Helen Keller in Love by Kristin Cashore Page B

started brushing her hair. “Your hair’s so tangled it’s like a pelt.” She bowed her head. I tugged the brush through the knots.
    “Animals have pelts, Helen. Not humans.” She kept wanting to teach me, even though I was no longer a child.
    “You’re curled up like an animal, a hurt one, in bed,” I spelled. Her bathrobe was matted beneath my fingers when I touched her sleeve; the breakfast tray on her bedside table gave off the odor of untouched eggs and cold coffee.
    “Careful or I’ll bite.” Annie made a snapping motion with her mouth, and I was so thankful she forgot about Peter that I laughed.
    “Do that again.” I held her to me.
    She leaned back so I could brush more. Her shoulders, thick with muscle, weight, and worry, sank beneath the even strokes of the brush. Gradually, her breathing slowed.
    The familiar scent of just we two together made the thought of Peter fade away.
    Vaguely, then more strongly, a childhood memory came to me. I am seven years old, sitting at Annie’s knee in my bedroom in Tuscumbia, Alabama. Annie is filled with nervous energy: it is my first Christmas since she arrived. Annie, in order to tame me, had taken me from the house where I lived with my mother and father, and moved us into a two-room house, where just she and I lived. Every day she taught me words; every night I slept, a child, by her side. She was nineteen, an orphan. And that Christmas day she wrote a letter to her former teacher—a Braille letter I later read. In it Annie crowed to her friend, “With Helen, I have found someone who will love me completely—and can never leave.” And I never wanted to leave her, until Peter.
    Anniesat up, took the brush from my hand, and said in the eerie way she had of reading my mind: “You were to be with me on the train. Instead you were alone with him—Helen, after everything I said, you’ve disobeyed?”
    Before I could protest she said, “It’s done. I’ve sent for your mother. She’s already left Alabama by train; she’ll be here in a week. She’ll stay with you, every minute of the day, mother hawk that she is, until I’m better.”
    “You sent for Mother? From Alabama? Without talking to me first?” I turned my head toward the window; a steady shake-shake of the floorboards told me the Boston-bound train thudded through the far woods. Peter was on that train, due to return the next day to Wrentham and the house Annie had rented for him, to be close to me. Every cell of me filled with anticipation, hummed with it until the train rushed over the slight hill behind our house.
    “I thought you rented a house so he could be near.” I steadied myself by holding her bedpost.
    Annie’s hand was sweating and silent in mine.
    “I changed my mind.” She turned to lie back again, exhausted. “Too many things are changing around here, Helen. When your mother gets here everything will go back to normal.” Annie struggled to sit up. “When Peter gets here tomorrow I’m telling him I’m back in charge. He has to stay away.”
    But even as I touched her soft hair, my fingers filled with love for her, I wanted to tell her the truth: Before Mother arrives, I will make my move. Nothing will stay as it is.

Chapter Ten

    I n the books I’ve written about my life I never told the whole truth. Once Peter and I came back to my rattletrap farmhouse outside of Boston everything changed for me. I know I wrote about how Peter and I had a “little isle of joy” in our love together, but I don’t think—no, I
know
—I never wrote that I did it this way: I betrayed, cut off, lied to, people I loved.
    Here’s another thing I never wrote in all those books: I would do it again.
    It was the second day we were back. The heat was sweltering. King’s Pond gave off the scent of wet acorns and oak leaves as Peter pulled me toward the wooden cabin set in a grove of pines by the shore. “Come with me. For a minute.” The ground gave way in soft pockets under my shoes as he