The Collected Stories of Amanda Cross Read Online Free PDF Page A

word to anyone. And I won’t bother you with any more rides, if you decide to stay with the carriages and horses. But if you decide to go back, just call your Chair, dear Fred Monson, and announce your return for next semester. ‘Never apologize, never explain.’ A good Victorian piece of advice.”
    AS YOU KNOW , Tania decided to return. And from that day to this, no one ever knew where she’d been, and no one ever guessed. They were all glad to see her back–Tom, and the students, and even her colleagues–so she found out she was loved. Maybe that made her return more rewarding. But Kate never knew, because Kate never spoke to her again.

O NCE U PON A T IME

    T his was the only true story she had ever heard, Kate Fansler used to say, that properly began “once upon a time.” Kate, who had never seen the beginning, said it was, nonetheless, as clear to her inner eye as any personal memory, sharp in all its detail, as immediate as sense itself. The family to whom it happened was named Grant. They were in their summer home in New England. “The King was in the counting house, counting out his money; the Queen was in the parlor, eating bread and honey.” That is, the father, as in this context we should call him, had gone into town for the papers; he had money invested, and wanted to study the stock market pages. The mother, a college professor, was upstairs in her study, ostensibly writing an article for a conference on the uses of fantasy, in fact, reading a novel by Thomas Hardy, which seemed–as she later said, sounding prophetic–to answer to her condition. The children were on the lawn playing a ragged and hilarious game of volleyball.
    There were four of them, three boys and a girl, all twelve years of age. The girl and one of the boys were twins; the other two boys were school friends, come for the weekend. They too were twins, identical as opposed to their fraternal twin hosts, and the badminton set had been their hostess’s gift. They had been invited for two weeks, as a favor to their parents, and because the resident twins were judged too self-reliant and in need of outside stimulation. It had taken a whole day to put up the posts for the net, and another day to practice with the rackets and shuttlecocks. The father had pointed out that they could play volleyball with the same net, and had, the next afternoon, provided the ball.
    There the four of them were, having both learned and invented the game, playing at it furiously and with much shouting–the girl was as good at it as the boys, and taller than the visiting twins–when one of the visiting twins (they do not remain in this story long enough to be named) shouted: “Look! It’s a baby!”
    And, as the four of them would remember the scene and tell of it for the rest of their lives, a baby, wearing a diaper and shirt and nothing else, came toddling toward them out of the bushes that lined the property and across the lawn. The baby was about a year and a half old and appeared to have learned to walk only recently. It rocked toward them, with that unsteady gait characteristic of babies, and laughed, holding out its arms, probably for balance but, as it seemed, reaching toward them. And what seemed most marvelous, it chortled in that wonderful way of babies, with little yelps of delight as it staggered toward them.
    The volleyball players ran down the lawn toward the baby. An adult, or even the sort of twelve-year-old girl who played house and dreamed of herself in a bridal gown,would have scooped up the baby. These children simply stood one on either side of her–which two took the baby’s hands could never, afterward, be agreed upon; perhaps they took turns–and slowly moved, midst coos of encouragement, toward the house. The girl then ran ahead–allowing a boy to take the baby hand she held, or so she insisted–to alert their mother. “Ma,” she called. “A baby walked out of the bushes.”
    The professor, reading of how Clym