was.
    â€œI loved her anyway, without reservation, as children do.
    â€œDespite my mother’s illness, my early childhood was happy. That was before the depression arrived. A kind of giddiness seemed to infect the whole country then. We were mindlessly happy, it seems to me now. But it was wonderful at the time and when you’re at that age, what do you know about those things anyway? Happy is happy.”
    She gave Lisa a wan smile and squeezed her hand. “The time you’ve hard for growing up in hasn’t been quite so sweet,” she said sadly. “Oh, I don’t think it’s been all that bad for you. But the shadows are longer now than they were then. It all changed in 1945.”
    Lisa gave her a puzzled look.
    â€œOh, study your history child. That was the year we blew up Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and learned that our planet was as mortal as we are. I always thought a great dividing line was drawn then. No one born after that time can understand what it was like to grow up without that shadow.
    â€œBut that’s beside the point. We were here. And except for an occasional episode involving my mother, we were happy….”
    As Dr. Miles continued the story, Lisa felt herself drawn into the past, absorbed by the web of sorrow and despair that had wrapped itself around her grandmother’s happy childhood all those years ago.
    Myra Halston was beautiful. Pale and too slender, she nevertheless projected an air of elegance and vulnerability that attracted men, whether she wanted to or not.
    Her husband, Harrison, was a successful stockbroker, and she was the one great treasure of his life. In no sense was she a helpmate; she was far too frail for that. To Harrison Halston she was like a rare orchid, delicate and lovely and needing special care. So every summer he brought her to Sayers Island because the doctors had told him that sea air would do her good. He built her a house and hired servants to make sure she was not overworked. He did his best to ease her troubled mind.
    But his best was not good enough, especially when outside events came crashing in on them.
    Ellen McCormack was Carrie and Alice’s nurse, and the two girls loved her desperately. She was everything their mother was not: large and robust, she seemed to burst with good humor and was always ready for an expedition or to tell a story.
    Alice and Carrie love their mother in the way that children love something distant and precious. But she was too fragile for them to touch, and so they gave most of their affection, their boisterous hugs, to Ellen.
    Myra Halston saw this, and it hurt. She began to hate Ellen McCormack. That hatred festered like a growing infection until it poisoned her thoughts.
    The simple solution would have been to let the woman go. There were plenty of others who would have welcomed the job.