It Will Just Be Us, page 16
“In town?” he says blankly. “Oh, you mean Shadydale? I’m from about forty miles west, as the crow flies.”
“Legends travel that far?”
He sets down his mug, slides the camera strap from around his neck to hold the device in his lap, and shrugs. “Legends travel pretty far.” Now he looks about the room, admiring it openly. “All right, so you got me. I’m not a believer—that’s my parents’ deal. They make me do this door-to-door stuff. I am a bit of an architecture aficionado, though. This house has been on my bucket list for years, but as it’s a private residence, I never dreamed I would set foot inside. I was only stopping by to take pictures of the front, and, well, I thought I’d try my luck.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know very much about architecture,” my mother drawls. “But I don’t think I’m quite done talking about ghosts.”
His smile falters. He looks at me again for help, but I offer him none. “If you’d just let me take a peek around, maybe snap a few photos for my blog, I’d happily get out of your hair. There’s no need—”
“Nonsense,” says Agnes. “Sit, enjoy your tea. We’re only having a conversation. You know, we don’t often get visitors out here. Most folks think to stay away. I can’t imagine why.” She smiles over her mug. “So forgive me, but I like to talk. While I have you here, I’d like to get your take on it. Do you feel any particular energy in this old house?”
“Well,” he says with a shrug. “I don’t know.” He looks around. “I guess there is a kind of electricity in the air. Old wiring, you know. I’ve visited a number of nineteenth-century buildings that have the same problem, and I’ve blogged extensively about it for my column on East Coast Victorian architecture.”
“Certainly, copper wiring is a conduit.”
“I’m sorry?”
An elderly woman walks into the room, disrupting our conversation.
She is vaguely familiar to me, with white hair pulled neatly back into a bun, a pashmina wrapped around her plump shoulders, and a face marked by laugh lines.
“Hello,” Nathaniel says to the new arrival, who, of course, ignores him.
“Sam,” Agnes says, easy, nonchalant. “You remember your great-grandmother, Harriet?”
Oh yes, now I recognize her.
“Hello, ma’am,” Nathaniel tries again, louder this time, as if the old woman is merely hard of hearing. She walks slowly, gingerly, about the room, touching potted plants that aren’t there, straightening pictures on the wall that are already straight. We watch her perambulations with mild fascination.
“Is she … all right?” asks Nathaniel.
“Oh no, I’m afraid not,” Agnes says lightly.
Nathaniel looks alarmed.
We continue to watch Harriet’s slow, laborious movements around the room before she starts toward the couch on which Nathaniel is sitting. He moves over to make room for her, and through good fortune she sits in the vacated spot rather than on top of him. I’ve had this happen to me before, where an echo will occupy the same space as me for a moment or two, and while it doesn’t physically feel like anything, it is an incredibly unsettling experience.
Harriet slumps back now, her breathing labored. What did she die of? A heart attack? Stroke? I can’t quite recall.
My mother and I exchange a look. You know the one—I give her a quirk of my eyebrow, silently asking where this is going, and she retains that genteel smile-that-isn’t-a-smile, her eyes glittering as if to say, Watch, and you will see.
“Ma’am, are you all right?” Nathaniel shouts in Harriet’s ear.
Abruptly, she freezes, all her muscles strained taut, and her tremors become unnatural shaking as her eyes roll up to reveal the rheumy whites and her jaw clenches in a teeth-cracking grimace. Ah yes, it was a seizure. She was epileptic.
Nathaniel lifts his hands as if to grab her, but he won’t bring them close enough to touch her seizing body. “What are you all doing? This woman needs medical attention!”
“Oh, it’s too late for that, I’m afraid.” Agnes gazes fondly at her grandmother. “Don’t worry, it will be over soon.”
She watches Harriet die like one who has watched many people die, and the look in her eyes disturbs even me. How much death has she seen in this house, after all?
When the seizure is over, Harriet slumps to the side, straight into Nathaniel, who shrieks as she passes through him and leaps to his feet, dropping his camera and turning to stare at the woman gone cold-eyed, one arm flung out above her head, which rests upon the spot where he was sitting. She is now still.
“What happened? What just happened?” Nathaniel cries out, patting his hands over his front as if to check that he is, indeed, solid.
“Now, Nathaniel,” I tell him, smiling. “Don’t pitch a fit.”
Harriet remains too still after too much movement. Her mouth gapes and her eyes are infinity.
Agnes sighs. “Well, I do hate having a corpse on the couch.”
“What is … wrong with you people?”
I laugh, then, pleased with it all, and with my mother especially. Perhaps having fun at this stranger’s expense is cruel, but it is a delicious kind of cruelty, isn’t it?
Finally, Harriet’s paper-pale corpse flickers like a badly tuned television and disappears. Phantom laughter from another room drifts our way, unprovoked.
“What?” Nathaniel shouts, whirling around at the noise, and I find this reaction so comical that I laugh again.
“Are you quite sure, Nathaniel, that you do not believe in ghosts?” asks an amused Agnes as she sips her tea. “Why, didn’t you know when you came here that this is a haunted house?”
At once, before he can make any attempt at a reply, a scream rends the air, and I think for a moment of the poor soul—Nathaniel’s nerves must be frayed as far as they will go, and I almost want to tell the house to give it a rest now, we are done with the theatrics.
But I am on my feet just as fast as Nathaniel is stumbling toward the foyer, the forgotten brochure flying away in a flap of paper only to slide across the hardwood floor, scattering tumbleweeds of dust.
“You people,” he keeps saying, like he can’t believe us, like we have pulled some sort of mean-spirited prank on him. “You people!”
The scream, I realize, sounds familiar. Maybe it isn’t an echo. Maybe it is happening right now.
Elizabeth.
Pushing him out of my way, I bound up the stairs to see about the scream, my feet taking me toward Elizabeth’s room. My heart beats a frantic tattoo even as I tell myself it is merely an echo of some prior time, when someone screamed in obvious pain, the screaming like needles in my ears.
When I burst into Elizabeth’s room, there she is, clutching her pregnant belly, blood soaking through her gray leggings. She has a sickly sheen to her skin and her hair sticks in sweaty tangles, her eyes embraced by dark rings.
Julian is trying to kill her from the inside out, I think wildly. He will tear his way out of her flesh, and he will keep tearing through flesh until I put a stop to him.
* * *
The ride to the hospital is a blur, even though I am the one driving.
Funny how that happens, isn’t it? All those miles eaten up and forgotten in the whirlwind of thoughts, as if our brains can contain only so much at once and have to filter out the everyday motions of driving, signaling a turn, braking at red lights and stop signs.
All along I am wondering what happened.
Mother sits in the back seat with Elizabeth’s head on her lap, and I cannot be bothered to worry about her, too, though she looks drawn and red-eyed in the rearview mirror, her left hand a clenched fist around the handle above the door.
I cannot be bothered to worry about my mother because my heart is clenched like a fist for my sister. After silently resenting her sudden chaotic appearance in the otherwise fairly peaceful life I had created back at home, after fuming at her refusal to listen to me regarding Julian, after being so dismissive of her, now, now I am feeling a kind of terror—not for Julian, although I cannot think of the implications if this is a late-term miscarriage, but the kind of terror that reminds me how desperately I need my sister to be all right.
* * *
Even when we are sitting in the waiting room while Elizabeth is taken for tests, with the dark falling softly out the windows like black snow and the gentle hum of air circulating through the building’s vents, my mother clenches the armrests of her chair, her eyes closed and her face pinched like one fighting their way through the nausea of a roller coaster.
There isn’t anything I can do, I think to myself. I have tried to take her hand from its death grip on the chair, but she refused to let go, swatting me away with her elbow, and I have tried to pat her on the shoulder, feeling ridiculous even as I did, but she shuddered away from the touch as if my hand burned with ice.
Her breath hums, wheezes in and out of her throat.
“Everything is going to be okay.”
“I don’t need you to tell me that,” she says, struggling for air as if she were running a marathon.
“Then calm down. Just breathe.”
“Don’t you tell me what to do,” she barks.
I almost laugh. As if she would stop breathing just to spite me.
“You’re making me anxious,” I tell her, wishing she would stop behaving like this and knowing it is unfair of me to wish such a thing.
“Ask them how much longer.”
“I just asked them five minutes ago. They’ll call us up when she’s done.”
My mother shakes her head. “This is ridiculous. I can’t just sit here forever. I can’t even breathe.”
“Of course you can,” I snap, despising the sharpness in my voice. I ball my hands into fists and dig the nails into my palms. A few other people are in the waiting room, and they aren’t looking at us yet, but they might be, out of the corners of their eyes, for all I can tell, and I just want to keep it that way. “You breathe every second of your life.”
She lets go of the chair and bends over, hands on her stomach, and I grab her shoulder to pull her back up, to stop her from these hysterics, but she twists out of my grip, swaying, unstable, gasping, and dry-heaves twice before vomit comes up her convulsing throat.
When she straightens up again, she wipes the back of her hand over her mouth and fixes me with a glare that reminds me of my childhood. “You don’t know,” she says with a scratchy voice, and that is all she says.
Lucky for us, we are in a hospital, so she is given a sedative and a place to lie down, and then it’s just me left to wander the lonely halls back and forth between my mother and my sister, down past the endless series of doors. I decide to sit in my sister’s empty room, and what must be an hour passes as I wait for them to wheel her back. I look at the cold tile floor and the mirrored window that turns the falling dusk into a shadowy reflection of the room. I listen to nurses wheel the broken bodies in from down the hallway and wheel the empty gurneys back out to wherever they came from, in and out like the tide, until I can’t stand it anymore and I get up to walk up and down the hallway.
Wheels creak and roll across the glossy tile floor. I can’t remember what room I came from. All the doors are closed, and I cannot open them. I hurry back down the hall, toward the grinding wheels, just as a male nurse pushes a gurney into an open doorway, and there it is, the room, and there is Elizabeth, being moved to her bed.
The doctor follows shortly after, a stony-faced woman with her hair pulled back tight against her scalp. She offers her hand for a perfunctory shake and says I must be the sister.
“I suppose I must be,” I say. “So what happened?”
“At first we assumed it was a placental abruption due to the pain and bleeding,” she explains, “in which case, we would have performed an emergency cesarean. However,” she continues, “that wasn’t the case. The bleeding’s stopped, and she’s doing well. To be honest, there’s nothing wrong with her.”
“So … that’s it?”
“That’s it,” she says with a shrug. “Just one of those things.”
“Just one of those things.”
“The body is a magnificent and mysterious thing.” At last she smiles thinly. “Sometimes it does things we can’t explain. But your sister is healthy, and everything looks good. This was just a minor fluke.”
“What about Julian?” I ask.
“I’m sorry?”
“The baby.”
She nods. “The baby is in good health. No problems, which is why we didn’t induce. Better to let him come when he’s ready. Now, we gave Elizabeth a little something, but I think she’s mainly just exhausted from the ordeal, so we should let her get some rest. We’ll keep her overnight for observation, and tomorrow, barring any complications, she should be able to go home.” The smile returns, just slightly. “Good news, right?”
Good news, certainly, but why doesn’t it feel like good news? Why does it feel like Julian is lurking in there, biding his time, waiting to burst free?
12
Like lonely islands in the darkness, streetlamps crawl past as I drive us home, spread out enough that their pools of light never touch. My mother in the passenger seat is partly dozing, groggy and dulled from the sedative. The darkness is broken; the silence, now, too.
“Mom.”
“What is it, honey?”
I hesitate. I want to ask her about her experience this evening, about how she reacted to leaving the house for the first time in so long, but I can imagine how that conversation would go. I am perfectly fine, she would say, affronted that I would even suggest otherwise, and so directly. Perhaps it is best to approach such things sideways.
“I found the key.”
“What key?”
“To the room at the end of the hall.”
Agnes chews on this for a long moment before releasing a low, flat, “Oh.”
I am driving slowly because I do not want to get home, not yet.
“I saw where you hid it.”
“You did, did you?”
“I thought that room had been locked since—forever.”
“It had been. Before. And it has been since.”
“Are you going to tell me why you had it? Why you hid it?”
She is quiet for a long, long moment. “I would rather not.”
Her non-answers are beginning to annoy me. “Come on, Mom.”
The streetlamps glide toward us through the night, momentarily light up the car yellow, and then flee quickly behind us, retreating into the darkness. The moon is low and bearded with gauzy clouds. This is a country road, I think, for no real reason. We are in the empty country dark.
“You were so young, you and Lizzie,” she says at last, carefully. “I hadn’t thought it right, to tell you where he did it.”
“You mean Dad?”
Neither of us looks at the other. I am watching the road roll toward us, and she too is staring straight ahead, the artificial light periodically flashing over us. Maybe it is easier, not to look.
Everyone knows my father hanged himself—because gossip travels fast in small towns—and even if my mother had wanted to keep it from me, there was no way she could silence the whispers. I always knew my father had hanged himself, but it never occurred to me to think beyond that, or even to imagine it. What it looked like. Where I was at the time. It was always just the words. It’s not something you want to stop and really think about.
The silence in the car is incredible, heavy, absolute.
“He did it in that room. He’d found the key, somewhere, while cleaning up, I think—you know he always liked to keep things tidy. I’m not sure how he figured out it was for that room. He must have tried all the doors before he fitted it into the lock. Before then, he’d never seemed to notice the room. I’d told him once, early on, that it was just another room, one we kept closed, and that was that. He never asked, never mentioned it, never showed any interest whatsoever.”
I can think of nothing to say, so I say nothing.
“I was no good afterward. I wanted to know why. I thought I might find some clue in there. I spent hours sitting in that wretched room, waiting for him to appear … willing him to appear.”
“And did he?”
Before she speaks, I know the answer. My mother has that uncanny ability to draw specific memories from the house, to conjure up what she thinks she wants to see. I imagine my mother, desperate, pleading with the house to show her what she thought she wanted to see, using her witchy designs to make the house do her bidding, burning a lock of his hair, placing small tokens of his around her, until the house relented and revealed to her its secrets, as it always did.
“Yes.”
The long quiet, again, as if our conversation exists only in the pools of light cast by the intermittent streetlamps.
“I watched him hang himself. Again … and again …” Her voice goes whisper-soft. “And again.”
There she is, in my mind, watching the terrible act with morbid desperation, the endless repetition of it, and I feel something terrible inside me, in my throat.
“I drove myself mad, watching. And you know what I learned?” She waits a beat. “Nothing.”
“So you hid the key.”
She nods. “I couldn’t have you girls wandering in there.”
“Did you … did you ever find anything else in that room? Anything that might have explained why he did it?”
The corners of her mouth drag down. “I wish I had.”
I am moments away from telling her about the journal, my mouth open to divulge his secret, thinking the answer she sought all those years ago must be within those yellowed pages—but the sight of home approaching just ahead stifles the words in my throat. It would only hurt her to reopen this wound. And what if there isn’t a good reason, a real answer, hidden within those intricate writings after all? What if, seeing the madness playing out upon those pages, she plunges back into the weight of grief, knowing that something so terrible was lurking in her husband’s mind all along, something she couldn’t see?
