It Will Just Be Us, page 11
“Where do you think?” she hisses. “As if I had anywhere else to go!”
The pause allows me to imagine what the person on the other end might be saying.
“No. I don’t want to see you.” She goes off on a whispered tirade at this point that is impossible for me to understand, but it ends with two words weighted with the heaviness of the earth as it depresses and curves space-time around it: “A divorce?”
There is a long pause after that.
“No, of course not,” she says at last. “I don’t know. I don’t know.” And then, “Of course I do.”
I can almost feel her words crackling in the air.
Elizabeth and Donovan have always had a tumultuous relationship. Perhaps all of her relationships are like that. When they first started dating, they passed smoldering looks to each other; they couldn’t get enough, ravenous for the other, but they bickered, too. When I stayed with them, they could go from a terse conversation out the sides of their mouths while watching TV on separate couches to a full-blown screaming match to a half-weeping, half-laughing reconciliation in an hour or less, whereupon they might snuggle back together on the couch to finish watching whatever was on TV. It was strange for me to behold that riot of emotions; I could not imagine behaving in such a way with another person. The more riled up I get, the quieter I become, and the more insistently someone asks me what is the matter, the more cagey my response. But Elizabeth is a tidal wave, a whirlwind that pulls up pieces of the house around her until whatever has had the misfortune of her focused wrath has no choice but to explode in equal measure.
Curiously, when they were not together, Donovan seemed remarkably more at ease. There were days when Elizabeth would don her fashionable pencil skirt and heels to go into the office while Don, a coder, elected to work from home in his sweat pants, and if it was an off day for me, then I would stealthily observe how quiet and calm the house became, how it settled into its foundation with ease, like a sigh as one slips into a warm bath, how readily Donovan might toss me a casual joke. I thought that if love was such an unpredictable thing, then perhaps I didn’t want any of it after all.
But I did love Elizabeth, even if the love of sisters, too, could be wild and tumultuous.
When we were children, I made Elizabeth a necklace of arrowheads I had dug out of the mire, which I presented to her on her fourteenth birthday as if it were gold and diamonds and not a jagged mouth of sharp rock strung together on twine. She could have tossed it back at me like the junk it was, or thrown it away, or even simply draped it over the snarl of necklaces that adorned the top of her dresser and left it there to tangle, but instead she put it around her neck and wore it almost every day that year. It was one of those kind things she had a habit of doing that made me love her again.
My childhood with Elizabeth was predictable in its unpredictability. One day we might be warriors together, traversing a long-lost domain to slay invisible dragons in the name of our mother, the queen. She would encourage me on those travails and request my advice on how to proceed, as an equal. Then on other days I became, inexplicably, her enemy. We might venture into the swamp, and she would throw a rock at me when I followed too closely, narrowly missing my face with the muddy missile, and yell at me to leave her alone. After the rock, I might shed some tears, and she would tell me to go cry to Mother, who had sequestered herself away again with her drink and her silence and her loneliness.
Now that I think of it, that smooth rock in my bedroom is one that was thrown at me, and I kept it so long because it carried with it a curse that I thought, one day, I might hurl back at my sister.
Elizabeth was always a force of nature: benevolent when it pleased her, conspiratorial with me when she liked, and abruptly fearsome or vengeful when the mood struck.
As we grew older, her vindictiveness smoothed out to a kind of niceness, on the surface, even when she was being scornful. Those are the ones you have to watch out for. People who are outwardly aggressive are easier to predict; you always know what they are feeling. Elizabeth was the type that forced me to go back over our conversations to determine what, if any, cruelty might underlie the polite words, what criticisms, what barbs, what condescension.
I find it much easier, in general, to despise Elizabeth. Her incuriosity. Her self-centeredness. Her cattiness. But I mustn’t let myself hate her. To hate is so easy, so comforting. To love is much more difficult.
But I loved her when she wore that necklace of arrowheads. I wonder whatever happened to it.
The house feels stuffy. The air is thick with secrets.
I follow the dark, narrow hallways and creaking staircases down and out to the backyard, the cool wind berating me as I join the shrubs and trees that shiver against it. Overgrown grass blows flat and stands up again, hiding whatever lies in the soil beneath. I think about the treasures Elizabeth and I found when we were young, rooting around for additions to her necklace.
I don’t see echoes of us, though. There are others here.
Clearly we are not the only ones who dig in the dirt as children, who dredge up enchanted artifacts from the mystical swamp like sacred tokens of childhood. Such possessions of seemingly magical provenance, of a history so ancient as to seem folkloric.
But who are these other children? Who is the boy mining the mud, playing with a girl dressed in an old-fashioned frock and bonnet holding in wisps of escaping blonde hair? Who are they, these two mysteries so close to the swamp, happily digging together?
From a distance, it is possible to think nothing of the scene. It is an echo of history, a pleasant reminder that childhood play is timeless. Would that I could turn from the happy vision without curiosity, with acceptance of whatever it is, or was, or will be. But how can I? Who else am I but the one who creeps closer to make out their faces?
Only the closer I creep, the less I see, for the boy has no face.
He kneels, scrambling with his narrow hands as if looking for bones, the bones of the creatures he has buried. I can almost see the dirt caked eternally under his fingernails.
And the girl—she is not from the present. She is not from the future, either, but the past. When she turns her head to me, I cannot help but recognize the features of Constance Wakefield, not much older now than when I last saw her.
What else could it be but that Constance is playing alone in her own time, and the faceless boy in his, and they just happen to be playing at the same game, in the same place, as I see them in this fractured moment?
I feel like my mother, watching the ghosts of children unaware of the future.
The faceless boy pulls out a sharp black arrowhead from the dirt and presents it to the girl in his outstretched palm, showing off his treasure. Constance turns, her face lights up, and she leans over to look at the artifact, nodding in approval. And time has been ripped apart and resewn together, fused imperfectly such that a girl from the nineteenth century and a boy who has not yet been born might interact, might even touch, since she is reaching out now for the arrowhead still clumped with soil and bits of grass, to see it with her fingers, to feel it into existence.
I reach out as if to tell her to turn away, not to touch it, not to touch him.
It turns out, I don’t have to worry about her touching him.
The faceless boy—no, let us call him by his name—Julian rises to his feet, grass stains turning his knees a sickly green, and as he stands he thrusts the arrowhead at Constance with violent momentum, which carries the sharp rock into the girl’s neck.
Constance reels back with the arrowhead protruding from her flesh like a hard black tumor. She gapes at Julian—the boy who is capable of slipping through time to invade and alter the past.
Poor Constance does not know enough to leave the stone in place—I am not in the right time to tell her; I am out of time, or perhaps I am the only one within time—and from her convulsing throat, she yanks the stone free. A gout of blood blooms from her neck, her slippery neck, grasped by slippery hands, but there is no keeping it in; it streams from her mouth and from the pulsing gash, red, redder than a sunset. She falls, her throat gurgling. She coughs blood, like her mother. She pulls herself across the grass, away from Julian, who picks up a rock—Constance on her back, now, gasping at the sky—and he brings it down on her face. The rock craters her left eye, pooling red, cracking her skull like an egg.
Finally, she is still, but I’ve taken her trembling into myself.
Julian drops the stone and looks at the girl; his face is blank, a nothingness.
Then, from out of the swamp, a woman dripping with brown water, vines and soaked foliage tangled in her hair, slogs over to him, trailing her sodden dress on the ground. She walks stiffly, her limbs moving in a way that suggests they are rusty with disuse or with rigor mortis, her skin moving wetly as if disconnected from the bones beneath.
Clementine approaches Julian and takes his hand in her own. She gazes down at the body of the girl. She breathes a long, slow death rattle of air into drowned lungs and exhales.
“Bury her deep,” she says. “They took my daughter. We’ll make it so they don’t find theirs.” She looks to a spot in the shadow of a red maple, nods.
After a moment, Clementine and Constance vanish, but Julian remains briefly afterward with his arm still outstretched as if he continues to hold her invisible hand, staring out in my direction but giving no indication whether he can see me, whether he knows I can see him.
PART THREE
MIRRORS AND DOORWAYS
8
Over the centuries, many people have lived in the swamp, and several determined archaeologists have managed to find fragments of their existence—reworked arrowheads, clay pipes, and the like—but do you know what no one has ever found in the swamp?
Human remains.
What happened to those who died in the swamp? Surely, there are many who have perished there. Hundreds or thousands once occupied its remote interior. And, just as surely, those who died were not removed for a dry burial; many never had any contact with the outside world. Is it possible that the acidity of the swamp literally disintegrated the skeletons, ate away any remnants of human existence? Or is there another explanation? It makes you wonder, doesn’t it?
When Mother asked me what I was doing, I told her it was part of my archaeological work. I was digging for artifacts.
“Well, just don’t tear up the whole yard. And be sure to close up those holes when you’re done.”
“Of course.”
By now I am thigh-deep in my third hole, hillocks of moist earth piled up around me. The first, empty. The second, empty. Perhaps what I saw was only a dream. Perhaps it didn’t happen at all, and Constance Wakefield lived to a ripe old age. And I am digging holes, endless holes, like a lunatic.
But I have to know.
I am on my fourth hole, the sun bearing down through the cold air, through the exposed branches, their red leaves scattered and curling in their death throes, when my shovel strikes something hard and unyielding. Kneeling to dig with my hands, I find it is only a tree root.
Despite the cold, I’ve removed my jacket. My skin has a sheen of sweat. I lean my back against the maple, my arms aching, torn between frustration and relief. One more hole, I decide. Five is a nice round number; I will dig one more hole, and that will cement it for me.
Deep within the fifth hole, I strike again. There’s something here: a hardness in the soil. My hands scrabble at the grime, pushing it away, until I am staring at two sockets in a dirt-caked, tawny skull.
Dusk has settled by the time I’ve uncovered the entire skeleton, careful not to disrupt its position. Forgoing the shovel, I dig with a small trowel the rest of the way, then use a brush to expose the bones.
Calling forth what I can remember from the forensic anthropology course I took in grad school, I examine the pelvis; the wider subpubic angle and concavity, together with a sharp ridge down the ischiopubic ramus and a ventral arc, identify the skeleton as female. Based on the size and growth of the bones, it is clearly a young girl, prepubescent, perhaps twelve or thirteen.
It is more difficult to be clinical as I examine the skull by the diffuse moonlight and failing sun that dwindles beneath the horizon. The left socket has been cracked open, a gaping hole, and around it the skull is fractured with radial cracks splintering off from the site of impact. I close my eyes and see her eye bursting like a cherry tomato beneath the bludgeoning stone. I open them and stare into the skull’s dark sockets, and think of the vague black pits of his eyes.
I fill in the holes, close Constance back into her bed of dirt; it doesn’t seem right to disturb her remains any further. I will not document this find. She isn’t an artifact to me—not when I’ve seen her running down the hallways, vibrant, full of life.
* * *
Whippoorwills cackle with derangement at midnight, when I am tired and aching from my dig, but I can’t sleep for listening to them. They call their names again and again, unable to stop the incessant echo affirming their identity. Doesn’t it seem as if the night, of all times, with its lonesome mystery, is when we desperately repeat our names into the abyss, hoping to come out the same person by morning?
The knowledge that Julian killed, kills, will kill Constance—and others—eats away at me. That he can kill through the span of time. That he can hurt me, even now, even though he isn’t yet born.
My mother already knows something is wrong, even if she doesn’t know what. Maybe I should tell her. She’ll believe me. She won’t tell me I’m crazy.
But what exactly will she do? It will only disturb her.
I need to understand. Maybe if I can talk to Julian, I can find out why he is the way he is, and I can stop him from ever turning out this way. But I’m not my mother; I cannot call up echoes at whim. I need help.
My mother taught me a ritual designed to, in her words, “commune with the spirit world.” It must be done in the dark of a basement, with a mirror and a candle. It’s not exactly the spirit world I’m looking for, but it will have to do; if anything can summon Julian, bring him into the present here with me, perhaps it is this.
Because I lost the candles from the basement, I have had to borrow my mother’s white candle from her reading room. The mirror is another matter. The one in my bedroom is immovable from its place on the wall, and my sister’s vanity includes a mirror as part of the furniture. The seven bathrooms—only three of which are in any state of use—all have mirrors affixed to the walls. In my search, I find myself stepping into the Rose Room with a shudder at the floral carpet that imbues the room with a kind of unpleasant saccharinity, at the air that is warm and stuffy, like a fever.
What would life be like without mirrors? Imagine the course of history in which identities must develop without ever glimpsing themselves reflected in a pane of glass. Who am I but that I know what I look like?
I wonder if Julian will be made to live without mirrors. Perhaps I will smash all the mirrors in the house, and then he will never know his own face. And then the house will never know his own face.
In digging through the drawers, I come across a hand mirror with an ornate silver handle carved into floral designs. The dusty surface reflects my prying eyes. I try to wipe it clean with the sleeve of my shirt, but the mirror nearly slips from my grasp at the sound of a cough very close to me.
Carefully I hold it up and use it to peer behind my shoulder. I think to myself, There is no one else in this room. There is no one else in this room. Yet the sensation persists—the feeling that someone is standing right behind me. If I turn around, they will vanish as if they were never there. What is this sense that we all have, this sense of knowing when we are being watched?
When I look into the mirror, I am certain I see a shadow standing just there—Julian, murderous Julian, come to slit my throat—but when I turn my head, it is gone.
The cough comes again, wet and wretched.
This was the sickroom of Frances Wakefield, many years ago. Her illness clogs the air with remembered disease, that peculiar feeling that must linger in disused hospitals and abandoned sanitariums. It is her history that lives here.
Each room in this house has its own peculiar history—the yellow nursery, which I avoid for the ghosts of babies whose cries resonate along the patterned walls; the stone tower, accessible only from a spiral staircase tucked away in a black hallway and seemingly instilled with the spirit of Gothic castles; the library with its memory space of books; and on and on.
Is it my imagination, or do I hear the death rattle of Frances Wakefield just to my left?
If I should run into my mother or Elizabeth right now, I think I would go mad from the shock. But it is late, and dark, and they must be in bed.
With my acquired tools, I descend. I have come to the basement to call my name into the darkness and see what answers.
The old wooden chair that I place in the center of the room stinks faintly of fungus. The darkness is unbreakable beyond my little candle, and I hold up the mirror to my side so I can see it only obliquely. Do not look directly into the mirror. Terrible things will happen if you do.
Sitting in the dark with strange stirrings in a mirror that can be glimpsed only at a maddening angle, from the corner of your eye, is nearly unbearable. I wonder if I ought to ask the house to show me something, but the house does not listen to me as it listens to my mother, who calls up her happy memories whenever she pleases.
Abruptly I notice a change in the basement’s odor. The smell of decay has intensified. Rotten swamp water, a vaguely fishy, vegetal smell. Where there wasn’t before, there is now a presence beyond the tepid glow of the candle that flickers double in the mirror.
“Are you here?” I whisper. “Julian?”
From the corner of my eye, I detect movement in the glass, too subtle and too dark to make out. My eyelids peel themselves back and I stare determinedly ahead, trying not to look directly into the glass, not to break whatever connection I might be forging with the house or whatever else lives in it, for we are not alone here, not with all of time unspooling around us, and all the other creatures who have lived here or will live here creeping through the dark.
